Crisis Of Capitalism Research Articles

Crisis of capitalism and cycles of right‐wing populism in contemporary Turkey: The making and unmaking of Erdoğanist hegemony

AbstractThis paper analyses the right‐wing populist rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) in Turkey, focusing on the crisis of capitalism, emerging discontent in the rural populations, and opportunities for and obstacles to a successful left‐wing populist mobilisation. We put forward three arguments. First, through an examination of the historical evolution, class‐based and social‐demographic foundations of the ruling right‐wing populist alliance between the AKP and the Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP), we argue that the MHP is a more classical case of far‐right populism, whereas the AKP is a “heterodox” case that borrows several elements from the left. These “heterodox” features of the AKP, together with the interlinked crisis of the 1990s, played a significant part in the support the AKP received from the subordinate majority. Second, we argue that the success of the AKP's hegemonic right‐wing populism from 2002 to 2013 was linked to an unusually favourable macro‐political‐economic climate that helped the AKP counterbalance its neoliberal policies with pragmatic social assistance programmes. However, together with the disappearance of this macro‐political‐economic climate in the second decade of its rule (2013‐present), the disastrous consequences of the AKP's neoliberal policies became more explicit, and the AKP's populism moved from a hegemonic to an authoritarian right‐wing populist type. Third, we claim that today, due to the deepening of the current economic crisis (further exacerbated by the Covid19 pandemic), the AKP's cross‐class alliance began to break down, and the rural movements in the Turkish countryside have been playing a major role in unmaking the AKP's hegemony. However, in the absence of a strong left‐wing populist movement with a stronghold in the Turkish countryside, emergent possibilities for a radical progressive transformation are not utilised. Instead, the groundwork is being laid for another wave of right‐wing populism.

Противоречия глобального мира в зеркале аксиологического подхода

The article reveals the peculiarities of understanding the contradictions of the global world through the prism of an axiological approach, which involves considering social reality from the point of view of the values existing in it. The transformation of reality by representatives of the axiological approach is conceived through the correction of the existing value system. This approach has gained popularity in philosophy since the end of the XIX century and has spread widely in all reflexive spheres (theology, science, art, in everyday consciousness). The basis for its formation was the aggravation of social contradictions caused by the crisis of capitalism, which was reflected in the criticism of the imperfections of society by intellectuals and in the search for ways out of it. The atomized individual, comprehending the world, questions the unconditional significance of anything, including God, life, truth, goodness, etc., and asserts its relativity. The need to exist and solve vital tasks together with other people leads him to search for opportunities for consolidation through the development of various meaningful practices. Thus, the axiological approach, being one of the examples of such practices, involves an appeal to the discourses of “justice”, “human rights”, “freedom”, “humanism”, etc. The discourse of the “panhuman” considered in the article as a starting point has the recognition of the imperfection of society and the search for integrating values common to all (= the same for all), that is, having an abstract character. The authors of the article show the limitations of concepts appealing to the axiology of the “panhuman” to comprehend the contradictions of the global world, referring to the analysis of the arguments of neo-pragmatism, post-liberalism, and dialectics.

Food geographies ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene: Introducing the issue and main themes

AbstractThe Anthropocene provides a useful way to think through all manner of human–environment processes and challenges. This is especially pronounced in relation to food and farming, which are heavily implicated in changes to the Earth's biophysical and chemical processes. Yet, despite burgeoning interest in the Anthropocene as a concept, it is comparatively absent from recent developments in food geography. This is surprising given the profound impacts of food and agriculture on biogeochemical flows and geographical strata, and given future predictions regarding ‘Anthropogenic climate change.’ The objective of this Theme Issue therefore, and the five papers that comprise it, is to redress this by directly connecting and drawing together social science scholarship that examines food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene. The Theme Issue papers engage with different aspects of the Anthropocene as spatial phenomena and here we integrate relevant arguments from each, alongside wider agri‐food geographical scholarship, to explain what we mean by food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene. In doing so, we respond to Tsing and colleagues' (2019, Current Anthropology 60, S186–97) call for a spatial as well as temporal treatment of the Anthropocene. These spatial expressions are also key to the proliferation of terms that have accompanied developments in Anthropocene scholarship. We conclude by offering up some brief reflections on a future research agenda. An important first step is to conceptualise food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene, including accounts that ground and potentially unsettle food and the Anthropocene as Capitalocene (Moore, 2016, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism) and food and the Anthropocene as more‐than‐human (Haraway, 2016, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucen). A second step is to address key contemporary Anthropogenic agri‐food relations, especially those that are already in flux or transition. A final priority for future research is to deepen and extend the ethics of care and moral food geographies of the Anthropocene imperative.

De Loughry Treasa, The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis–Contemporary Narratives

De Loughry Treasa, The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis–Contemporary Narratives

Thinking Resistance, “Emergency,” and Kismet: A Response to Dylan Rodríguez’s Presidential Address

Thinking Resistance, “Emergency,” and Kismet: A Response to Dylan Rodríguez’s Presidential Address Sunaina Maira (bio) Dylan Rodríguez’s presidential address in October 2021 was delivered at a virtual conference, in that not-quite-new but still strange digital space that we have inhabited for our work and collective gatherings since the onset of COVID-19. Rodríguez begins his eloquent talk by acknowledging Indigenous Peoples Day and issuing an urgent call for “collective study” and a “gathering force” expressed through insurgent knowledge production. He shares a radical vision of forms of “revolt, insurrection, creativity, self-determined community” that could realize “abolitionist, liberated ways of being.” In the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings across the US and globally in 2020, and in the context of border violence targeting Haitian refugees and other migrants, this powerful call is one that American studies scholars needed to hear. At the beginning of his talk, Rodríguez comments briefly that it has been an “extraordinary couple of years” due to the pandemic and global uprisings but does not mention the virtual nature of the conference or of teaching during the lockdown nor elaborate on the convergence of “pandemic with police power.” I want to consider what it means to call for resistance to the US state at a moment when the ravages of medical apartheid and vaccine nationalism were—and are—still wreaking havoc in Black and Brown communities and inflicting mass deaths on vulnerable populations, within and beyond the US. Furthermore, what does a “gathering force” represent when many could not, or were not supposed to, gather in person and are excluded from or struggling in the new Zoom world? Counterinsurgency/Counterrevolution Rodríguez draws our attention to an ongoing crisis of “oppressive violence” that preceded the unequal suffering produced by the pandemic, incisively focusing [End Page 213] on the necessity of challenging reformism as a recuperative response to the national state of emergency. He offers several important examples of such responses to police terror and BLM protests, including corporate co-optation of antiracist frameworks as well as opportunistic appropriation by the university. In his brilliant analysis, the work of American studies is defined in relation to the imperial state’s need for “infiltration of ideas” as well as pedagogy in order to reform, rather than radically transform, the state apparatus, thus the need for a complex and militant “anti-‘American’” dissent. He highlights Black study as a source of abolitionist praxis but also indigenous, anticolonial, feminist, and queer thought as part of a culture war that operates through “counterinsurgency.” I think it is important to note that the larger, if implicit, context for this critique is also the debate unleashed by “domestic warfare” in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The attacks by Trump supporters were generally framed by a nationalist narrative of “emergency” for the US state and a momentary disruption of stable democracy, a temporal deviation provoked by an exceptionally authoritarian, right-wing populist leader, thus reinscribing the state of exception.1 Coups presumably never happen in the US, so there is a spatial exceptionalism in this “progressivist narrative” as well. This state of emergency was also reinscribed on the mass deaths of Americans during the pandemic, as defenders of US exceptionalism attempted to contain the embarrassing crisis of public health and neoliberal capitalism in order to rewrite the decline of US empire (given the scale and racial specificity of fatalities due to COVID-19, perhaps they could also be described as “proto-genocidal”?). The battles over masking only amplified preexisting culture and race wars in which entrenched libertarianism and neoliberal individualism evaded the economic and existential precarity caused by degraded social welfare and state health care. Nationalist slogans, including liberal ones by those working remotely, about essential workers as “heroes” on the frontlines of the pandemic have obfuscated the material realities of precarious labor and worker struggles that erupted during the pandemic.2 Social distancing protocols also transformed the terrain of organizing, making it difficult to do community outreach and transforming the “public.” While Rodríguez does not mention these struggles during the pandemic, he rightly argues that racial and class wars entail not...

Global production and the crisis of the tax state

This article combines a fiscal sociology framing with value theory in the classical tradition to yield a composite lens through which to examine the relation between Global Value Chains, Global Wealth Chains and the tax state. It has specific regard to the ongoing crisis of tax states globally, as corporate profits go undertaxed. In summary, the argument is as follows. Although capital and the state are both primarily in the business of capturing value from Global Value Chains indirectly (i.e. otherwise than through ownership of means of material production), labour in Global Wealth Chains has a dual role of (i) suppressing the profitability associated with material production in favour of returns from intangibles and (ii) suppressing the corporate tax take. It therefore simultaneously constitutes capital's instrument of value capture, and its instrument of supremacy in its contestation with the state over the proportion in which value capture is shared between the two. Better-paid labour associated with value capture on the part of capital (i.e. better paid Global Wealth Chain labour) is predominantly located in wealthier states, giving those states an alternative source of revenue and consequently giving them a reason for maintaining a global order in which capital has supremacy over them in the contestation over value capture from Global Value Chains. Further, these dynamics are in a feedback loop which serves as a countervailing tendency staving off a structural crisis of capitalism, and that feedback loop is a core driver for today's crisis of tax states.

Irish Postcolonial Studies, 1980–2021

AbstractThis essay contests the idea that Irish postcolonial studies is a diminished field in contemporary Ireland, instead contending that it has been a sustained and significant critical force in Irish studies for over four decades and will likely remain so. The Irish “decade of centenaries,” international protests against institutional racism, and “decolonizing the university” controversies have brought issues of colonialism, racism, and empire to new prominence in Irish society and encouraged the take-up of postcolonial critique in Irish historiography, political studies, and other disciplines. The essay surveys the achievements and limitations of Irish postcolonial studies, primarily in the field of cultural analysis, since the 1980s and concludes with an assessment of major challenges ahead. The crises of contemporary global capitalism, it suggests, will impel postcolonial studies not just to engage received histories of empire and anti-imperial struggle but also to consider current conjunctures in terms of postcapitalist futures.

Moral crisis/moral critique?

The crisis of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy has a genesis stretching back a decade or longer. Why is it that, until now, socialists and those on the left have struggled to articulate a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse? We argue that at least part of this failing comes from an ambivalence about making the moral argument for socialist transformation. Both a moral critique of the existing order and the articulation of socialist future grounded in a distinct moral order are necessary components of transformative change: they are able to fix substantive policy initiatives - whether a green new deal, universal basic income or the nationalisation of essential services - within a broader vision of how society and the state should function, and on whose behalf. Morals are important in the functioning of any socio-economic order - communicating meaning, providing rationale and generating expectations regarding the practices of ourselves and others. They construct and stabilise contingent social orders and hierarchies. The current social contract is characterised by increased individualisation, responsibilisation and the moral imperative towards competition and consumption. Morals are what allow people to tolerate current conditions. But as contemporary capitalism becomes increasingly uninhabitable, a moral critique - that is the ability to both unpick what stabilises the current conjuncture and offer an alternative - becomes all the more urgent. We look at a number of initiatives and movements, most but not all lodged in the anti-austerity protests of the past decade, for examples of such political strategies. In such movements we see how material criticisms of capitalism are grounded in concrete struggles for justice and emancipation but framed in a counter-hegemonic moral framework that explicitly challenges the status quo.

The Surplus of Death

Abstract This article focuses on the temporal and spatial proximity mediating the lives of those who have been institutionalized in distinctive (albeit similar) ways on the Greek island of Leros, like asylum seekers and the mentally ill—and those working in asylum institutions—who appear co-implicated in the circuit of crisis capitalism and the biopolitical/necropolitical effects of managing populations deemed disposable in the name of care and protection. Drawing closely on the double meaning of the term asylum, this article explores the gendered and racialized biopolitical apparatus of vulnerability management in asylum contexts, especially the deadness and livingness they produce. It argues that complicity arises within the dense atmosphere of the surplus of death and the unattainable accumulation produced by multiple crises. It approaches the associated “surplus of death” as essential to the political economy of asylum management, which operates on a logic of “slow death” and the wearing out of populations struggling to endure its unbearable affects. This affective atmosphere is imbued with ethico-political questions that are neither owned by particular subjects nor disavowed in their universal reach but sustained (in their unsustainability) through norms and morals reiterated in their articulation, sense-making trouble, and measurement of worth.

Rate of Profit, Wages, and Crisis A Marxist Perspective of The Theory of Crisis

The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, the paper aims to discuss Karl Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit and the alternate, probably inconsistent, Marxian theory of crisis based on the rise of wages. Second, the paper examines the relevance of these theories in our days by reviewing important literature on both classical and neoclassical analysis of crisis. A thorough review of literature revealed that Marx’s focus was to provide a real science that explains the phenomena of recurrent crisis in the capitalist society, as opposed to explaining specific incidents that triggers a certain crisis. Marx viewed the capitalist crisis as an endogenous function to the capitalist society itself

The 2007/08 capitalist crisis evolution in Greece: A geographical political economy perspective

The 2007/08 capitalist crisis severely affected the socio-economic conditions in the majority of the developed economies. In the spatially uneven mosaic of the crisis’ effects, the European Union peripheral economies recorded a deep recession. This paper explains why Greece is the European Union country that was most acutely affected, seeking to theorize the political economy of crisis evolution. It does so, by adopting a Marxist perspective on the crisis in Greece to examine the interplay of base (structures) with superstructure (institutions), linking production with society, culture, regulation and politics. It highlights the specificities of the Greek political economy and the particularities of the application of the neoliberal project in Greece.

Ordoliberalism Revisited

The recent publication of Kenneth Dyson’s book Conservative Liberalism, Liberalism, Ordo-Liberalism, and the State offers an occasion to reconsider the body of ideas known as ordoliberalism. The books reviewed here represent much of the most recent scholarship in English on the subject. In this essay, I undertake two tasks: first, to clarify what the term properly refers to and in particular how it is related to “neoliberalism,” and, second, to consider its influence on postwar German policies and institutions. I argue that much of the recent discussion of ordoliberalism and neoliberalism overlooks important differences between early ordoliberal thinking and the ideas associated with neoliberalism. Over time, as neoliberalism evolved and particularly as it became an ideological justification for policies and institutions justifying the accumulation of concentrated market power, these differences have become wider even as they have been obscured by misreadings of ordoliberalism. A better understanding of ordoliberalism can also provide insights relevant to the contemporary debates about the crisis of liberal democracy and capitalism. Is it in fact a “third way” for ordering an economy, an alternative to neoliberalism and socialism?

Embodied capital in the history of inequality

AbstractThis article engages Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology from the perspective of the human body and public health. It explores how Piketty's account could be enriched by examining how economic inequality produces physiological inequity and how human health is essential to understanding the intractability of capitalist crises.

Marxism, Theory, Conjuncture: Notes on a Possible Contemporary Gramsci–Althusser Dialogue

Abstract This article offers various hypotheses regarding the conditions necessary for the reconstruction of a Marxist theory capable of meeting contemporary dilemmas. The central hypothesis posits two beliefs: first, the deep crisis of contemporary capitalism (and perhaps of civilisation) can only be critically addressed by rehabilitating strong theories based on a perspective of totality (this category’s fall from grace, as well as how to rework and revive it, are in part the focus of this text); secondly, while the current crisis might be outwardly novel, the heterogeneous body of texts making up what is called Marxism is already capable of furnishing tools to address the crisis. The starting point is the characterisation of the present conjuncture as anti-theoretical. By this is meant an excessive interest in how reality describes itself and an equally excessive disinterest in the use of strong concepts to think through that reality. Based on this hypothesis, the possibility explored is that a certain interpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism – excessively historicist and immanentist – has participated, in its own way, in a form of anti-theoricism. In order to propose a theoretical alternative, the article aims to rehabilitate a virtuous relationship between the contributions of Gramsci and those of Louis Althusser with the purpose of thinking a Marxism concerned with the problem of theory, but also attentive, through the centrality of the problematic of the conjuncture¸ to the question of historical singularity.

Morbid Symptoms: What Did Gramsci Really Mean?

Abstract One of Gramsci’s most quoted phrases is his 1930 statement in the Prison Notebooks that ‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. This has traditionally been taken to refer to the emergence of fascism against a background of capitalist crisis and failure of anti-capitalist forces. However, a closer examination of the textual and historical context of that sentence indicates that Gramsci was more likely to have been referring to the pci’s ultraleft turn in conjunction with the Comintern’s Third Period.

Rethinking prevention as a reactive force to contain dangerous classes

The pervasiveness of preventive rationality, which is especially evident in populations caught in the prison-neighbourhood circuit, constitutes a challenging field for anthropological theory because it allows us to rethink the problem of hegemony in the context of the crises of capitalism. Drawing on research conducted in Chile amongst practitioners of crime prevention programmes and prisoners’ families targeted by such initiatives, in this paper, we explore crime prevention as a political concept whose effects are inseparable from the maintenance of class and gender disparities. In conceptualising how petty crime prevention has become a predominant technology of classifying, policing and managing low-income populations, we take Foucault's notion of illegalism – as distinct from illegality – and extend it to dispossessed groups affected by dramatic levels of economic inequality and structural violence. We discuss preventive rationality in relation to the contradictions engendered by an authoritarian form of capitalism protected by constitutional constraints inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. By connecting the conceptualisation of petty crime prevention to the ongoing contradictions of the society in which we live, we seek to sharpen attention to the ways in which the neoliberal hegemony attempts to contain its decline.

COVID-19 and young people’s ‘Future Presents’: lockdown stories from the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT In this paper, we draw on the outcomes of a place-based scenario planning project in Melbourne's (AUSTRALIA) inner northern suburbs that was titled COVID-19 Recovery Scenarios for Young People in Melbourne's Inner North. As part of that project, we conducted video interviews with 53 young people during what became an extended second lockdown period in Melbourne as the city dealt with a resurgence in COVID infections. In this paper, we present the stories of four young people – Rosie, Ash, Marco and Chloe – that are illustrative and inclusive of the uncertainties and hopes that young people in Melbourne's inner north gave voice to. We situate these young people's stories in what Rosi Braidotti (2019) has identified as the convergence of the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth mass extinction. Our aim is to situate the pandemic, the social, cultural, economic and political responses to the pandemic, and the challenges and opportunities that this public health crisis produces for young people's health and well-being, their education, training and employment pathways, and their sense of belonging, connectedness, even community, in the broader, unfolding crises of global capitalism, of earth systems, and of biodiversity that is heralded by the Anthropocene.

The relevance of autarky in the conditions of the crisis of capitalism

The relevance of autarky in the conditions of the crisis of capitalism

Racial formation and education: A critical analysis of the Sewell report

The article provides an analysis and critique of the education component of the 2021 Sewell Report on Race and Ethnic Disparities. It commences by providing a critical summary of the report focusing on its spurious claims to objectivity, the erasure of racism and the inadequacy of its recommendations. The second part of the article focuses on developing a contextualised analysis of the report. Omi and Winant’s ideas about racial formation are used to provide a lens through which to interpret the Sewell report as part of a wider hegemonic project of the right to redefine what it means to be British in the context of a deepening organic crises of capitalism. The article outlines the nature of the crisis. It locates the report within a consideration of three ‘racial projects’ that have shaped education policy, namely, the nationalist, multicultural and antiracist projects. Through advocating a ‘colourblind’ approach to education policy and the selective appropriation of multicultural discourse, it will be argued that the report needs to be understood as part of a wider effort to reconfigure the nationalist project in response to crisis. It is suggested, however, that despite its many flaws, the Sewell report poses challenges for those who have traditionally been aligned to multiculturalism and antiracism in education. The article concludes by setting out a vision for a new progressive project aimed at advancing racial and cultural justice that it is suggested, can begin to address these challenges.

Plato, Hegel and the Crisis of Liberalism

In this paper I propose to use Hegel’s theory of history, especially as he applies it to Plato, to diagnose the crisis of liberalism. In other words, I will argue that in the same way Plato’s Republic is a rational reconstruction of the aesthetic political unity of the ancient world, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is a rational reconstruction of the politics of the modern, liberal, world. My main thesis, based on a Marxist reading of Hegel, is that the crisis of liberalism is intimately bound up with the crisis of capitalism. Hegel, in my view, was aware of this crisis but failed to resolve it because he could not see beyond the horizon of free enterprise capitalism.