Logic Of Capitalism Research Articles

(Doing) Time Is Money: Confinement, Prison Work and the Reproduction of Carceral Capitalism

This article examines how prison work functions as a site where neoliberal and carceral capitalist logics are reproduced across individual, organisational and societal levels. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a private UK prison, we argue that confinement exacerbates prisoners’ obsession with money and predatory entrepreneurialism, reflecting and reinforcing the broader dynamics of carceral capitalism at each level. By analysing these interconnected dynamics, we demonstrate how incarceration perpetuates these logics. Furthermore, we illustrate how prison work perpetuates neoliberal exploitation, surveillance and control, hindering rehabilitation and societal reintegration. Our analysis underscores the need for a comprehensive reassessment of the Prison Industrial Complex. We conclude that rather than viewing prisoners as a captive audience for reproducing carceral capitalism, prisons should be reimagined to prioritise the humanity of those impacted by the criminal justice system and to create alternative models of accountability and social transformation.

The Postmodern Transformation of Language through Social Media, Memes, Emojis, and GIFs: A Study Among Selected North Indian University Students

This study explores how digital communication technologies—a consequence of late capitalism—have changed language usage. The study looks at how GIFs, memes, emojis, and social media language have evolved and how postmodern cultural logic is embodied in these forms of communication. Based on Fredric Jameson's theory that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, the study highlights the digital forms' inherent fragmentation, intertextuality, and pastiche. It focuses on how language has evolved to reflect postmodern society's hyperreal and dispersed structure by becoming more context-dependent, expressive, and visual. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to examine how social media content is analyzed and to obtain perspectives on various communicative forms from 300 university students in Delhi, Punjab, and Haryana. The findings imply that, in addition to changing language, digital communication technologies have also introduced new forms of expression that combine text, image, and emotion, challenging established linguistic theories. This study advances our knowledge of language in the digital era and has implications for the larger cultural shifts these developments signify.

Introducing Economics Students to Marxist Political Economy: Mental and Physical Health in the Workplace

Introducing economics students to Marxist political economy (MPE) can be a challenging endeavor, especially as there is often limited space in the curriculum. Given this constraint, it can be difficult to know where to start and how to best do justice to the complexity and depth of Marx’s work. Students can find MPE daunting, approach the topic with a range of preconceptions, and find it hard to see the immediate relevance. This case study of our teaching practice illustrates how we have approached this issue by introducing students to MPE with an application to physical and mental health in the workplace. By starting with students’ own experiences of work, we help them unpack how and why the workplace is structured in the way it is. Initial discussions about the workplace, including about situations in which students have tried to avoid doing work, enable some initial theoretical categories to be developed, such as the distinction between labor and labor power, as well as other observations about how their workplaces are organized to extract labor from them, and the unequal rewards from the output of the work that they do. This provides a way into a more formal theoretical presentation of MPE, but one that is rooted in the lived experience of students. We then look at the implications and effects that the labor process has on physical and mental health (which Marx documents in Capital volume 1) using case studies from across the globe, including Amazon warehouse workers in the United States and United Kingdom, and textile workers in India. By teaching MPE in this way, we aim to demonstrate how the logic of capitalism imposes itself on the workplace and shapes daily life, and we hope this can inspire students to explore Marx’s work further. JEL Classification: I2, P1

Bernard Stigler's Theory of Media Technology and Impact on Communication Studies

Abstract: In todays digital era, media technology is critical in shaping modern society. Accompanied by the rapid development of digital technology, the functions and roles of the media have undergone tremendous changes, and the speed, quality, and ways in which people access information have undergone unprecedented changes. Advances in media technology have reshaped how people interact with the outside world and profoundly impacted culture, cognition, and identity. Bernard Stiegle's media technology theory provides a theoretical framework for re-examining the relationship between humans and technology from a technological perspective. Stiegle argues that technology is both a tool for human development and the second origin of human beings. By proposing the theory of 'tertiary retention,' the crucial role of technology in the externalization of memory is revealed. Technology acts as both an antidote and a poison, facilitating the progress of human society and posing significant risks. In the digital age, changes in media technology have brought about problems such as cultural homogenization, identity crisis, and systemic ignorance and even led to the proletarianization of social consciousness. Stiegler's theory criticizes the logic of capitalism behind digital technology and argues that human beings must re-examine their relationship with technology to avoid falling into a technologically dominated cultural dilemma.

Decolonial leaps in more-than-human geographies

This commentary illuminates how Whitehead's vitalistic ethos and speculative philosophy mobilises decolonial leaps in more-than-human geographies. These risky leaps that unsettle apocalyptic, commonsense western literacies of planetary crises call for daring and experimentation. Amid the ongoing brutality of a racial, colonial, and capitalist logics, perhaps Whitehead and Roberts are accomplices in decolonial leaps that contribute to a planetary consciousness.

Decolonisation is not even a footnote: On the dominant ideologies and smokescreens in South African higher education

The turn to democracy in South Africa brought hope for a higher education sector that would play a key role in tackling racial inequalities and injustices. However, transformation promises ended up being largely smokescreens for maintaining entrenched racist and capitalist logics rooted in colonialism and apartheid. Instead of focusing on epistemic decolonisation, universities became commodified and commercialised neoliberal enterprises focused on the maintenance of Eurocentric epistemic hegemony. In this conceptual article framed within the decolonial theoretical framework, we critically interrogate how two dominant ideologies – the Rainbow Nation and neoliberalism – have sidelined fundamental transformation and epistemic decolonisation in South Africa. Focusing on the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Strategic Plan 2020–2025, we illustrate that decolonisation is not government’s priority and that neoliberal visions continue to dominate strategic planning for higher education. We argue that the lack of political will and policy alignment from the government will contribute to the further entrenchment of coloniality, Eurocentricity and neoliberal logics at universities. We conclude with the call for critical engagement with the history of universities and their role in propagating and supporting colonialism and apartheid and argue that progressive scholars and students must continue to organise within South Africa and beyond and work on the radical dismantling of the Eurocentric and neoliberal universities.Contribution: While other scholars have engaged separately with neoliberalism and the Rainbow Nation and their impact on higher education in South Africa, in this article, we bring these two ideologies together to show how they have combined to prevent decolonisation of higher education.

Flâneuserie of "In Treatment"’s Laila Green:

The Parisian flâneur is a figure whose indulgent urban loitering is shaped by straight white male privilege. In contrast, this essay introduces the concept of the Blackqueer flâneuse, highlighting the radical imagination’s role in maneuvering through heavily surveilled and controlled spaces. By weaving together intersecting theories of waywardness (Hartman) and willfulness (Ahmed), it examines Black flâneuserie —both as an imaginative and tangible mode of mobility— that ingeniously subverts or sidesteps the violence of capture. Focusing on Laila Green, from the series In Treatment (2021), the essay unveils her outlaw imagination, her yearning for liberation, and her everyday practices of wandering as alternative expressions of flâneuserie. Employing the concept of queer failure (Halberstam), the analysis frames Laila’s persistent attempts at escape alongside her history of facing setbacks as a practice of flâneuserie. With the help of critical geography (de Certeau, Tuan, Cosgrove, Cosgrove and Dora) and Jungian theory, it conceptualizes Laila’s passion for high places and mountains and ultimately the realization of her passion as evidence of her individuation. Akin to the paradoxes of white male flânerie, Black flâneuserie in Laila’s case unfolds as a paradoxical journey of self-discovery, complicated by her privilege and the entanglements of her wanderings within the logic of racial capitalism.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

Excess and Donation: From the Restricted Economy of Being to the An-Economy of the Gift (Or, the intriguing story of six pesos)

In the context of the recent publication of Donner le tempts II, we question the status of the gift, its singularity, its relationship, beyond the intentional structure of decision and consciousness, with the general problematic of democracy and the archive, of Khora as an enigma that haunts the same Onto-Theo-Cosmological conjugation of metaphysics and logocentrism, to show that the question about the gift is also the question about history and about the very possibility of democracy, beyond the capitalist logic of accumulation and valuation. We end up referring to the strange case of the ‘six pesos’ thematized in Miguel Angel Asturias's novel, Hombres de maiz, as a case of the incalculable. Far from an instrumental account, but also from a providential version of the gift, we try to show it as an event always already inscribed in the abyss of our exchange relations, a possibility contained in its own impossibility.

Estado de excepción neoliberal y resistencia en el sureste de México

In November 2021, the President of Mexico (2018-2024) declared that the priority megaprojects of the National Development Plan (Maya Train, Isthmus of Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, Dos Bocas Refinery) fall within the realm of national security. Public and private investments in these projects are directed towards southeastern Mexico, covering the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Yucatán, and Tabasco. These regions are home to indigenous peoples and communities that hold 45% of Mexico’s total social property. In some cases, these communities are visibly linked to national political organizations that defend land and territory. The decree is considered a state of exception applied to land-territory use, with dual implications. On one hand, it represents the undivided social field monopolized by monetary metrics. On the other hand, it signifies the expansion of a neocolonial condition promoted by the Mexican federal government, which marginalizes the voice of resistance in favor of adopting the capital logic defined by the stratification of the global economy. The methodology involves participatory action research since 2019, collaborative research through the coordination of workshops, caravans, marches, and political-community meetings, promoted in conjunction with assemblies fighting for territorial defense. We anticipate the increased use of such state of exception in response to the intertwined rise of health, environmental, and economic contingencies that drive the economic cycle, coupled with ineffective governmental policies formulated for regular times. In other words, the state of exception is activated to ensure the continuity of capital accumulation driven by the concentration of private property.

Dispossession after War: A Feminist Political Economy Perspective

“Post war” has been highlighted as an arena in which, under the banner of reconstruction, processes of accumulation by dispossession are often intensified. This conceptual article explores gaps in how “dispossession” is typically defined, to deepen understanding of the complex, gendered modalities that occur in post-war, when the population is already living in the wake of wartime land dispossession. Through an interdisciplinary feminist political economy and conflict studies lens, “dispossession” as a concept is interrogated beyond the original Marxist meaning of separation from the means of production via wholesale agrarian transition. The article argues that, in the long post-war “moment,” gendered dispossession might occur in three interrelated ways, all connected to wartime dispossession. The first is bodily dispossession which occurs through shifting forms of patriarchy. The second is dispossession manifesting within reconfigured social reproductive relations. The third is piecemeal dispossession, through the embedding of other capitalist relations, including lifetime debt. HIGHLIGHTS A feminist approach to dispossession reveals its less visible and its gendered dimensions. Conflict-related dispossession consists of more than mass land expulsion during war. In post-war, dispossession connects to both state and capitalist logics of accumulation. Dispossession can have different modes: it is an embodied process, occurs through social reproduction, and can happen covertly. A feminist re-conceptualization contributes to analyses of violence against women in war and post-war.

Adorno’s dynamic theory of ideology

ABSTRACT Adorno’s conception of ideology was denounced by Habermas as incompatible with a viable form of social critique. By conflating ideology and the ‘identity principle’ inherent to modern Western reason, he argues, Adorno offered an overly negative characterisation of modernity and failed to recognise its rational potential. This paper questions this line of criticism by revisiting Adorno’s position. While he does sometimes associate ideology with identity-thinking, this association does not exhaust his views on the subject. For Adorno, ideology is just as much a matter of Identität as a matter of Schein, or illusion, and its practical effects. Moreover, he views ideology as an intrinsically dynamic concept, whose definition has changed throughout human history. Drawing on his late sociological writings, I distinguish three major stages in the development of the concept of ideology, namely (a) ideology as simple illusion, a definition associated with the Enlightenment and expanded by the so-called sociology of knowledge; (b) ideology as necessary illusion, invoked by Marx to capture the structural logic of capitalism; and (c) ideology as disillusionment, related to the positivism of late capitalist society. Finally, I reflect on what this survey reveals about the relationship between illusion and identity in Adorno’s theory of ideology.

The Carceral Logic of Female Eligibility Policies: Gender as a Civilizing Narrative, the Science of Sex Testing, and Anti-Trans Legislation1

Female eligibility policies punish people for gender nonconformity and normalize patriarchal rule. These policies were used first to exclude women deemed “too masculine” from competing against women who more closely conform to gender stereotypes. In recent years, this form of discipline has dovetailed with efforts to determine the circumstances, if any, under which transgender women may compete against cisgender women. Modern sport, as a set of institutions, does not stand apart from capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. In this article, I use a prison abolitionist lens to connect anti-trans campaigns and female eligibility policies that police sporting identity to the carceral logics of racial capitalism to make the argument that sex surveillance is related to race, social control, and capital accumulation.

Caring Technologies: Confronting Invisible Work in Digital Capitalism

ABSTRACTIn recent years, critical studies on digital platforms have emphasized that contemporary capitalism increasingly exploits the relational and cognitive faculties of human beings as sources of value. At the same time, activist projects are emerging in order to challenge the logics of commodification, individualization and accumulation that govern digital capitalism, being grounded in values that aim to promote visibility of labor and cooperation. This article contributes the notion of “caring technologies” where care is employed as a critical lens able to uncover the kinds of productive work made invisible by capitalist logics governing mainstream digital platforms and as a value for designing digital technologies aiming at challenging these very logics. By drawing on feminist theories about domestic work, we stress the analytical and interventionist character of care insofar as it sheds light on the forms of invisible work that allows the productive system to function and a politics that values social and economic relations usually neglected in the capitalist system. Ultimately, the article elaborates on a politics of caring to confront digital capitalism, transforming care into a logic that informs activist interventions which value agential and inalienable aspects characterizing the diverse forms of labor mediated by digital technologies.

Between continuous presents and disruptive futures: Identifying the ideological backbones of global environmental scenarios

Despite the great relevance of global environmental scenarios for the study of environmental change and sustainability transitions, they have rarely been the object of analysis for scholars of the social sciences. In this article, we analyze the ideological assumptions of 993 global environmental scenarios contained in 243 academic works. By developing a new categorization of environmental scenarios, we investigate the economic and governance organization reflected in the scenarios, as well as the portrayed human-nature relationships. We find that global environmental scenarios developed and used by the scientific community largely reproduce rather than break with dominant power structures in the economic, governance and cultural domain. The majority of scenarios reflects an anthropocentric worldview and assumes that the logic of global capitalism and of the Westphalian state-based governance system will not change radically during the 21st century. The implicit solution of sustainability problems dominating these scenarios is a combination of continuous economic growth, rapid technological progress and an international (environmental) agreement. ‘Alternative scenarios’ are scarce, often only problematize one dimension of the social structure of world society and frequently lack explicit drivers of change or pathways to desirable futures. To increase the diversity of scenarios, future research should focus on refining and quantifying existing post-capitalist, post-state-centric and/or ecocentric scenarios, and on developing a range of scenarios whose storyline systematically problematize or even break with current power structures.

Changes in land use dynamics following the Fundão dam collapse in the Doce River Basin, Brazil

Although regarded as “unexpected,” the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam in 2015 resulted from the synergistic interplay between the capitalist logic of environmental resource exploitation and environmental degradation in the Doce River Basin (DRB). Our objective was to assess whether this disaster altered land-use dynamics in the DRB. To achieve this, we characterized land-use transitions by comparing changes over three years before (2012–2015) and after (2016–2019) the disaster. We differentiated municipalities adjoining the affected rivers from the remaining municipalities. We evaluated anthropogenic and natural driving forces as explanatory variables: farmland to natural vegetation (land abandonment) or natural vegetation to farmland (farmland expansion). We detected two main driving forces of land abandonment, precipitation and temperature, both before and after the dam collapse. Still, there was a shift between periods: before the dam collapse, the drivers of land abandonment differed between municipalities adjoining and those not adjoining the affected rivers. After the disaster, all municipalities shared the same drivers for land abandonment. For farmland expansion, we detected five drivers for the period before (temperature, precipitation, natural vegetation area, roads, and municipality area) and five drivers after (urban area, slope, natural vegetation area, roads, and municipality area) the dam collapse. Thus, we detected a change in the drivers but no distinction between municipalities adjoining and not adjoining the affected rivers. Our results evidenced a direct effect of the disaster on land abandonment but not farmland expansion, where the observed temporal changes may be related to temporal changes independent of the disaster. Our work shows that the collapse of the Fundão mining dam changed the drivers of “land abandonment,” which may be due to anthropic avoidance of using Doce River’s water for farmland or to a change in socio-economic drivers, such as those related to the monthly financial compensation of affected farmers.

Challenging dominant education paradigms: posthuman feminist inspirations towards alternate pathways for decolonising the curriculum

AbstractSouth Africa’s curriculum, and education system at large, remains humanistic and dominated by Western Eurocentric ways of thinking, doing and being. The ongoing protest action in higher education has made explicit the inequalities that continue to keep epistemic violence, Eurocentrism, and human exceptionalism intact. Central to this protest action has been the need for curriculum inquiry to reinvent itself and go against the pedagogical grain by advocating for a decolonised curriculum. However, the decolonial turn has largely been a structural exercise of abstract and rhetoric intensity fueled by a language of critique that is entrapped in discursive tendencies that inhibit the type of radicalism needed for it to invigorate alternatives that can challenge dominant education paradigms. This article is inspired by posthuman feminist theory that troubles the logic of advanced capitalism, epistemic injustice and dominant education paradigms. Invoked by new materialism, intra-actions of our becoming within and as part of the world are the deep entanglements of ethics, knowing and being that can spur scholarly activism. Four curriculum studies scholar activists shared their narratives of how they are enacting their curriculum to challenge dominant education paradigms. Their lived experiences as material, relational, embodied and embedded incite posthuman tendencies of what it means to teach to transgress. Experimenting with transversal transgressions this article attempts at a non-anthropocentric, feminist inspired perspective for curriculum inquiry to find alternative pathways for decolonising the curriculum so that it can rise to the challenges of our time.

“Open data means business”: Infrastructural and economic implications of opening up data in smart London

Around 2009–2010, opening up public data was a governmental strategy in the UK, as part of the implementation of the Transparency Agenda, based on the assumption that unfettered access to government data would inexorably lead to transparency, accountability and participation. Following this conjecture, and in an attempt to create an alternative to the corporate-driven smart city discourse, the Greater London Authority prioritised open data in its initial smart city plans to facilitate a ‘citizen-centred’ smart city. However, subsumed within the digital economy, open data was eventually promoted and implemented primarily for its lucrative potential to create new businesses, rather than prioritising the aspirations of transparency and participation. In this article, I explore the implications of this shift and the nature of open data- driven smart city making by focusing on a transport app, Citymapper that is built on open data released by Transport for London (TfL). By closely studying the app's product development process to generate profit together with its struggle to raise funding through venture capital and crowdfunding, I arrive at two main arguments. First, I argue that open data driven smart city making in London was a form of experimentation instead of a formal and rigid planning as it saw open data as an end in itself without much understanding of what this process would lead to in practice. As such, the case of Citymapper shows that the contingent process of opening up public transport data meant opening up public infrastructure in the city. Second, by examining the app's unsustainable business models and detailing its struggle to maintain revenue and profitability, I outline how open data-driven products are ultimately subsumed within the logic of platform capitalism rather than creating an alternative digital economy.

Gray hair and pink slips: An analysis of Twitter responses to gendered ageism

When Canadian broadcaster, Lisa LaFlamme, announced in August 2022 that CTV National News did not renew her contract, some observers suggested that the corporation’s decision resulted from LaFlamme’s choice to “let her hair go gray” during the pandemic. An international public outcry ensued on Twitter. Our study involved an examination of these tweets (n = 440). Analyses revealed that approximately 80 percent of tweets indicated opposition to LaFlamme’s dismissal, while only 2 percent indicated support and 18 percent indicated a neutral position. Among tweets expressing opposition, the most common justification, found in 79 percent of these tweets, centered on assessments of the employer’s decision as poor. The frequency of all other justifications for opposition was considerably lower, with only 26 percent of these tweets mentioning ageism, 22 percent mentioning sexism, and 20 percent mentioning a general sense of unfairness to LaFlamme. These findings suggest the salience of capitalist logics in shaping how the public frames gendered ageism in the workplace. Our analyses also suggest a view of responses to this inequality as personal bodywork choices. Together, these framings reflect a more individual- than structural-level critique of gendered ageism, knowledge of which can inform efforts to dismantle it.

Symposium 3: Networked learning in the time of pandemic

Digital networking technologies have allowed lecturers and students to remain connected while being physically isolated during global lockdowns resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the increased utilization of online spaces for teaching and learning during the time of isolation has brought the question of intersubjectivity and alienation in cyberspace to the forefront. As part of an ongoing phenomenological analysis of the virtual, we survey the experiences of networked learning reported by a group of South African university students in their end of course surveys. We track particularly their experience of alienation, their capacity to engage with material in the online environment, and their awareness of self as a learner. For Merleau-Ponty there resides in intersubjectivity a founding corporeity that serves to explicate the composition of the intersubjective world as based in a plurality of anonymous subjects and in the intersubjectivity of intellectual consciousnesses. In terms of the virtual, a redeployment of Merleau-Pontian thought (and particularly his concept of the flesh) reveals that the body-subject and digital technology artefact are co-implicit in the generation of the virtual. The virtual serves as a point of networked intersubjectivity that concretely expands and constrains human experience and behaviour. Furthermore, in the virtual we navigate a reified landscape. Virtual reification, though seemingly a contradiction, sees us treating the virtual as concrete from the basis of our embodiment. This leads us to an alienated networked intersubjectivity, whereby all potentialities are founded in ordered and carefully arranged systems that promulgate pragmatic and capitalist logics. We investigate how reification makes up the virtual, and how our engagement with the virtual points us back to the nature of alienation (indeed, for Marx, alienation is an intersubjective social relation). We find in the virtual therefore not isolation, but rather a deficient mode of intersubjectivity. While the individual never becomes atomized, for even in the virtual a deficient mode of intersubjectivity remains nevertheless a mode of intersubjectivity, we find that the individual functions as part of a deficient and distorted network. We suggest in conclusion certain teaching methods that may minimize or mitigate students’ experience of alienation.