Capitalist Profit Research Articles

Public Responsibility Towards Indonesian Idol's Music Talent: An Adorno Perspective

The music expressed around us, particularly in the realm of competitive music, faces significant challenges in maintaining subjectivity and objectivity to ensure a fair competition process. This study examines reality shows like Indonesian Idol, questioning whether they are pure competitions or avenues for capitalist profit. From Adorno's perspective, this issue is linked to societal impact, highlighting three main problems: standardization, commodification, and massification. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this research involved 67 respondents who completed questionnaires to explore the systematic flaws in Indonesian Idol’s competition structure. The study aimed to analyse how these flaws align with Adorno's concepts of standardization, commodification, and massification, and their influence on public perception and critical thinking. The quantitative aspect involved statistical analysis of questionnaire responses, while the qualitative approach included in-depth interviews to gain insights into participants' views on transparency and fairness in the competition. The findings indicate that Indonesian Idol’s competition system is heavily influenced by industry standards that prioritize commercial success over artistic integrity. This results in a homogenized musical output that caters to mass appeal, undermining the authenticity of the competition. Additionally, the commodification of contestants transforms them into marketable products rather than genuine artists, while the massification process dilutes the cultural significance of the musical content presented. The study concludes that for reality shows to serve as responsible public entertainment, they must instil transparency and fairness in their competition processes. Implementing these principles can foster a more critical and discerning audience, ensuring that such shows contribute positively to the cultural landscape rather than merely serving commercial interests

Corporate Responsibility and Repair for Anti-Black Racism

In an era when the public and shareholders increasingly demand greater accountability from institutions for racial injustice and slavery, scholarship on corporate reparations is more and more essential. This article argues that corporations have played a significant role in the cultural dehumanization of Blackness and therefore have a particular responsibility to make repair. Cultural dehumanization refers to embedding anti-Blackness into US culture in service of capitalist profit accumulation, which has resulted in status and material inequalities between Blacks and whites that have persisted from slavery to the present. More specifically, the article argues corporations have a moral duty to offer reparations to Black Americans regardless of any redress offered by other perpetrators of anti-Blackness. It appeals to tort law in providing a moral justification for corporate reparations to Black Americans.

Rentierism, ‘Capitalist Breakthroughs’ and Non-Transformative Development in Late Putinism

This essay explores ‘territories of accelerated development’ (TORs) to reconstruct the economic policy-making, development institutions and macroeconomic framework of late Putinism since the 2010s. It argues that even with Russia’s integration into the world economy and the developmental rhetoric of state elites, TORs and the national developmental regime around them reproduce the patronal management and recycling of rents rather than the transformative and state-permeated facilitation of productive investments and capitalist profits. This upscaling of rents has been systemic. The result—rentierism—challenges common understandings of rent-seeking and commodity rents as incidental features of Russian ‘state capitalism’, and, instead places them at the centre of a non-capitalist order of its own.

An Interview with Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre on Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities

In this interview, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre introduce their book Enrichment and core concepts for the analysis of new developments in contemporary capitalism. The study focuses the analysis of the enrichment economy, which is grasped as a new form to explore and exploit ‘the past’ as a source for capitalist profits. The interview presents forms of valuation, which are more general principles of how value and prices can be ascribed to goods. The approach of Boltanski and Esquerre assumes an organized plurality of such forms of valuation. Also, the two sociologists stress the importance of discourses of valuation, which bring these forms of valuation into operation. As the interview makes evident, one major aim is to present a new perspective on the relationship between values, prices, and practices how prices are legitimatized or criticized on the basis of discourses of valuation. The interview situates Enrichment in the context of other contemporary sociological works, which focus on the economic core issue of value and valuation. The book can also be recognized as a proposal to reconcile structuralism and pragmatism in sociology. At the end of the interview, the more recent outcomes of the continuing collaborative work of Boltanski and Esquerre after Enrichment are discussed.

Chromium as a tool of logistical power: A material political economy of open-source

Open-source software is used by almost all technology companies and has become an integral part of the technical infrastructure of digital capitalism. Generally, developers of open-source software have been viewed as a social movement at odds with the capitalist profit motive. This idealized view has been challenged as companies have made significant investments in open-source since the early 2000s. Current research frames corporate participation in open-source as fundamentally extractive in nature, failing to account for these sizable investments. Through a historical analysis of Google's Chromium browser project, we provide another way to understand corporate participation in open-source. This article takes a material political economic approach to argue that control of open-source projects can grant companies logistical power that enables them to influence standards and shape the Internet as an infrastructure for digital capitalism.

The Apostle of Failure: Queer Refusal, the Corinthian Letters, and Paul’s Unflattering Characterization in the Acts of Thecla

Abstract This article examines the Acts of Thecla’s unflattering presentation of the character Paul, as part of the reception of Paul’s Corinthian letters into the second century. Informed by feminist and queer biblical interpretations of the Corinthian exchange, it shows how the Acts of Thecla picks up on tensions over authority with Paul’s teachings on baptism, eschatology, and sexual renunciation in its portrait of Paul. Engaging Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the article suggests that the Acts of Thecla reads Paul’s letters this way in service of the social critique and queer antagonism that it holds up for its second and third century readers. Where Halberstam claims “queer failure” as resistance to capitalist profit, reproductive futurity, and neoliberal notions of success today, here Thecla’s story is read as a narrative of refusal in its own time. Paul’s muddled encounters with Thecla, steeped in the Corinthian exchange, it concludes, are central to this ancient tale about being, and improbably surviving, outside and at the edges of imperial, civic, and familial frames.

How ethnicity matters in labour studies: harnessing ethnic marginality in Chinese manufacturing

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the labour force is segmented through ethnic distinctions. These distinctions can be harnessed to increase capitalist profit. While critical labour studies have documented how gender, race, and migration status are used to generate cheap labour, the ways in which ethnicity structures the labour market are less well understood. We approach this issue with ethnographic data on Yi ethnic minority people from the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture who migrate to South China to become manufacturing workers. These labour migrants enroll in factory work via co-ethnic labour brokers. The brokerage system provides workers with a sense of protection and solidarity, but simultaneously repurposes and entrenches existing inequalities. Based on how relationships between workers, brokers, and employers were structured, we develop two connected arguments: Firstly, ethnicity serves in much the same way as gender, race, and migration status to differentiate the labour force, for example by allowing for salary segmentation and flexible hires. Secondly, ethnicity differs from other labour market distinctions in that it is not only an identity marker, but also organises co-ethnics hierarchically through responsibilities and entitlements bestowed by kinship relations.

Acts of Deforming a City; Top-Down Placeless-Making in Pretorian Cairo

Top-down or authoritarian urban interventions, in Cairo mushroomed in 2018; flyovers, transforming the streets into express and arterial roads cutting through residential areas. Furthermore, they were carried out in the name of “development”; however, their liveability measures and Placemaking aspects seem questionable. In order to monitor and evaluate the top-down urban interventions’ measures, significant cases from Pretorian Cairo were chosen for assessment. Various authoritarian urban interventions from 2018 to 2022 in Cairo are collected, described according to their values, are analyzed in relation to Placemaking aspects and objectives. Neglecting pedestrians’ safety, ignoring acts of imagining places for human activities, maximising capitalist profit, creating car-oriented projects and eliminating potential public collaboration produced a process the author calls placeless-making. They presented the following characteristics: overwhelming domination of commercial investments, street billboards in numerous sizes and designs and visually unidentified spaces. No place identity was created, no public collaboration was achieved, and no physical activities were encouraged.

Facing mass extinction, it is prudent to decolonise lands & laws: a philosophical essay on respecting jurisdiction

ABSTRACT The drivers of mass extinction today are societal processes (including economic and legal systems) inherited from European imperialism and embedded in the international state system. Their path dependencies demand that we engage in decolonial work. This work centrally involves countering land abstraction – the rendering instrumental of lands, waters, and skies for the sake of national territory, capitalist profit, or industrial resource use. Much Indigenous law is centred on moral relations with lands, internalising ‘ecological reflexivity’ within Indigenous society in highly articulated ways not present in the social memory of nation states. Prudential reasons thus support decolonising Indigenous lands, making room for the sovereignty and jurisdiction of Indigenous law. Such reasons are not exclusive but rather add to already evident reasons of justice in support of Indigenous decolonisation which have for some time been urgent calls for concern. This paper provides new reasoning for decolonisation concerning the practical relations between the disestablishment of our inherited colonial order and the curtailment of now alarming rates of extinction threatening the current order of life on this Earth.

Saving for one another: the informal economy of subsistence among the urban poor in Ghana

Urban space is monetized. Survival in urban areas is therefore largely dependent on the dictates of methodological individualism, capitalist norms and values, which are invariably linked to rent-seeking and instrumentalism in most urban transactions. The urban poor in Ghana, who are mostly informal sector workers, face enormous challenges in transacting with banks and other financial institutions. This challenge, however, does not prevent them from participating in the money market. They devise strategies of savings and acquiring loans largely on interest-free basis. They also invest in informal activities to financially secure themselves and their future. This paper discusses the mechanisms that regulate the institutionalization of informal savings and investments in urban poor communities in Accra and Winneba in Ghana. It is based on a qualitative research conducted between 2014 and 2016 with 133 participants in four Ghanaian communities using purposive sampling technique. The study employs the concept of equality matching to discuss urban financial common strategies. The paper attempts to debunk the hegemony of the capitalist profit perspective in urban transactions, emphasizing that the urban poor in Ghana mobilize their finances through established social relations with largely no profit-making in mind.

Spanish Imperial Vassalage and the Social Reproduction of Slavery in Colonial Cuba

Abstract With the social reproduction of slavery in colonial Cuba as its center point, this essay draws on the recent historiographical acknowledgment of the way vassalage mediated the often starkly drawn social distinctions between whites and enslaved people within colonial Spanish America. Inside the region’s emergent, capitalist political economy, feudal vassalage continued to define each social sector’s rights and responsibilities vis-á-vis the Spanish Crown. The rights of enslaved vassals derived from their potential contributions to the Spanish monarchy’s imperial survival, in their capacity to populate the extensive empire with loyal Catholic subjects and potential military defenders. These concerns also justified the Spanish monarchial state’s ability to intervene between its slaveholding vassals and its enslaved vassals, by limiting private property rights over enslaved people and operating in ways that did not fully conform to capitalist profit motives. Awareness of such sovereign-vassal interdependencies challenges historians to broaden their understanding of the relationship between capitalism and slavery to include the remnants of feudal social-political forms, even into the nineteenth century.

Marx’s Capital through the lens of Roemer’s General Theory (and vice-versa)

This paper considers how Roemer’s General Theory of Exploitation and Class and related work has engaged and reframed the historical materialist critique of capitalism initiated by Marx’s Capital project, and in turn how aspects of Marx’s account of capitalist profit and exploitation not addressed in the General Theory might be analyzed within Roemer’s framework of rationally optimizing agents and equilibrating markets. In particular, the paper discusses how imperfect contracting conditions and capital accumulation might figure in a coherent materialist theory of profit and exploitation.

Monetary economics from econophysics perspective

This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject “Can Economics be a Physical Science?” The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author from theoretical physics to economics. It briefly summarizes applications of statistical physics to monetary transactions in an ensemble of economic agents. It shows how a highly unequal probability distribution of money emerges due to irreversible increase of entropy in the system. The second part examines deep conceptual and controversial issues and fallacies in monetary economics from econophysics perspective. These issues include the nature of money, conservation (or not) of money, distinctions between money vs. wealth and money vs. debt, creation of money by the state and debt by the banks, the origins of monetary crises and capitalist profit. Presentation uses plain language understandable to laypeople and may be of interest to both specialists and general public.

PARALLELS AND CONTRASTS IN GENDERED HISTORIES OF INDUSTRIAL LABOUR IN BURSA AND BOMBAY 1850–1910

AbstractTextile manufacturing in India and the Ottoman Empire transformed fundamentally in the nineteenth century, when mass-produced goods imported from Europe permeated local markets. Faced with increasing competition from abroad, local producers changed their techniques, materials, designs, and target customers. At the same time, processing industries emerged in places with intense mercantile activity, introducing new meanings, relations, and patterns of work. This article investigates the role played by gender in the shaping of labour markets and class politics in two export-oriented industries that developed simultaneously: the silk-reeling industry in Bursa and the cotton-spinning industry in Bombay. It shows that the secondary economic value attributed to women's work, combined with rural connections of workers, brought down wages and subsidized capitalist profits in both sectors. Within the emerging industrial workforce, ideas about appropriate roles for women and men provided the vocabulary and constituted boundaries of class politics. Bringing gender into the debate of industrial development and class, the article reveals parallels and contrasts in two non-European settings that are rarely compared in the existing historiographies.

Value and Nature: From Value Theory to the Fate of the Earth

Value is central to Marx's theory of capitalism, but it is a concept more honored in the breach than taken to heart. What value is there in value theory? How does it illuminate the problems for which critics of capitalism seek answers? Value theory did different things for Smith, Ricardo, and Proudhon, let alone Marx, and it has to evolve to serve contemporary purposes. One of these is making it speak to the central role of natural resources in production; another is to integrate nature with complex labor; yet another is to delineate all forms of exploitation in search of capitalist profit; and, finally, it must help us unmask the destruction of the earth through unlimited accumulation of capital.

International development and the private sector: The ambiguities of “partnership”

Historically, the relationship between the private sector and international development has been deeply ambivalent. For many, a vibrant private sector and competitive markets are the essential prerequisites of development. For many others, development is principally concerned with ameliorating the dislocation associated with capitalist profit seeking. In the last generation, this ambivalence has given way to an emphasis on the complementarities between the private sector and development. Yet skeptics have continued to criticize the form of development this trend has promoted. We review the historical conditions behind this trend; the controversies concerning transnational corporations and foreign direct investment; the rise of corporate social responsibility; the parallel rise of philanthrocapitalism; and the growth of micro-credit as a market-oriented vehicle for poverty alleviation and empowerment. When taken together, it is clear that private sector actors have become increasingly influential in the new landscape of development, yet their effects remain ambiguous.

The Classical Bargaining Model for Organized Labor

Classical economists believed that economic value, which is the basis for all discussions pertaining to markets and prices, was determined by the costs of the factors needed to produce the good in question. Economic expansion would require capitalists to pay higher wages to workers because of diminishing productivity in agricultural production, and, as wages rose, capitalist profits would necessarily fall. According to Ricardo, over time this process would lead society to an undesirable stationary state. John Stuart Mill’s extension of the classical labor theory of value provides for a theory of distribution that is separate from the fixed laws of production. Once the theories of production and distribution became disentangled, economists were able to envision ways to influence distributional outcomes that could alleviate the suffering of the majority of the population. We explore the classical labor theory of value and the implications it produces for a theory of distribution. In particular, we discuss Mill’s unique contribution to classical value theory and argue that Mill, through his economic argument in favor of organized labor, actually foresaw the modern literature on uncertainty and information. We illustrate this contribution by way of an example that captures the distributional gains that workers enjoy from repeated negotiations between unions and employers.

Polityczna reprodukcja kapitału

Article describes concept of political reproduction of the capital, which is a new method of the reproduction of the capitalist society, based on the means of political assets and free of the early capitalist belief in a permanent economic growth. The idea of political reproduction of the capital helps to understand the transformation of the global capitalist system and also helps the marxist theory to overcome the problems concerning the methods practiced by the modern, financial capitalism – including its public debt policies. Modern capitalism doesn’t need constant growth and makes use of the central planning institutions, allowing the global capital to avoid disastrous effects of new system’s crisis. The modern reproduction of the capital is therefore based on the objective of maintaining capitalist power regardless of the level of capitalist profit.

Applying Species-Being to the Workplace

The economy has entered a state dubbed The New Normal, where capitalist profits have returned but underemployment, unemployment and worker dissatisfaction remain high. In this essay I develop an applied ethical tool by blending Marx's theory of alienation with Aristotle's concept of eudemonia. Then I utilize the tool in diagnosing and resolving the problem of discontent and layoffs in the manufacturing industry, along with a series of other concerns presented by workers. I then defend the practicality of Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises as both the best tool for getting us out of The New Normal, and resolving issues of alienation and discontent in the workplace. Finally, I defend Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises from possible criticisms.

Pursuing Ideology or Conforming Reality: Why does Education Shift its Function from Equity to Competitiveness in the Era of Globalization?

Facing the phenomenon of cultural reproduction, the state needs to adopt active policies to achieve the emancipative function of education – to free working class students from structural constraints. However, as globalization generates a considerable amount of capitalist profit, international competitiveness, addressed by neo-liberalism, replaces social justice so that the state focuses on the issue of human capital, mainly cultivated through education. For many researchers, this declination indicates that the state has become a tool to serve the interests of capitalists and thus contributes to social inequity. However, this essay argues that such criticism might overlook the influence of the material needs of people in the state. This individual need is able to fuse into a collective force, steering the state to join a global market in order to gain profit and, then, to improve life conditions, viewed as a crucial criterion for evaluating the degree of civilization of a given society. Therefore, this new context leaves education no choice but to adopt market logic, giving students competence for employability.