Real Capital Research Articles

Communist Ideals to Capitalist Realities: Uncovering Kerala Model’s Struggle with Foreign Aid(ed) Dependency and Disempowerment of the Marginalized

This article analyses Kerala’s development model through dependency theory, highlighting its reliance on foreign aid and consequent policy constraints. It examines how tied loans eroded Kerala’s policy autonomy and social model, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. The state’s financial crisis and strained central relations led to accepting loans with neoliberal conditionalities, undermining welfare policies. Using the World Bank-funded Jalanidhi project as a case study, it contextualizes Kerala’s aid dependence within global capitalism, where aid often acts as “euphemized domination.” It reveals the model’s vulnerabilities, interlinked with exploitative global relations, and advocates for economic restructuring fostering self-reliance and people-centered development.

Nietzsche in The Office: the aesthetic justification of capitalist realism

ABSTRACT In this paper, I provide an interpretation of the American mockumentary-styled sitcom, The Office (2005–2013), as an instance of what Nietzsche calls an “aesthetic justification” of life. The Office offers an aesthetic justification of the life of lower-tiered North American white-collar workers under neoliberalism. The Office performs this function via an implicit endorsement of what Mark Fisher (2009) calls capitalist realism, or the idea that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I focus on an illuminating scene in episode 16 of Season 3, “Business School” (2007), that exemplifies this especially well. The argument is that The Office orchestrates an aesthetic justification of those aspects of our existence that cannot be justified morally under capitalism, for example, precarity, ruthless competition, and so on. In Section I, I outline Nietzsche’s conception of aesthetic justification. In Section II, I discuss the major themes of The Office, highlighting their resonance with the concerns and experiences of the workforce. In Section III, I bring these together in a Nietzschean analysis of the “Business School” scene. Finally, in Section IV, I close by offering some open-ended but critical reflections on this analysis via Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

Capitalist realism is dead. Long live utopian realism! A sociological exegesis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

Capitalist realism is dead. Long live utopian realism! A sociological exegesis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s <i>The Ministry for the Future</i>

Effect of Energy Utilization on Pakistan’s Economic Development: A Time Series Analysis

The present research has been conducted to study the causal relation among GDP, electricity utilization, exports, real capital and labor force for Pakistan. Time dependent data for the mentioned parameters have been used for the time period of 1980 to 2022. Inter-relations among the above-mentioned variables have been studied in this work by the method of cointegration using bounds test. The results illustrate that there is an existence of long run relation among the parameters where GDP has been taken into consideration as the dependent variable. Granger causation analysis has also been performed for the variables. Results show that Granger causality between GDP and electricity utilization runs in both directions. Moreover, the study discloses that Electricity utilization granger cause exports and per capita real capital. Exports granger cause per capita real capital. Per capita real capital granger cause GDP. Labor force granger cause GDP and exports. The long run relation equation of GDP, Electricity utilization, exports, real capital and labor force has also been examined for parameter stability. The parameters are found to be stable with the significance level of 5%. The research also suggests some significant strategy recommendations.

Recuperative Wokeness: Nike and the Commodification of Potential for Social Change

Faced with the increasingly politicized nature of sport and the need for resource accumulation under neoliberal capitalism, brands employ political stances to connect with consumers and expand customer bases. The ubiquity of social media in the present moment offers a unique opportunity to analyze corporate messaging and also audience response. Seven hundred and fifty YouTube comments from three Nike ads were coded. Overall commenters responded positively to Nike acting as a “representative” for progressivism in sport while failing to acknowledge larger social movements or Nike’s own questionable business practices. Using Debord’s theory of spectacle and Fisher’s capitalist realism, we discuss “recuperative wokeness,” our term for how these narratives serve to co-opt activism, and how this works to maintain the legitimacy of neoliberal market system.

Coconstructing (Trans-)Capitalist Realism

Recent legislation targeting transgender individuals has relied on trans-antagonistic discourses depicting transgender communities as led by a perverse ideology and as attaining the status of a cult. Trans-affirming opponents to these laws have responded with a biopolitical analysis suggesting that the state is denying the means of life to a marginalized group or that right-wing pundits are manufacturing a transgender crisis to expand state power via a state of exception. However, trans-affirming activists overlook political economy in their biopolitical analysis such that both these legislative attacks and their trans-affirming opposition validate late capitalism. In the following, I use post-Marxist theory to reveal a catch-22 whereby both anti-transgender legislation and its ostensible opponents uphold neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy. Whereas anti-transgender legislation appears aligned with neoliberal austerity and the seemingly implacable privatization of (previously) public space, opponents continue to recapitulate medicalizing narratives for transgender subjects that are bound up in late capitalist tensions and erase class within these discourses (plausibly resourcing transgender subjects who become “respectable” through whiteness and wealth). In the process, trans anti-capitalist activisms are overshadowed or occluded, perhaps constituting a trans capitalist realism in which trans anti-capitalism is rendered impossible. Implications for global gender nonconforming communities are explored within the context of US and Global North cultural imperialisms, and more explicitly leftist opposition to legislative attacks are reviewed.

How we (used to) remember the Partisans. Culture of memory and art form during and after Yugoslavia

ABSTRACT This paper contends that, under certain socio-political circumstances and in given historical periods, some art forms become particularly powerful means of expressing collective ideas about a shared past. Might artistic forms themselves tell us something about the social function of collective memory, as well as about the society that “addresses” its past through them? In an attempt to answer this question, the paper will look at the distinctive artistic expressions for remembering the Yugoslav anti-fascist Partisan movement and World War II at three moments in time, during which the memory of World War II was respectively (1) institutionalized as a narrative of the Partisan struggle and victory (through monumental memorials), (2) then called into question and remolded into “dissident” literary narratives, to eventually become (3) a form of activist socio-cultural critique of both nationalist memorialization in post-Yugoslav states and contemporary capitalist realities (through choir singing).

“If you like your history horrible”: The obscene supplementarity of thanatourism

By examining witch tourism in Lancashire, England, this paper reveals the ideological role that dark histories fulfil for consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore thanatourism as a means for ‘post-historical’ subjects to conceive of wilder, pre-liberal worlds before capitalist realism extinguished all alternatives. Nevertheless, because of how history remains subsumed and consumed commercially, thanatourism works to support rather than subvert tacit endorsement of the neoliberal-capitalist present. Using Derrida and Žižek's theoretical articulations of ‘supplementarity’, we show how thanatourism and its dark historical content is made to function as an ‘obscene supplement’ to the neoliberal-capitalist present through three processes: managed metempsychosis, governed grotesquerie, and curated kitschification. Authenticity within thanatourism remains illusory, but an illusion that nonetheless perpetuates capitalist realism.

Canada’s Nuclear Colonialism: Capitalist Realism and the Neoliberal Public Sphere

Background: In Canada, actors in industry, government, and civil society have proposed small modular reactors as a technological solution to climate change. Analysis: A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of New Brunswick’s mainstream newspapers indicates a profound bias in favour of perspectives drawn from actors in industry and government. The sources underemphasize the risk profile of small modular reactors, delegitimize criticism, and promote a nuclear realist project tied to the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism and colonialism. Conclusions and implications: Disproportionate coverage of pro-nuclear sources from industry and government thwarts representative public deliberation. Indigenous nations, acting as counterpublics, challenge technocratic, colonial, and neoliberal discourse.

Moving post-socialist publics: citizens, spaces, and practices

ABSTRACT This Introduction to the Special Issue on moving post-socialist publics aims to lay out how existing mobility politics and discourses in the region under scrutiny are intertwined with historical, socialist-era mobility practices, and infrastructures. Mobility paths and policies are imbued with a contested understanding of socialist legacies as well as capitalist realities. The Special Issue explores how transport options and choices confront citizens with social diversity, transformations of social norms, institutions and routines, values, concepts, and traditions. Valuable lessons can be learnt in terms of critical mobility geographies beyond the region as post-socialist transformations address justice and changing social norms and understandings of state roles. A decolonial inspiration that challenges existing readings of the formerly socialist region and transgresses the analytical “Othering” of its transition experience can be traced throughout the papers. Instead of arguing whether or not post-socialism is still a valid analytical framework, authors see the region as marked by multiple experiences of modernity and coloniality. In the former Soviet peripheries, urban mobility shapes socio-spatial contentions, making visible multiple and conflicting narratives of modernity and coloniality, tracing flows and dependencies at different scales, and taking into account complex constellations of actors, cultures, and materialities. The post-socialist lens is meant to critically scrutinize continuities and changes, providing particular interpretations for contemporary issues: mobile post-socialist publics are thus a turn away from what was before but in a context in which a strong relation to the past is embedded in several continuities in institutions, materialities, and practices.

Work and community tourism: reflections on capitalist realism

This theoretical essay aims to reflect on the concept of capitalist realism, by the author Mark Fisher, and its correlation with the context of work in Amazonian tourism, especially that carried out in conservation units (CU) by traditional communities. Fisher defines capitalist realism as a widespread belief in a defeatist way, which supports the idea that capitalism is the only viable economic and political system, with no alternatives even in the face of widespread dissatisfaction. In the context of Amazonian tourism, the proposal for community tourism (TC) stands out as an alternative to the mainstream, focusing on local development centered on the communities' endogenous resources. However, the essay argues that TC analysis often neglects working conditions and industrial relations. The question arises as to how it is possible to propose a sustainable alternative without considering workers and their interactions with natural resources. On a methodological level, this study is a theoretical essay, anchored in a bibliographical review with a critical perspective and qualitative nature. As a preliminary result, it points to the danger in hybrid forms of work organization in tourism, highlighting that, although they can be forged as anti-capitalist alternatives, they end up being co-opted by a logic of maximizing profits, harming the conservation of common resources and the well-being of workers. The hopelessness of alternatives preached by capitalist realism in the context of work encounters barriers in experiences aligned with the solidarity economy, shared management of common resources, cooperatives and collective forms of work/equal distribution of income. Although there are significant experiences in the counterflow of mainstream tourism, they are not capable of revolutionizing the horizon of Amazonian community tourism.

“Respect existence or expect … resilience?” epistemic reflexivity towards liberated disaster studies

PurposeThis paper proposes a way of reflexing on how we think within critical disaster studies. It focuses on the biases and unthought dimensions of two concepts – resilience and development – and reflects on the relationship between theory and practice in critical disaster studies.Design/methodology/approachPremised on the idea of epistemic reflexivity developed by Pierre Bourdieu, and drawing on previous research, this theoretical article analyses two conceptual biases and shortcomings of disaster studies: how resilience builds on certain agency; and how development assumes certain political imagination.FindingsThe article argues that critical disaster scholars must reflect on their own intellectual practice, including the origin of concepts and what they do. This is exemplified by a description of how the idea of resistance is intimately connected to that of resilience, and by showing that we must go beyond the capitalist realism that typically underlies development and risk creation. The theoretical advancement of our field can provide ways of thinking about the premises of many of our concepts.Originality/valueThe paper offers an invitation for disaster researchers to engage with critical thought and meta-theoretical reflexions. To think profoundly about our concepts is a necessary first step to developing critical scholarship. Epistemic reflexivity in critical disaster studies therefore provides an interesting avenue by which to liberate the field from overly technocratic approaches and develop its own criticality.

Capitalist Heterotopia & Lost Social Utopia: Documenting Class, Work, and Migration in Post-Communist East-Central European Fiction

ABSTRACT Some of the most acclaimed novels from post-communist countries deal with communism through an anti-communist ethos. The emerging international canon of post-communist representations of communism and transition to capitalism has always sought to enfoce a convincing anti-communist ideal. Writers have only recently formulated critiques of the post-communist transition through what Boris Buden describes as post-communist cultures without social utopias. Those novels are not rooted in anti-communism but rather criticize the death of utopias following the fall of communism. Drawing on the Romanian case, we try to outline the heterotopias of capitalism in post-communism from the standpoint of novels on migration and work abroad, addressing contemporary understandings of capitalist realism, post-socialist realism, autofiction, and documented realism. Analysing novels by Liliana Nechit, Mihai Buzea, and Adrian Schiop, we reveal the subjective nature of the testimonial literature on migration and contrast it to the need to incorporate workers’ agency into this literary process. While the description of Eastern European capitalism through novels about migration has become an indictment of communism and a subtle plea for a ‘better’ form of capitalism, the novels about internal migration recover a lost social utopia that ended with the 1989 collapse of Romanian communism.

Governing AI, governing climate change?

AbstractThose concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. In truth, both may be said to be forms of self‐governance. Climate and AI intersect firstly in how they are imagined: dominant climate and AI discourses are both symptoms of Anthropocene thinking and ‘capitalist realism’. They also intersect in as much as ‘AI for Good’ initiatives propose that AI is ethical because it can help to address climate change. What seems missing, however, is any consideration of this climate AI as a procedure—is its knowledge valid, what knowledges does it displace or exclude, what biases are reproduced?—and consideration for its consequences, including harms. Does it actually result in climate mitigation and/or adaptation in a given context? What ‘maladaptive’ outcomes might it drive? What alternatives does it foreclose? These sorts of questions are ones where geographers will continue to have a lot to say.

Capitalist realism or post-growth ? Evidence from mental growth infrastructures of post-capitalist organisations

Capitalist realism or post-growth ? Evidence from mental growth infrastructures of post-capitalist organisations

Thinking and teaching beyond the terror of capitalist reason

The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and capitalist realism in the contemporary United States, as this is lived in the waking dreams of pedagogy and imaginative praxis. Looking beyond familiar analyses, this project exposes the terror of loss that motivates the punishments visited upon school and society by elites and points to the spectral presence of justice, which lives with us as persistent horizon even as it is persistently refused by power. Interleaved with these unravelings of the texture of experience as domination, this project gestures toward a thinking and teaching that is wise to capitalism’s recurrent fantasies. This pedagogy inverts the certainties that organize our senses of knowledge and curriculum, navigates the hidden topology of the real (beyond the reflexive affirmation in schools of what is), and proposes an unruly form of thought that moves out past the walls that sign the edge of the classroom and the edge of the truth. This project does not announce a settled approach but rather challenges the limits of the familiar at the level of our structures of feeling. We feel the terror of the given in the present, but we can also follow the seam of experience toward the point at which its impositions are attached—in spite of themselves—to the confounding/liberatory logic of the “impossible.”

Emancipating from (Colonial) Genealogies of the Techno-social Networks or Reversing Power Relations by Turning the Predator into Prey in Jordan Peele’s Nope

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man.

This is not an exit: accounting education and attempting to escape the capitalist realist “cage”

PurposeThrough this reflexive, theoretically informed polemical piece, this paper aims to seek to reflect on the role of accounting education in United Kingdom Higher Education (UKHE). The authors reignite an old, but pertinent debate, whether accounting graduates should be educated to be accountants or receive a holistic, critical education.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopt a theoretical position drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher, and their fusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, in particular Fisher’s (2009) conceptualisation of “capitalist realism” to take a critical standpoint on the effects that UKHE marketisation is having on the teaching of accounting and other business-related disciplines.FindingsThe authors outline four key aspects of where accounting education in UKHE is influenced by capitalist realism, as a result of the marketisation of UKHE.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is a reflexive polemic and so is limited by this written style and presentation.Social implicationsThe authors argue that capitalist realism is a dominant theme that influences accounting education. They propose that universities now, more than ever, must focus on their societal duty to foster critical viewpoints in their graduates and dispose of a model that is subject to capitalist realism ontology.Originality/valueThe theoretical stance allows for a potentially deeper consideration of issues surrounding marketisation of higher education, from the micro level of social interaction (that of the accounting academic and their impact/perceptions of the reality).

(Auto) Ethnographic notes about DIY ethos in lofi hip hop

This article explores the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos within the realm of lofi hip hop, highlighting its significance in the aesthetic and modes of listening, production, and curation. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent among urban youth who are connected to the internet but face the harsh realities of work and study. Through digital ethnography, I delve into the personal narratives of individuals who actively contribute in lofi hip hop community. Initially, I examine the DIY esthetic characteristics that manifest in the sound, visuality, and textuality of lofi hip hop. Subsequently, I analyze the DIY performativity and affectivity exhibited by listeners, bedroom producers (artists), and DJs (YouTube channel owners and playlist curators). Finally, I provide a concise autoethnographic narrative to contextualize the hypothesis that the DIY culture observed in lofi hip hop is related to the recent dynamics of capitalist realism.

Psychological Capital and Work Engagement: Moderating Role of Social Relationships

Background Employees are the real capital of any organisation, and to keep the employees productive and functional, employers need to focus on the psychological capital and social relationship of the employees to keep them engaged in their work. This study examined the emerging field of constructs of psychological and social capital to examine Indian employee’s behaviour. Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine a comprehensive model of the relationship between employees’ psychological capital and work engagement. Furthermore, it examines the moderating effect of social relationships between them. Methods This is a primary survey conducted mainly on the manufacturing industry. A sample of 375 mid- and senior-level executives of different age groups was considered in the study from India’s public and private manufacturing sectors administering a questionnaire survey. A random sampling technique was used for data collection. This study applied SPSS and Amos software to validate the measurement model. Results The results indicate a significant correlation among PsyCap, work engagement, and social relationships. PsyCap and social relationships are positively connected to work engagement. Thus, these results provide preliminary support for our hypotheses. The finding suggests that psychological capital and social relationships positively influence work engagement, and social relationships moderate the association between positive psychological capital and work engagement. It helps employees get better engaged at work. Conclusion Organisations must develop psychological capital to provide resources to employees and share a supportive relationship. Developing and maintaining a supportive relationship for employees and employers is important. In the future, both qualitative research methods and longitudinal data from other sectors can be used to understand the interplay between social and psychological capital for enhancing work engagement. Developing and cultivating positive social relations can help employees utilise their psychological strength to better engage in work.