Capitalist Transformation Research Articles

Silent De-Sovietization and Urban Renewal in Dushanbe

In the past decade, large-scale urban reconstruction has been ongoing in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital city. In this process, the city’s Soviet architecture is being demolished and replaced by Dubai-inspired high-rises. This transformation of public space is a manifestation of the process of silent de-Sovietization that has taken place in Tajikistan. Unlike what has been seen in other post-Soviet countries, this form of de-Sovietization does not result from rethinking the country’s Soviet past and deliberately departing from it. Rather, it is a casual by-product of Tajikistan’s capitalist transformation.

‘The Emperor of All Maladies, the King of Terrors’: The Violent Somatechnics of Cancer

This article considers the current worldwide cancer epidemic as shaped through complex somatechnical intra-actions between the intimately fleshy suffering of individual bodies and structural violence exerted through carcinogenic necrotechnologies such as pesticides. Additionally, it unpacks the epistemologies of ignorance that characterise contemporary cancer imaginaries in the west by reflecting on how they operate through the widespread deployment of warfare metaphors; metaphors that, in the twenty-first century, have morphed into ‘war against cancer-as-terror(ist)’- images. United States oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s bestselling book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2011) – also the winner of the Guardian’s non-fiction book award – figures as a nodal point for the ways in which mainstream western cancer narratives and biomedical models obscure the links between cancer and what anthropologist-chemist Anastasia Karakasidou calls chemical modernity; that is, the global spread of carcinogens as a consequence of the worldwide racial capitalist transformations of agriculture and production through chemicalisation. Investigating how epistemologies of ignorance work at the levels of cancer biology, cancer treatment, and environmental carcinogenesis, this article at the same time also demonstrates how the somatechnical lens makes it possible to analyse the intertwined operations of violence, power, technologies, and bodies at all of these levels. This analysis is then complemented by a contemplation of the conative vitality of bodily matter that ontologically accounts for the chiasmatic two-way process between techné and soma that is central to a somatechnical understanding of cancerous embodiment. This article also uses autobiographical material to reflect upon the ways in which epistemologies of ignorance and their matching stories of cancer as natural pathology/enemy/doppelgänger/terrorist are nourished at the individual level of experience of cancer patients and their companions and carers.

Soybeans and Capitalist Transformation among Family Farmers in Argentina

Soybeans and Capitalist Transformation among Family Farmers in Argentina

Going with the Flow: Moving Cells and Changing Values in Biomedical Practice

Science and technology studies have devoted considerable attention to the economic implications of biomedical technoscience. This article enriches these studies by offering a new reading of several strands of literature to explore how the valuation processes of gifts, commodities, and assets are intertwined in practice. We derive this approach from an empirical analysis of autologous blood donation in the case of a cell therapy called “extracorporeal photopheresis.” Combining ethnographic fieldwork with semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and document analysis in a cell therapy laboratory at a Belgian university hospital, we followed cells in motion from their original donation to their reinjection into the body, observing the practices that constitute and shape their value. We find that the various qualifications as “gift,” “commodity,” or “asset” that cells acquire, accumulate, or relinquish, as well as the consequences of these qualifications, are accessible only by observing the valuation practices that configure living processes. Our analysis highlights the interrelations between the economic forms that living entities can take and rejects the idea of a watertight boundary between them. By emphasizing the entanglement of logics specific to donation, commodification, or assetization, we contribute to linking the value shifts observed at the level of the laboratory to broader capitalist transformations.

Eating Out in Contemporary Hanoi: Middle-Class Food Practices, Capitalist Transformations, and the Late-Socialist Good Life

Vietnam's embrace of the Leninist-capitalist hybrid known as the socialist market economy has led to a number of food transformations. These include increasing food imports, heavy investment by powerful domestic and foreign actors in food production and retailing, and the scaling up of domestic agriculture, as well as a range of problematic dietary changes. In an urban food scene that is tremendously rich in the number and diversity of its food spaces, the prevalence of eating out has increased dramatically. Related to affordability, convenience, time, consumer culture, and the search for the good life, eating out has become embedded in everyday life in late-socialist Hanoi. Ongoing food transformations are seeing many of these food practices move from the streets to air-conditioned restaurants. Based on eating ethnography, this article analyzes the boom in eating out in contemporary Hanoi. Studying the interplay among social practices, urban foodscapes, and political economy, and focusing on the middle-class good life and the structural conditions underpinning it, the article analyzes the visible and invisible geographies of food. The latter includes the increasing dominance of capitalist actors in late-socialist foodscapes as cheap food is enabled by intensified animal slaughter and the deep structural inequalities produced by Vietnam's compressed capitalism.

Striving to be Men in the Family: Masculinity and Capitalist Transformation in Vietnam

Women in Vietnam, historically and today, have participated in the labor force at a high rate. Since Vietnam opened its markets in 1986, their participation has noticeably declined. Given this change, what does economic transformation mean for how men understand the place of women in society, and relatedly, what does it mean for how they understand masculinity? Through ethnography and interviews with 53 men in Ho Chi Minh City, I find that Vietnamese men in this urban center aspire for projects of masculinity that rely on the reimagination of Vietnamese women as non-workers in history. My findings show that men from different economic positions and occupations evidence divergent views of the family and women’s role in it. Men who are employed in waged occupations with a high school degree or less seek to realize “tradition” through the single-income family and the homemaker wife, yet this family is not necessarily an echo of the past. By contrast, men in salary paying occupations with some or complete college education view the dual-income family and the female worker as progressive despite the long history of women’s labor in Vietnam. This finding presents an opportunity to understand how masculinity as an ideal, a process, and a lived experience occurs during moments of economic transformation.

The spiral of state capitalism: labour transformations or the ‘whip of external necessity’?

This article opens a conversation between uneven and combined development (U&CD) and state capitalism studies. It reflects on the potential of U&CD to answer the following questions: why has there been an aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world capitalist economy since the turn of the millennium, and why has this taken an uneven and combined form? I argue that U&CD as an evolving research programme holds great potential in creatively expanding the study of state capitalism and its multi-scalar geographies. It is particularly well positioned to help us elucidate the multilinear and interactive character of present-day state capitalism. U&CD’s heuristics of ‘societal multiplicity’, ‘combination’ and ‘hybridisation’ can help us trace the combinatorial dynamics which result in the cumulative expansion of state prerogatives and their cascading impacts across policy realms and geographic space. Yet the causal mechanisms identified by U&CD (the ‘whip of external necessity’, ‘the privilege of historic backwardness’ and ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’) are unable to grasp contemporary state capitalist transformations in their historical and geographical fullness, notably due to a tendency to misread spatial unevenness as temporal dislocation. Theorising state capitalism requires that we examine the role of multiple and interacting capitalist states in politically mediating historically determinate transformations in the capitalist labour process, and their ramifications in terms of the temporal and geographical dynamics of value production and circulation. Thus, looking at U&CD from the perspective of the new state capitalism reveals both its analytical strengths and limitations for GPE.

Continuity or change? Platforms and the hybridization of neoliberal institutional contexts

In recent years, a wide range of contributions have sought to conceptualize the emergent effects of platforms on contemporary capitalism(s). One strand of literature has emphasized the novelty of platforms, stressing their disruptive features and proclaiming the rise of a new era – platform/digital capitalism. Another strand has tended to position platforms within the longue durée of capitalist transformation, focusing on the continuities and historical recurrences of platform-led transformations. In contrast to both strands of literature, this paper argues that platforms should be understood as reworking existing, neoliberal institutions from within, engendering a process of hybridization. It builds on the French Régulation approach to trace platform-led transformations in the wage relation and social reproduction. It argues that platforms have consolidated their dominance in the post-2008 financial crisis period by, on the one hand, inserting themselves into neoliberal ‘innovations’ in labor markets, benefitting from a flexibilized, precaritized and casualized workforce and, on the other, by responding to the neoliberal crisis in social reproduction, and the decades-long privatization, marketization and individualization of reproductive tasks. It explores these dynamics in the context of Amsterdam and Berlin, tracing the hybridization of the neoliberal wage-labor nexus in the context of food delivery, cleaning and care platforms.

Negotiating Land in Rurban Bengaluru, South India

Recently, there have been calls to decenter theories of the urban to theorize the rural as a formative force. While recognizing that the urban remains structurally dominant, scholars point towards the interconnectedness of the urban and the rural under present capitalist transformation processes. We proposed to study recent urban–rural entanglements through the heuristic of rurban assemblages. We focused on rural groups and how they negotiate their integration and disintegration into the urban cosmos while remaining embedded within their rural context through the lens of land. This article adds to the debate on the contradictory meanings and uses of land in the context of land dispossession and commodification for urban and industrial development. The work specifically paid attention to the reshaping of subject–land relations and analyzed how implicit or explicit references to the city and the countryside permeate the construction of values and uses of land among the old and new social groups in the metropolitan region of Bengaluru, South India.

Book review: Gayatri Nair. 2021. Set Adrift: Capitalist Transformations and Community Politics along Mumbai’s Shore

Gayatri Nair. 2021. Set Adrift: Capitalist Transformations and Community Politics along Mumbai’s Shore. Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiv + 202 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography, index. ₹1295 (hardback— ISBN: 9780190130244).

The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902–1955

The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902–1955

This site is a dead end? Employment uncertainties and labor in data centers

Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.

Debating the fate of the homemaker: The ERA and the death of the family wage

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution to argue that amendment adversaries fought over the future of women's economic security. Post‐war US economic growth stalled in the 1970s, bringing the family‐wage ideal of male breadwinning and female homemaking down with it. In these unsettled years, how female economic dependence would be addressed was an open question: would it be by propping up male breadwinning, as ERA opponents wanted, or by combining good jobs with fairly compensated domestic labour and government assistance, as supporters believed the ERA promised? A revisionist interpretation of the ERA battle, this article shifts attention from conflict over gender identity and cultural values to economics and capitalist transformation. It examines arguments presented in pamphlets, the media and to Congress about how homemaking women could achieve security in the face of changing economic reality. The ERA's defeat was a Pyrrhic victory for conservatives. The threat to government‐sanctioned male breadwinning appeared to have been vanquished. But the family‐wage system was truly on the rocks, and supporters’ vision of a working‐family norm, with roles based on function, not gender, won out. Without the ERA, however, working mothers shouldered the consequences.

Introduction to the Special Issue Precarious Labor, Capitalist Transformation, and the State: Insights from Central Asia

The end of the Soviet Union marked a turning point in the radical reconfiguration of labor relations in the post-Soviet world, including in Central Asia. The effects of this “unmaking” of Soviet working life—to paraphrase Humphrey1—were articulated in new capital-labor relations that led to a heightened sense of financial and existential insecurity across large sections of Central Asian societies. Thirty years on, mass labor precarization in the region appears in line with broader trends in the global political economy, where, despite enduring and even significant differences between countries in the Global North and the Global South, “[c]ontingent, precarious, and temporary jobs are becoming the norm.”2

From Neoliberal Dreams to Precarity: Micro-Entrepreneurs and Family Debt in Kyrgyzstan

AbstractThis article argues that precarity partly arises from the growth of household debt in the age of rentier capitalism. It examines the mechanisms of neoliberal finance and its debt-based economic growth model in shaping precarious work and life in Kyrgyzstan. The unequal social relationship between lenders and borrowers generates considerable economic dispossession, appropriation, precarity, and harm. For debt-ridden micro-entrepreneurs, some of the pressures and consequences of debt are acutely felt within their family context, where members struggle to negotiate and ameliorate the impact. By drawing on three case studies of a small farmer, a bakery owner, and a petty trader turned petty producer, the article examines how usurious interest loans plunged them and their families into distress, insecurity, fear, loss, and powerlessness. The first-person accounts of these micro-entrepreneurs-cum-borrowers explain how debt was produced and experienced, and how it was inseparable from the country's rentier capitalist transformation. The study also draws on twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with financial institutions and thirty-three semi-structured interviews with borrowers conducted in Kyrgyzstan.

The political economy of land expropriation in urban Bangladesh

This paper explores the 71-year (1947–2018) history of land expropriation in urban Bangladesh. It examines three interrelated questions regarding land occupation. First, how does the state and market pursue their mutual and competing class interests by expropriating land? Next, how does the state and market deploy primarily extra-economic means to seize land? Finally, how do actors, strategies and purposes of land expropriation vary from one political regime to another? This article addresses these questions by engaging with extant theories of land dispossession and class analysis and collecting a wide range of empirical evidence from Dhaka, Bangladesh. It argues that state and market actors in different political regimes use extra-economic means to accumulate land, creating preconditions for capitalism and expanding the existing capitalist system. To elaborate on this argument, it examines three factors of land expropriation: class, power and structure. The class dimension examines state and market actors who pursue their respective class interests by grabbing land. The power dimension explores land occupation strategies: who can use what forms of legal or illegal means to expropriate land. The structural factor shows how actors, methods, and purposes of land accumulation vary from regime to regime. Overall, this paper examines historical and contemporary forms of class interests attached to land accumulation, distinct mechanisms and purposes of land expropriation, and the nature of capitalist transformation under various political regimes.

Co-movement between the convergence of economic and health status in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract The Central and Eastern European countries have made considerable economic progress since the capitalist transformation. This paper investigates whether there is a co-movement between two factors of well-being, improvement of economic and health status between 1995 and 2018 compared to the six founding European Union (EU) member states. Applying the Pedroni- and Fisher-type cointegration test and a panel vector error correction model, our estimations suggest that there is a mutual causal relationship between economic convergence measured in GDP per capita and health status convergence measured by life expectancy. The long-term bi-directional effects are also proved by impulse response functions. Using the same econometric methods, the examination of the relationship between government health expenditure and life expectancy indicates that governmental health expenditure promotes the health status convergence. This study concludes that the FDI-based, low-wage growth model of the Central and Eastern European countries has not impeded the convergence in both factors of well-being to the founding EU member states. The results demonstrate that the improvement of the healthcare system may be a channel for the acceleration of convergence.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche, Kapital

Strasser shows convincingly how her subject fits into the great capitalist transformation of our society. The shift from home production to factory production and the market is a main theme, naturally enough. Strasser also argues well that housework changed along paths previously established for capitalist labor in general. . . . Never Done [also] places itself squarely in the new tradition of scholarship that explores the historical construction of gender. Perhaps its main contribution in this area is to put the much-discussed idea of "separate spheres" in a context of material life.

Critical geographies of smart development

AbstractThe development of smart infrastructures is a political act that intersects, in powerful ways, with ongoing decolonial struggles across the uneven landscapes of the postcolonial world. This paper develops a grounded, relational approach to the critical geographies of smart development that starts from place‐based relations of power to investigate how specific postcolonial dynamics inflect the global articulation of smart development. Drawing on the work of Gillian Hart, our approach situates the development of smart infrastructures within longer, contested histories of geopolitical intervention and capitalist transformation and foregrounds ongoing land, labour and livelihood struggles that transect the urban–rural divide. Using critical ethnography and relational comparison in South East Asia and the Middle East, we show how Myanmar's smart farms and Jordan's smart grid were built and selectively adapted or refused in ways that furthered existing inequalities and ontologies of disconnection, while providing material conduits for the enhancement of ethno‐nationalist projects to define the postcolonial state. This approach reframes the stakes of smart development, providing pathways for generative comparison that centres ongoing equity struggles and historically situated constellations of power to understand how smart development materialises in the postcolonial world.

Beyond Morality: The Moral Economy Framework and the Fisheries in Mumbai

The notion of the moral economy has shifted widely in interpretation over the years. Beginning as a concept to understand shifts in political economy, it has increasingly focused on the role that morality and values play in non-capitalist economies. Resource-dependent communities are viewed as exemplifying moral economies, embodying morals that are based on notions of equality and reciprocity and thus seen to be the anti-thesis of modern capitalist societies. Such a formulation shifts the focus from social change—the foundation of the earlier moral economy framework—to a focus on morality and participants in ‘moral’ economies. This article argues for a return to the older conceptualization of the ‘moral economy’ where class remains an important determinant of action such that different political economic regimes represent different kinds of moral economies. Based on a study of the Koli caste community of fishers in Mumbai, this article explores the messy ways in which community and class identities intersect in response to a capitalist transformation. A return to the older moral economy framework offers an opportunity to critically analyse community values and class politics and the role they play in shaping collective action without reducing capitalism as the ‘amoral’ other to older livelihood practices.