Capitalist Exploitation Research Articles

The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s <em>La barraca</em> (<em>The Cabin</em>)

The political drive of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s journalism and novels of social protest has often been categorised as distinct from the predominantly aesthetic renderings of environment in his Valencian fiction (Medina, 1984; Cameron, 2018). This article seeks to reframe the ideological impetus of one of his best-known works, La barraca [The Cabin] (1898), through a focus on vivid imagery of the pathological body as it interacts with the Valencian landscape. By applying late 19th-century theories of crowd psychology and emotional contagion to the portrait of the pathologised nature of rural violence in La barraca, this article analyses the novel’s thematic focus on social inequality in the context of literary Naturalism. It contends that the trope of stagnant water, channelled through the fertile Valencian plain as a conduit of contamination, echoes the moral sickness of rural society that results from a powerful combination of environmental determinism and imitative behaviour. Scholars have widely concurred that in his social protest novels, Blasco Ibáñez critiques the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat. Extending earlier studies of the author’s naturalist fiction, this article proposes that the representation of contagious violence perpetrated by the landless rural labourers in La barraca draws implicitly on bourgeois discourses. It thereby aims to problematise the ideological foundation for the novel’s exposition of social injustice in late 19th-century Spain.Featured image: Alexander Wallace Rimington, 'Valencia - Huerta y Valencia al fondo', 1906. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons {{US-PD}}.

Holding hope: Financial coaching and the depoliticisation of poverty

AbstractThis paper examines the affective and temporal dimensions of hope's use in the non‐profit spaces of poverty governance. Drawing on 14 months of qualitative fieldwork at financial coaching programmes in Boston, Massachusetts, this paper explores how financial coaches understand the function of hope in their work with low‐ and moderate‐income clients. By tracing how financial coaches use hope to encourage clients to participate in and build allegiance to the contemporary economy, this paper argues that hope is foundational to how contemporary poverty alleviation programmes, of which financial coaching is indicative, depoliticise clients' lived experiences of impoverishment. Amid a resurgence of interest in the geographies of hope, the significance of this inquiry lies in its ability to offer an alternate reading of the seemingly benevolent, positive, or radical uses of hope by conceptualising hope as a placating force that cements existing economic arrangements and forecloses alternative political imaginaries. The inquiry undertaken in this paper, then, has implications not only for our understanding of the persistence of poverty, but also indicates the role of non‐profit organisations in the production and ongoing maintenance of broader systems of capitalist exploitation.

Sports and Politics: Commodification, Capitalist Exploitation, and Political Agency

Not since the 1960s have sports and politics been so intertwined in the public consciousness. Protests connected to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the horrifying revelations within women's gymnastics, to name just two, have advanced the profile of athletes and the causes they represent like never before. As such, this is a propitious time for the publication of Frank Jacob's edited volume Sports and Politics: Commodification, Capitalist Exploitation, and Political Agency. The collection aims not only to show the intersection of sports and politics but also to highlight the ways that exploitation and corruption have shaped sports both past and present.Section I focuses on the role of political corruption in sports. In his essay, Steven Riess details political corruption in Illinois connected to the horse-racing industry (notably harness racing). He finds that those politically connected advanced their interests in sports and that, oftentimes, prominent politicians pushed through bills creating new race tracks and parimutuel betting in exchange for stock ownership in the tracks. Tom Heenan examines the city of Melbourne, Australia, and what he sees as its false claims to being a global sporting capital. This image, according to Heenan, enabled crony capitalists to enrich themselves through the building up of sports infrastructure at the expense of public funds. They succeeded because people wanted to believe in Melbourne as a sporting mecca rather than confront the city's deeper economic and social inequalities.Section II explores racism and its linkage to sports and politics. Thomas Aiello considers the evolution of tennis in New Orleans from 1876 to1976 and how the sport became more accessible to the masses over that time, but in different ways for whites and African Americans. He finds that “Black tennis . . . democratized from the top down [while] . . . White tennis, meanwhile, democratized from the bottom up” (70). Both Nicole Hirschfelder and Steve Marston analyze athlete activism in support of the BLM movement. Hirschfelder contrasts media coverage of Colin Kaepernick with that of the WNBA. She finds that the liberal media placed significant emphasis on Kaepernick as a lone figure, feeding into older tropes of the single warrior crusader while largely ignoring the protests of other football players. The same liberal media tended to ignore or downplay the collective protests of WNBA teams. She asserts that despite being well-intentioned this coverage reinforces larger structures of power in society. Marston compares and contrasts the activism of LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick as a way of getting at what he sees as two strands of athlete activism. One strand, represented by James, embedded itself within the tradition of racial liberalism, while the other, embodied by Kaepernick, is connected to a tradition of racial radicalism. He finds that these strands of liberalism and radicalism, though different, ultimately intersect and help shape each other.The third section shifts to sexual abuse and homophobia and their connection to sports and politics. Kathleen Bachynski writes on the Larry Nasser sexual-abuse case and its role in the larger #Metoo movement. One of her notable findings is that reporting on sexual abuse in the twenty-first century has moved away from just focusing on the individual perpetrators to the larger role that institutions play in fostering such environments and condoning them. Nasser's case showed the ways that larger political/social/cultural changes have created an environment where more victims feel comfortable coming forward. This, in turn, has forced some institutions to rethink policies surrounding sexual assault. And yet, she soberly concludes, the saga over Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination has shown there are limits to the #Metoo movement. Lastly, Francesco Collura writes on homophobia in sports and how heteronormative masculinity has constructed a culture that remains challenging for LGBTQ+ athletes. Some attempts have been made, like in hockey, to create more welcoming and tolerant environments, but the author sees more needing to be done because “the NHL's heteronormative patriarchal environment has a hegemonic masculine hold on athletes from identifying or exhibiting ‘un-masculine’ behaviors that could harm the NHL's hyper-masculine reputation as an aggressive league” (167).The collection of essays spans a lot of topics and time periods, and as such, the volume as a whole lacks the kind of coherence to recommend it for, say, a sports history course. That said, all the essays are well researched and written. They cover a range of interesting and important topics and certainly succeed in showing how sports and politics have and will probably always remain deeply intertwined. This is in no small part because of the important role that capitalism and commodification play in sporting developments.

‘To conceal domination in production’: Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical functionalist theory of race

This article revisits the Frankfurt School’s reflections on race, anti-Semitism and fascism, focusing especially on the theory of race implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that this theory has the potential to be developed into a critical functionalist theory of race that avoids both class and race reductionism, offering a thoroughly intersectional competitor to currently dominant philosophies of race. The key to such a theory is the view that racialization plays a functional role in sustaining capitalist exploitation. While Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the scapegoat function of racialization, I argue that this function, while important, does not exhaust the possible functionalities of racialization and neglects an especially crucial function: the maintenance of a specifically racial form of exploitation.

The Sanders-Bookchin Debate

ABSTRACT Throughout the 1980s, the politics of Burlington, Vermont, were dominated by two of the American Left's most prominent figures: Bernie Sanders and Murray Bookchin. While there was considerable overlap between the two in terms of their general critique of capitalist exploitation, Sanders and Bookchin were often at odds with each other regarding renewable energy, economic development, and direct democracy. Bookchin accused Sanders of promoting an out-of-date “bread-and-butter” form of socialism that neglected quality-of-life concerns, specifically the need for greater democracy. In turn, Sanders thought Bookchin had a “back-to-the-woods mentality” that failed to consider that significant economic growth was necessary to end poverty. This article will examine the differences between Sanders's and Bookchin's approach to socialism within the context of Burlington's politics. It will explore the implications for these approaches in building a broad-based and highly democratic left-wing movement.

The Adivasi and the undead: From (post)colonial carnage to Necrocene apocalypse in Betaal (2020)

ABSTRACT In conversation with work by Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy and Jason W. Moore, this article shows how the 2020 Indian Netflix zombie miniseries Betaal aligns British colonial-capitalist oppression with the neocolonial-capitalist violence performed by Indian soldiers on India’s indigenous Adivasi community. Merging the (post)colonial with the post-apocalyptic in spectacular and violent ways, Betaal tells the story of elimination of an Adivasi community that resists capitalist exploitation of their lands, accidentally releasing a pandemic in the form of undead British soldiers once in the employ of the East India Company. The extractive violence that these two entities perform destroys not only people and traditions, it exhausts the land itself and can thus be considered an element of what Justin McBrien calls “the Necrocene”. The zombie pandemic that erupts in Betaal is an attempt to render the apocalyptic violence and death that unregulated capitalism performs on ecology and precarious communities.

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

The Daughter of Isis at Duke University

The Daughter of Isis at Duke University

The route of Orion: Towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyze a Chilean mining geoanalyst's narrative about large unrecognized geoglyphs he has charted in the Atacama Desert. The turns of this narrative take us through the Ancient Aliens hypothesis, but also an alterative pre-Inca migration route between the Atlantic and the Pacific thousands of years old, and in contravention to normative Andean archaeology. I argue that we need to look at alternative forms of history making that are not based on ontologically realist premises. Using Kleinberǵs notion of ‘past possibles’, based on Derrida's theory of historical deconstruction, I defend that in the mining expert´s narrative coexist a multiplicity of possible pasts, in oscillation between latent and manifest. I also look at the Desert itself, and its extractive industries, as well as a notion of ‘extreme’ in relation to temporal thinking, arguing that it is not enough to see the narrative on aliens as a result of neoliberal capitalist exploitation.

Surrogate Humanity: Resistant Art Practices under Technoliberalism

This essay reviews the book Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, co-written by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora. In this critical text, Atanasoski and Vora consider the ways in which liberal structures of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation have been ingrained into robotic technologies. By revealing the interwoven relationship between technological development and racial dispossession, Surrogate Humanity searches for alternative models of human-machine interactions that can destabilize social inequalities and their reproductions.

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

The Penn Effect and Marx's International Law of Value: A Review of Value and Unequal Exchange by Andrea Ricci

Placing itself in the revival of interest in unequal exchange, Ricci's book claims the need to give the theory a new conceptual foundation to justify recent proposals to estimate unequal exchange on the basis of the so-called Penn effect. In order to do that, Ricci identifies Marx's international law of value as a fitting theoretical framework and hence develops a radically innovative theory of global capitalist exploitation through international trade. Finally, he assesses the magnitude of unequal exchange over the past three decades by producing estimates based on the proposed approach.

Interaction as an Artistic and Political Strategy: a Philosophical Source of the Relational Aesthetics

The article analyzes the concept of «social turn» in the art of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the most famous conceptualization of which is Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud. Collapse of the communist project, general disappointment of the art community in the neoliberal version of capitalism – those are aesthetic and political reasons for the Relational Art. The article discusses the difference between the Relational Art and modernist artistic practices. The interpretation of the principle of "operational realism" according to Bourriaud - the art of «social turn» does not revolutionize the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation, but learns to exist in the established cultural context, carrying aesthetic projections on social relations already existing in reality in order to gently recode the world. The main «medium» of the Relational Art is human relations, the main theme - «being-together», the goal – microsocialities, new ways of human collaboration. The article proposes a comparative analysis of the aesthetic and political aspects of Guy Debord's concept of the "society of the spectacle" and Relational Aesthetics - the former served as the philosophical source of the latter.

Why ecological economics should not adopt Marxian value theory

In their attempts to challenge the view of neoclassical economics that economic value is determined by subjective preferences, heterodox economists have posited objective measures of value based on abstractions such as “socially necessary labor time” or embodied energy. Such approaches seem intuitively to be valid ways of understanding capitalist exploitation, unequal exchange, and accumulation, but are analytically flawed. As the concept of economic value assumes a monetary metric, it cannot be applied to biophysical resources such as labor time or energy, which are measured in hours or Joules. The critics of neoclassical economics have thus remained constrained by the conceptual universe of the discipline that they are criticizing. To transcend this impasse, we must recognize that the capitalist pursuit of exchange-values is propelled by the artifact of general-purpose money and that its encouragement of endlessly expanding production and economic growth conflicts with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A coherent understanding of ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system means criticizing neoclassical economics without advocating an alternative theory of value. What are being unequally exchanged in the world-system are not “underpaid values” but material resources. Such a perspective on global inequalities implies a fundamental reconsideration of the mainstream view of technological progress.

Introduction

Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism. In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of digital work and capitalist exploitation for some time. From social photos, selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic - the digital image is not only predominantly networked but also accessed through platforms and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. In this issue, the contributors show how participation and commodification are closely linked in the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.

Liberal democracy and globalized capitalism in Africa: Perspective from Heidegger

This paper sets out to defend a set of mutually inclusive theses. First, it argues that liberal democracy’s sojourn in Africa is not political but economic. Secondly, that there is nothing natural about capitalism, rather capitalism was forcefully globalized in order to create the false impression that man is by nature motivated by self-interest or profit. But this paper demonstrates the historicity of capitalism. Finally, the paper employs Martin Heidegger’s ontological analysis to show that liberal democracy is just the political manifestation of what he calls “the nihilism of Western metaphysical thinking”, a thinking that is expansionist, dominating and ultimately “enframing”; (controlling). Using the expository, historical, analytic and critical methods, the essay demonstrates that the liberal democratic march in Africa is to provide the enabling conditions for capitalist exploitation. Thus, it argues that without the political ground- clearing capacity of liberal democracy, the economic domination and control by capitalism in Africa would be very difficult. In conclusion, the paper draws from the actual experience of liberal democracy and the thrust of capitalism in Africa to demonstrate their ontological ambivalence.

Himalayan BRI: an infrastructural conjuncture and shifting development in Nepal

ABSTRACT In Nepal, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) contributed to the articulation of a post-2015 conjuncture involving a new constitution, earthquake reconstruction, an Indian blockade and disenchantment with Western non-governmental organization developmentalism. This conjuncture permitted the emergence of new domestic possibilities, regional configurations of power, Himalayan geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics, and developmental trajectories involving an infrastructural turn. Considered a frontier zone since the Sugauli Treaty, Nepal has mobilized its own historical, geographical and political conditions, and articulated the BRI as a historical opportunity to liberate itself from India’s market monopoly and domestic political and economic influence by generating a new national discourse in favour of a sovereign, autonomous and self-reliant development path that is already shaping national policymaking, state restructuring, political mobilizations, regional negotiations and Nepal Himalaya landscapes. As such it challenges the conventional opposition between globalized capitalist and imperialist exploitation and national sovereignty.

The reemergence of Engels’ concept of social murder in response to growing social and health inequalities

In 1845, Friedrich Engels identified how the living and working conditions experienced by English workers sent them prematurely to the grave, arguing that those responsible for these conditions -- ruling authorities and the bourgeoisie -- were committing social murder. The concept remained, for the most part, dormant in academic journals through the 1900s. Since 2000, there has been a revival of the social murder concept with its growth especially evident in the UK over the last decade as a result of the Grenfell Tower Fire and the effects of austerity imposed by successive Conservative governments. The purpose of this paper is to document the reemergence of the concept of social murder in academic journal articles. To do so we conducted a scoping review of content applying the social murder concept since 1900 in relation to health and well-being. We identified two primary concepts of social murder: social murder as resulting from capitalist exploitation and social murder as resulting from bad public policy across the domains of working conditions, living conditions, poverty, housing, race, health inequalities, crime and violence, neoliberalism, gender, food, social assistance, deregulation and austerity. We consider reasons for the reemergence of Engels’ social murder concept and the role it can play in resisting the forces responsible for the living and working conditions that kill.

Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, LiamCamplingAlejandroColásLondon & New York: Verso. 2021. pp. xiv + 418. £20/$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781784785239

Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, LiamCamplingAlejandroColásLondon & New York: Verso. 2021. pp. xiv + 418. £20/$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781784785239

A Note on African Socialism

A Note on African Socialism