Contradictions Of Capitalism Research Articles

Agroecology and Political Economy: The Peasant World and the Contradictions of Capital

Agroecology and Political Economy: The Peasant World and the Contradictions of Capital

Urban Villages, Grid Management, and the Contradictions of Capital

Urban Villages, Grid Management, and the Contradictions of Capital

플랫폼 자본주의에 관한 고찰

How does the platform digital economy, which has emerged as a new business model, appear in terms of the long history of capitalism? The irony is that there is a tendency to monopolize the DNA of the platform industry based on value-based “network effects”. As long as these companies are born and grown in a capitalist environment, they cannot escape the laws of capitalist competition. “More users → more interactions → more data → more value”. Given that the initial dominance tends to solidify into a permanent position leading the industry, it is inevitably a foregone conclusion that these platform capital will turn into a monopoly.
 So if the state owns it, it will be like China. Nick Surnick's answer to this is a “public platform” or “decapitalist platform”. State regulations that we can easily think of - such as prohibiting monopolies, blocking exploitative lean platforms, protecting privacy and avoiding tax evasion - are urgently needed, but this is a minimal step and cannot address the structural conditions that have brought these companies to life. And with a cooperative platform, it is not powerful to confront strong platform monopolies.
 As Nick Sernick argues in platform capitalism, capitalist contradictions occur and the big flow and direction of resolving them should not be forgotten. A way to promote technology with everyone's ownership, control and democratic participation and distribution as a “public platform” or “decapitalist platform”. It's not new, but it's not like I've ever been, but the path of widowhood still lies ahead of us. It will be necessary for the state to exercise the necessary regulatory power and invest in the development of public platform technology, making it a de-capitalist platform.

Edward Bond’s Dialectical Theatre from the Perspective of a Dialectical Understanding of Utopia and Dystopia

Edward Bond asserts that art is significant because it is made up of a constant dialectic of variation in which every idea is subject to criticism. Bond does not argue that a utopian work of art resolves actual conflicts in a fictitious setting; rather, he emphasises that it exposes these issues in a concrete way in its internal structure and reflects the need for a new and different existence. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Bond, one of the most prominent representatives of Marxist-dialectical theatre, creates a dramaturgy of utopia (individual)/dystopia (dividual) and hope/hopelessness in his plays The Bundle (1978) and Summer (1982). Bond believes that art, particularly theatre, should be employed to encourage the desire for a socialist utopia. Bond does not resolve the contradictions of life (within capitalism) in a utopian fiction; rather, he contends that the problems of capitalist exploitation that drive individuals to hopelessness should be made visible in his plays’ internal structure. He does this through a kind of Brechtian theatre where the contradictions of capitalism are foregrounded. Like Brecht, Bond attempts to use theatre to promote change in society - both represent the fundamental problems of society to convince spectators that social change is necessary and possible. Bond purposefully employs a mix of political propaganda and a utopian hope for a new and different existence. His plays exhibit a desire for a politically awake society, and a peaceful world that prioritises equality and freedom.

The Socio-ecological Question, the Global Environmental Justice Movement and Anti-systemic Environmentalism

Abstract This article makes two central arguments: i) we can understand the current phase of anti-systemic movements predominantly through the globally expanding forms of resistance centered on environment, food, climate, soil, water, and so on as a collective socio-ecological critique and confrontation of the global capitalist relations of production; and ii) we can conceptually specify the global environmental justice movement through the notion of anti-systemic environmentalism expressing “the second contradiction of capitalism,” i.e., the socio-ecological crisis of the capitalist world system. In making these arguments, it introduces the concept of the socio-ecological question, theoretically grounded in the value theory of nature, in establishing the world-historical relationality among diverse place-based socio-environmental movements.

Abundance Against Scarcity

Abundance Against Scarcity

The Bhagavad Gita in the making of conscious capitalism

The article is a critique of arguments outlined by Mackey and Sisodia (2013). This article is divided into two parts. The first part proceeds from a critical analysis of Mackey and Sisodia (2013) and their narratives of conscious capitalism as manifested in its theological foundations in response to capitalist contradictions, conflicts and challenges. The second part deals with the relationship between Hindu religious consciousness in the making of conscious capitalism. This article argues that Hindu religious consciousness provides philosophical solutions to internal contradictions and challenges of capitalism by outsourcing its systemic problems to individual work ethics, which is Karma (duty) in Hindu religion as outlined in the Bhagavad Gita (the songs of god). However, these religious solutions are temporary as everyday life experiences generate human consciousness that questions the power of capitalist systems. It also argues that Hindu religious consciousness is concomitant with requirements of capitalism and its compliant consciousness.

“Un petit entraînement physique, pour l’acceptation du monde”. Christophe Tarkos and the neoliberal counter-revolution as the Revolution

Christophe Tarkos, a self-defined “poète révolutionnaire”, does a revolution of a weird kind. His texts maximise the duplicity of the revolutionary idea in the 1990’s neoliberal context. On the one hand, as Graeber notes: “the Left had largely abandoned utopianism”; on the other: “the Right [...] had catastrophically appropriated [...] the idea that the revolutionary is the agent of the inevitable march of history” (Graeber: 2014). As the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism on all of life’s aspects is declared complete (Dardot and Laval: 2009), Tarkos formulates the depleted the critique of capital in the counter-revolutionary idiom of neoliberalism – “L’argent est la seule valeur universelle”, “l’argent est révolutionnaire” (Tarkos: 2008). In so doing, he lays out a political double-bind: that of neoliberalism itself, consistently destroying humans’ bodies, psyches and their living milieu, and that of the impossibility for revolutionary forces to bring the counter-revolution to a stop. In providing his reader with “un petit exercice musculaire de remise en forme pour supporter, accepter le réel” (Tarkos: 2014), he devises the poetical counterpart to Gary Becker’s extension of Homo œconomicus to humankind: “someone who accepts reality” (Becker: 1962). Yet most critics interpret Tarkos' texts in light of Left-wing emancipatory ideals: either in the indirectly subversive manner of Deleuze (Barda: 2018; Sainsbury: 2018; Caillée: 2014) or through a Marx-inspired exposition of capital’s hidden contradictions (Farah). Focussing on the poems L’Argent (1997) and Oui (1996), I argue that Tarkos does nothing of the sort. Claiming that neoliberalism and the political context of the 1990’s is more relevant to interpret them than the emancipatory tradition, I show that Tarkos' poetry “littéralise” the worldview in which there is indeed no alternative (Gleize: 2009). Comparing Tarkos' poems to the foundational kernel of neoliberal thought (W. Lippman; L. von Mises; F. Hayek; G. Becker and Paul H. Rubin), this article highlights their disturbing proximity and explore the socio-literary effects of the quashing of non-capitalist revolutionary hopes. Focussing on L’Argent, part 1 analyses how capitalist contradictions are weaponized, capitalism absolutised, and the Marxian revolution is equated with the neoliberal one. In part 2, a close-reading of oui shows Tarkos' language to be a free-evolving and indeterminately plastic entity which manages to combine freedom and determinacy in a way neoliberals have hitherto failed to conceive. From this, part 3 presents the foundations of neoliberal theory which are at work in Tarkos' texts. In accordance with this tradition, Tarkos instrumentalizes the evolutionary view of history in which capitalism is the “Great Revolution” (Lippman: 1937) to which the “intuitive” mind of “common men” (Paul H. Rubin: 2003) has to be adapted. Given that their “mental architecture” is “adapted to life in the small roving bands” (Hayek: 1988), it follows that the true task of revolutionaries, for Tarkos and neoliberals alike, is to foster “the revolutionary re-adaptation” of humanity to market fundamentalism, the division of labour, heightened competition and the universalisation of the commodity form. “La valeur de l’argent, he writes, réconcilie l’ensemble de soi et du monde, elle fait de soi l’adaptation elle-même” (Tarkos: 2008). In a poetical tour de force, Tarkos effectively invents the dream idiom of neoliberalism. The pre-determined horizon of capital as human’s necessary destiny is thereby reconciled with the metamorphic, unpredictable and internally “plastic” (Malabou) features of life and thought. A better player of this fool’s language-game than France’s game master Emmanuel Macron (Révolution: 2016), Tarkos' poems square the revolutionary circle in neoliberal times.

Modern Japan and Multiple Modernities: A Case Study

Transformation studies should be a key topic for the comparative analysis of civilizations. Their most important task is to deal with the changes to world-views and cultural semantics inherited from axial traditions, changes resulting from the emergence of modern society and its radically innovative normative turn. To put it another way, the question relates to modern discursive reworkings of path-dependent figures of thought. In the context of such processes, discourses on identity intertwine with more or less critically oriented discourses on culture and society. For non-European countries, and very emphatically for Japan, Northwestern Europe is an almost exclusive domain of reference, notwithstanding eventual condemnations of European “decadence” or – as the case may be – capitalist contradictions. But when some critical distance from Europe is achieved, it combines easily with returns to a supposedly primordial native legacy, even with the illusory belief that this legacy can inspire a transformative creation of something new in human history. Such intellectual phenomena occur, with significant variations, across a broad political spectrum. This essay discusses a few exemplary Japanese cases.

Contextualizing precarious work: labor dispatch, boundary-drawing, and the politics of labor regulation in post-socialist China

ABSTRACT This article examines the rise of labor dispatch – a fast-growing form of precarious work – and its regulation politics in post-socialist China. Drawing on qualitative research, the author argues that rather than generalized deregulation and state retrenchment, the development of labor dispatch in China is shaped by the intertwined dynamics of precarization and dualization, with the state playing a predominant role in uneven regulation and institutionalized dualism. Through a case study of the automobile industry, the article investigates agency workers’ social composition, subjective workplace experiences, and struggles. It highlights the boundary-drawing strategy pursued by the state and employers to strike a balance between increasing labor flexibility and profitability and maintaining certain stability and legitimacy with a core workforce. However, this strategy has also generated new terrains of contradiction and resistance by agency workers. The state re-regulation to limit labor dispatch in the face of rising labor disputes and agency workers’ discontents channeled by the official trade union, suggests that labor politics in post-socialist China is a contested process. These findings advance a contextualized, dynamic approach to the study of precarious work that emphasizes the contradictions of capitalism, the historical and national contexts, boundary-drawing dynamics, and key actors in shaping the contours of precarious work.

Crisis conservation and green extraction: biodiversity offsets as spaces of double exception

Extraction and conservation seem to be polar opposites, yet they entertain multiple relations as the 'greening' of extractive activities mobilizes conservation efforts to address the 'extinction crisis.' Drawing on a review of the literature and two case studies, this article discusses the politics of affinity and enmity shaping the extraction-conservation nexus, and partnerships. As crisis conservation and green extraction receive increased attention, the article suggests that the convergence of extraction and conservation is not only pragmatic, but also reflects shared discursive imaginaries and valuations of nature, practices materialized through spaces of 'double exception', and common politics of enmity directed at local communities that legitimize exclusionary practices rather than solve capitalism's contradictions.

The urban process under racial capitalism: Race, anti-Blackness, and capital accumulation

ABSTRACT This paper employs racial capitalism as a framework for understanding the urban process. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to center the racial character of the urban process within a broader political economy of racial capitalism and (2) to position capitalism and racism as mutually dependent systems of exploitation. The paper begins by discussing the omission of race and racism within urbanization processes. Here, the work of David Harvey is critiqued in order to highlight not only the contradictions of capitalism, but also those of Marxist scholars in understanding urban development. The paper then discusses the forms of racial capitalism through modalities of dispossession and displacement, the agents engaged in this process, and the competing ideologies that structure the urban political economy, particularly in the U.S. The paper ends with suggestions for future research to consider the constitutive nature of capitalism and racism in producing urbanization processes.

Confronting Agamben on the Pandemic: Biopolitics, Class Struggle and Surveillance Capitalism

This paper evaluates Agamben’s observations on the COVID-19 crisis and its consequent crises that seek to revisit issues of the security state. Through this paper, I attempt to probe the contentious relationship between capitalism and human freedom, biological life and its politicisation thereof without taking recourse to the idiom of biopolitics. I seek to enumerate the ways in which Marxist postulates such as ‘class struggle’ and the ‘internal contradiction of capitalism’ are indispensable frames to think along while addressing the concerns of an anticipatory surveillance society by demonstrating the problems and limits of displacing immanent dialectics of antagonisms of class struggle with Agamben’s immanent sovereign logic of reproduction of biopolitics.

Marx’s geopolitical economy: ‘The relations of producing nations’

This short article explores the conception of the international relations of the capitalist world embedded in the last section of the Grundrisse, titled ‘Bastiat and Carey’. It shows that, contrary to the widespread tendency to take Marx as a theorist of ‘globalization’, Marx actually took the existence of nation-states and national economies seriously and conceived of their interrelations as arising from the contradictions of capitalism.

Break or Continuity? Friedrich Engels and the Critique of Digital Surveillance

This paper is a contribution to the argument that Engels’s work remains topical and may provide us with the analytical tools necessary to approach contemporary manifestations of capitalist contradictions. Based on Engels’s work on political economy (with emphasis on his contribution to the labour theory of value and the articulation of the law on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) it will critically review the concept of “surveillance capitalism” as developed by Shoshana Zuboff, in order to explain central aspects of the process of digital surveillance. In particular, it will criticise the view expressed by Zuboff that surveillance capitalism constitutes a break with capitalism’s past and can be tamed through an enhancement of democratic accountability and regulation. Marxist contributions to the critique of digital surveillance have already approached this phenomenon in a many-sided manner. This paper builds upon these contributions and suggests that the exponential growth of digital platforms can be explained as a direct result of the development of capitalist contradictions, especially the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production as expressed in the law of the falling rate of profit.

The Contradictions of Capitalism, “Greening” of Capitalism and the Lessons From Fuzhou’s Socialist Ecocivilization Construction

ABSTRACT There is a fundamental contradiction between the valorization of capital and the environment, between the infinite pursuit of the surplus value by the former and the finitude of the latter, between the abstract nature of capital and the diversity and concreteness of nature. Capitalism has begun to deal with this contradiction and initiated the process of “greening.” This was to save capitalism rather than nature, and the application of market mechanisms obscured an alternative path of governance. As part of that alternative path, the government of Fuzhou City actively used capital to restore and improve the environment, and provided ecological goods to the public in the process. However, since the internal contradictions within capitalism always exist, in the process of using private capital for ecological improvement the Fuzhou government still has to overcome its negative effects.

Nonhuman Animals as Fictitious Commodities: Exploitation and Consequences in Industrial Agriculture

AbstractThis article examines how nonhuman animals, along with land and labor, represent fictitious commodities as described by Karl Polanyi. Animals in agriculture are examined as an extreme example of animal commodification whose use resembles the exploitation of land and labor. Conceptual frameworks developed from Marxist theory, including the subsumption of nature, the second contradiction of capitalism, and alienation, are applied to illustrate how the negative impacts to animals, the environment, and public health associated with animal agriculture are caused by attempts to overcome the incomplete commodification of animals. This article illustrates how social theory can be extended to apply to animals, especially animals who are deeply embedded in human society. The inclusion of animals in social analyses also serves to strengthen our overall understanding of exploitation and oppression under capitalism.

“Letters to the Neighbors” by Conservative Publicist M. O. Menshikov as a Source on the History of Russian Everyday Life at the Beginning of 20th Century

“Letters to neighbors” by M. O. Menshikov are analyzed by the author of the article as a historical and literary source. It is reported that in the first volume of “Letters to the Neighbors” the most important contradictions and problems of Russian life were considered, the unresolvedness of which led to revolutions of the beginning of the 20th century. It is noted that the journalism of M. O. Menshikov had a deep social orientation. It is shown that he attached great importance to the problems of poverty, social stratification, illiteracy, drunkenness, backward healthcare, a raw materials economy, and the contradictions of capitalism. It is emphasized that the publicist paid attention to the problem of human loneliness in society in the context of the implementation of new technical inventions (aviation, railways, telephone, etc.), reflected on the idea of increasing alienation between the people and the authorities. The author of the article points to the value and fairness of M. O. Menshikov’s judgments about the importance of considering the press as the most important institution of civil society, as well as the need to form a powerful middle class as the basis of civil society. The biography of M. O. Menshikov is considered, its place in the history of domestic conservatism is characterized.

Climate, capital, class and crisis

The extent of the environmental crisis — most apparent in climate change — has raised in sharp focus the relation between humans and nature as one of the central contradictions in capitalism. The monetisation of nature is one of the principal features of financialised capital, with carbon trading now one of the world’s major commodity markets. At the same time, the environment is a focus for new alliances in the struggle for socialism.

Marxism and Latin American Literature

In the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.S.R Marxism remains a viable and flourishing tradition of literary and cultural criticism. Marx believed economic and social forces shape human consciousness, and that the internal contradictions in capitalism would lead to its demise.[i] Marxist analyses can show how class interests operate through cultural forms.[ii] Marxist interpretations of cultural life have been done by critics such as C.L.R James and Raymond Williams.[iii]