Core Capitalist Countries Research Articles

RESIDUALIZED PUBLIC HOUSING IN ROMANIA: Peripheralization of ‘the Social’ and the Racialization of ‘Unhouseables’

AbstractThis study analyzes public housing residualization as a multiscalar phenomenon, providing specific details about how it happened in a Central and East European context via the marketization of the housing system, the peripheralization of ‘the social’ and the racialization of ‘unhouseables’. It employs secondary statistical data, interviews, and document analyses to examine the endemic features of global capitalism within Romania's housing regime. The study shows that the dismantlement of the state‐socialist establishment has resulted in a lower social rental rate than in core capitalist countries. It observes that when the public housing stock has generally been depleted, newly established social housing is relocated to the peripheries of cities as a nonmarketable component of the dualist public housing sector. In Baia Mare, the municipality has created social housing enclaves for vulnerable groups associated with dangerous behavior by excluding them from other forms of public housing, whereas in Cluj‐Napoca, it has attempted to exclude marginalized people from public housing by turning it into a site of class warfare. In both cases, the housing stock under scrutiny is associated with the racialized Roma ethnicity. The approach adopted in the study enables the residualization of public housing to be addressed across the peripheralization–racialization nexus.

From Street Parties to Hardbass: Dance and Protest in Czech Postsocialist Urban Space

In this study, I aim to discuss the nature of protest dances taking place in urban spaces of postsocialist Czech Republic. My point of departure consist in the hardbass masked dances that were produced and propagated by activists with links to far-right social movements mainly in Eastern Europe in the early 2010s. Hardbass thus mimicked the earlier anti-globalization social movement Reclaim the Streets (RTS). The anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s can be considered a truly global social movement, active not only in the core capitalist countries but also in locations that are more peripheral.

Apparatuses of Denunciation, Neoliberal Governmental Rationality, and the Potential for a Fascist Turn

Abstract This article explores the sociopolitical causes behind the proliferation of the apparatuses of denunciation in Turkey in the 2010s, and the escalation in the number of citizens denouncing their fellow citizens. These developments have taken place within an international context marked with the initiation of similar campaigns in core capitalist countries (e.g., the United States, United Kingdom) in the post-9/11 period mobilizing citizens to watch for suspicious behaviors that potentially signify “terrorist” activities. In Turkey, the Communication Center for the Office of the President, police hotlines/websites, community policing networks, neighborhood heads, the night-guard system, and legal statutes enabling denunciation are parts of these apparatuses. The article argues that the mechanisms of denunciation surfaced as part of the “security states” that emerged in the late 1990s under the dominance of neoliberal governmental rationality that encompasses components creating a fertile sociopolitical fabric both for the materialization of fascist tendencies and a preference for denunciation as a governmental technology. Accordingly, the apparatuses of denunciation in Turkey emerged at a point where the “security state” constructed by the Justice and Development Party government in its second term (2007–11) delivered a fascist turn within the context of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Colours of a revolution. Post-communist society, global capitalism and the Ukraine crisis

The Ukraine crisis is usually treated either as Russia’s return to the old-style empire-building (the right) or as a clash of two imperialisms (the left). However, the essence of this crisis can be understood only from the dual perspective of the consequences of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the modern global capitalism. The most rotten sections of the Soviet bureaucracy moved the society to capitalism. However, this effort could secure only a peripheral (Ukraine) or at best semi-peripheral (Russia) position in the capitalist world-system as a provider of cheap raw materials. Meanwhile, modern capitalism led to world economic crisis. In these conditions, the capital of the core capitalist countries obviously decided to strengthen its control over the periphery, and Russia’s aspirations to secure its domination over the former Soviet space were in the way. To thwart them, Western powers decided to provoke a Ukraine crisis, exploiting Ukrainians’ justified indignation at the backwardness and corruption inherent in their own peripheral capitalism. Hence, a study of the properties of the post-Soviet societies and their place in the world hierarchy is the key to understanding the Ukraine crisis.

O rompimento da Barragem de Fundão em Mariana-MG após 03 anos: considerações sobre um “crime que se renova”

Este artigo aborda o contexto da luta de classes após 03 anos do rompimento/crime da barragem de Fundão em Mariana-MG, ocorrido no dia 05 de novembro de 2015. Tal fato se inscreve na lógica produtivista em contexto de capitalismo dependente. O processo de extração e comercialização do minério de ferro, uma das commodities mais produzidas/extraídas do território brasileiro neste início de século XXI, é conformado pela queda e retomada das taxas de lucro, o que contribui para a perpetuação da dependência e subordinação econômica, política e social deste continente e do Brasil em relação aos países de capitalismo central. Após o rompimento/crime duas posições antagônicas se explicitaram no processo de ressarcimento e reparação dos danos/perdas: a atuação da Fundação Renova, instituição fortemente vinculada às mineradoras que causaram o rompimento/crime, e a perspectiva de luta e reivindicação por parte dos atingidos. Conclui-se que o contexto de luta e resistência é árduo, atravessado por interesses de classes sociais antagônicas que são materializados em trâmites burocrático-institucionais e legal-normativos, o que reafirma a histórica dominação do capital sobre a classe trabalhadora no contexto da mineração extrativista.

Social Forces and the International Political Economy after the 2008 Financial Crisis: The Case of Business Summit 20 (B20)

The 2008 financial crisis stands out for being a crisis that occurred not in developing countries, but in the core capitalist countries, thus assuming greater proportions and with broader ramifications. In this context, the G20 gained new impetus, and, as a result, several studies have sought to understand not only the crisis but the role of the reformed G20 in the process of resolving it. Despite the relevance of this literature, little attention has been paid to the G20 outreach process, in particular to the growing dialogue established between the G20 and B20 (Business Summit 20), a group that represents the business sector in these exchanges. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the engagement of business elites with the actions taken by the G20 to deal with the 2008 financial crisis – that is, the role of social forces in the (re)construction of contemporary international political economy. It seeks, in a concise and exploratory way, to sketch the relationship between the B20 and G20 in the period between 2010 and 2017, in order to better understand processes associated with the transnationalization of the capitalist class. It starts from the hypothesis that during this period it is possible to identify the constitution of a ‘B20 Nucleus’, constituted by the business sectors present at most B20 summits, and to a large extent based in the countries of the North Atlantic. In this sense, the B20 acts as a point of integration for the global corporate elite.

Political economy and social movement studies: The class basis of anti-austerity protests

Mainstream social movement studies have developed a useful kit of concepts and theories, well adapted to understanding social movements in core capitalist countries at the peak of growth of the welfare state. Widespread assumptions about the role of political opportunities, resource mobilization and framing processes need to be updated to make sense of contentious global politics in the 2000s, in particular, adding a focus on the socio-economic conditions for protests. In order to illuminate research results about the social basis of anti-austerity protests, the article critically reviews some recent contributions to political economy. In particular, some of the most influential contributions within Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to relevant capitalist transformations are discussed, with reflections on different temporalities in capitalist transformations.

The Tyranny of Monopoly-Finance Capital: A Chinese Perspective

Since the 1980s, economic growth in the core capitalist countries has been driven by an enormous expansion of financial capital, accompanied by steady deindustrialization. In recent years, the monopoly power of this financial capital has displayed increasingly tyrannical characteristics: it depends for its continued growth on ever-increasing indebtedness and dependence in developing nations, widening the divide between rich and poor and ultimately fostering state violence that serves to suppress popular resistance.… [Today,] military and monetary strength work together to profit from inequality and instability in emerging economies.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

New Spirit and New Hero: How Hungarian Startups Redefine the Ideas of Local Capitalism

AbstractThe present paper investigates how theBridge Budapest, a CSR organization founded by leading Hungarian IT startups, attempts to shape the values of Hungarian society towards capitalism in general, and towards entrepreneurship in particular. In my paper I argue that the central aim of the organization is to facilitate Hungary’s catching up with the core capitalist countries through the transformation of the attitudes and the ideologies surrounding capitalism in the Hungarian context, i.e.the local spirit of capitalism. This consists, on the one hand, of restoring the legitimation of some of the core institutions of capitalism, such as the enterprise and the entrepreneur, and of confronting the risk-taking, innovative and ethical figure of the entrepreneur hero with the provincial figure of the ‘postcommunist cheater’. On the other hand, it also consists of propagating a new management of work that aims to produce self-controlling and self-motivating employees. In the narrative of Bridge Budapest IT companies appear as the perfect moral and economic subjects – the bearers of the new spirit of capitalism – that have the expertise to offer solutions to the problems of Hungarian society, and around which the local capitalism should be built.

Marxism, Modernity and Marginality

Since the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent century of revolutions in the global South, Marxism has been more at home in the margins – in what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the periphery and semi-periphery – than anywhere else. In the core capitalist countries, Marxism continues to have a great impact among intellectuals, but also often finds itself challenged by social and cultural theory grounded in a rhetoric of marginality, usually identifiable by the prefix post – poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and that bogeyman ‘postmodernism’ (see Chari and Verdery, 2009). One of the more unfortunate situations of left theory today is the mutual suspicion and even hostility sometimes found between the ‘posts’ and Marxists. Some have read poststructuralism – apparently ignorant of its political provenance – as inherently hostile to Marxism and some Marxists have mirrored this incorrect understanding, returning the unwarranted and unproductive enmity.1 In Marx at the Margins Kevin B. Anderson makes it clear that Marx himself was a theorist of the margins and that his work on the margins fundamentally shaped his theoretical masterpiece, the three volumes of Capital. One of the important achievements of Marx at the Margins is to help connect Marxist theory with the poststructuralist, deconstructionist, subaltern-studies, and postcolonial approaches with which Marxism sometimes, incorrectly, appears at odds. Anderson treats at least two types of margins. The first margin is the one indicated in the subtitle of the book, regions outside of England and north-west Europe, outside, that is, of those areas thought in modernization theory to represent the most advanced cases along a single track of development. Marx’s occasional and ephemeral writing – newspaper articles, notes, letters, and unpublished drafts – make up the second margin. The two margins are interrelated empirically, since many of Marx’s most extensive writings on the margins of capitalism occur in his marginal writings. Both of these margins can be studied now better than ever before because of the excellent work proceeding on the new Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (1972–). Anderson’s book is especially important because it not only analyzes these two marginal aspects of Marx, but because it also relates these two margins to the core of Marx’s achievement: a dialectical approach to history, and

Emerging Hybrids? Health Care Policy Research in Canada and the United States

Since the 1980s, reductions in public expenditures stemming from neoliberal economic pressures have resulted in health care restructuring within the western hemisphere for single-payer systems as well as within the tiered health care system in the United States. These initiatives commenced alongside the fallout of economic crises in core capitalist countries beginning in the 1970s (see MacGregor 2001; Navarro 1996). In Canada and the United States, resulting reductions in health care expenditures have led to the downsizing of inpatient services and shifts towards outpatient community care.

From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715

Scholars once referred to the years spanning 1540 to 1715 as part of the forgotten centuries in the Native American history of the South. In recent years, however, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have shed more light on this period's history, and Robbie Ethridge has done a service in compiling and synthesizing all the new work into one much-needed volume. She has also contributed some original research of her own, and the book as a whole represents a refreshing conceptualization. Ethridge's theme is one of transformation: she shows how southern Native Americans, from Mississippian times to the early eighteenth century, changed and restructured their societies under the weight of a European invasion. Within what she calls the Mississippian shatter zone, natives faced the devastating Hernando de Soto expedition in the 1540s, the advent of horrific Old World diseases, the introduction of the Spanish mission system, and periodic entanglement in colonial wars as the Spanish, French, and English fought for control of the region. Yet Ethridge claims that European trade, notably the Indian slave trade, served as the most destructive force and greatest impetus for change among southern natives. She helps illustrate this fact by using the Chickasaws—descendants of the Mississippian chiefdom of Chicaza—as a focus group. In reaction to the turmoil going on around them and the need for European trade goods (including guns), the Chickasaws became a “militaristic slaving society” (p. 155), preying on neighboring tribes to supply the Europeans with captive laborers. Here Ethridge makes another important contribution to our understanding of Indian life in the South by tying the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms and the creation of the coalescent Indian confederacies of the eighteenth century—including Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws—to the emerging world economy in which the South was a “strategic outpost” supplying the core capitalist countries of Europe, most notably England, with “labor and resources” (p. 90). Too often, historians have neglected the world systems concept as an integrating technique that enables world and American history to be linked together for a better understanding of each.

Economic Crisis and the Decline of Remittances to Mexico

Economic Crisis and the Decline of Remittances to Mexico Tamar Diana Wilson In this era of globalization and strong migratory flows what happens in the United States and other core capitalist countries has repercussions on the developing world. Anthropologists working in both migrant-sending communities in Latin America and in migrant-receiving communities in the United States currently have the opportunity to map how economic downturn in the receiving country affects migrant families and communities in the sending country, thus showing how the local is affected by the global, an important theoretical (as well as humanitarian) concern in anthropology.1 Applied anthropologists working in both the United States and abroad may be able to play a role in helping unemployed immigrants, whether staying in the United States or returning to their home communities, to generate or access alternative sources of income. Recently much attention has been paid to the present and predicted decline of remittances in Latin America and the Caribbean. Slowdowns in [End Page 587] remittances have been registered in Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador and Guatemala (Lazo, 2008: 1). The effects of these slowdowns in remittances will be widespread in the migrant-sending countries. It is estimated that "El Salvador receives about 18 percent of its gross domestic product from money abroad and Guatemala about 12 percent" according to the Inter American Development Bank (Lazo 2008: 1).2 The World Bank also notes a slowdown in remittances since the third quarter of of 2008, a situation expected to "deepen" in 2009 due to what has now become a global financial crisis (Ratha, Mohapadra, and Xu 2008:1). The World Bank expects the flow of remittances worldwide to decline by between 0.9 and 6 percent in 2009. Regional differences exist, however. Remittances from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean slowed most between 2007 and 2008, showing a zero percent increase; but remittances from all sources to the Middle-East and North Africa increased by 8 percent in the same time period (Ratha, Moapadra, and Xu 2008: Table 1, p.2). Even in countries where absolute amounts of remittances remain stable, the value of dollar remittances has fallen. The Inter-American Development Bank reports that in 2008 remittances to Latin America will fall by a value equivalent to 150 billion dollars, or by 1.7 percent, the first fall since the Bank began keeping track in 2000. The Bank attributes this decline in remittances to four causes: 1) inflation in the immigrant receiving and sending countries; 2) recession in the United States and Spain which prevents access to better paying jobs; 3) the anti-immigrant climate in receiving countries; and 4) the fall in the value of the dollar compared to currencies in a number of Latin American countries, thus lessening its purchasing power (Cardoso 2008: 1). The Bank holds that the situation is particularly difficult in Mexico where 57 percent of remittances are used to cover basic needs like clothing, food, and housing. The other 43 percent is invested in savings, small businesses, property, and education (Cardoso 2008: 1). While Mexican authorities predicted an 8 percent decline in remittances over the course of 2008, the World Bank predicted only a 4.4 percent decrease (Ratha, Mohapadra, and Xu 2008: 4). Even this decline will have a great impact on the Mexican economy, however, since after oil exports, remittances are the highest source of foreign exchange (Wilkinson 2008:1; González Amador 2008: 1). It was reported in September 2008 in La Jornada, a widely read Mexican newspaper, that the head of the national tax office (Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público) estimated that due to the downturn in the U.S. economy there would be 2.5 billion dollars less in [End Page 588] remittances in 2008 than there were in 2007. The head of the tax office sustained that approximately 10 million Mexicans are working in the United States and that their remittances, amounting to approximately $25 billion annually, help to reduce poverty and increase consumption in Mexico (González Amador 2008: 1). It is estimated that one in four Mexican families receive remittances from abroad (González Amador 2008: 1). Migrant...

The road not (to be) taken—Why there is no Linkspartei in the USA: The AmericanSonderwegand the structural barriers to popular third parties in the US political system

The decline of neoliberal hegemony has by now spread from the periphery of the imperialist chain to some of the core capitalist countries themselves. The rise of new political formations such as Die Linke is evidence of this. But the defeat of the new imperialism that neoliberal globalisation has revealed itself to be requires a shift in the relationship of forces in the belly of the beast—in the USA. The US left has been undecided as to which strategy to adopt. It is therefore crucial to recollect the specific economic, political and ideological barriers that have historically and to this day frustrated the efforts of subaltern third-party class politics in the USA, and which will continue to do so, particularly given the present moment of class fragmentation and the Christian fundamentalists' ‘hijacking’ of the issue of class.

Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and the Process of Settlement among Mexican Immigrants to the United States: Reflections on the Current Wave of Mexican Immigrant Bashing

After reviewing literature which correlates economic crises with immigrant scapegoating and shows the former functionality of Mexican undocumented immigrants for U.S. capitalism, I argue that the anti-immigrant sentiments arising globally today have a new dimension that is closely related to the restructuring of the world system as well as to the qualitatively different character of immigration. Immigrant bashing is partially a reaction to the "deterritorialization" and increasing delegitimization of the nation-state as a viable "encapsulating" entity. Such deterritorialization represents a qualitative change in immigration patterns: immigrants from underdeveloped to core capitalist countries have progressively formed "daughter communities" and become settlers instead of temporary, circular migrants, thus becoming economically less functional for U.S. capital. At the same time, their cause has been taken up by Mexican-American political groups, making them increasingly dysfunctional in political tens.

Anti-immigrant sentiment and the process of settlement among Mexican immigrants to the United States: Reflections on the current wave of Mexican immigrant bashing

After reviewing literature which correlates economic crises with immigrant scapegoating and shows the former functionality of Mexican undocumented immigrants for U.S. capitalism, I argue that the anti-immigrant sentiments arising globally today have a new dimension that is closely related to the restructuring of the world system as well as to the qualitatively different character of immigration. Immigrant bashing is partially a reaction to the “deterritorialization” and increasing delegitimization of the nation-state as a viable “encapsulating” entity. Such deterritorialization represents a qualitative change in immigration patterns: immi-grants from underdeveloped to core capitalist countries have progressively formed “daughter communities” and become settlers instead of temporary, circular migrants, thus becoming economically less functional for U.S. capital. At the same time, their cause has been taken up by Mexican-American political groups, making them increasingly dysfunctional in political terms.

Dependent Development and Foreign Policy: The Case of Jamaica

Dependency theory contends that Third World states which are economically dependent on core capitalist countries will develop foreign policy positions consistent with the interests of core countries. Economic dependence produces this outcome, it is argued, because the structures of dependence produce economic and political elites in the peripheral countries whose interests coincide with those of multinational corporations and core country political elites. This article examines the case of Jamaica, which, although extremely dependent economically on the United States, has experienced dramatic changes in its foreign policy since its independence in 1962. The causes of these changes are examined based on interviews with Jamaican elites in 1962, 1974, and 1982, on historical evidence, and on interviews with American policy makers and aluminum company executives. The evidence shows that though the Jamaican business elite strongly favored a very pro-U.S. foreign policy throughout the period, a large segment of the political elite affiliated with Michael Manley's People's National Party moved to a militantly Third World-oriented position that included a major offensive against the aluminum multinationals when the party was in power in the 1970s. It is argued that this policy change was a direct product of the contradictory outcomes of Jamaica's successful pursuit of a dependent development economic strategy in the 1950s and 1960s, and that such challenges to core country economic interests in foreign policy are an inherent feature of dependence which is likely to appear in other cases of successful dependent development.

The Nature of Democracy in the Core Capitalist Countries : Meanings and Implications for Class Struggle

The Nature of Democracy in the Core Capitalist Countries : Meanings and Implications for Class Struggle