Crisis Of Capitalism Research Articles

Capitalism, Austerity, and Fascism

Abstract There is a strong resonance between events of the inter-war years and today. These include a questioning of laissez-faire capitalism and austerity, and the rise of so-called ‘populist’ parties on both the left and right. Clara Mattei’s (2022) The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism thus makes an interesting contribution, by locating the key argument of her book in the febrile period of European history between the wars. According to Mattei, the First World War disrupted the pre-war capitalist system to such an extent that it created a crisis of capitalism, itself. As a result, following the end of hostilities, there was a conscious effort to restore the pre-war ‘capital order’ by means of a technocratic ‘austerity strategy’, and this was strongly linked to the rise of fascism. We argue that the inter-relationship between capitalism, austerity, and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s was rather more complex, and that to make sense of this, it is necessary to broaden the focus beyond Italy and Great Britain and the international financial conferences at Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922). Otherwise, we risk misunderstanding and mis-diagnosing our own times, as those inter-war politicians, financiers, and economists discovered to their cost. We therefore also include Germany and the USA and base our analysis on the events of the entire inter-war period.

The crisis of democratic capitalism; Crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy

The crisis of democratic capitalism; Crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy

Image of the Future: An Optimistic Tragedy

The article raises the question of possible variations of attitude to the future, both in theoretical discourses and in the worldview of the contemporary. The problem of the future (humanity) is put in the context of the problem of crisis of the modern state of society, including the context of the crisis of modern capitalism. The author shows that modern capitalism, which has spread to the whole world, no longer has opportunities for extensive development and for taking its crisis phenomena outside its own system. In this regard, there is a way to solve the internal problems of this system on the principle of bringing them into the future. The article demonstrates two versions of understanding the future: the first one – a return to the past – represents either a retreat backwards in order to free up space/time for a subsequent intensive move forward, or a version of barbarization/archaization/primitivization of the present, conscious or not. The second version of the future’ image, with all its possible tragicism, is the image of the future as a future, another, different, something that has not yet happened. This version requires a new social theory that explains the process and allows to develop an action strategy.

The Ecological Crisis of Capitalism and Human Survival

In this remarkable reprise reprinted from Monthly Review's October 1992 issue, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy look ahead to the ecological crisis that has continued to unfold into the twenty-first century. Presaging the critical juncture at which we find ourselves today, they write that "only a change in the in the nature of power structures on a global scale could bring a realistic hope for the long-term continuation of human civilization…. If you think that is true, what do you think are the implications?"

数字时代下无产阶级何以生存与联合

Entering the digital age, capitalism further realizes the externalization and transfer of its internal contradictions through the deep combination of digital technologies such as big data and intelligent algorithms. With more powerful and flexible means of exploitation, it leads to the alienation of human labor and the loss of proletarian revolutionary consciousness, and makes human civilization face a huge crisis. But the essence of “capitalist crisis” or “capitalism in crisis” is not beyond Marx’s critical vision of alienated labor. Therefore, under today’s digital capitalism, it is particularly urgent and important to re-examine and analyze the living state of the proletariat under digital capitalism from Marx’s perspective of alienated labor, and propose solutions to promote the historical process of the communist revolution. In this sense, China, as an important revolutionary force that promotes the historical transformation of the world situation, leads the new practice of the proletarian revolution with the new form of digital civilization, assumes the historical responsibility of promoting human happiness and liberation, and provides a Chinese solution for implementing the Marxist internationalist position and promoting the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Критика глобального кризиса капитализма с позиции современных российских ученых

Chinese Marxist philosophers analyze the critical understanding by Russian scientists of the global crisis of capitalism and the prospects for social development in the 21st century. It is noted that the global crisis of capitalism is a natural stage of systemic contradictions in the logic of bourgeois development, and that modern problems of the capitalist economy are rooted in the inevitability of cyclical crises in conditions of market production and the hegemony of financial capital. It is suggested that the global crisis of capitalism is a cumulative manifestation of globalization in the 21st century, reflecting the fragility of the alliance of capitalist countries and intensifying the confrontation between the great powers in the context of the transformation of the international order. This, as noted in the articles, indicates the inability of the neoliberal system to cope with the challenges of the modern world. The international community must overcome the contradictions of internationalism and nationalism, based on Marxist ideas of the state, social community and human wellfare, which is the starting point for building global socialism.

The Formation of American Historiography of the New Deal (1930s – early 1960s)

The article analyzes the formation of American historiography of the New Deal based on a comprehensive study of scientific and journalistic literature. The initial assessments of the New Deal date back to the presidential campaign of 1932 when it was still a preliminary theoretical reform program. During the political debates of the 1930s, opponents of F. Roosevelt criticized the New Deal because, in their opinion, it did not align with American traditions, operated with un-American approaches to public administration, etc. These assessments were significantly influenced by the international situation related to the crisis of capitalism and democratic governance in Europe. Political opponents, referring to experience overseas, unjustly regarded the New Deal as a manifestation of one of the European radical “isms”. The author of the article found that such assessments did not find a wide response in society, and the scientific works of researchers who defended similar theses were on the margins of historical debates around the New Deal.
 The publication of their memoirs by most members of F. Roosevelt’s cabinet and his advisers, as well as the opening of access to the President’s library in Hyde Park, contributed to the formation of the first scientific assessments of the New Deal in the late 1940s. The historiography of the New Course had its “founding fathers”, to whom the author of this article includes – Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., B. Rauch, R. Hofstadter, F. Freidel, J. Burns, and W. Leuchtenburg. These researchers established a scientific basis that remains valid to this day, despite various attempts to revise it. They established certain historiographical trends and approaches to research and interpretation of this period in the 1950s. The author determined that the 1950s were marked by a debate between two schools of historical thought – Progressive and Consensus, regarding what the New Deal was – a continuation of the reform movement of previous decades, a turning point, or a revolution in American life and politics. In the research, the author considered and analyzed the main arguments and counterarguments of each of the schools.

The moral economy of the English football crowd: The European Super League and the contingency of football fan activism

On 18 April 2021, six of the most storied clubs in English football – Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur – announced they would be joining a new breakaway European Super League. These proposals triggered vehement opposition from football fans, which catalysed the intervention of the UK government in the form of a fan-led review of football governance. The reaction to the European Super League – which collapsed within 48 hours – demonstrates that the commodification and globalisation of football is contested. This article applies the lens of moral economy to analyse the contemporary mobilisations of football fans in England counter to these processes. The novel application of a moral economy framework provides a fresh perspective within the extant literature on football fan activism. This article represents the first systematic application of a moral economy approach to the political sociology of contemporary sport and its fandom. Employing an expanded understanding of moral economy, the article extends its application beyond the analysis of pre-modern food riots popularised by E.P. Thompson, incorporating the insights of Karl Polanyi and Andrew Sayer. Adopting this broader meaning, the concept of moral economy enables us to explore emergent and dynamic forms of fan activism, which seek to contest the commodification of football. The supporter mobilisations against the European Super League are examined to illuminate this perspective. Through an exploration of the contingency of the moral economy of football fandom, this article expands, in conceptual terms, the literature on football-based social movements, connecting it to the wider commodification and financialisation of football (as an important aspect of everyday life) and the internal contradictions and crisis of advanced capitalism.

Uneven decommodification geographies: Exploring variation across the centre and periphery

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed significant variation in the scale and form of decommodification across the capitalist world economy. To explore these uneven decommodification geographies this article develops a new conceptual framework that combines a critical Polanyian reading of decommodification with Latin American insights into centre-periphery structures and relations. The decommodification of land and labour in Britain (centre) and Ecuador (periphery) are then analysed from this conceptual perspective. The comparative analysis reveals significant variation in the scale and form of decommodification between the two countries during the pandemic. However, some important similarities are also observed, especially in relation to the (de) commodification of land. Here, the article draws on the corporate food regime literature to better understand similarities and differences between Britain and Ecuador. By revealing the uneven and shifting terrain of decommodification, this article makes a novel contribution to wider debates about the capitalist conjuncture and the intensifying crises of neoliberal capitalism.

DESTRUKTIVNI PROCESI PRIVATIZACIJE – EKONOMSKI I SOCIJALNI SUNOVRAT

In the world economy the historical conflict between labor and capital is intensifying in the process of the dominance of speculative financial capital. The rise of unemployment in the new global crisis leads to the spread of fear for the existence of the masses. There is a general decline in the share of employees' income in the national income, along with a real decline in salaries and wages. The functioning of globalized capitalism and the creation of the precariat are investigated. The aggravation of the conflict between labor and large speculative capital is the path to a permanent crisis. The relationship between private capital, profit and the welfare state are the basis of new crises in capitalism. A critical finding of the process of privatization and its destructive action in society is needed. A special part of the paper refers to the creation of a dependent and indebted economy, along with the discovery of the mechanism of creation of the debt burden. Finally, it investigates where modern economies and society have led to the devastating concept of neoliberalism, privatization and the separation of labor from capital and the results of development. Key words: economy, privatization, capital, debt economy.

Национальные государства в условиях капиталистической конкуренции

This article raises the issue of global competition between states and corporations as the most powerful subjects of world politics. The global crisis of capitalism, intensified by the global coronavirus pandemic, has naturally weakened the social foundations of many political regimes of nation-states. A new round of global competition between competing groups of financial capital has been set. The result of this competition may be a new global conflict, making it inevitable that many national states will participate in it.

Affinity and Separation of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—Analysis of the Crisis of Capitalism in Weberian Perspective

Affinity and Separation of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—Analysis of the Crisis of Capitalism in Weberian Perspective

Under Attack from the State and in Our Homes: Materialist Interventions and Lessons in Abolition Feminisms from Desis Rising Up and Moving

Abstract: In this paper we consider working-class abolitionist feminists’ conceptualizations of safety. Taking seriously the notion that “freedom is a place,” we look at how working-class South Asians and Indo Caribbeans in New York City build livable worlds at the intersecting crises of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We look at Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)’s organizing efforts following the expansion of immigrant detention and policing that came after the 1996 immigration laws and their contemporary organizing around gender-based violence and oppression as examples of a materialist articulation of abolition feminism. Drawing on DRUM’s archive and autoethnographic reflections, we show how DRUM develops and practices an abolition feminism that addresses both systematized racial state violence and patriarchal violence in working-class Asian American communities. We show how DRUM’s experiments with community-based intervention (CBI) around domestic violence aims to reduce violence and meet the material needs of gender-oppressed individuals in the community, while expanding the horizon for socialized care and a world without police.

Post-Yugoslav municipalism: dis/obedient democratic initiatives in Zagreb and Belgrade

New municipalism as a political-strategic approach is a reaction to the authoritarian management of the deep and multiple crises of capitalism after 2008. From their base in Spain, municipalist platforms have extended elsewhere across the globe, including in the south-east European periphery in Zagreb and Belgrade – via Zagreb Je NAŠ! and Ne Da(vi)mo Beograd – both of which have subsequently transformed themselves into political movements. This article analyses these two initiatives guided by three questions: in which conjuncture and in the context of what kind of state did these municipalist platforms in Zagreb and Belgrade emerge? What is the character of new municipalism in Serbia and Croatia? And what is their emancipatory potential? The article concludes that the platforms, and the new parties into which they transformed, are not experiments in radical democracy but are characterised by an intention to establish the rule of law and democratic freedoms. As such, the turbulence they create is providing a challenge to the prevailing, widespread system of patronage and thus questioning the current regimes.

The Debate on the Fiscal Matter in the Contemporary Capitalism Crisis in Light of Critical Political Economy

The Debate on the Fiscal Matter in the Contemporary Capitalism Crisis in Light of Critical Political Economy

The impact of the capital crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on the Spanish social State

Resumen: Este artículo examina una parte de un estudio realizado en España sobre el Estado Social español durante la crisis del capital iniciada en 2008 y posteriormente durante la pandemia de COVID-19. El propósito ha sido entender las medidas adoptadas en cada uno de estos períodos históricos y sus impactos en el Estado Social. A continuación, se presentan algunos de los resultados obtenidos a partir de una investigación bibliográfica, empírica y documental.

Emergency Power in Hungary and the COVID-19

We live in an era of overlapping states of exceptions: the climate and ecological emergency, the permanent crisis of global capitalism, the migration crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on the Hungarian political regime, this paper investigates how and why exceptional measures restructure our life. It can be argued that the main outcome of the exceptional measures is the rise of a new executive power, and it is demonstrated how heavily authoritarian regimes rely on the state of exception. It has been argued here that behind the strengthening of the emergency power there is the new rise of unlimited executive power, which is nothing more than the legal and political fulfilment of two-thirds majority power. Upon the case of the permanent state of exception of the Orbán regime, it can be said that the COVID-19 as an epidemiological crisis cannot be traced back to the Orbán administration, but the executive power has found a way to create a new political crisis based on the epidemic. The paper briefly discusses the impact of the 2022 Hungarian national election campaign period and the Russian aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 on the Hungarian emergency powers.

On the proletarian public sphere and its contemporaneity: crises, class and the media

This article attempts a critical enquiry into contem­porary politics and culture as characterized by a prolonged capitalist crisis and its concomitant economic, social, political, and environmental dimensions. The article highlights the position of the working class today, and its critical potential for a politics of social change, and socialism. Class is understood in intersectional terms, taking into consideration the associations of ethnicity, race and gender in the formation of classed subjects in a globalized world. The experience of the lower classes in structural as well as political terms, is largely negated from publicity, or assimilated and distorted by the media and cultural industries. This has dire consequences for understanding the crisis, its causes, effects, and possible solutions, interpellating the working class and the poor to bourgeois norms and sensibilities. The negation of proletarian voices and the mediation of the proletarian experience by hegemonic bourgeois ideas is theoretically discussed, drawing on the proletarian public sphere notion, and also by looking at empirical contexts of media practices (notably the mainstream news coverage of the Greek/European economic crisis of the 2010’s, and the European “refugee crisis” from 2015 onwards). By not addressing the systemic foundations of crises (e.g., economic, humanitarian) in their complexity, the insecurities triggered by neoliberalism are articulated by liberal pundits and mainstream media through discourses blaming targeted groups (e.g., migrants and workers of the European periphery). Hence, the development of effective antagonistic politics, relies on the creation of both organizational forms and communication structures, to produce shared meanings and identities, as well as political goals and strategies; class perspectives are crucial to overcome the prolonged, current political impasse that capitalist society reproduces, and the possibility to overcome the crises that capitalism produces.

Review of Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis ' Cultural Strategy by Ben Davis (Haymarket Books)

The eight essays in Ben Davis’ Art in the After-Culture are centered on the interchanges between cultural production and economic development in contemporary society. Largely told through the lens of leftist aesthetic theory, the book pushes against exploitative notions of capitalist systems and ambitions towards decentralization. Davis likens art to a “survival kit” and advocates for creative practitioners to strategically influence the direction of society.

The Paradox of Polycrisis: Capitalism, History, and the Present

The cascading crises of the novel coronavirus pandemic era are seen, by some observers, as the constitutive components of a broad “polycrisis.” It is a useful term, but, as some have pointed out, while it registers the fact of coinciding crises it does little to explain the interaction of those crises. Indeed, polycrisis is a misleading conceptualization of the pandemic era in part because the cascading character of the present crisis is a function of a shared ultimate cause. What we have been experiencing is best understood as a crisis of capitalism, the result of industrial humanity’s deformed relationship with the natural world. This is more specific than an obvious contending description that would render the present crisis in anthropogenic terms, as a result of human activity. Instead, the present crisis is the product of specific forms of human activity and particular elements of humanity, namely, capital. This being the case, we might speak instead of a broad, structural crisis that is, in turn, experienced as a crisis cascade. This “paradox of polycrisis” has historiographical implications, and this article concludes by suggesting how contemporary historians can confront the crisis and write history for our times.