Crisis Of Global Capitalism Research Articles

The Political Economy of Reparations and the Dialectic of Transnational Capitalism

ABSTRACTThe contemporary global capitalist crisis provides the context for studying reparations, the struggles for which face uphill challenges, foremost because transnational capital will only engage with reparations to serve its own interests. Far from being a panacea for historical wrongs, reparations campaigns are shaped by the historical logics of capitalist accumulation and the liberal racial social contract. The cases of Namibia and the Commonwealth Caribbean (CARICOM) that are examined in this study highlight the contradictions that underpin the demand for reparations arising from genocide in Namibia and capitalist slavery in the CARICOM region. The cases reveal an association of reparations initiatives with buying complicity or capitalist fixes rather than reparative justice for historical grievances, while more autonomous demands for reparations face violent suppression, as in the case of Haiti. Today's reparations struggles are further undermined by revolutionary innovations in digital and robotics technology, confronting exploited racialized populations with a rapidly dwindling supply of jobs. This article locates the contemporary reparations debate within the wider context of global capitalism and its racialized liberal foundations, tracing the links between colonial wrongs, international power relations and ongoing systems of capitalist accumulation which reparations are used to stabilize rather than challenge. It is thus difficult to make a case for the transformational potential of reparations.

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.

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.

Zombie Apocalypse and the Crisis of Global Capitalism: Class, Precarious Work, and Environment

Zombies have always represented sharp criticisms of state and capital. From their roots in slavery in the Caribbean colonies to George Romero’s zombie films, which can be read as criticisms of racism and consumerism, this article proposes that zombies have embodied both the “mindless” labourer deprived of soul and forced to work eternally as well as the fetishised consumer in a capitalist world. By the end of the first decade of the current century, zombies began to appear in films which were neither Hollywood-style nor, indeed, American at all. This article argues that these non-American zombie films portray the zombie apocalypse as a crisis of contemporary global capitalism. It will closely examine four international zombie films, Backpacker (Thailand, 2009), Seoul Station (South Korea, 2016), Cargo (Australia, 2017), and Little Monsters (Australia, 2019). The zombies in these international films reveal several aspects of capitalism such as illegal migration, the precariat or disposable workers, and the ecological crisis. Moreover, these films also reflect the way out of the zombie/capitalist dystopia which touches upon not only revolutionary but also indigenous and generational politics.

Тенденции развития периферийных стран в условиях глобального кризиса: на примере Казахстана

This article raises the question of the development trends of peripheral countries in the context of global capitalism on the example of the situation in Kazakhstan. The global crisis of capitalism, exacerbated by the global coronavirus pandemic, has naturally weakened the social foundations of many political regimes, especially in peripheral countries. These countries are in a relationship of unequal economic exchange with the countries of the capitalist center of the world-system. On the example of the protest situation in Kazakhstan, one can see the whole range of class contradictions that exist in modern society.

Report: Hungarian Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference 2022

Report: Hungarian Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference 2022

Problems of destandardization and precarization of labor in the context of globalization-americanization-deglobalization of the world economy in the XXI century

The article is devoted to the analysis of the content, essence and social consequences of the transformation of employment in industrially developed countries after the Second World War in the context of globalization - americanization - deglobalization of the world economy. The author pays great attention to exposing the modern mythologization of the digitalization of labor and labor relations in the countries of the global North in order to cover up the true essence of various forms of non-standard work, which has become widespread in the modern world-system within the framework of digital capitalism. At the center of the study and research of the problems of destandardization and precarization of labor in the world of digital capitalism is the digitalization of the world of work and labor relations and the impact of the digital economy on the situation of workers in Western countries, especially in the United States, which has become a role model throughout the world, including the countries with "economies in transition". The author draws special attention to the fact that the introduction of non-standard employment into economic practice in the West was caused by the transition of economically developed countries to the new social structures of accumulation by means of withdrawal, that is, by reducing labor costs within the framework of the neoliberal economy. Based on the study and analysis of foreign sources, the author concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic has become a trigger to the exacerbation of the current systemic crisis of global capitalism, which puts on the agenda the need to search for and implement new, fairer and more humane forms of world order under the slogans of the social movement of alterglobalists "People are higher than profits!" and "Another world is possible!"

‘SYRIZA and Podemos, we shall overcome’? Left transnational cooperation in times of crisis

The Eurozone crisis and its austerity-centred management opened up a fertile ground for the so-called ‘radical left parties’ (RLPs) and their anti-austerity agenda. Moreover, it provided a unique opportunity for this party family to enhance its rather underdeveloped transnational cooperation. Sharing several objective and subjective features, SYRIZA (Greece) and Podemos (Spain) – arguably the two most prominent European RLPs today – seemed particularly well-placed to develop a strong transnational cooperation. However, the current literature has hardly addressed whether such expectations have been borne out. Indeed, despite a recently increased interest in the radical left, there are still very few studies focusing on the transnational cooperation among RLPs. Building on documentary research and qualitative elite interviews covering the 2014–2017 period, the article has two main objectives: first, to map the cooperation between SYRIZA and Podemos by identifying the key channels and actors of this process; second, to assess their cooperation over said period, with a focus on the factors fuelling and obstructing it. The article argues that the relationship between the two parties reached its peak around SYRIZA’s electoral victory in January 2015 but declined following its deal with the ‘Troika’ 6 months later, which blatantly contradicted SYRIZA’s anti-austerity programme. It is shown that while the main incentives behind their cooperation have been their shared opposition to neoliberalism, the European Union’s (EU) reaction to the crisis, and the similarities in their countries’ economic situations, the main obstacles hindering that cooperation have been the primacy of national politics and the diverging views on the EU. The findings arguably provide useful insights for the wider left transnational cooperation today, in a time of renewed global capitalist crisis, when such cooperation is perhaps more relevant than ever.

Savage Inequalities: Capitalist Crisis and Surplus Humanity

ABSTRACTThe escalation of worldwide inequalities reflects a crisis of global capitalism that is as much structural, one of over-accumulation, as it is political, one of hegemony. This article explores the current restructuring of global capitalism and global labor. Capitalist globalization has undermined earlier redistributive arrangements at the level of the nation-state, unleashing unprecedented global social polarization and also aggravating over-accumulation pressures. The transnational capitalist class has turned to several mechanisms to sustain accumulation in the face of stagnation: financial speculation, the pillaging of public finance, and militarized accumulation. Digitalization is driving new world capitalist restructuring that is resulting in increased precariatization and the expansion of surplus labor or surplus humanity. This precariatization includes cognitive workers who are atomized and isolated as the labor process has become individualized, which poses new challenges for working-class consciousness and solidarity among multilayered members of the global working class. The crisis poses a danger of twenty-first century fascism and a global police state but also new possibilities for emancipatory projects. An emancipatory project must bring together surplus humanity and its struggles in the margins and at points of social reproduction with workers inserted into the circuits of global capital under precarious work arrangements.

The Crisis of Global Capitalism as the Harbinger of De-Globalization

The Crisis of Global Capitalism as the Harbinger of De-Globalization

Is the Financialization Hypothesis a Theoretical Blind Alley?

The Financialization Hypothesis is a popular argument in contemporary heterodox and also mainstream economics. It maintains that capitalism has undergone a radical transformation over at least the past three decades. The financial system, through a series of innovative mechanisms, has conquered the commanding heights of capitalism and has changed the whole system according to its own prerogatives. Concomitantly, the global capitalist crisis of 2008 is considered to have been a financialization crisis. This article disputes the Financialization Hypothesis and argues that instead of casting light on the actual workings of modern capitalism, it misconstrues them and leads into an explanatory blind alley. The spectacular ballooning of the financial system during the recent decades of weak profitability and accumulation does not constitute a new epoch, let alone a new capitalism. Instead, it represents a familiar capitalist response to periods of weak profitability. This does not preclude the proliferation of new financial instruments, which lend specific new forms to a well-known capitalist process. The Marxist theory of crisis and fictitious capital offers an analytically and empirically superior understanding of this process.

« Il y a des gens d'humeur vagabonde qui déménagent tous les ans » : stratégies et mobilité sociale de la classe ouvrière de Québec durant la Longue Dépression de 1873

La Longue Dépression de 1873 correspond à la toute première crise capitaliste mondiale. Les analyses de ses répercussions au Canada se sont cependant concentrées sur les faillites d'entreprises et le marasme boursier. Aussi les rapports sociaux durant cette période singulière n'ont-ils guère retenu l'attention. Afin de comprendre les dynamiques internes de l'économie capitaliste, nous avons abordé la crise à partir de la question de la propriété et de la structure de classe. En cherchant à comprendre les relations entre propriétaires et locataires, d'une part, et le marché, d'autre part, nous mettons en lumière dans notre analyse sociohistorique les caractéristiques de la structure sociale du quartier Saint-Roch à Québec, en plus de la nature même de la crise.

The Nationalist Temptation: Labor and the Crisis of Global Capitalism

The Nationalist Temptation: Labor and the Crisis of Global Capitalism

Toward social movement activist research

In this article, we grapple with possibilities and dilemmas of activist scholarship in the struggle for education justice and political power. As activists and scholars, our social movement praxis seeks to produce knowledge that shifts the dominant neoliberal policy discourse, exposes racism inherent in neoliberal education policies, and supports education justice struggles. Although our work is centered in Chicago, a focus of contestation over neoliberal education policy and the right to the city, we believe this work is relevant to other US and international contexts facing similar reforms. We discuss the value of multiple forms of activist scholarship, describe the Chicago context and the principles that guide our social movement praxis, and raise dilemmas we wrestle with. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of activist research in this historical moment of global capitalist crisis, austerity politics, racist and anti-immigrant attacks in conjuncture with social movements reaching for new humane, democratic, and egalitarian social alternatives.

Breaking the Silence? The Mass Strike, Occupy Wall Street, and Demanding Jobs for All

The ruling class solution to the 2008 global capitalist crisis has been to restore profitability and power to capital through massive state bailouts of banks and industry combined with savage attacks on working class living standards, with Greece simply being the most advanced in the process. At the same time, a post‐2008 global mass strike emerged that provided an opportunity for a working class response to not only the latest round of attacks, but to those imposed over the three decades of the neoliberal era. In this article, I use a Luxemburgian theoretical lens to analyze the U.S.'s Occupy Wall Street component of the mass strike process. I highlight the intramovement ideological and political obstacles to advancing the mass strike process through establishing a broad set of radical, working‐class centered demands to address the crisis.

Endless Accumulation, Limits to Growth, and the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall

This article proposes a simple new model that helps to analyze the long-term movement of the profit rate. The article applies the new model to the United States and China, the world's two largest economies, to illustrate how the new model may help analyze the global capitalist crisis in the 21st century. In the new model, the long-term movement of the profit rate depends on the long-term average economic growth rate and the ratio of accumulation. As the capitalist economy stagnates and ecological sustainability imposes constraints on future economic growth, capitalism may have exhausted its historical capacity to check the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Greece: The Broken Link

The capitulation of Syriza could have been anticipated. They had given assurances to the ruling class in the years before assuming power in Greece. Capitulation was inscribed in the main strategic line officially declared and followed consistently by Syriza: ‘Neither break nor surrender [to the EU, ECB and the IMF] but an honest compromise'. They expected to implement a mild Keynesian policy, a policy that is an illusion in the contemporary crisis of capitalism. They asked for a class peace in conditions of open class war. Austerity is a means of control under conditions when the neoliberal strategy has failed and the globalization promoted by finance capital has imploded. The sinister story of the three Memoranda imposed in Greece in the last five years abolish, in form and in essence, all economic and legislative sovereignty from the Greek State. It takes into its extremes a long history of debts, defaults, foreign political interference and economic dependence of the country. The resistance of the population is a political time-bomb that Capital's institutions cannot defuse. In the current world crisis of global capitalism it is not only the Greek link that has been broken in 2009–2010 but the European chain itself, without meaning by this its automatic collapse. Nothing can be the same in the euro-zone, in the EU, and globally after the Greek bankruptcy. Greece as ‘Europe's failed state in waiting' (Larry Summers dixit) is situated in the crossroads of all international contradiction.

Capital, crise e produção do espaço: As determinações críticas da construção habitacional em São Paulo.

A diversidade de interpretações acerca da recente crise mundial capitalista obscureceu por muitas vezes o nexo entre crise, capital e produção social do espaço. Temos a intenção de recuperar tais conceitos em sua condição concreta indissociável, para tanto, propomos investigar as profundas transformações na produção propriamente dita da mercadoria habitação na cidade de São Paulo, no decorrer da década dos anos 2000 - período marcado pelo grande aporte de recursos ao setor -, em sua intrincada relação com as novas formas de capitalização, financiamento e crédito. Seria esta fração da produção social uma saída para o capital financeiro em busca de valorização, o que sanearia as crises? Concebe-se que a crise da reprodução do capital tem determinado estas novas configurações - da produção e do financiamento -, que atingem o plano da vida impondo renovadas formas de dominação e acirrando os fetiches. Pretendemos, com isso, desvelar o discurso de modernização na construção civil a ocultar novos e velhos métodos de exploração do trabalho, assim como as peias que agem no cotidiano de quem adquire "o sonho da casa própria".

Zapatismo: other geographies circa “the end of the world”

A chorus of activists and intellectuals claim that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has either ceased to exist or become politically irrelevant for Mexico and the world. In this paper I put forward the rather different thesis that despite the enormity of their task, the Zapatista project continues apace and merits careful consideration. To this end, I first argue that much of the confusion regarding the ‘death’ of the Zapatistas arises from a change in Zapatista strategy in response to the decomposition of Mexican society resulting from the contemporary global crisis of capitalism. Next, I detail how, having foreseen this decomposition, the Zapatistas set out to both theorize the nature of contemporary capitalism and reconceptualize anticapitalist politics accordingly. Since the early 2000s this reconceptualization has led to a shift in Zapatista strategy that, although not easily intelligible to contemporary media or much academic discourse, centers on the construction of ‘other geographies’. Finally, I argue that judging from the events of the past few years, this strategy has allowed the Zapatistas not only to persevere but also to pose a concrete alternative to the dominant strains of left political and spatial strategy.

For a political economy of massive open online courses

In understanding the changes that are impacting the global higher education sector, developing a critique of the relationships between technology and technological innovation, new managerialism and financialisation, and the impact of the secular crisis of global capitalism is critical. Moreover, it is important to critique these changes historically and geographically, in order to understand how political economics shapes the space in which higher education policy and practice are recalibrated for capital accumulation and profitability. This article will argue that educational innovations such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) might usefully be examined in light of the relationships between technological and organisational innovation; the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall that is affecting competing educational providers; the disciplinary role of the State in shaping an educational space for further capital accumulation; and the subsumption of open networks to the neo-liberal project of accumulation and profitability. Such an analysis then enables a critique of the claims that are made for open networks in delivering new forms of sociability that transcend structures of power and domination. As a result of this political economic critique, the article will situate the emergence of MOOCs inside and against Capital's drive to subsume labour practices inside technologically mediated forms of coercion, command, and control. It will argue that the ways in which MOOCs and the services that are derived from them are then valorised might offer a glimpse of how the neo-liberal educational project is disciplining academic labour and how it might be resisted.