Critique Of Capitalism Research Articles

Krytyka kapitalizmu jako krytyka kultury

Critique of capitalism as a critique of cultureThe text is devoted to scientific and journalistic achievements of Marek “k-punk” Fisher. The author tries to show the originality of thought of the English theorist of culture and his contribution to the critical reflection on contemporary cultural phenomena. Fisher gained popularity in 2009 with the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. He published in such magazines as The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wire. In particular, he was interested in popular culture. The researcher and academic lecturer — with counter-cultural background — was often involved in defending the interests of the working class. The idea of the article is to familiarize the Polish reader with the concepts of Fisher, which are especially connected with the thought of Jacques Derrida.

The inverted postnational constellation: Identitarian populism in context

AbstractAs exemplified by the pan‐European ‘Identitarian movement’ (IM), contemporary far‐right populism defies the habitual matrix within which right‐wing radicalism has been criticised as a negation of liberal cosmopolitanism. The IM's political stance amalgamates features of cultural liberalism and racialist xenophobia into a defence of ‘European way of life.’ We offer an alternative decoding of the phenomenon by drawing on Jürgen Habermas's ‘postnational constellation.’ It casts the IM's protectionist qua chauvinistic populism as ‘inverted’ postnationalism, engendered through territorial and ethnic appropriation of universal political values. As such, inclusionary ideals of cosmopolitan liberalism and democracy purporting humanistic postnationalism have been transformed by Identitarians into elements of a privileged civilisational life‐style to be protected from ‘intruders.’ Remaining within the remit of the grammar of the postnational constellation, trans‐European chauvinism, we contend, is susceptible to inclusive articulation. Foregrounding radical emancipatory social transformation would however require not more democracy, but a principled critique of capitalism.

Introduction

Introduction

Happiness, wellbeing and ecosocialism – a radical humanist perspective

ABSTRACTThe GDP growth paradigm has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, with the rising threats of global social inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation. New thinking around ecosocialism, degrowth, happiness and the wellbeing economy insist on keeping alive the utopian imagination. It seeks to break through the constraints of traditional state-or-market development debates, by searching for ways to subordinate both the state and market to society, in harmony with non-human nature. Pioneering work on alternative development indicators has been done in recent times, the most notable being the Gross National Happiness Index, currently in practice within the small Buddhist mountain state of Bhutan. The happiness/wellbeing perspectives do not have an explicit critique of capitalism, and avoid any mention of ‘socialism’ or ‘ecosocialism'. Is there a Chinese Wall between the Buddha and Marx – or can these perspectives be harmonized, as part of building a broader counter-hegemonic movement?

Émile Durkheim e a crítica do capitalismo em da divisão do trabalho social

Este artigo pretende analisar o diagnóstico sociológico de Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) sobre a sociedade moderna como contendo uma relevante crítica do capitalismo. Para tanto, nesse artigo, apresento e discuto os aspectos centrais dessa crítica na obra Da Divisão do Trabalho Social (1893). A primeira parte do artigo consiste numa discussão das teses centrais do livro, de modo a contextualizar o pano de fundo histórico e teórico dentro qual a crítica durkheimiana do capitalismo é formulada. Por sua vez, na segunda parte, dividida em três seções, abordamos o objeto principal desse estudo, buscando articular os pontos de apoio da crítica de Durkheim ao capitalismo industrial e liberal de sua época, a saber: anomia jurídica e moral, autorregulação do mercado e desigualdades.

МАРКСИЗМ: РАЗМЫШЛЕНИЯ ОБ ИСТОРИЧЕСКОЙ РОЛИ И ОГРАНИЧЕННОСТИ

The article comprehends Marxist views in the field of philosophy, political economy, socio-political sphere. It is shown that Marxism is not a monolith. Along with the undoubted advantages, the social doctrine of Marxism contains ideas and provisions that have not stood the test of time. But the costs of Marxism are not the supporting structures of this doctrine. The author is of the opinion that not confirmation of a number of provisions of authentic Marxism by socio - political practice of the XX-th and the passed years of the XXI-th century is connected with the fact that any social theory “works” in this way, as the implementation of such a theory takes place in line with the coherent concept of truth. Marxist doctrine was created in the era of early capitalism, which did not yet contain the necessary material for more accurate scientific positions and forecasts. In the article the author comes to the conclusion that a number of Marxist views, provided their authentic interpretation, remain relevant in our time. These include: unsurpassed by anyone criticism of capitalism; conclusion on the growth of inequality and income inequality between the strata of society; regulations on the adaptation of production relations to changing productive forces, on ensuring the basic needs of people with the help of new technologies, the development of social and industrial democracy; ideas about the dependence of material production on scientific knowledge, creative, spiritual activity of people, on the progress of technology; humanistic position of Marxism, expressed in the ideas of human liberation, social equality, justice, solidarity. The author believes that the urgent task of the intelligentsia is to preserve Marxism as an integral part of intellectual and political culture, as well as the development of Marxist doctrine in creative competition with other trends of social thought.

Crisis in the era of the end of cheap food: capitalism, cannibalism, and racial anxieties in Soylent Green

ABSTRACT Not just a reductionist representation of overpopulation, Soylent Green offers a nuanced critique of capitalism. In the course of the film, audiences learn that the seaplankton of which soylent green is supposedly composed no longerexists. The audience is horrified to discover by the end of the film that “soylent green is people.” While seemingly horrific, the notion of humans cannibalizing themselves in order to survive functions metaphorically for the system of capitalism, where human lives are cannibalized, wasted at ever accelerating rates in order to procure the most profit possible. In this respect, Soylent Green offers avisual representation of what Jason Moore calls the end of cheapfood. Yet, even as Soylent Green offers a powerful representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food, the film asks audiences to re-invest in hegemonic white masculinity, a system of power and oppression intimately linked to capitalism. In particular, the film embodies what Hamilton Carroll writes about as white male injury, a new form of white masculine identity politics. Even as the film offers up a powerful critique of capitalism’s crisis state, it simultaneously does so through reproducing a discourse of white male injury.

From the Demise of Social Democracy to the ‘End of Capitalism’

Abstract Over the past decade, Wolfgang Streeck has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the debate on the crisis of democratic capitalism. This article provides a critical appraisal of Streeck’s recent writings in light of his wider intellectual trajectory, tracing the evolutions and continuities in his work over time; highlighting its important contributions to our understanding of the present crisis; and presenting a fourfold critique of his latest book on the end of capitalism. The main argument is that Streeck’s work, while very valuable for its elucidation of the dynamics behind the demise of social democracy, ultimately remains plagued by a corporatist residue that keeps him from drawing his increasingly radical critique of capitalism to its logical conclusions. As a result, Streeck’s embrace of an exceedingly catastrophist worldview, devoid of any emancipatory potential, has tempted him to veer dangerously close to the welfare chauvinism of the nationalist right.

‘Oddly Shaped Emptinesses’: Capital, the Eerie, and the Place(less)ness of Detroit in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides

ABSTRACTDrawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on the eerie as the sensation of nothing where there should be something), as well as Nancy Fraser and Rahael Jaeggi’s critiques of capitalism as an institutionalised social order, this paper uses Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicide to take up the significance of place and placelessness in contemporary American culture and literature. Set in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s, The Virgin Suicides simultaneously disguises and reveals its sense of place, a curious and unstable tension that in turn calls readers’ attention to an entire set of unstable binaries inherent to capitalism as a social order – the separation of economic production from social reproduction, economy from polity, the natural from the human, and exploitation from expropriation. In its eerie interruptions and evocations of suburban decay, The Virgin Suicides offers a way to think about the destabilising effect of attempts to separate production from social reproduction, exploitation from expropriation, and human society from non-human nature, a toolkit that might then be used to think about (for instance) the Flint Water Crisis or the contradictions of an international border-crossing like the Ambassador Bridge.

The Radical Republican Structure of Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Society

In this paper, I argue that Marx’s political and social theory expresses ideas that we can characterize as ‘radical republican’ in nature. By this term, I mean a theory of the nature of human beings as essentially social in nature, of free individuality as a function of the developed interdependence of the social context to which one has access for self-development, of a concept of the common good as the socio-economic wealth of the community as oriented toward the ends of social and individual developmental aims and goods, and a concept of justice as the maintenance of these criteria. Marx’s critique of capitalism is a genuinely political critique in that is embraces the economic and social dimensions of human reality. Marx’s ideas about exploitation, alienation, commodity fetishism, and so on, all are categories that describe the defective nature of capitalism as the negation of the values of radical republican ideas.

Justice of ≪new man≫ in Karl Marx' vision

Abstract This study aims to highlight the problem of justice in Karl Marx’s vision from the perspective of the critique of capitalism. Although, there is a strong dialectic in the socio-political and philosophical debates among political thinkers (including Marxists) on the existence or non-existence of a theory of justice in Marxism, the exegesis of Marxist writings reveals two types of justice (“Justice through fair distribution and Justice through the dictatorship of the proletariat”). The first aspect the study proposes is to reinforce and argue for the existence of a Marxist theory of Justice, followed by a critical analysis of how this is reflected in both socialist and communist society.

Imperialism in the Anthropocene

Today there can be no doubt about the main force behind our ongoing planetary emergency: the exponential growth of the capitalist world economy, particularly in the decades since the mid–twentieth century. The mere critique of capitalism as an abstract economic system, however, is insufficient in addressing today's environmental problems. Rather, it is necessary also to examine the structure of accumulation on a world scale, coupled with the division of the world into competing nation-states. Our planetary problems cannot realistically be addressed without tackling the imperialist world system, or globalized capitalism, organized on the basis of classes and nation-states, and divided into center and periphery. Today, this necessarily raises the question of imperialism in the Anthropocene.

Lost in translation? Transferring creativity insights from arts into management

Since the early 2000s the business sector has, as a matter of both professional and academic concern, repeatedly advocated the transfer of artistic practices, especially those deemed exemplary forms of creativity, to a management world grappling with new challenges – a claim we here call the ‘transferability thesis’ in order to consider the responses made to what Boltanski and Chiapello define as an artistic critique of capitalism. Drawing on the wide range of relevant academic literature, this article critically examines the plausibility of the ‘thesis’. To this end, we review analytical literature advocating artistic transfers alongside empirical work that examines art interventions within organizations. Both are important components of a broader organizational aesthetics approach even though, we contend, neither strands of research provide a plausible argument for meaningful transferability. We then draw on arts-based literature, management theory and psychology to compare notions of creativity at both ends of the proposed transferral process. We highlight convergence and variance in art and business thinking, noting fundamental mismatches with regard to utility, rationalization and heteronomy – three levels of incompatibility that make a genuine transplantation of art ideas highly unlikely. Finally, we discuss our critical contribution in relation to the specious status of the ‘thesis’ and the centrality of Boltanski and Chiapello’s triadic model of capitalism to our investigation. By way of a conclusion, we suggest that further research is needed to examine the symbolic nature of appeals to artistic creativity by management.

Kapitalismuskritik und Krisendiskurs

Ever since the origin of the global economic crisis 2007 ff., the political debate, along with the contemporary analysis of society, centre around an ongoing discourse that is deeply affected by said crisis. It is within this context that the critique of capitalism saw a renaissance in social studies. This paper suggests to not look separately at the economic, ecological and political crises, but rather regard them as a sign that points out the proneness to crisis of capitalism as society’s regulative framework. At first, we will be covering texts that deal with the relation between the capitalistic economy and politics. Afterwards, the topics of financialisation, inequality, (post-)growth and democracy will be discussed. Our aim here is to show that this newly arisen critique of capitalism is, and has to be, the very core of a modern critique of society itself.

Ideology and alienation: A necessary relationship

Abstract This article results from a research1 focused on ideology and alienation as social complexes present in the world of men, and on fundamental determinations that connect these two categories in human thought and praxis. The study aims to reflect on the ontological foundations and roles in society of ideology and alienation, based on the thought of Georg Lukács (2013) in his work Para uma Ontologia do Ser Social [Toward the Ontology of Social Being]. The article is structured in two distinct and connected moments, discussing first ideology and the fundamental base of the concepts. Then, the work debates alienation as an ideological phenomenon, particularly when it comes to reifications and their relevance to the critique of capitalism.

Climate Control

In this brief text written on the occasion of the Whitney Independent Study Program's fiftieth anniversar, Jonathan Crary discusses how the many media portrayals of climate change and global warming effectively reabsorb environmental catastrophe into spectacle and affirm the ability of dominant institutions to solve or ameliorate any crisis. Noting the marginalization of Guy Debord's 1971 text A Sick Planet, Crary argues that a unique historical opportunity was lost in the late 1960s and early 1970s when there was a broad failure to align an eco-socialist critique of capitalism with the energies of anti-war and anti-imperialist mass movements.

Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect

Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect

Locating the political and the aesthetic in media spectacles in India

ABSTRACT The primary motif of this article is to present a theoretical focus on the problematic of women’s participation in the Indian media industry. This article includes a critique of capitalism and its influence on the space afforded to women in the field of visual media in India. Through citing relevant examples from the recent past in the television news media industry, the author has investigated theoretically and aesthetically the image and perception of the woman on the screen and behind the screen. The article deals with the spectator-spectacle dynamics, and has sought to locate dissent and establish that there is always possible a reversal in the setting; the spectator may be as challenged into “seeing” as the spectacle is in “showing.” There is a focus on the phenomenon of becoming, self-becoming and reclaiming the screen. Finally, the article seeks to discuss the malleable nature of technology that may not only oppress women but may also beused by women to frame alternate relations to visuality and narration. The article argues how the dominant politics in India curates ideologies most divorced from rationality and equality to undermine the cause of women and artistic advent of visual feminism.

Acting Out: "Cage Rage" and the Morning After

Acting Out: "Cage Rage" and the Morning After

Climate Leviathan: a political theory of our planetary future

Climate Leviathan is a Marxist critique of capitalism through the lens of radical climate change activism. In fact, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright aim to go beyond a mere critique of capitalism, acknowledging that climate change should be regarded as a unique political problem involving the centrality of scientific knowledge, the spatial imbalance of climate change causes and effects, and the temporal inconsistency of the need for immediate responses to future impacts. According to the authors, two conditions are deemed to shape the coming political–economic system (pp. 28–9): the first is whether society will continue to be dominated by capitalism; the second is whether a ‘planetary sovereign’, seen as a world-ruling single entity or organization, will emerge. On this basis, four possible combinations of a future global order under climate change are presented: first, the titular ‘climate Leviathan’, an undesirable variant of Hobbes's Leviathan, a planetary sovereign grounding its power in capitalistic values; second, a ‘climate Mao’, a state-centred entity, for example a truly communist China, discarding capitalism; third, a ‘climate behemoth’ of reactionary populism, which would lead one of the world's superpowers, for example Trump's US, to reject the centrality of the state while continuing to utilize capitalism; and fourth, ‘climate X’, an anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign formation.