Capital Development Research Articles

Transnational Temporalities: Capitalism, Crisis, Social Movements

The article reconsiders contemporary internationalist experiences in relation to the multiple temporalities that characterized key cycles of struggles in the 2010s. Although these cycles are heterogeneous in social and political composition, they have resulted in significant synchronizations. The article's specificity lies in linking a reinterpretation of internationalism to an examination of the role that multitemporalities play both in longue durée capital development and in the various phases that characterized the post-2008 world. The series of crises that have marked the past decade have in fact led to contradictory outcomes, on the one hand opening the door to the rise of post-fascist forces, while on the other hand triggering unusual and powerful struggles. These outcomes have contradictory political orientations but are united by the fact they all have temporalities that are discordant with those initially imposed by capitalist processes. With regard to social movements, the article shows how the diversity of the geographies, practices, and claims animating them can be understood as unfolding “within and against” the post-2008 global scenario. It illustrates how contemporary social movements exhibit complex and contradictory rhythms and temporalities, arguing that the tuning between these multitemporalities is vital for rethinking the renewal of internationalism today.

Relational antifascist education: Resisting neoliberal fascist productions

This essay argues that educational practices are uniquely situated to mobilize antifascist resistance. Contemporary fascism produces through macro- and micropolitical movements. The author looks to how educational practices make molecular fascist productions sensible. Educators can resist the molecular and micropolitical productions of fascist desires by creating and inviting complex relationships in educational practices and spaces. By making the complexity of each individual’s partial struggles sensible, educators resist the microfascist individualizations of contemporary capitalism operative in pedagogy. The development of capitalism into neoliberalism produces new fascisms not reducible to previous fascist iterations. Neoliberalism and fascism must be attended to in their complexities and differences in order to mobilize affective antifascist resistance. In conclusion, this essay argues for complex resistance to the differing fascist tendencies operative in neoliberal academic spaces and practices.

Capitalism’s Unclear Futures

The authors of the present article pose and consider in detail the highly relevant issue of whether capitalism has a future or whether it will be replaced by some new system. And if it does have a future, then what future will it be? These questions are nothing new, but in the recent few years, just like a hundred years ago, they have acquired exceptional importance, since not only the Left but also the representatives of the largest financial capital started speaking about the end of capitalism. The present article considers the following aspects: what is capitalism as an economic sector and as an economic system? How did capitalism evolve? What are its potentialities? The authors also make some forecasts for the next 50–100 years. Various scenarios for the future of capitalism are considered: from maintaining its leading role to its reduction to a sector. It is assumed that in the coming decades, the development of capitalism may proceed in different ways in developed and developing countries, which may result in a complex continuum of types, transitions, combinations, and forms of capitalism. In some countries, the development of capitalism has reached a level when it has already exhausted itself and needs transformations; meanwhile, there are countries where full-fledged market relations have not yet emerged. The authors analyze two main types of capitalism. The developed countries are likely to experience a shift toward strengthening of distributive institutions. In their turn, the developing countries that continue the processes of economic and socio-political modernization are likely to proceed toward strengthening of capitalist market institutions, though with some important restrictions preventing exploitation and environmental degradation. The authors believe that capitalism will be inevitably transformed in one way or another, but such transformations can vary greatly.

No Royal Road: Urban Transportation, Capitalist Development, and Monarchy in Thailand

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of the Thai monarchy in shaping urban transportation in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital and one of the world’s most congested cities. With an inquiry into the history of Bangkok under the reign of the previous king, Rama IX, the narratives of city staff who received the monarch’s guidance, and the king’s initiatives that relate to city planning, this article illustrates the problematic role of the monarchy in urban transportation. While the palace and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration have saluted Rama IX’s initiatives for building more ring roads, overpasses, and bridges to solve traffic congestion, this article argues that these royal initiatives failed to address the roots of the problem. These include an excessive reliance on motor vehicles, insufficient public transportation, the dominant role of the automotive industry in the national economy, city planning that serves middle-class drivers at the expense of the mass of commuters, the close association between the crown and car companies, and the unconstitutional role of the monarchy in such matters. Swept under the rug during the historic reign of Rama IX, these problems have started to come to light in the current reign of Rama X.

Mobilising in a (former)-red subculture industrial district: the case of the No-Keu permanent assembly

ABSTRACT The article contributes to the understanding of the impact of capitalism on social movements that mobilise against environmental pollution. While research on the topic has looked especially at global trends in capitalist development, the analysis switches attention to the specific local forms of economic development. It does so by focusing on the so-called district economy and related local political subcultures, looking at their decline in particular. Based on interviews and document analysis, the empirical investigation of a protest campaign in Tuscany, Italy, against the illegal disposal of dangerous industrial waste and the alleged collusion of members of the local political and economic elite with organised crime demonstrates the effects of the degeneration of the local model of development. The article explores challenges and opportunities for contentious politics in defining not only the grievances but also the networked organisational structure, the politicised collective frames and the eventful repertoire of protest.

Finance, infrastructure and national space: from productive integration to the neoextractivist disintegration of the nation

Over the past five decades, the promotion of competitive spatial fragments linked to the primary-export sectors, herein called neoextractivist segments, has brought about a restructuring of the national space, generating a tendency toward a fragmentation of the national space. In this article, we contribute with a critical, updated reading of this fragmentation process of the national space, from an understanding of how the State, infrastructure, finance, and Neoextractivism have been articulated in the capitalist development both in general and in Brazil, thus revealing new dynamics and structures of territorial control and wealth extraction. The agents linked to these dynamics and structures have formed a neoextractivist coalition of disintegration that acts to operate in maintaining and broadening primary-export activities, thereby reinforcing the nation's tendency toward fragmentation.

From Western India to Eastern Africa—the Rise of the Parsis in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Abstract The present paper examines the socio-economic conditions for the ascendancy of the Zoroastrian community in Western India between the 18th and 19th centuries. This study reinforces the well-established thesis on the role played by the Parsis in the development of capitalism in India. What distinguishes it from other narratives is the periodization of this development and the consideration of Parsi agency in the Western Indian Ocean region and East Africa, especially Mozambique. The cooperation of the Parsis with the European trade companies and private European traders as of the mid-17th century—most notably, their links to the English East India Company, which boosted the Zoroastrian communities of northwestern India—is investigated. I try to show how the Parsis, who had been predominantly peasants, farmers and artisans from the 10th to 17th centuries, increasingly embarked upon trade, moneylending, brokerage and production. Because of their accumulated wealth, their numbers as well as their influence augmented throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

Planning, state building, and the days after in Palestine

Abstract Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and documentary research, this article examines three shifts in national-scale planning in Palestine. In the period after the Oslo accords, Palestinian planners were tasked with the responsibility to create formal structures of governance and build for a future, eventual state there. Through that process and especially after the second intifada, national planning came to focus almost exclusively on market openness, privatization, and capitalistic development as part of a state and economy building project. Increasingly since 2015, planners have attempted to re-take some kind of formal authority. This article argues that such regimes show how Palestine is increasingly crafted at the state-scale as a node in wider global political economies in order to ostensibly stabilize the political situation, and in ways that have wide consequences for Palestine.

Boulevards, Festivities, and Earthquakes: The Making of Guatemala City, 1880–1920

This article examines the socio-political and urban-cultural transformation of space in Guatemala City between 1871 and 1920, spearheaded by the rise of a new political regime known as the liberal reform period. By focusing on the social construction of the new public spaces of power, this study explores how the transformation of the capital city was one of the key instruments of the authoritarian regimes to legitimise their authority, power and new secular values in the urban space. The urban transformation redefined the use of land for capitalist development (expropriation of church properties and privatisation of communal lands), setting up new boundaries and reorganizing the capital in a new dynamic of urban segregation. It also meant the exclusion of the Indigenous population from living in the city. This study pays special attention to the role of three figures as the main protagonists and promoters of the localized urban transformations in Guatemala City during their respective reigns: Justo Rufino Barrios (1873–1885), José María Reyna Barrios (1892–1898) and Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920). Lefebvre’s conception of the social production of space is mobilized to analyze the creation of the material setting and the construction of those new spaces of power carefully planned and embedded with political meaning during the first period of modern urban growth in Guatemala City. Drawing on a variety of primary sources such as official records (Laws and Decrees, Memoirs of Public Works, Municipal records), newspapers, commercial guides, illustrated journals, city plans, postcards and photo albums, the article demonstrate how the new modern urban space was reorganized with clear political and economic interests, setting up a new process of urban segregation. The study also highlights the limitations and contradictions of the selected urban transformations, which ended abruptly with the earthquakes of 1917–18.

Introduction

ABSTRACT Far from simply being a ‘bookend’ of the industrial age, deindustrialization is an integral part of capitalist development and thus has a long history. In the North American context, the early scholarship on deindustrialization emerged from the efforts to resist plant closures as they were happening. More recently, the field of deindustrialization studies has been reinvigorated by authors who have shifted the centre of gravity from the US Rust Belt to Europe and increasingly to other parts of the world. This introduction traces the emergence and recent transformations in the field of deindustrialization studies. It also introduces this themed issue on the politics of deindustrialization, which tells the stories of shuttered mines, mills, and factories within the wider restructuring of the international division of labour in the late twentieth century. The articles, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, extend outward to how workers, their unions, state actors, and the general public responded to the challenge of deindustrialization. The authors are all affiliated with the ‘Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time’ (DePOT) research project (deindustrialization.org), which brings together many of the world’s leading deindustrialization scholars to put the field in transnational perspective. By extending the range of comparisons and scales of analysis, this special-themed issue invites us to broaden our understanding of deindustrialization, both thematically and methodologically.

Intimate Extractions: Demand Dowry and Neoliberal Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh

ABSTRACTBased on qualitative research on marital problems in Dhaka, this article uses the term ‘intimate extractions’ as a lens to explain the relationship between escalating levels of demand dowry and neoliberal development in Bangladesh. Evidence from across Bangladesh shows that demands for cash made by husbands, accompanied by threats of violence or divorce, are on the rise. Building on gendered theories of contemporary capitalist development and feminist analysis of microcredit, the article argues that demand dowry should be understood within the current context of rapid economic development in Bangladesh. High levels of precarity, lack of state welfare and the need for cash for businesses, labour migration, education and healthcare mean that people from all social classes are in perpetual need of money. Marriage problems and the practice of demand dowry present opportunities for husbands to extract money from wives and their families. Embedded in the intimate relationship of marriage, demand dowry can therefore be understood as a ‘conversion’, a process in which intimate relationships are converted into projects of capital accumulation, thus becoming an ‘intimate extraction’.

The Century of the Crises, the Century of the Accumulation: Two Sides of the Same Coin

ABSTRACT The hundred-year history of capitalism in Turkey can be discussed in different contexts. This study addresses this process by focusing on economic crises. It argues that the history of capitalism in Turkey can be interpreted as a transition from one crisis to another. This paper suggests reading the crises in the context of the two main accumulation processes: the commercial capital accumulation process and crises (1929 and 1954-8) and the crises of industrial capital accumulation (1978/79, 1989, 1994, 2001, 2008, 2018/2019). The 1978/79 crisis is considered as a crisis of inward-oriented capital accumulation, 1989 as a crisis of export-oriented capital accumulation, and 1994, 2001, 2008, and 2018/2019 as the crises of capital import-oriented accumulation. This study reads these crises that have occurred in different periods as a result of the foreign exchange production and acquisition problem stemming from the peculiarities of late capitalist development.

Revealing the Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies through law and the painted moment

Teleological histories frequently identify the emergence of company law in England as originating in the charter corporations of the Elizabethan period. I argue that while the corporations created for foreign trade helped amass the wealth required for the capitalist development which would subsequently shape the modern company, corporations are not its organisational origin story. I demonstrate this using a multi-disciplinary study of the East India Company (the Company). By analysing the evolving rights of Company stockholders and related legal developments, I show how the state shaped a trading venture into a colonial project and strategic force in European military conflicts. Uniquely, I further evidence this through an analysis of art connected with the Company made contemporaneously to the events discussed. This shows that the Company was an aggregate of people and ambitions conjoining private finance with the imperial aspirations of the Crown – a ‘they’ not the ‘it’ of modern companies.

Spatial political economy: The ideology of Nature, State–space and the oil commodity frontier

In this article, a spatial political economy approach is used to examine the development of global capitalism through an analysis of the expansionary movement of commodity frontiers. It surveys the early history of oil exploitation in Chile and offers a close analysis of Patagonia’s constitution of its oil commodity frontier as Cheap Energy. It is argued that focusing on the internal relation of space and Nature can enhance our understanding of capitalism as an emergent and dynamic totality grounded in particular places where value is extracted. The article sheds new light on the spatialities of Import Substitution Industrialisation in Latin America using the case of Chile and its development agency, Corfo, and reveals how the capitalist ideology of Nature was wrought as a state project. The political economy of scale in this context is examined by analysing the central role of state and class relations in the environment-making process of capital accumulation. The article advances a new understanding of State–space within uneven and combined capitalist development. The spatial political economy lens allows for a fresh understanding of past history, which may help us understand the current ‘green’ energy transition by means of the production of space and Nature.

Socio-political and Structural Aspects of the Concept of Social Entrepreneurship: The Case of Serbia

The focus of this research are the ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, which in transitional and developed capitalist societies alike, rely on cognitive models shaped by divergent cultural and socio-political contexts. To be more specific, these cognitive models emerge from different theoretical concepts of social entrepreneurship, as well as from contextually different ways of combining the invariant, structural elements of the concept, both of which are dialectically positioned within the neoliberal capitalism ideology discourse. Within the interaction among the elements constituting the structure of the concept of social entrepreneurship (such as social innovation, civic collectivism, an employment of members of marginalized social groups) and the overall neoliberal ideology discourse, which on its own behalf, operates in accordance with certain logical rules as any other discursive formation does, numerous contradictions and paradoxes emerge. The first chapter of this study critically examines the role of social entrepreneurship within the neoliberal capitalism framework through a comparative analysis with philanthropic endeavors and commercial (traditional, profit-oriented) entrepreneurship, as well as by comparing the diverse ways in which this phenomenon is defined in various socio-political contexts. The process of establishing the social entrepreneurship sector in Serbia, initiated in the post-2008 period reached its normative conclusion with the enactment of a unified law regulating this entrepreneurial activity in 2022. However, it remains incomplete both in terms of the cultural conceptualization of the phenomenon and its practical implementation perspective. This assumption is further examined in the second chapter of this paper in relation to the ideas regarding the social and political cultural heritage legacy, constructed by both policy makers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in the social protection system which, on their behalf, during the specified period assume the role of social entrepreneurship promoters and emerge as primary contributors to its development. In the third chapter of this study, an exploration of the conditions and operationalization possibilities of key elements within the social entrepreneurship concept is undertaken. This analysis is illustrated through the services provided to the elderly citizens, which provides a framework for developing the thesis on the incomplete process of establishing the social entrepreneurship sector. Subsequently, the fourth and concluding chapter contextualizes these findings within the processes of constructing social issues pertaining aging and unemployment. In addition to drawing the attention to the distinct characteristics and the potential of social entrepreneurship, this research seeks to initiate a discussion focused on exploring possibilities of overcoming the predominantly constraining conditions and factors that influence the further development of this type of entrepreneurial activity within the transitional Serbian society.

Capitalist development and land struggles in Africa: the role of engaged scholarship

The expansion of capitalism into Africa induced significant transformations of African societies which have continued to influence what people on the continent do today. Africa’s encounter with capital, though still limited in scope, has always been ruthless, coercive and violent, as displayed in the slave trade, colonial occupation and current neocolonial incursions. Although some political economy analysts have suggested that capitalism in Africa has not exploited Africans enough, this article shows that the encounter with capitalism on the continent has been, and continues to be, vicious, with its brutality often obscured by its stunted nature. The article draws on Lungisile Ntsebeza’s work on land to show that engaged scholarship can play a critical role in unveiling the mechanisms and nature of capitalist exploitation and brutality in Africa, often masked by weak capitalist penetration. Using examples of current land struggles, it shows that capitalist exploitation in Africa is not only limited to those engaged in capitalist relations of production (wage labour) but extends to people outside these relations.

КОЛОНІАЛЬНИЙ ТУРИЗМ: РОЗВИТОК, ВИДИ, ХАРАКТЕРНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ

The article is devoted to the study of the history of the development of colonial tourism in the second half of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th century in the countries of the East. The relationship between the formation of the colonial system, the new needs of the capitalist development of European countries in the 19th century, and the emergence of tourism as an important tool for the study of colonized territories and peoples is revealed. It is emphasized that gradually the market of impressions and recreation became an important factor in the economic and cultural exploitation of the colonies. It is proposed to define colonial tourism as a type of travel organization that involved visiting colonially dependent territories to get to know the history, culture, historical and cultural heritage, everyday life of local residents, as well as for the purpose of health and recreation. Colonial tourism is characterized as internal (trips by representatives of the colonial community to the country of their stay) and as external (visiting by residents of metropolises and colonial dependent territories for tourist purposes). This type of tourism is characterized by a special elite social and ethnic composition of tourists. The connection between tourist trips and the formation of transport infrastructure, in particular rail and sea transport, which significantly increased the possibilities for the mass movement of people and goods, is analysed. Such forms of colonial tourism are characterized as trips with sightseeing and educational purposes, colonial cruises, colonial hunting, and organization of rest places in the form of “stations on the hills”. Attention is focused on the distribution of such popular types of information about colonial territories as postal (colonial) postcards during the researched period. It is emphasized that the relevance of this topic is because in the modern tourism of many countries there is a historical injustice, which is manifested in exploitation, abuse of images of the past, fascination with colonial nostalgia, the illegal transformation into a commodity of the cultural and ethnic heritage of once colonial dependent peoples.

Imperialism and crises of social reproduction in Africa

Gender inequalities feature in the prevailing model of financialised capitalist development, which in the peripheries is increasingly dependent on enclosures of land and nature, unbridled debt that is being shifted onto households, and deepening exploitation of gendered labour for service and industry. These conditions of accumulation generate reproductive crises in the core and peripheries that have serious implications for the survival and sustenance of working people and surplus populations of the global South. This article uses two main arguments to elaborate the nature of these reproductive crises from the vantage point of working people in the peripheries. First, by elaborating the link between land, nature and the commons and social reproduction in the agrarian South, foregrounding an agrarian question of gendered labour which agrarian reforms must address as a condition of national liberation. Second, the ways in which social reproduction is structured by centre–periphery relations of capitalist accumulation are elaborated in relation to the structures of gendered labour under late capitalism, asking how these dynamics shape the conditions of survival and reproduction of working people in Africa. The article highlights the imperative for a social reproduction lens in the analysis of imperialism within the possibility of liberation as well as sovereignty of Third World nations.

Agricultural digitalisation and just transition: a framework for the analysis

Digital agriculture is generally depicted as a new technological frontier allowing both the efficiency and sustainability of the agri-food sector to be increased through the introduction of innovative “green” and cost-effective solutions. However, there is still little empirical evidence on the wider environmental and socio-economic implications of ongoing agricultural digitalisation processes. The paper makes the point that the digitalisation of agriculture is a political and ecological process representing an important element of the uneven and combined patterns of the capitalist development of agriculture. At the same time, the practices that inform agricultural digitalisation are shaped by social, economic and environmental factors that change according to the context. Starting from these premises, the authors propose a critical framework for equipping empirical research on digital agriculture with a more comprehensive understanding of local contexts, while also retaining a wider political economy perspective inspired by the concept of “just transition”.

Peace and Value Education Policy Perspectives in The Context Of India

Education must be autonomous for development. Cultural and ethical aspects of education are often overlooked due to the focus on economics in capitalist development. A lack of awareness of these realities impacts society significantly. Bringing in the behavior scale is necessary. Inculcate the idea that education for development fosters a commitment to global solidarity, peace, justice, and environmental awareness in youth. It aims to enable children and youth to contribute to positive development locally and worldwide. Based on the foregoing realities, peace and value education are pioneering initiatives that require vision and determination. A brief attempt may diminish its effectiveness and increase cynicism. Humans can become sophisticated destroyers of themselves and life on earth through education. Education alone is essential for citizens to live peacefully and with dignity. In this research, we emphasize the significance of value and peace education in policy formulation and implementation. Libraries will be used in this two-part research. The first section of this study discussed the significance of peace and value education at the national level. The second portion contains recommendations and suggestions for implementing peace and value education in Indian policy and related publications.