Endless Accumulation Research Articles

QTL epistasis plays a role of homeostasis on heading date in rice

If there was no gene interaction, the gene aggregation effect would increase infinitely with the increase of gene number. Epistasis avoids the endless accumulation of gene effects, playing a role of homeostasis. To confirm the role, QTL epistases were analyzed by four single-segment substitution lines with heading date QTLs in this paper. We found that QTLs of three positive effects and one negative effect generated 62.5% negative dual QTL epistatic effects and 57.7% positive triple QTL epistatic effects, forming the relationship “positive QTLs-negative one order interactions-positive two order interactions”. In this way, the aggregation effect of QTLs was partially neutralized by the opposite epistatic effect sum. There also were two exceptions, QTL OsMADS50 and gene Hd3a-2 were always with consistent effect directions with their epistases, implying they could be employed in pyramiding breeding with different objectives. This study elucidated the mechanism of epistatic interactions among four QTLs and provided valuable genetic resources for improving heading date in rice.

The ‘dizziness’ of accumulation: how digital collecting is undermining the very meaning of collection

Much of the previous research on collecting focuses on the resemantization of the object/item when inserted into a series that ‘releases’ it from its functionality and makes it an extension of the subject (Baudrillard 1968; Leone 2015). Digital collecting, however, essentially undermines the relationship between the collector and their collection, especially with the potentially endless accumulation allowed by the digital medium and the possibility it provides to gather items without actually owning them. The criterion of scarcity/rarity that used to prevail in traditional collecting is now replaced by a principle of abundance (Denegri-Knott et al. 2012), potentially opening new forms of ephemerality and meaninglessness. More specifically, these latter arise in connection to feelings of dispossession and uncontrollability that many collectors experience concerning their digital possessions, especially when stored online (Odom et al. 2012). And yet, new collecting practices can emerge, driven by the desire to share the content and with greater attention to its curation. Reframing these practices within a culture characterized by hyper-archivability (Brown and Hoskins 2010) and the fluid time of micro-archives (Pogačar 2016), the present contribution tries to shed some light on (some of) the contemporary trends in collecting, revealing all their ambiguity and the eventual return of the specter of illegality.

Learning to Listen

Learning to Listen

The broker

ABSTRACT An emphasis on flow and endless accumulation has been central to the understandings of contemporary maritime capitalism. This form of accumulation has been enabled by structures of violence and exploitation wrought through desires of ever-bigger and ever-faster within the world of global shipping. But flow is only part of this story, mobility at sea is always interrupted, sticky and delayed. Maritime journeys are constituted by chokepoints, drift, and stuckness and are moments of anxiety and peril for a variety of actors from seafarers to policy makers whose projects seek to overcome these blockages in order to make possible more efficient and more profitable forms of circulation. For others, interruptions point to possibility. Here, I emphasize that for ‘maritime figures’ like insurance brokers, and seafarers, interruptions are part of everyday life at sea: a life constituted through an admixture of peril and possibility.

Systemic and pathogenetic approach: a new look at traditional Chinese medicine

A mere focused medical specialization and standardization, the lack of a holistic, systemic view of the human body, leads to a deadlock in the further development of modern medicine. P.K. Anokhin's functional systems theory (1935) made a breakthrough in medical science, setting it in a new direction. So far, however, the fundamental aspects of this theory have not been fully applied in practice. Till the present day, there is an endless accumulation of scientific facts that are not united by a holistic ideology. Nevertheless, the truly systemic approach proclaimed in the twentieth century by P.K. Anokhin has been used by mankind since ancient times, particularly in Chinese traditional medicine (CTM). Its basic postulates, the concept of Yin-Yang, Wuxing (system of five primary elements), the idea of acupuncture points and body channels, do not contradict up-to-date scientific data, and every year they draw new confirmations of their relevance. At the same time, they provide a clear vision of the general patterns of the whole body function and the interaction of its parts. The authors propose a transition to a whole new level of knowledge of the human body, called the «systemic and pathogenetic approach.» It allows considering an illness according to CTM as a result of dysfunction of an integral system of a body. Properly set medical thinking based on this approach will lead to adequate diagnosis and the choice of the proper treatment for many diseases.

No Capitalism Without Nationalism

Most theories of nationalism labelled as ‘modernist’ tend to overlook the fact that the phenomenon to which they vaguely refer as ‘Modernity’ is defined by a single, very precise and consistent socio-economic system, that of capitalism. However, this fact makes nationalism and capitalism, rather than nationalism and ‘Modernity’, practically congruent. From this perspective, the essential question that arises is whether the emergence of these two was a spontaneous but compatible and useful coincidence, or nationalism was capitalism’s deliberate invention? In the capitalist era, society has become merely a resource whose existence enables functioning of the market. Such a society must destroy all traditional communal ties on which the maintenance of traditional society was based, so that the principles of reciprocity and solidarity be replaced by the procedures of asymmetric economic exchange. Once the procedures of asymmetric economic exchange become the central principle of human relations, society stops functioning as a whole and becomes sharply divided into two parts – a well-organised and tightly-structured network of self-interested individuals permanently striving for perpetual economic gain and a shapeless mob of socially dislodged labour permanently striving for mere survival. The incessant widening of the gap between the two strata makes capitalism’s essential principle of endless accumulation of capital socially unsustainable. For, rapidly urbanised masses, forced into selling their labour below the minimal price, contain a permanently present insurrectionary potential that might threaten stability of the entire system. So, bridging that gap without actually changing the structure of society becomes the paramount task for the system trying to preserve its mechanism of incessant exploitation of labour and limitless accumulation of capital. Therefore, the system has to introduce a social glue that is tailored to conceal, but also to cement, the actual polarisation of society. At the same time, this glue is designed to compensate the uprooted masses for the loss of their authentic identities by replacing these with a single artificial one. This multi-purpose invention is an abstract concept of absolute social unity, named “the nation”, based on the assumption that those who are located on both sides of the gap, no matter whether they are on the exploiting or exploited side, automatically share the same equal rights, same common interests, and same identity.

Artificial boundaries? Shaping policy through empowering research

This paper is about the politics of policy knowledge production. It calls for spaces to be forged to allow teachers’ voices to have centre stage in knowledge creation and production. Specifically, this paper discusses the need for alternative ways of conducting educational research so that power in research design is utilised as a capacity for change. First, the politics of knowledge production is explored. The second and most central task of this paper is to highlight the role that teachers’ knowledge can play in shaping education policy through emancipatory research practices. Overall, this paper advocates that the time has arrived for a fresh look at teachers’ participation in the production and validation of knowledge. Valuing teachers’ embodied knowledge and the unique position teachers hold within the education system, this paper is a window on the present, and suggests the direction the conversation should take in order to move education policy beyond the endless accumulation of evidence towards impactful change.

And It Was Good: Building an Ethics of Sufficiency

To follow Jesus’s command to love our neighbors in our neoliberal age, Christians must cultivate new theological and economic stories that urge practices of sufficiency—ways of living with “enough.” The neoliberal version of the United States’s origin story of the American Dream, built on individual responsibility and meritocracy, knows no end to monetary accumulation. And the ways neoliberal rationality colors the Christian creation story can reinforce the drive toward endless accumulation. There are ways of living and practicing Christian stories, however, that can cultivate the kind of communities that form people to know how to say “enough.” This article argues that there is no genuine community, service to others, or love of neighbor if Christians cannot live out of these new stories that cultivate an ethics of sufficiency. Economically privileged Christians cannot love our lower-income neighbors if we continue to participate in a rationality that encourages limitless economic acquisition.

Anthropocene, Emissions Budget, and the Structural Crisis of the Capitalist World-System

This paper evaluates the implications of global emissions budget distribution between three large geographical areas (China, OECD countries, and the rest of the world) in the context of Anthropocene and the structural crisis of the capitalist world system. Two plausible emissions distribution principles are considered. Under neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle, can continuing economic growth be made compatible with requirements of climate stabilization in all three regions. This conclusion does not change significantly when plausible acceleration of emissions intensity reduction in the future is taken into account. To limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, at least two of the three large regions need to reorganize their economies to operate with zero or negative growth. Such a reorganization cannot be achieved under a capitalist economic system given the inherent tendency of capitalism towards endless accumulation. Neither is it likely to be achieved under any conceivable economic system dominated by market relations.

Remembrance Day for Lost Species

This essay explores the work Remembrance Day for Lost Species (RDLS), a coalition of artists, activists, and environmental organizations who memorialise the losses of extinction. I argue that RDLS's practices create an ethics of witnessing ecological loss in ways that expand discourses about what (and who) counts as grievable life. I take up Judith Butler's theorisation of the powers of mourning in rendering life legible to illuminate the ways RDLS mobilises grief and absence, thus reimagining relations between humans and nonhumans in a space outside of capital. RDLS participants unite on 30 November to bear witness to the extinction of species, habitats and cultures. The movement was founded in 2011 by UK-based performance collective Feral Theatre, artist Andreas Kornevall and Reverend Peter Owen Jones. Several other organizations and artists have since joined, though anyone may create participate, adding their events to the RDLS crowd-sourced electronic archive. I look at a particular event, the Lake Merritt Regenerative Memorial and Pollinator Procession (2017), to articulate the performance practices brought together under RDLS as a praxis of ethical witnessing in the time of climate crises. RDLS renders nonhumans as subjects through the creation of mourning rituals for extinct and endangered species. By approaching nonhumans through what Butler has called grievability, RDLS counters the human exceptionalism that supports the exploitation of nature as merely raw material for endless accumulation. By challenging this logic of accumulation, RDLS participates in a queering of normative capitalist time through the creation of a time-space outside of the inexorable forward movement of capital. As they engage in ‘nonproductive’ uses of time, RDLS resists the vast unmarked (biodiversity) loss intrinsic to global capitalism, bringing forth new forms of human and nonhuman relationality in the face of ecological breakdown.

Reassessing China’s Growing Presence in the Arctic:

This paper intends to provide an analytical framework to interpret China’s growing presence in the Arctic from the perspective of world-system theory. I have set up the analytical framework from the following four aspects. Firstly, China’s externalizing behavior in the Arctic region is governed by the internalized law of value of the modern world-system, i.e., the endless accumulation of capital. Secondly, China has benefited and is still benefiting from the division of labor, with Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and most recently the Arctic serving as a relatively subordinated resource periphery. Thirdly, driven by a strong upward mobility, China has leapfrogged the periphery and semi-periphery and gained a semi-core position with an upward trend towards the core, by offering a favorable external environment to the Arctic (invitation to promote). Lastly, since the world-economy is currently in a Kondratieff B-phase, China, as an emerging global core power, is logically dedicated to the relocation of productive activity and the probability of alternative profitable outlets, where the Arctic is highly compatible. Keywords: China, Arctic, world-system theory, endless accumulation of capital, division of labor, upward mobility, Kondratieff B-phase

Counter-memory and and–and: Aesthetics and temporalities for living together

This essay traces a critical genealogy of counter-memory – spanning critical theory, film and contemporary art – bound to what Rosi Braidotti terms nomadic subjectivity. Engaging with the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists and artists, this essay charts the import of nomadic subjectivity as a method for staying with the many times and histories of global contemporaneity. It aims to move beyond thinking of counter-memory as simply a means to maintain or register erased and/or contested histories, or as a dialectical mnemonic system. It charts an alternative concept of counter-memory, one that is post-dialectical, not bound to the formulas of either/or, us/them or self/other, but which is instead committed to the endless accumulation and proximities of things – the and–and.

The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation, by PeterFleming. Pluto Press, London, UK, 2017, 320 pp., ISBN: 9780745399409, £14.99, paperback.

The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation, by PeterFleming. Pluto Press, London, UK, 2017, 320 pp., ISBN: 9780745399409, £14.99, paperback.

Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century

Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century

Book Review: Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy by Jerry Harris

Jerry Harris Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2016; 286 pp.: ISBN 0986085324, 16.62 [pounds sterling] Jerry Harris has written a powerful book for our times. We live in a period of multiple crises: a neoliberal globalization that is undermining national economies and delegitimizing nation-states, the global displacement of millions by capitalism that has produced mass migrations worldwide, terrorist blowback from imperial wars, unstoppable capitalocentric climate change and an unresolved financial crisis that still looms over our heads. And on top of all this is the inability of the state to find a fix for any of these crises due to the crisis of democracy that Harris analyses in this sweeping study. That crisis of democracy is not due to political gridlock. It goes deeper. Political elites are no longer so much in the service of national capital. With globalization, they have become beholden to a transnational capitalist class (TCC) rooted in transnational corporations. Unlike the era of national capitalism where the system enjoyed hegemonic legitimacy due to political democracy and growing economic well-being, global capitalism is facing a worldwide crisis of legitimacy in the face of spreading austerity and the naked political power of the 1% (p. 98). That delegitimization of political elites is expressed in the current US electoral campaign, in the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, in the sweeping unpopularity of Mexico's president and in so many other countries that have been drawn into global capitalism. This is because, as Harris shows, 'the new transnational capitalist class has little use for democracy, the social contract, or any sense of national responsibility' (p. 19). The hegemonic bloc that the ruling class had constructed around Keynesianism in the post-World War II (WWII) period has now dissolved as capital has leaped over national borders, in effect expelling the working class from its benefits. As Harris perceptively points out, 'neo-Keynesianism has been unable to mount an effective alternative, trapped by its own belief in a more just globalization' (p. 50). As social tensions mount, coercion tends to replace consent as the main form of control. Neoliberal corporate globalization has transformed the working class worldwide into a precariat. Production has been restructured into global assembly lines. Investment has shifted away from production towards financial speculation. These changes have enabled the formation of the TCC. Harris argues the TCC is a self-conscious class that knows no national identity, moving between global cities, conferring in places like Davos, presiding over a global system of endless accumulation of capital. Governance of this system is through the market and the beginnings of a transnational state' (p. 96) being constructed in trade deals that establish a judicial apparatus independent of national states in investor-state resolution panels. In effect, these give sovereign power to transnational corporations in the new world order of global capital. Here, we can see most vividly the crisis of democracy. Harris postulates that a stable social order requires a balance between state, market and civil society. The market fundamentalism of neoliberalism gives all weight to the market. Today, neoliberalism is the dominant ideology embraced not only by the ruling class but also by the subject classes. Thus, the state is not seen as the instrument of a popular will serving its interest. Rather, its aim is to widen the market in service to individual 'freedom'. In practice, this amounts to the freedom of corporate capital in the market and the freedom of consumers to buy what they offer. It is a freedom without political content. Social solidarity and collective action are seen as interfering with freedom. It is thus that Harris says 'We may be facing a time in which the bourgeois democratic revolution has run its course' (p. …

What Goes Around Comes Around: From the Coloniality of Power to the Crisis of Civilization

This article combines world-systems, decolonial, eco-feminist and post-human ecological approaches to deconstruct the planetary crisis of the hegemonic civilization. Underpinned by anthropocentric, androcentric, hetero-patriarchal, Euro/Western-centric, modern/colonial and capitalist systems of power, this civilization causes devastating socioecological effects. Globalized through (neo)colonialism/(neo)imperialism, it has subjugated the rural under the urban and the Global South under the North, becoming globally hegemonic. Through the coloniality of power hegemonic conceptions of progress, growth, development and modernity have been spread, procuring the loyalty of semi-peripheral and peripheral regimes into a civilizational obsession with endless accumulation based on the “mastery of nature.” Most “postcolonial” elites, especially across “emerging economies,” have not broken with this coloniality. They often reproduce govern-mentalities aimed at “catching-up” with, cloning, emulating, imitating or conforming to hegemonic models enacted in the North’s metropolitan cores. Overcoming this crisis requires not only a critique of neoliberal capitalist modernity, but a world-systemic transformation towards ecosufficient lifeways based on indigenous, eco-feminist, and post-human alternatives.

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.

The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

ion from his material environment. The foods that baffle Margaret in this passage are the tropical fruits of the island and are thus aligned with the island’s flora and fauna closed out by Valerian’s greenhouse isolation. Eating is arguably the activity that puts us most intimately and elementally in touch with the concrete material world, as we take in and transmute into our own substance the fruits of nature. Eating is what Margaret cannot do. By the end of the breakfast, some ten pages later, she has managed to consume only one bite. In Tar Baby, the grotesque is thus associated most strongly with the abstraction of the capitalist characters. Their bizarre habits—Valerian’s self-incarceration in the greenhouse, Margaret’s inability to eat, and, I would add, Jadine’s insistence on wearing a fur coat in the heat of the tropics—enact maladjustment to the basic material conditions of life, expressing the depth of their alienation. From Colonial to Capitalist Exploitation Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein tells us, “is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital”; as a result of “its [own] internal logic,” a capitalist system “expand[s] its boundaries” (xiv). Morrison’s critique encompasses this expansionary drive, in particular the historical reach of capitalism into the Caribbean through the entwined trades of sugar and slavery; historical allusions to the European colonization of the islands cluster around the characters’ doings in the present, suggesting a continuity of exploitation from the colonial past to the capitalist present. Carruth’s astute essay on the geopolitics of food expresses this continuity in economic terms: Tar Baby, she says, mirrors the change “from a colonial to late capitalist economy—an economy in which an American-led paradigm of free trade carries on the imperial trade in cocoa, sugarcane, and other Caribbean commodities” (606). The candy millionaire Valerian represents the contemporary permutation of this trade in sugar and cocoa, as well as the expansionary reach of capital into the Caribbean. In a scene that exemplifies Morrison’s technique of superimposing shapes drawn from history onto the figures of her characters, Valerian and Son confront each other after their Christmas dinner dispute. Each finds support for his standpoint in the legendary horsemen who ride the island’s hills, ex-slaves who, as both the native islanders (8) and the omniscient narrator (152) tell us, swam ashore along with some horses when a slave ship foundered off the Isle des Chevaliers some three hundred years ago: Somewhere in the back of Valerian’s mind one hundred French chevaliers were roaming the hills on horses. Their swords were in their scabbards and their epaulets glittered in the sun. Backs straight, shoulders high—alert but restful in the security of the Napoleonic Code. W y a t t

Floridas señas: Góngora and the Petrarchan Tradition

This essay examines the use of the Petrarchan motif of the ‘generative footsteps’—the magical ability of the beloved to make flowers bloom wherever she steps—in three sonnets by the Golden-Age Spanish poet Luis de Góngora: ‘Al tramontar del sol, la ninfa mía’ (1582), ‘Tres veces de Aquilón el soplo airado’ (1582) and ‘Los blancos lilios que de ciento en ciento’ (1609). Through close readings, it examines how the image serves as a metatextual symbol in the three poems. Where the motif often functions in Petrarch to evoke an ideal of spontaneous and unmediated creation, Góngora's sonnets reflect upon imitation and influence, drawing attention to the insuperable gap between a poem and its source, arguing for the superiority of imitation over mimesis and representing literature as an endless accumulation of glosses.

The Sacrament of Language

The Sacrament of Language