Logic Of Capitalism Research Articles

Violencia urbana y políticas de seguridad: análisis en cuatro ciudades latinoamericanas

El presente estudio aborda la violencia urbana a partir de la lógica capitalista de ocupación territorial. Por medio de esta lente, se observa que la violencia se ve fortalecida por las desigualdades sociales, principalmente localizadas en los sectores periféricos de las áreas urbanas. En el intento de ilustrar esta realidad, se propuso un estudio de caso de cuatro ciudades latinoamericanas: Medellín (Colombia), Guayaquil (Ecuador), Río de Janeiro y Curitiba (Brasil), utilizando el indicador de la tasa de homicidios por cada 100.000 habitantes en la comparación de resultados de sus políticas en la lucha contra la inseguridad y la violencia urbana. Entre los principales hallazgos encontrados en estos estudios están: i) infraestructura urbana de calidad y educación para reducir la delincuencia, ii) industria de la inseguridad para la rentabilidad económica de oligopolios inmobiliarios, iii) militarización de las calles, y iv) violencia urbana concentrada en áreas segregadas.

从《帝国主义论》看当代资本主义国家资本逻辑

从《帝国主义论》看当代资本主义国家资本逻辑

Three critical perspectives for thinking alternatives in the context of neoliberal capitalism

In the current context of the deepening of the logic of Capitalism, this work makes a review of three perspectives of critical thinking in order to reflect on alternatives to the processes of growing inequality and exclusion. In the first place, the diagnosis of the situation in the context of World War II made by thinkers of the Frankfurt School is recovered. Following are Franz Hinkelammert’s contributions on his conception of the subject and his critique of the law of the market; to finally recover the studies of the common as political action against the current accumulation processes through the configuration of commons for their expropriation. It concludes by integrating contributions from the three perspectives as a valuable historical experience for the construction of alternatives to a system that, despite its impetuosity, shows signs of weakening. Realidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No. 156, 2020: 113-138

Hidrelétricas, Direitos Humanos e alienação do território na Amazônia: Estudo de caso da UHE Tabajara - Rondônia

Os megaprojetos hidrelétricos na Amazônia brasileira provocam grandes impactos socioambientais e violações sistemáticas dos Direitos Humanos dos povos indígenas e comunidades tradicionais. As inúmeras barragens construídas apresentam um histórico de fragmentação de territórios tradicionais e de exclusão social. Neste texto, analisa-se mais um desses projetos, que está em formulação, a Hidrelétrica Tabajara. Assim, problematiza-se planejamento hidrelétrico na Amazônia articulado ao que se qualifica de alienação do território. Posteriormente, a análise se desdobra no uso corporativo do território para o capital e na alienação do território para os grupos sociais afetados, atingindo os direitos humanos e os modos de vida das comunidades afetadas. Conclui-se que os grandes projetos na região instituem escalas de domínio político dos recursos naturais e dos territórios, de modo que se ressalta o uso corporativo do espaço regional na escala do capital e do Estado, ao passo que, igualmente, tem-se a alienação dos territórios dos grupos sociais mais vulneráveis, no qual o sentido e destino do lugar fica afetado pelas lógicas do capital hidrelétrico, constituindo-se em formas de dominação e expropriação social.

Los rostros violentos del extractivismo en la región norte de Centroamérica: Expulsiones y Fronterización en el contexto de la COVID-19

Vivimos tiempos de extrema violencia, la matriz de origen es la organización de la sociedad basada en los principios de un sistema económico-social donde la vida no importa. En los últimos años, la búsqueda de valorización del capital ha llevado a la explotación de la naturaleza con gran brutalidad, hasta provocar su acelerada destrucción. Este fenómeno llamado extractivismo, provoca la expulsión de millones de personas en todo el mundo, en particular en los países subdesarrollados. En Centroamérica el extractivismo, la violencia sistémica, la pobreza, el cambio climático, y ahora la pandemia, se articulan para dar lugar a la huida. El propósito de este artículo es analizar las consecuencias de estos factores que se expresan en los flujos migratorios y desplazamientos forzados. Se trata de expulsiones como forma de expresión de la lógica del capitalismo global. Las expulsiones enfrentan una contradicción fundamental: la creciente fronterización, la contención y el confinamiento, ahora profundizada por la COVID-19.

Marketisation of Academia and Authoritarian Governments: The Cases of Hungary and Turkey in Critical Perspective

This article analyses the recent political repression of academia in Hungary and Turkey within the critical scholarship on globalisation and neoliberalisation of higher education. We introduce and challenge the hegemonic definitions of academic freedom that sit comfortably with the capitalist logic as well as repressive governing forms and assess the recent attacks on university communities with emphasis on both academic labour and freedom. Adopting a case study approach, we investigate how economic and political forms of repression accompany and reinforce one another within the specificities of both country contexts. We delineate the underlying structural and historical dynamics as well as emergence and evolution of methods of struggle and resistance employed by diverse university communities in their shared and divergent characteristics. Our conclusions include critical reflections on the broader implications of higher education restructuring, authoritarian interventions, and the future of systemic-level resistance.

O Processo do Conhecimento sobre a Gestão Estratégica de Pessoas no Contexto das Universidades

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo caracterizar o processo do conhecimento sobre a gestão estratégica de pessoas no contexto das universidades. Para tanto, foi realizada uma revisão bibliográfica dos artigos publicados sobre a temática gestão estratégica e gestão de pessoas nas universidades, em periódicos indexados pelas bases Scopus® e Web of Science®, no período de 2015 a 2020. Foram selecionados 13 artigos para a amostra, os quais apontam que tal campo de conhecimento apresenta potencial de pesquisa, bem como está em crescimento, devido ao aumento das publicações nos últimos anos de trabalhos sobre a temática, publicados em diversos países. Destaca-se a importância de estudos sobre o papel da liderança na estratégia relacionada a pessoas, bem como o interesse da academia pelo capital intelectual nas universidades. Por fim, ainda há que se ampliar discussões sobre o papel de outros agentes, para além dos gestores e docentes, bem como da lógica capitalista que atua coercitivamente sobre as universidades.

Hoping for success, becoming a spiritual subject

Abstract This article focuses on the entanglement of trajectories of transnational education/work and religious conversion among Chinese overseas students who move to the UK before returning to China. In contrast to the existing literature on returnees where the gaze is only turned on highly prestigious schemes/trajectories of return, we look at those who become involved with Christian evangelical congregations and bible reading groups in response to a general state of disillusion with social beliefs of global competition and success. By drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in London and Beijing, we engage with literature on lived religion, migration and the care of the self through a sociolinguistic lens. We take pressures for successful return as a technology of hope that shaped our participants’ experiences of Christian conversion, and examine religious practices as support-based subject-transformation projects whereby our participants regulate their and others’ practices and feelings through daily semiotic activities as they operate within global spaces of higher education and the labour market. In so doing, we detail a complex interplay of self-transformation experiences, collective practices of refusal, and capitalist logics of market expansion.

The Responsibility to Prevent Future Harm

Through the example of legal resistance to mining in Ecuador, this article explores the shift towards suing states rather than corporations. Key to ongoing resistance struggles is the allocation of preventive responsibility to ‘the state’ through the filing of constitutional lawsuits. I show how both the shift from the ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics of time’ and a shift in the imaginary of the state contribute to claims of responsibility being increasingly directed at states. The article inquires into the effects of the temporal reversal from assessing past harm (and ruling retrospectively) to assessing the likelihood of future scenarios in order to prevent future harm. Finally, I address the limits of such allocation of responsibility, showing that while constitutional lawsuits are political attempts to challenge the government’s economic programme and disrupt the logic of global capitalism, many powerful policy-shaping actors remain beyond the law’s reach.

Guardianes del mar y del viento. El conflicto socioambiental del pueblo ikoot en el istmo de Tehuantepec

The resistance of some indigenous communities to the global capital extractivist logic has resulted in the development of strategies beyond the economic sphere, beyond market and capital gain; in that sense, it bursts into the territories for the conquest of goods, bodies and rights through biocultural dispossession. In this logic of extra-economic domain, the worldview of the indigenous people who have coevolved with its habitat and the protection of their territories has managed to face the prevailing capitalist system. Our objective is to present an analysis of the community resistance process carried out by the Huave or ikoots community, on the Tehuantepec Isthmus in Oaxaca, Mexico. Through various community strategies, the ikoots have managed to cope with the advancement of mega projects that seek to exploit the potential of the region, due to its geographical potentialities.

Making Sense of Populist Nationalism

ABSTRACT One of the blind spots of political economy in its response to the financial crisis and its aftermath is the tendency to attribute contingency and rationality to long-run economic developments, but to attribute contingency and irrationality to political trends and developments. This reflects the continuing legacy of economism in the political economy tradition. Critical political economists anticipated the financial crisis but not the political responses to the crisis, including the resilience of neo-liberalism and the upsurge of populism and nationalism in many western democracies. The temptation to dismiss the economic policies of these new nationalists as economically irrational and superficial because they interfere with the logic and superior rationality of global capital is reminiscent of some of the political-economic analyses of the neo-liberal turn in the 1970s and 1980s. A critical political economy seeking to make sense of the variety of populist nationalist insurgencies needs to overcome the binary distinction between cultural and economic logics by accepting that there are different rationalities rather than a single homogenous economic rationality on one side and political and ideological irrationalities on the other.

Loan-Words: Economy, Equivalence, and Debt in the Arabic Translation Debates

Abstract This article examines a public debate about Arabic translation that took place in Cairo in March 1908. The social transformations of the long nineteenth century had been accompanied in Egypt by a parallel upheaval in conceptions of language, and by 1908 Arabic, like the global economy, seemed threatened by crisis. Some speeches from the debate actually connect these crises, equating linguistic meaning with financial value or critiquing the “costliness” of literary style; others conceive translation as an exchange predicated on equivalence between languages and governed by abstract economic laws. Scholars have suggested that the cultural violence of colonialism has structured modern Arabic literary production and defined its place within world and comparative literary studies. Here, I ask how that place might be reconceived if early twentieth-century Arabic theories of literature and language are understood as embedded not only in colonial ideological paradigms, but also in (imperial) capitalist logics of market efficiency and infinite exchangeability.

The Fugitivity of Art

This article examines the art practices of Akinsanya Kambon, Pan-African artist, activist, and former Black Panther. Fujino posits that Kambon’s art and activism embody a marronage politic through the creation of alternative spaces that reject the logics of racial capitalism and white assimilationism. Whether as a fugitive living in clandestinity or as co-owner of a Pan-African art studio and gallery, Kambon—through his sculptures, paintings, drawings, and accompanying griot storytelling—has emphasized African creation of art, knowledge reclaimed from the ancestors, revolutionary theories and practices, and emancipatory imaginations. The Black Atlantic figures prominently in his art and ideology.

Fighting gentrification from the boxing ring: how community gyms reclaim the right to the city

ABSTRACT This article explores ‘community gyms’ as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of today’s right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to a critical approach to urban development also individuals who would otherwise not embrace anti-systemic politics. Specifically, the article analyses the spatial dimension of community gyms. It exposes how they constitute a bulwark against the commodification and gentrification of the urban habitat, recovering vacant or abandoned buildings to return them to the locals and embodying an alternative model of urban development centered on people rather than profit. The article also explores the gyms’ relational dimension, showing how community gyms nurture novel relationships of care, in three ways: they include and give agency to marginalized subjects, they forge militants through sport practice, and seek to mitigate the socio-economic needs of their social surroundings. In so doing, the article shows that leisure, too, can create moments of disruption able to generate change, and that sport, when understood as a political act, can unsettle the capitalist logic of commodification of leisure. Inspired by a carnal sociology approach to social research, this article is based on original data gathered by means of in-depth interviewing, ethnographic observation and document analysis.

MUJERES Y CUIDADO: DISPUTAS Y NEGOCIACIONES EN EL ESPACIO ACADÉMICO

Resumen El presente artículo ofrece insumos, tanto empíricos como teóricos, que evidencian cómo opera el vínculo entre el espacio y el género en la academia de ciencias sociales y humanidades de Bogotá, Colombia. A través de 10 historias de vida de mujeres que trabajan en distintas universidades, afirmamos que la academia es un espacio hostil para las mujeres que la habitan, en tanto que se reproducen en su interior lógicas dualistas, coloniales, heteropatriarcales y capitalistas, que afectan de manera particular las experiencias de mujeres y cuerpos no heteronormativos. Encontramos que el cuidado es una noción central y conflictiva en dicha experiencia de la academia, pues opera tanto como forma de opresión, al anular la participación y visibilidad de las mujeres, como de resistencia, negociación y potencia política para transformar la universidad.

Catatonic Futures and Post-Apocalyptic Capital

What does late capitalism’s mode of temporality reveal about the logic linked to its mode of production? This article establishes a dialogue between theoretical works concerned with this question and Jeff Noon’s speculative fiction novel Falling out of Cars. By drawing on Marxist criticism in the works of Fredric Jameson and Gilles Deleuzeand Felix Guattari, it argues that Falling out of Cars develops a catatonic mode of temporality that critically challenges these authors’ diagnosis of schizophrenia as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Noon’s novel offers a dystopian version of the future in which catatonic subjects function as the norm for the system’s optimal operation. The catatonic temporality of the novel emerges as the logic underlying this transformation, namely, as the passive assimilation of the individual to the system’s economic rationale, which no longer needs human agency in order to operate. Falling out of Cars does not only deploy these narrative techniques on a purely aesthetic basis, but explicitly links them to the objective conditions of the world they aim to represent. In this sense, Noon’s novel suggests catatonia as the dominant logic leading to capitalism’s terminal stage in which individuals no longer possess agency to take control of their lives.

Unifying nature of food: consumer-initiated cooperatives in Istanbul

Purpose This paper aims to study how activists involved in consumer-initiated cooperatives, in a specific context, challenge the practices of the neoliberal system and develop counter-practices that are ingrained with their values. It aims to access the transformative capacity and inclusiveness of consumer-initiated cooperatives and the role played by prefigurative practices in changing the status quo. Three practices – defetishization of agricultural commodities, surplus generation and distribution, prefiguration – that enable the inclusion of those groups who are marginalized in the food production and consumption nexus by neoliberal policies are identified. Design/methodology/approach The findings of this paper were developed from 23 unstructured interviews, participant observation and analysis of the social media accounts of five consumer-initiated cooperatives located in different districts of Istanbul and which are involved in a collective response to the neoliberal policies. Findings The study discusses that, in a specific context, political events and economic policies can be a catalyst for the initiation of alternative consumer-initiated cooperatives. The findings indicate that these organizations can develop and articulate prefigurative practices that are influential in transforming the prevailing capitalist food provisioning system to be more inclusive. Research limitations/implications The findings offer an alternative view to the dominant capitalist logic and advance the concept of how the economic sphere can be re-politicized and how the persevering notion of financial performance is resolved by invoking values of inclusion, solidarity, responsibility and sharing. The findings are based on the study of five cases in a specific context during a specific period. Originality/value This paper focuses on cooperatives owned and governed by activist consumers and presents results concerning their underlying practices for creating a food provisioning system that is inclusive and aiming for social justice and equality. Similarly, it provides evidence of how local political and economic conditions influence the appropriation and development of these practices – commodity defetishization, surplus distribution and prefiguration.

Working on and at Play

As media objects, video games are imbued with values held by their makers. This is done intentionally by serious games practitioners but also occurs independently of design goals. One of the more problematic manifestations of »values at play« is playbour, a putting-to-work of play that recalls Agamben's mourning the loss of »menuchah«, an inoperativity that is more than a means to prepare one for more work. But is there a way to rescue leisure from its subservience to labour? Or, if not, is there a way to make the work done through play operate against the logics of late capitalism? To make sense of the conversations around player, game, power, and labour, I articulate two concepts: visibility, or the degree to which a system can account for the actions of those operating within it, and perception, a measure of an actor's understanding of the methods through which a system understands their movements. Through several gameplay examples, I use these concepts to lay the foundation for suggesting that play is a force for critique, for laying bare a game's operational logics so that they may be subject to our scrutiny. To conclude, the concepts of glitch and queer failure are introduced to argue for a working on and at play that interrogates not only video game machines, but the larger machines of ideology that drive them.

Vapor Memory, or, memory in the ruins of history

This article explores vaporwave’s appropriation of the past and future to constitute a (non)-site for the displacement of the present. In doing so, vaporwave – an electronic music genre that samples sights and sounds from 1980s and 1990s popular culture – masquerades itself as a radical project that decentres the subject’s location within the linear matrix of time () and houses the potential to oppose the humanistic territorializations of late capitalism (; ). I argue that these arguments focus too closely on vaporwave’s style and aesthetic dimension without considering its maintenance of various structures of oppression and appropriation indicative of globalized capitalism. The result is a misattribution of transgressive potential to vaporwave that ignores its incredibly conservative undertones. To engage with vaporwave then demands a bifurcation of its outward, rhizomatic veneer and the codes, conventions and axiomatics that underwrite it. I make this argument by drawing upon Jean , , , ) scepticism of any accelerationist and technologist politics of subversion to mount effective sociopolitical change. Additionally, I make use of many feminist and critical race approaches to highlight the affinities between vaporwave’s appropriate style and the logics of late capitalism.

Critiquing Anthropocentric Media Coverage of the COVID-19 Sport “Hiatus”

This commentary highlights a recent trend of anthropocentrism (a focus on human-centered interests and activities) in the media coverage in the United States and Europe on the disruption of the contemporary sports industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argued that the coverage promotes anthropocentric narratives by framing the pandemic as an external force causing a temporary and unforeseen “hiatus” in the sports industry. As a result, media consumers learn about human interest stories associated with consumer demand and industry adaptation: stories that renormalize, rather than question, the sports industry in its current and hegemonic form. Such media discourses bypass an opportunity to consider the longstanding entanglements of human and nonhuman actors in sporting contexts, rethink sport through environmental and nonhuman perspectives, and, ultimately, advance more progressive, democratic politics. The commentary employs a posthumanist lens to critique the recent anthropocentric media coverage, highlighting the ways in which it reproduces the dualist logic of neoliberal capitalism and deflects attention to the human and nonhuman relations that have always existed in contexts of sport and human physicality.