Terminal Crisis Research Articles

Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco‐scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences

AbstractThere is no single ‘great’ commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio‐technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the ‘end of Cheap Nature’ and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of actors situated at multiple scales are intensifying the use of cities and their hinterlands for the production/transgression of localized commodity frontiers. We draw on scholarship on uneven geographical development, state‐led restructuring and eco‐scalar fixes to present two case studies from different segments of the carbon cycle in the global South. The first case demonstrates how the introduction of waste‐to‐energy technology in Delhi facilitated the generation of ‘carbon credits’ while waste matter itself became a commodity. The second discusses attempts by the Brazilian state of Amazonas (Amazônia) aspiring to shift from rainforest exploitation to financialized conservation supported by the ‘green global city’ functions of metropolitan Manaus. These cases demonstrate that although the global carbon‐control regime may enable accumulation, implementation remains speculative, and localized commodity frontiers provoke social resistances that jeopardize their durability.

Welfare-to-work: experience in the emerging Vietnamese welfare state

The redevelopment of the welfare regimes of former socialist states since the terminal crisis of state socialism in the early 1980s is an emerging field of scholarship. This article contributes to this work by investigating welfare-to-work in a less-studied case, contemporary Vietnam. The research indicates that Vietnam’s newly emerged employment assistance framework represents a blend of certain aspects of the Bismarckian welfare type with earnings-related contributory social insurance measures and the Beveridge-type of flat-rate tax-financed social protection. It is also a little more liberal than the regimes of capitalist welfare states by adopting a so-called “socialisation” approach to fight unemployment. Unlike European, American and some north Asian experience, there are no signs of contracting-out of service delivery informed by new public management principles. Its funding model sits somewhere between a public employment services (PES) system and a private recruitment agency-based system. It is a hybrid model, wherein public offices deliver government-funded assistance but also receive outcome fee payments from employers. It motivates jobseekers to work, thus lowering the unemployment rate. However, its actual implementation is challenged by significant administrative problems, including a considerable amount of red tape.

The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis

The credit crisis of 2007–8 prompted a Manichean discourse that labeled finance the flighty and unreal other of the solidity of the real economy. Almost overnight the “speculative finance” shifted from a descriptive term to an evaluative one, with freewheeling finance singled out as the main cause of the crisis. The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself. Not only is finance a part of the real economy but since the 1970s it has played an increasingly significant part in it. This essay aligns with recent work in critical finance studies that puts pressure on the idea that finance can be separated from the real economy. Supplementing the world-historical scale at which this work often remains, this essay theorizes the real abstraction of finance through its lived social experience. The year 1973 was replete with financial events: the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the gold standard, the Middle East oil crisis, the creation of the Chicago options exchange, and the invention of the Black–Scholes equation governing derivatives. It also saw the birth of the financial thriller with Paul Erdman’sThe Billion Dollar Sure Thing. Seizing upon a formulaic genre and opening it up to a flood of real events from the trading floor, the financial thriller acts as a dynamic interface and sensitive seismograph for theorizing the fictionality of finance. This essay opens with a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’sAmerican Psycho(1991) as an example of a work that renders real abstraction in an explicitly social way. Rather than viewing the novel as a hyperbolically postmodern reflection of abstract financial maneuvers, I argue that it is thickly embedded within the historically specific financial cityscape of 1980s Manhattan. I then turn to a comparative reading of recent financial thrillers written in response to the twenty-first-century credit collapse. Unlike Ellis’s novel, these thrillers strive to keep the unreality of finance segregated from the real economy at the level of plot, while also making use of generic strategies to do so at the level of form, pushing financial data into footnotes, descriptive asides, and a different tonal register of narrative. By reading these thrillers alongsideAmerican Psycho, a book written before the shock of terminal economic crisis, I offer a more historically nuanced reading of their attempts to salvage a workable economy out of the mess of the twenty-first-century American economy.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada: el ocaso del partido de Estado en Oaxaca

The popular movement that emerged on June the 14th, 2006, in the city of Oaxaca de Juárez and the opposition’s victor y on the elections held on July the 2nd of the same year are connected. Both processes reflect the terminal crisis of a political regime based on traditional clientele and authoritarian relationships as forms of domination. However, the electoral shift that favored the opposition during the last presidential and legislative elections isn’t entirely new. After a detailed analysis of the evolution of the electoral results in the 570 districts of Oaxaca, one can conclude that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionar y Party) has been loosing votes since the end of the eighties decade . The opposition (PRD, PAN, and recently the Convergencia) have gained ground during the last 20 years. Oaxaca has gradually ceased to be a stronghold of the PRI.

Is the Psychology of Creativity in Terminal Crisis? Comments on Glăveanu’s Article “The Psychology of Creativity: A Critical Reading”

This article was written thanks to the funding received from the program Mobility Plus (1152/1/MOB/2014/0) from the Ministry

Rehabilitating and Resettling Offenders in the Community. By Anthony Goodman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 250pp. 32.99 pb)

Probation in England and Wales is moving, under the impact of the Coalition government’s privatization programme, into what many would consider terminal crisis. From a relatively calm backwater, the agency has been thrust into the front line of neo-liberal political and social engineering. Any text on probation published today is required to help understand what has led to this situation. The book under review was published before the privatization programme was fully articulated and contains little directly on the subject apart from a few ruminations on the shape of things to come. But its value lies in the meticulous documentation, supplemented by interviews with practitioners conducted over a considerable period, of the changes introduced by successive governments particularly from the beginning of the 1980s. If we wish to fully understand the current turmoil, some consideration of this history is vital. Goodman deftly navigates the maze of Home Office documents and the mountain of reports, reorganizations and political injunctions to show how English probation, over a longer period than many might imagine, has metamorphosed from a relatively autonomous agency primarily focused on the rehabilitation of offenders to a tightly controlled and bureaucratized arm of the criminal justice system geared to public protection, control, surveillance and risk management—its own ‘punitive turn’. As Paul Boateng, Minister for Prisons and Probation during the first Blair administration, proudly announced: ‘We are a law enforcement agency: It’s what we are. It’s what we do’ (p. 100).

Imagining the humanities – Amid the inhuman

The rationale for retaining the humanities in universities in the 21st century is not self-evident. A case for the humanities can only be fully made against a sense of their loss or their absence. Some say that we are already in a post-human society, but what role might the humanities play in such a society? Presumably, the fate of the humanities is bound up with a sense as to what it is to be human, and that such being–human, such human being, has value. The humanities are rather self–centred, it seems, according human being a special place on this planet. Perhaps some modesty is called for. The humanities go through crises – a crisis of the humanities – every decade or so. Are we currently in the midst of just such a crisis? Or is it a terminal crisis? It may be that a new kind of imaginative and critical humanities awaits.

Are biotechnology and its clusters in crisis?

This paper asks whether biotechnology, in general, and the industry clusters of innovative biotechnology enterprises that have uniformly characterised its economic form, are now in a terminal crisis. Or are the difficulties that are clearly evident and described below surmountable and showing signs of being surmounted? The question of a crisis in biotechnology is important because so much faith has been placed in the technology over the past generation during which it has made great technical strides forward in medicine and other user communities (agro-food, energy, environment, security) and contributed significantly to healthcare and welfare gains while high hopes have long and justifiably been associated with its vibrant industry clusters. The paper postulates a crisis based on two key features of biotechnology. The first of these is an economic crisis in which enormous sums are required to research, develop and innovate new products, especially medical drugs. The second is epistemological and confronts the (reductionist) central dogma of biotechnology with the evolutionary implications of emergent systems biology.

Targeting Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Stem Cells

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a clonal myeloproliferative disorder that is characterized by the presence of the fusion oncogene BCR-ABL that encodes the tyrosine kinase BCR-ABL. Constitutive expression of BCR-ABL leads to the unregulated production of mature myeloid cells in the bone marrow and their subsequent release into the blood. Untreated, CML will progress from a chronic to accelerated phase over a number of years before quickly proceeding to a terminal blast crisis phase, reminiscent of acute leukemia. The advent of tyrosine kinase inhibitors has led to much improved management of the disease, but these drugs do not provide a cure as they are unable to eradicate the most primitive, quiescent fraction of CML stem cells. This review looks at recent research into targeting CML stem cells and focuses on major signalling pathways of interest.

The Internet and “Frictionless Capitalism”

Since 1994 when the first browsers made their appearance the internet became the ‚new medium‘ par excellence. As is always the case with new media, there was an intense discussion about the future usage and effects of the new technology. One of the central arguments of this discussion was that the new medium might solve the problems of capitalism – Bill Gates coined the phrase "frictionless capitalism". In the first part of my paper some of these discourses are analyzed. These discourses, often publicly uttered by conservative and liberal politicians, try to construct the internet as commercial medium solving problems of late capitalism. But already the dotcom-crash 2001 hinted at problems with that construction. In the second part there is a discussion of a special interpretation of Marx’ theory of capitalist crisis. It is argued – also with recourse to Norbert Wiener – that the internet is part of the third industrial revolution which might lead to a very deep and even terminal crisis of capitalism. Instead of solving the problems of capitalism the internet might deepen them. We are witnessing since 2008 a chain of ever increasing symptoms of a deep crisis. By using Marx’ approach some of the important effects of the new medium can be described far more accurately than does the unreflected euphoria of Gates and others.

Akkumulationszyklen und Hegemonie

Cycles of accumulation and hegemony. A critical discussion of Giovanni Arrighi’s arguments on the relocation of centre and periphery of the world economy. Based on data on GDP and on stock market capitalization, the paper takes issue with Giovanni Arrighi’s notion of the “terminal crisis” of the US hegemony and the related relocation of the center of the world economy to China. While some indicators support Arrighi’s argument (e.g. the shift of the accumulation dynamic from the material to the financial sphere), others don’t. My analysis in this paper does not yield unambiguous results. Moreover, I question Arrighi’s primary unit of analysis, national economies, maintaining that such a focus downplays the recent fundamental changes in the organization of the world economy. I propose a less state-centric approach to identify centres of the world economy, which is derived from an integration of the concepts of global commodity chains and global cities.

On ‘the urbanism of nothing’

The following informal discussion by e‐mail arose in the process of discussing the issue title for 15.1. It began from a sense, frequently explored in City, that urbanism, at the same time as ‘the urban revolution’ or ‘The Age of Cities’ is being uncritically asserted, is on the edge of a possibly terminal crisis and that some(not all) manifestations described as ‘rurban’ are a sign of this. Maros Krivy's exploratory paper in that issue on ‘Speculative redevelopment and conservation…’ suggested, particularly in the illustration that he labelled ‘“Nothing” at the place of the former Guman factory’, a possible intersection, no more than that, between the two lines of thought. The ensuing discussion is presented here, very lightly edited. The topic of moving beyond a condition of ‘nothingness’ announced in the original issue title and taken up in that editorial is touched on here by Anna Richter and taken up again in the editorial to this issue. Bob Catterall

El paradigma social de redes. Ser, pensar y hacer en la relación

Esta comunicación propone un Paradigma de Redes como nuevo principio de comprensión ontológica, epistemológica, ético-política y estética del modelo social surgido de la crisis terminal de la modernidad. Como nueva Filosofía de la Relación este Paradigma representa una nueva forma hermenéutica de estar-en-el-mundo, toda una forma de existencia interpretante, que ha de servir para la exploración de nuevas formas de interacción consigo mismo, con los demás y el mundo desde los efectos mundializadores producidos por la intensificación creciente de los nuevos flujos tecnológicos. Del mismo modo, como forma de conocimiento, de manera autorreflexiva, este Paradigma debe convertirse en un nuevo compromiso autocrítico ante el déficit de diagnóstico social que supone la quiebra postmoderna. Ha de ser un instrumento fundamental de conceptualización de la nueva experiencia económico-social, política y cultural que comporta en sí mismo.

The Terminal Crisis of the “Participatory Government” and the Election of Lee Myung Bak

This paper examines the election of Lee Myung Bak through the terminal crisis of the Roh Moo Hyun government that preceded it. I start with an analysis of the election of Lee Myung Bak and the electoral strategies of the liberal-progressive bloc in the December 2007 election and then move on to detail how these strategies shed light on tensions within Korean progressive politics since the transition to democracy in 1987. These tensions inform what I shall call the “terminal crisis” of Roh's “participatory government.” I argue that this crisis involves a problem of articulation within progressive politics between a politics of reunification and one grounded in egalitarian economic reform, including the lack of an alternative to the different forms of neo-liberalism embraced by both the Roh government and the conservative government of Lee Myung Bak. My hope is that thorough examination of these tensions that have informed the liberal-progressive bloc during the long decade since 1987 can spur reflection on the role of social movements in Korean democratisation and the dilemmas they face in crafting strategies for political and economic reform.

Explaining the world as a system: can it be done?

Explaining the world as a system: can it be done?

Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century by Warren Motte

MLR, 105.3, 20!0 881 the following chapter, 'The Discovery of History, Tidd shows how the Second World War prompted Beauvoir to become involved politically; how, rather than suppressing theOther, shewas going to discover theOthers of her contemporary society. Beauvoir, as everybody knows, was to denounce in Le Deuxieme Sexe the oppression of women in patriarchy, but also, which is less well known, she was to expose in La Vieillesse the ways elderly people are badly treated in a society geared towards productivity and youth. Tidd also narrates Beauvoir's involvement with her significant Others, mainly Sartre and Nelson Algren, but also Claude Lanzmann, and Sylvie Le Bon. She relies, of course, on Beauvoir's autobiographies, but also on more recently published letters and diaries, as well as critical studies. Tidd discusses all of Beauvoir's major works and even some of her lectures, such as those she gave in Japan, summarizing the argument or the plot and highlighting themain ideas. She signals too what kind of reception some of the essays and novels had. Beauvoir emerges as a formidable figure, perhaps more of a philoso pher than a fiction writer, since Tidd puts the accent on her ideas. Tidd obviously respects Beauvoir, and this is reflected in the tactful handling of some of themore controversial aspects of her life. This is an excellent introduction to Beauvoir's work, life,and myth. Swansea University Catherine Rodgers Fiction Now: The French Novel in theTwenty-First Century. ByWarren Motte. Champaign, IL, and London: Dalkey Archive Press. 2008. 237 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-56478-503-9. Although byWarren Motte's own avowal this accessible volume isnot intended to provide a comprehensive survey of the extreme contemporain, it defies perennial pronouncements of the terminal crisis of the French novel. Concentrating on the Metropolitan French novel that is his area of expertise, and by taking a series of what he describes as 'soundings' (p. 10), Motte seeks to put the range and diversity of the French contemporary critical novel on display' (p. 33). While the descriptor critical' remains somewhat opaque, the opening chapter identifies a personal preference forwriters who situate themselves questioningly in relation to literary tradition and to the cultural and political challenges of the turn of the twenty-firstcentury. With their self-reflexivemetaliterary strategies and a concern for certain kinds ofmarginality (though questions of gender and sexuality tend to be elided), forMotte, 'they share a crucial will tomake French fiction new' (pp. 13-14). The fictions featured (together with a helpful list of authors who were also candidates for inclusion) are for themost part published by Minuit and P.O.L. Each chapter operates discretely as a comprehensive introduction to recentworks by eightwriters: JeanEchenoz, Christian Gailly, Gerard Gavarry, Patrick Lapeyre, Helene Lenoir, Christine Montalbetti, Marie Redonnet, and Lydie Salvayre. Ar ranged from best to least known, this ordering arguably risks the occlusion of the 882 Reviews less familiar writers bymore established figures (Echenoz, Gailly, Redonnet, and Salvayre). Single works of fiction are situated in the context of the author's oeuvre and, to a lesser extent, the field of cultural production, although the chapter on Salvayre surveys the author's output since 1990. Each chapter is a lively and artful mix of description and analysis, which gives the reader a clear sense of narratives at once in terms of form, content, and the relationship between the two, though unfortunately, and no doubt due to editorial pressures, quotations are given only inEnglish. Accessibly, if sometimes fleetingly,Motte draws on critical perspectives includ ing those ofMarc Auge, Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Gerard Genette, and Emmanuel Levinas (plus be yond this francophone frame of reference, Gerald Prince, Edward Said, Tvzetan Todorov, and several contemporary critics of recent French fiction). There is, for example, productive reference to Derrida on hospitality as a way of discussing Marie Redonnet's Diego (Paris: Minuit, 2005), though amore predictable recourse toAuge undercuts the claims for originality ofGerard Gavarry's Hop-Id! Un deux trois (Paris: P.O.L., 2001). None the less,Motte's account of Gavarry's inventive metalinguistic perspectives on life in the banlieue otherwise lives up to his...

A Terminal Crisis? Examining the Breakdown of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Dispute Resolution Process

This case study examines the breakdown of the dispute resolution process that was intended to lay the foundations for a reconciliation between Eritrea and Ethiopia following their bitter border war of 1998 to 2000. The paper identifies general lessons for future third party settlements. In particular, the Eritrea-Ethiopia case suggests that factors such as the scope of the third party's mandate, the composition of ad hoc panels, and the transparency and duration of the panel's activities might affect the ultimate success of territorial dispute resolution.

Shifting regimes of governance in the coffee market: From secular crisis to a new equilibrium?

ABSTRACT This paper employs a global value chains (GVC) perspective to recent developments in the coffee market, associated with the behavior of market structure in a context of widening spreads around declining prices and affirms that due to their imperfect inclusion in the global economy, primary markets have entered ‘terminal crisis’. The paper asserts that while the role of state-territorial regimes of governance has noticeably weakened in the current (‘terminal crisis’) context, the combined strategic positioning of (‘related’) players, residing at highly imperfect, monopolized nodes has become the key shaper of development and this has had a de-stabilizing effect on the poorest. The paper observes that systemic crisis appears to be resolvable, subject to the ability of emerging new redistributive outcomes to reposition the coffee system at a qualitatively new equilibrium. In contributing to a more systematic (value-chain centered) line of enquiry on the relationship between development and inequality, the paper analytically expands key relationships in the GVC framework (using extra inputs from strategic management, economic trade and convention theory) and offers to policymaking a framework for ‘combating’ falling terms of trade in primary markets by means of new economic relations.

Re‐imagining and rescripting the future of education: global knowledge economy discourses and the challenge to education systems

Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology for analysis, this paper sets out the nature and form of the challenges directed to the compulsory schooling sector by the knowledge economy that is contained in key policy and related documents put out by the OECD, the World Bank and the UK government. The OECD and the World Bank’s policy agendas are increasingly important in setting policy and programme agendas for the developed and developing countries respectively; however there are important differences between the two institutions regarding how education should be redesigned. The World Bank’s redesign of education favours the market and individualism as the means for developing knowledge and skills for the knowledge economy. The OECD, however, while concerned with human capital formation, rejects the market model in favour of an institutionally embedded liberalism to overcome the problems posed by tacit knowledge. The UK, on the other hand, has promoted the idea of personalized learning. The paper suggests that this idea is particularly problematic for developing a system of innovation for the economy that is dependent on high levels of social interaction. The first half of the twenty‐first century will, I believe, be far more difficult, more unsettling, and yet more open than anything we have known in the twentieth century. I say this on three premises; none of which I have time to argue here. The first is that historical systems, like all systems, have finite lives. They have beginnings, a long development and finally, as they move far from equilibrium and reach points of bifurcation, a demise. The second premise is that two things are true at these points of bifurcation; small inputs have large outputs (as opposed to times of the normal development of the system, when large inputs have small outputs); and the outcome of such bifurcation is inherently indeterminate. The third premise is that the modern world system as a historical system has entered into a terminal crisis and is unlikely to exist in 50 years. However, since its outcome is so uncertain, we do not know whether the resulting system (or systems) will be better or worse than the one in which we are living, but we do know that the period of transition will be a terrible time of troubles, since the stakes of the transition are so high, the outcome so uncertain, and the ability of small impacts to affect the outcome so great. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 1)

The Politics of Restructuring : Trade Unions on the Defensive in Britain Since 1979

This paper shows that restructuring and the associated political programme have thrown British unions onto the defensive. It rejects arguments that unions have been 'tamed' and that unions are in terminal crisis, but argues that union structures and practices intended for application in the 1960s and 1970s were found to be inappropriate for the circumstances of the 1990s. Since 1979 a range of policy initiatives have been launched to address existing weaknesses. A review of these identifies several shortcomings and suggests that attempts to establish a 'new' agenda have only just begun.