Capitalist World Research Articles

ECONOMIC CYCLES, POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND SOME ASPECTS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROCESS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

ECONOMIC CYCLES, POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND SOME ASPECTS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROCESS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Transnational Capital and the Trend of Global Interactions

ABSTRACT Economic globalization has been accompanied by the cross-border development of class relations. Resting on large-scale cross-border operations by transnational corporations, capital is accelerating the formation of a transnational capitalist class. The capitalist world has formed new, contradictory relations based on a multitude of existing inherent contradictions, rendering the world situation still more complex. In the late twentieth century, a number of scholars began to focus on this phenomenon, discussing various of its aspects such as the gap between rich and poor brought about by the formation of a transnational capitalist class on a global scale; the transnational capitalist class and the question of global hegemony; and the relation between the transnational capitalist class and the world system. Their discussions have since attracted the attention of Chinese scholars. This paper presents a basic theoretical analysis of the above phenomenon using the methodology of historical materialism, while also summarizing and commenting on the opinions of representative scholars.

ÜRETKEN SERMAYENİN ULUSLARARASILAŞMASI VE ULUSLARARASI YENİDEN YAPILANMA SÜRECİNDE BATI-AFRİKA:EKONOMİK YAPI VE EKONOMİK GELİŞME (1960-1985)-1

The main aim in this article is to examines relatiom between restructuring process of world economy which is called v/orld capitalism and ecorıomic structures of IVest-Afrikan countries within the theoretical framework of intemationalization of production Capital. To begin mth, intemationalization of production Capital and its some characteristics are given. The second section is focused on changing structures of West -Afrıcan economies in related to restructurin process of world capitalism. Finally, last section is revioved theoretical framework of intemationalization of production Capital.

China: In the Perspective of Historical Materialism

Much is being written currently about the rise of China as an economic power, and about the nature of China's present- day social, economic and political reality. Most of this literature, however, while richly descriptive, does not seek grounding in an organized, theoretical, framework for the study of social structure and evolution. A rigorous re-development of historical materialist theory, in the Marxist tradition, can help in situating China's social formation within both the five millennia of Chinese history, on the one hand; and the political economy of the capitalist world system within which China's current development proceeds, on the other. A key finding is that the timeline for thinking about the nature and logic of a country's position and direction of change is itself relative to that country's period of historical existence — a relativity that is particularly significant for China.

식민지 자본주의의 전개와 3·1운동에 대한 시론적 검토

This article is an introductory study of the correlation between the colonial capitalism implanted by the Japanese Empire and the March 1st Movement. The body of this article approaches the foregoing correlation from three aspects: the structure of colonial capitalism, changes in daily life due to colonial capitalism, and people’s perception of capitalism. Through the hierarchical structure formed between the empire and colonial capitalism, the colony was indirectly linked to world capitalism through the colonial power, and the colonial economy was unilaterally reorganized according to the interests of the colonial power and capital. The Japanese Empire enforced policies that ignored the practices that had been passed down from ancestors and the profits of farmers, and Korean farms were incorporated into the circulation system of Japanese capitalism by force. As a result, the rural community, which was a reproduction unit of farmers and directly connected to survival, was being dismantled. Whereas Koreans had to seek only survival as isolated individuals before the March 1st Movement, they showed united power through the movement rather than being isolated. After the 1920s, Koreans began to make independent voices based on solidarity as a collective subject.

On Global Corporate Control: Review of an Article

Abstract This article reviews “The network of global corporate control” by Vitali et al. (2011) where the authors use modern network theory to analyze the centralization of global corporate control. Specifically, they calculate how a central core of transnational corporations (TNCs) have control over the total operating revenue of all transnational corporations. They find that out of 43,060 transnational corporations, 737 top shareholders control about 80 percent of the value of all TNCs. This control is centralized in the financial sector and extends to other sectors of the economy, including manufacturing and services. TNCs are more global than ever before. They are in virtually every country of the world and comprise a world capitalist system.

Engagement with English as a neoliberal endeavor: reconsidering the notion of language learning

ABSTRACT This article explores the idea of “engagement with English as a neoliberal endeavor.” Drawing on narrative accounts from seven employees who are/were affiliated with Japan-based companies that have adopted English as an official corporate language (EOCL), the article argues that even in these supposed “global” organizations, English does not exist simply to be learned or used as a business lingua franca; the language can also serve as an ideological construct that encourages employees in their neoliberal endeavor to be needed workers, with the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) functioning as a surveillance mechanism that drives the employees to continuously study the language with enthusiasm. Using this argument as a basis, the article offers an empirical alternative to how people’s multifaceted understanding of English and the learning of the language in the current neoliberal capitalist world can be captured. The examples used, as well as the idea of “engagement with English as a neoliberal endeavor,” contribute to opening up academic discussions to reconsider the notion of language learning.

‘Colonising the Future’: Migrant Crossings on the English Channel and the Discourse of Risk

In November of 2018, a small number of Middle Eastern migrants began crossing the English Channel to Dover in dinghies and fishing boats—a mode of crossing that had previously been somewhat rare. Despite the relatively low numbers, state and media responses to these events have been widespread and often alarmist, with the discourse of ‘risk’ becoming particularly prevalent. This paper explores the representational politics of this coverage, focusing primarily on online media from BBC News and press statements from the UK Home Office. Through a close reading of these texts, I argue that the language of risk serves to inscribe (ir)responsibility onto the bodies of migrants, presenting them as threats in need of management who are putting themselves and others at risk through their recklessness. Obscured from the discourse is the deeper causality of this risk—the fact that the same state actors who portray the migrants as unnecessary risk-takers are in many ways responsible for the conditions of ‘deterrence’ that make the risky option the only way. This moralisation and monopolisation of risk is ultimately part of a larger ideological discourse that serves to colonise possible futures. By placing the discourse of risk in historical and political context, this paper seeks to draw out the nuanced ways in which ascriptions of risk and practices of risk-management contribute to the perpetuation of a (neo)colonial and capitalist world order, whose violent effects are enacted in this instance upon subaltern migrants.

Three Aral Sea Films and the Soviet Ecology

Drawing on analysis of three films that converge on the Aral Sea and span from 1929 to 1988, Alec Brookes engages with Marxist scholarship on the Anthropocene and Capitalocene to argue that the Soviet ecology rested on the same fundamental principle of the Capitalist world ecology: the alienation of indigenous producers from land in waves of primitive accumulation. The Forty-First (1956) and Turksib (1929) both show how, alongside other devices, the dialectics of film form as theorized by Sergei Eisenstein were repurposed to reframe the conquest of “Man” over “Nature” and ultimately to appropriate land from producers within an ostensibly Marxist framework. In The Needle (1988), on an already desiccated Aral Sea, director Rashid Nugamov suggests that the restoration of Asian land to Asian producers provides a way forward after the decay and depravation of the Soviet ecology. The analysis here suggests that to confront the Capitalist world ecology in the present we must work to restore land to indigenous producers and promote indigenous ecological relations.

Dr Félix Martí Ibáñez's 'Considerations on Homosexuality' and the Spanish Anarchist Cultural Project

This article places a reconsideration of the Spanish anarchist doctor Félix Martí Ibáñez's work on sexual morality and, in particular, homosexuality within the dual historiographical framework of scientific ideas and anarchism's own history of engagement with these subjects. It argues that recent developments in the writing of the history of anarchism have paid far more attention to the articulation of cultural issues within anarchist movements as part of their overall contestation against the 'bourgeois', religious and capitalist world and sets this article within this renewed framework. The thought of Félix Martí Ibáñez is assessed not for its supposed 'scientificity' but for what it tells us about the eclectic nature of Spanish anarchism at the time and for what such thought signifies for today's libertarian movement.

Rethinking the Role of the State in Employment Relations for a Neoliberal Era

Over the past 30 years, state intervention to reshape employment relations has become a generalized feature of contemporary capitalism. A broad neoliberal reconstruction of the market order has gone hand in hand with a more active state. In this article the author argues that liberalization in the sphere of employment relations could not have taken place without a more active state. Building on a regulation theory framework and an elaboration of the concept of neoliberalism as the regulatory infrastructure of emergent growth models, the author examines how the widespread shift from wage-led growth to other forms of growth across the advanced capitalist world has encouraged changes in the role of the state in the regulation of employment relations. These roles include market making, individual employment regulation in place of collective regulation, state-directed social pacts, and redrawing the boundaries between work and non-work. The article concludes with an explanation for continuing variations in employment relations.

Racial capitalism, climate justice, and climate displacement

This article expands our understanding of climate justice by demonstrating how racial subordination, environmental degradation, and the fossil fuel-based capitalist world economy are interrelated. It uses these insights to critique the emerging legal and policy responses to climate change-induced displacement and to examine alternative approaches emerging from climate-vulnerable states and peoples. The article argues that racialized communities all over the world have borne the brunt of carbon capitalism from cradle (extraction of fossil fuels) to grave (climate change) and that a race-conscious analysis of climate change and climate displacement can reveal the commonalities among seemingly distinct forms of oppression in order to forge the alliances necessary to achieve just and emancipatory outcomes.

Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev. by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 278 pp. $99.00.

In Red Globalization, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking reinterpretation of Soviet history. Like other scholars in recent years, Sanchez-Sibony is interested in bringing the USSR into a broader global perspective. His approach is fittingly Soviet, with economics (specifically foreign trade) at the center of his historical analysis.The book's subtitle suggests an exclusive focus on the Cold War era, but the first chapter presents a well-supported interpretation of the rise of the Stalinist economic order as a response to international economic crisis. In this view, the turn to heavy industry and toward autarky was not so much a fulfillment of a long-lived Bolshevik vision as it was a policy forced by the collapse of European trading patterns in the 1920s. A second chapter on World War II and postwar reconstruction similarly argues that the Soviet Union did not so much turn away from Europe (at least in economic terms) as it was abandoned and isolated by it.The rise of U.S. hegemony in the aftermath of World War II presented numerous challenges to the USSR in the economic sphere. As the postwar world was coming into being, Sibony-Sanchez suggests, Soviet trade officials reached bilateral trade agreements (and many import and export deals) with firms and governments in Western Europe and Japan. But U.S. efforts to create a free-trade world functioning in a multilateral framework and underwritten by a steady, strong, and freely traded dollar sharply curtailed such opportunities. U.S.-led restrictions on Western trade with the Soviet bloc were yet another impediment to the integration of the USSR into the capitalist world economy.Red Globalization suggests the aptness of the 1970s insult that the Soviet Union was little more than “Upper Volta with missiles.” Like the African country now known as Burkina Faso, the USSR faced serious constraints in the open international trading system that emerged under U.S. sponsorship: a perennial shortage of hard currency. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet Union was one of many countries chafing under hard-currency (specifically dollar) constraints. But as the dollar-based world economy expanded, even the poorest West European countries found it easier to trade within the capitalist world than with the USSR. Thus the Soviet Union found itself in a version of the same predicament as Upper Volta and the rest of the Third World: in search of hard currency and with only (or mostly) raw materials to offer in exchange. Soviet manufactured goods were rarely competitive on the world market, and even its primary products often failed on that score too.In this context, superpower status became an added burden. Efforts to win “hearts and minds” in the Third World came at a hefty price tag, as Sanchez-Sibony notes. The Soviet Union and the underdeveloped countries often had similar export profiles, so complementarity was hard to come by. Ultimately, Sanchez-Sibony concludes, Soviet officials strove for the same arrangement that their Third World counterparts pursued: integration into the capitalist economy, if only incomplete and on unfavorable terms of trade.Among the many insights of Red Globalization is the insistence that Soviet leaders reckoned with the capitalist economy as rational economic actors—ideological bluster notwithstanding. References to the advantages of the “international division of labor” emerged not just from University of Chicago economists but also from Soviet ministers (p. 98); wheeling and dealing in trade negotiations was the province of the Old Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan (p. 107), not just the capitalists so frequently excoriated in Soviet public discourse.Even more impressive is that this story is told using an archival source base that is broad but spotty and inconsistent. Using documents scattered in the records of the USSR's State Planning Committee, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and elsewhere, Sanchez-Sibony finds telling evidence to support his major points. The sporadic nature of the records means that Red Globalization often shifts from one setting to another as it accumulates evidence. Thus, a single section might include brief vignettes of trade negotiations with three or four different countries, with some of the final results of the negotiations unknown. But Sanchez-Sibony's extraordinary efforts at combing through, and making sense of, chaotic archival holdings pay off handsomely.Sanchez-Sibony seems to take well-deserved pride in the book's many insights and novel interpretations, and with good reason. Based on his prize-winning dissertation, Red Globalization offers an important and indeed sweeping reinterpretation of Soviet history. Yet the book's frequent criticism of other scholars is distinctly unappealing. This tendency devolves into tendentiousness; for instance, in the passage (p. 4) that repeats the word “wrong” four times in three lines. But despite this occasional cantankerousness—not to mention the publisher's decision to price the book out of reach for individual scholars—Red Globalization is an important, indeed essential, perspective on the role of foreign trade in Soviet history.

The Capitalist 'Dystopia' in Robert Kirkman's Picture Novel The Walking Dead

Capitalism is an economic system wherein a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. By the early 21st century, the capitalist world system has entered into a structural crisis, and relentless capitalist accumulation on a worldwide scale is presently in essential clash with the survival of human civilization. Karl Marx (1818-1883) is the author of The Communist Manifesto (1848) and his critique became a prominent perception of capitalism during the mid-19th century. Looking back at the history of the “zombie” in American culture, it is a form of political commentary. The top of “zombiedom” today is The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman which centers around former deputy sheriff Rick Grimes who wakes from a coma to find the world invade with “zombies” and in a condition of aggregate social and economic crumple. Since Marx’s theory is based on capitalism and its running amok, the walkers can be used to symbolize capitalism in the story. They walk around doing nothing more than consuming any living thing that gets in their way. Marx's theories about society, economics and politics known as Marxism, hold that human societies expand via class struggle. So analyzing the representational fluidity of Kirkman's “zombies” in The Walking Dead by placing them in two disparate Marxian positions and a class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are highlighted in this study.

Segregação urbana na cidade de Major Izidoro: o caso do Bairro de Fátima em comparação com o loteamento Terra do Leite

RESUMO: O trabalho consistiu em avaliar a segregação urbana na cidade de Major Izidoro - Alagoas, analisando os casos do Bairro de Fátima e do loteamento Terra do Leite nas variações de suas paisagens urbanas marcadas pela segregação. O estudo foi embasado na metodologia de Silva et al (2017) e Oliveira et al (2017) que a partir de dados primários analisaram a atuação dos agentes produtores e a geração de áreas desiguais em cidades pequenas. A revisão de literatura nos ajudou a compreender as questões sociais e econômicas de ambos os bairros, além da sua formação, organização, desenvolvimento e a intervenção estatal através de obras e políticas públicas. Notamos que a cidade se fragmenta quando não se oportuniza uma gestão sustentável e inteligente gerando espaços de pouca democracia, paisagem marcadas por injustas e intensas diferenças além de fragilidade dos direitos sociais. Em suma, a cidade de Major Izidoro apresenta-se fragmentada e articulada, reflexo e condicionante social, isto é, os mesmos esquemas que imperam nas cidades grandes do mundo capitalista.
 PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Desigualdades. Organização social. Intervenção Estatal.

THE WAR IN SYRIA: A LONGUE DURÉE PERSPECTIVE

Many existing studies on the war in Syria offer important insights but none fully engages the longue durée of history and its implications. Syria like many other states in Asia was established and institutionalized in the context of the growth and expansion of a capitalist world economy centred in Europe. The Franco-British reorganization of the Levant between the two world wars was supposed to support long-term processes of wealth accumulation and economic growth but forceful integration in the world economy set the stage instead for nationalist backlashes, economic crises, and war. Indeed, one of the driving forces of conflict in Syria as well as in other parts of the developing world has been the recurrence of struggles between those pushing for ever greater capitalist integration and those resisting such efforts in the name of alternative ideologies, including communism, Pan-Arab nationalism, and various distinct currents of political Islam. To demonstrate these dynamics, this paper will present a sweeping overview of the history of Syria and of the greater region, from Ottoman times to the present. It will also examine in detail the war that broke out in Syria in 2011, highlighting how it relates to broader struggles unfolding across the immediate region and beyond.

Political Economy and the Tradition of Radical Black Study

A central concern of the Black Intellectual Tradition (BIT) since the close of the nineteenth century has been the explicit connection between the historical and structural development of the world capitalist economy on the one hand, and on the other, freedom struggles forged by African descendants. This dynamic, interwoven relationship, according to some critical observers of history, illuminates a key dimension of the modern Black experience.1 While Black Studies inherited this distinct political economic tradition, the status of political economy frameworks in the field is marginal. Because Black communities have produced a unique political economy tradition borne from necessity, study, and an incessant will toward freedom, this tradition must occupy a greater role in the work and practice of Black Studies. As a contribution toward that vital goal, I will introduce and analyze several key concepts, theories, and debates that have animated the radical Black political economy tradition. Based on my brief reflections on the lives, work, and politics of several radical Black scholar-activists within and beyond the U.S., I conclude by discussing how their ideas can serve the transformationalist vision of Black Studies.

ДЕРЕВЯННЫЙ КОНСТРУКТИВИЗМ: К ПОЭТИКЕ "МОСКОВСКОГО ДНЕВНИКА" ВАЛЬТЕРА БЕНЬЯМИНА

Walter Benjamin’s two strongest aesthetic impressions during his trip to Moscow, the theatrical avant-garde and folk toys, are connected not only by the immediacy of the testimony. His “Moscow Diary” is a complex construction, simultaneously a declaration of love for Moscow and a chronicle of an unfamiliar approach to known phenomena. A man of the constructivist era, Benjamin views the scenography of Meyerhold and Tairov avant-garde theater on a micro level, seeing small wooden structures. Those constructions produce a switch from a mode of protocol observation to a mode of disinterested play, of wondering what is happening. In Benjamin’s text, then, images of fairytale space emerge. Benjamin not only collects toys, but also perceives the constructions of avant-garde theater as a collection, as a way to erase the distinction between model and reality, something that cannot be achieved in the capitalist world. But the search for a job was also perceived by Benjamin as a construction of his destiny, stopping the action of the fairy tale.

Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism by John K. Noyes

Reviewed by: Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism by John K. Noyes Beate I. Allert John K. Noyes. Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism. Toronto: The U of Toronto P, 2015. 402 pp. In his helpful introduction, John K. Noyes gives an astute account of cultural history during Herder's time in order to document a growing awareness of the [End Page 377] various dimensions of globalization and the development of an anti-imperialist aesthetics. He argues that "although Herder does not use the word imperialism, it is clear that he talks about what Christopher Bayly calls the 'first age of global imperialism,' beginning around 1760—that is, around the time Herder started to write." Noyes also draws from theoretical works by Dimas Figueroa on the three structural conditions that make globalization possible, from Immanuel Wallerstein's description of "the second era of the great expansion of the capitalist world economy," and from Reinhard Koselleck's 1959 Kritik und Krise with the observation that "in the eighteenth century, the modern subject became increasingly defined as encompassing all of humanity," and that its "field of action was the unitary world of the globe." Noyes emphasizes that Herder followed the latest discoveries by James Cook and Georg Forster, and explains how "the changing picture of the world and its inhabitants," due to many scientific advances in geography, biology, ethnography, and anthropology, made the world then more imaginable as a whole, but also less imaginable, considering its infinite complexity, arguing that Herder considered "the threats which unchecked commercialism posed to the global environment—whether we take this as an environment of cultural and linguistic diversity, or that of biodiversity." Noyes maintains that Herder's writings can be interpreted as "an ongoing exercise in crisis management related directly to globalization." While Herder's writings are replete with many interesting and sometimes conflicting observations, Noyes has a talent for making even Herder's most speculative ideas appear to be logical, philosophically stringent, and grounded on materiality and cultural study. Noyes discusses how contemporaneous developments, in terms of globalization, made Herder aware of "the Atlantic slave trade and the decimation of the indigenous population throughout the New World," which he clearly condemned. As Noyes clarifies, Herder also opposed such "ideas as the superiority of European civilization, the primacy of reason, and the progress of humankind," while drawing attention to more complex notions that defy any simplistic interpretation. According to Noyes, Herder also rejected the idea that "artistic expression can be universalized, reduced to a set of a priori rules" as was implicit in the philosophical rationalism of his time and especially in "the academic school that dominated German philosophy at mid-century." As Noyes explicitly states, Herder had "a deep-seated aversion to any form of exploitation or domination of one culture by another," a contention that Noyes, however, then begins to unravel by elaborating on what he calls "several dimensions to his anti-imperialism." Especially striking is Noyes's exploration of aspects of Herder's biography in the context of his philosophical work—in particular, his important sea travels that led to a new methodological approach connecting the movement of the mind with that of the body. Noyes attributes a concept of "embodied thought" to Herder, which I find fascinating, stating, for example, that "Herder speculates on the migration of fish, and he uses the resulting figures of motion to think about the long history of migrating humanity that gave rise to Europe as he knows it." One of Noyes's primary achievements is to show how Herder's approach to aesthetics is extremely relevant to recent debates in postcolonial studies. Noyes explicitly engages with theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, 1999), A. G. Hopkins (Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, 2006), and Dipesh Chakravabarty (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2008), among others, and also addresses the important [End Page 378] book by Vicki A. Spencer, Herder's Political Thought: A Study on Language, Culture and Community (2012), adding important nuances to its interpretation of Herder. In his treatment of Sonia Sikka's Herder and Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (2011...

Sociological dimension of economic globalization: world trends and Ukrainian realities (Second part. Social changes in Ukrainian society in the context of economic globalization)

Globalization remains the most common and quite controversial concept in modern social discourse. Within the theoretical and conceptual sociological dimension, the authors analyzed the essence of economic globalization (EG) as its defining type. They studied globalization as an objective process (first of all, the international division of labour) and the subjective process of forming a global capitalist economy under the auspices of leading Western countries, supranational financial and economic institutions (primarily the World Bank and the IMF), TNCs. As the main drivers of globalization, they determine its forms and directions in the interests of the "core" of global capitalism. Within the empirical sociological dimension of EG (which involves measuring the various manifestations of the EG process itself as well as its social consequences), the authors paid particular attention to the analysis of social changes in Ukrainian society. The capitalization of the Ukrainian economy, which took place in parallel with Ukraine’s entry into the global economic space, led to degradation of the national economy, significant deterioration of living standards of most citizens, creation of anti-social state with the systemic crisis as its main attribute. To prove these conclusions, the authors analyzed the dynamics of the principal macroeconomic and sociological indicators of Ukrainian society’s life for almost 30 years of drift to the roadside of the global capitalist world, based on the study of numerous domestic and foreign sources. The authors focused on the research of eight critical areas of social changes: deindustrialization of the economy, global competitiveness and innovation, GDP dynamics, employment, income and welfare of the population, socioeconomic inequality, debt dependence and degradation of Ukrainian science. The analysis shows the need to abandon the neoliberal paradigm of development and search for the alternative and more fair models of EG.