Category: 2015

Posted on

Social Standards of Self-Restraint in World Politics

Andrew Linklater

Introduction

The process sociologist, Norbert Elias (2012:89) maintained that Caxton’s comment in his fifteenth century treatise on courtesy that ‘things that were once permitted are now forbidden’ could stand as the ‘motto’ for the European civilizing process that was to come. The main course of development which would revolve around the formation of modern states and the significant pacification of the relevant societies shaped different related spheres of social interaction. According to Elias, they included the standards that governed bodily functions, changes in table manners and (of particular importance for the present discussion) shifts in emotional responses to cruelty and violence. His writings were less consistent on the subject of whether actions that were once permitted in relations between states have become forbidden in the most recent phase of the modern states-system. The main objective of the following discussion is to synthesise elements of process sociology and the English School in order to determine whether the current era is distinctive if not unique. The paper begins with a brief discussion of Elias’s reflections on international relations.

Full Paper

Posted on

Neoliberal Nightmares or Fear of Terrorism? A response to Japhy Wilson´s Article

Ulrich Hamenstädt

Abstract

Political scientists are increasingly interested in popular culture. Notably, films appear as reflections of social and political developments as well as mirrors of common ideologies and fears. In his article ‘Neoliberal Nightmares’, Japhy Wilson (2015) brings forward the argument that the increasing popularity of gothic themes like the zombie apocalypse, could be interpreted as a reaction towards the financial crises of 2008; according to his article, neoliberalism died but is risen from its crave, scary as it was and hungry for the consumption of human flesh. This is a popular view on the current zombie hype and it is convincing at first. In contrast to Wilson´s view, this article highlights another interpretation of this hype: Zombies are the projection of international terrorism. Therefore this article argues that we are much more scared by things, which take our system into question than by the system itself. In doing so, this article argues, contrary to Wilson’s interpretation, that the zombies hype is part of a social and political anxiety from terrorism and not the anxiety due to the capitalist system. It will be also argued that fear is a recurrent topic in popular culture. ‘Zombies’ are an expression in a long tradition of fearful (international) events – like 9/11 – but also refer to the age of bio-political control.
Keywords: Zombies, popular culture, terrorism, bio-politics

Full Paper

Posted on

Documenting Karl Marx: Rethinking Marx Ideas on the Commodity within a Documentary

Ulrich Hamenstädt

Abstract

Imagine a market where you have a high misallocation of commodities; this market could be the global food market. More than 150 years ago Karl Marx asked the question, why the classical economy of his time had such problems to properly explain the reasons for dysfunctional markets. The work of Marx and Engels turned the 20th century into a kind of stone quarry, where different ideological directions made use of the theory, and often misused it at the same time. This paper wants to introduce the reader to some of the core ideas of Marx’s ‘Capital’, and also illustrate how lectures – in the case of Marx – can utilise the popularisation of public media for teaching purposes. This paper introduces Marx’s idea of ‘commodity’ in the context of interviews from the popular Austrian documentary ‘We Feed the World’. By using the current global agriculture production as an example, the paper examines an urgent problem of global politics on the one hand. On the other hand, the paper aims to illustrate how the idea of joining Marx’s theory with an actual documentary can be used in order to introduce one of the core thinkers of political economy to undergraduate students.
Keywords: Karl Marx, Capital, Documentary, We feed the World, Teaching

Full Paper

Posted on

Saving ‘World Market Society’ from itself? Risk, the New Politics of Inequality and the Agents of World Market Society

Alex Nunn

Abstract

Socio-economic inequality is now firmly on the international political agenda. In recent years the World Economic Forum, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Bank and International Monetary Fund have all produced publications lamenting increased inequality and its impact on political stability, the fragility of the international financial system and growth. This paper argues that this interest needs to be located in the emergence of an expanding ‘world market society’ (WMS) that these organisations are both representative of and have sought to promote. They are now also engaged in a complex process of identifying and seeking to manage systemic risks to WMS expansion, arising from the expansion process itself, with socio-economic inequality now seen as one of these. Several factors though suggest that their efforts may not be successful. These include the lack of capacity of international organisations to manage risk independently of their mainly state-scale allies and their inability to escape the objective of WMS expansion as they seek to manage risks to it. The paper argues therefore that there is an emergent New Global Politics of Inequality whose forlorn objective is to save world market society from itself.

Key Words: World Society; Inequality; Risk; International Organisation; World Market; International Monetary Fund; World Bank; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development; World Economic Forum.

Full Text

Posted on

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the lessons from Eastern Central Europe for Middle East/North African Transition

Stuart Shields

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the role played by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in helping to consolidate the gains from the Arab Spring. There is little academic analysis of the EBRD in Eastern Central Europe’s (ECE) transition, let alone the Middle East/North Africa (MENA). Yet here is an institution in the vanguard of political economic change. The paper explores the mechanisms and strategies utilised by the EBRD to aid reforms in ECE, and then explores whether similar formulations can be uncovered in MENA by comparing the intellectual assistance to post-communist reformers in ECE with the current advice to MENA, in particular Egypt.


Key Words: EBRD, ECE, MENA, Gramsci, Neoliberalisation

Full Paper

Posted on

Contrived Civilizations The Western Eurasian Mode of Hierarchies Production and the (Geo)Political Origins of Scientia

Gennaro Ascione

Abstract

In this article I expose the idea that modernity is not only a distinctive era as historical sociology uses to think, neither only a discursive formation, as anti-foundational postcolonial critique assesses. It is rather a configuration of a Western Eurasian mode of hierarchies production with global projection that first emerged as a response to the cultural, political and geopolitical challenges that the reconfiguration of power in XIII century Mediterranean space posed to dominant strata of Latin Christianity. In order to explore the conjectural emergence and reconfiguration of this mode of hierarchies production, I reconstruct the nexus of continuity and discontinuity between modern science and late medieval Scientia.
Key Words: Modernity, Circulation of Knowledge, Eurocentrism, Scientific Revolution, Aristotelianism, Averroism

Full Paper

Posted on

Political Capitalism, Economic and Political Crises, and Authoritarian Statism

Bob Jessop

Introduction

This contribution to Spectrum Journal is an extended version of a plenary lecture presented at the Second Spectrum conference on approaches and issues in international political economy, held at the Middle East Technical University (METU) on 10-11 April 2014. It addresses some key issues related to the overall conference theme. These are the nature of the world market, its crisis-tendencies, the capacities of states to govern the world market and manage crises, the significance of crises of crisis-management, and the increasing importance of states of economic as well as police-military-security emergency. First, in line with Karl Marx’s analysis, it begins by positing the world market as the presupposition and posit (result) of the expanded reproduction of capital accumulation. As a result, the development of the world market reflects an emergent rather than pre-given logic. Second, with Max Weber, it looks beyond the contradictions and crisis-tendencies of the pure capitalist mode of production (CMP) as analysed by Marx to those introduced by different forms of political capitalism as well as traditional commercial capitalism. Third, it considers the relation between capital and the state and its implications for economic and political struggle and crises. Fourth, it explores crises as a specific condensation of accumulating challenges that pose problems of crisis-management and, to the extent that established crisis-management routines fail, crises of crisis-management. Fifth, building on the preceding parts of the article, it explores the meaning of crises of the state and politics. Sixth, current trends in the state are identified and related to the decline of liberal democracy. The article ends with some general observations on the current economic and political crises.

Full Paper

Posted on

Class struggle in times of crisis: conceptualising agency of resistance

Andreas Bieler

Abstract

Class struggle in times of crisis: conceptualizing agency of resistance. While movements of resistance against neo-liberal globalization have increasingly become subject of analysis, there is little agreement on how to conceptualize such agency. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a conceptualization of resistance in order to understand better the possibilities of success, but also obstacles to more decisive action against global capitalism.
The paper will first discuss why it is important to draw on historical materialism in this respect in order to comprehend the historical specificity of capitalism. In a second step, it is argued that divisions along ethnicity and gender can be incorporated into analyses of class struggle, before suggesting four concrete ways of how to conceptualize expanded forms of class struggle including (1) Robert Cox’s focus on non-established, informal labor; (2) Harry Cleaver’s emphasis on the ‘social factory’; (3) Kees van der Pijl’s analysis of the extension of exploitation into the sphere of social reproduction; and (4) Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s grounding of analysis in the experience of the most exploited female workers in the Global South.

Keywords: Historical Materialism, Global Capitalism, Agency of Resistance, Class Struggle

Full Paper

Posted on

After the Crisis: Global Capitalism and the Critique of Political Economy

Hugo Radice

Abstract

Since the global financial crisis of 2008-9, neoliberalism has proved to be remarkably resilient. Alternatives in economic policy and political philosophy alike have found little resonance, despite street protests and insurgent parties of left and right in countries hit hardest by austerity. This essay focuses on Marxist and related analyses. It is argued first that Marxism has suffered from a separation between its analysis of capitalism as an economic system, and contemporary critiques of the political and social order, notably over the question of class. Marxist analyses of class have thus far failed to reconcile the traditional view of a two-class society with the complex social differentiations evident in capitalism. It is suggested that the unity of the working class arises not from its subordination to capital as such, but from the directly social character of the labour process in its material (use-value) aspect. In order to challenge capitalism, its critics need to explicitly propose an alternative social order based on equality, social justice, collective action and internationalism.
Key Words: Global Capitalism, Marxist Political Economy, Class Theory and Class Politics, Banking Crisis of 2007-2008

Full Paper

Posted on

A Cultural Political Economy of Financial Imaginaries: the (Re-)Making of ‘BRIC’ and the Case of China

Ngai-Ling Sum

Abstract

This article explores the role of economic/financial imaginaries (e.g., BRIC) from a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective. It is divided into four parts. Part one identifies some key questions from a CPE entry-point regarding the construction of economic imaginaries. Part two examines the role of (trans-)national forces in making and remaking the ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as a ‘growth’ and ‘hope’ object over three overlapping stages. It notes that the national and transnational resonance of the BRIC imaginaries depends not only on developments in the financial and real economies but also on specific discourses, practices, and knowledge technologies. Part three examines how the ‘BRIC’ discourses are recontextualized in the Sinophone world as ‘four golden brick countries’ to signify ‘strength’ and ‘greatest at last’. Part four investigates how China, as one of the ‘golden bricks’, was eager to showcase its strength following the 2007 financial crisis, which led to a fall in China’s exports and rise in unemployment.. It promoted a vast stimulus package that has posed tremendous fiscal challenges, especially to its regional-local authorities, which increasingly rely on land as collateral for loans and source of revenue. This intensified land-based accumulation, inflating the ‘property bubble’ and stimulating land clearance/dispossession. In turn this has had very uneven effects on the ‘subaltern south’, illustrated here through impact on the aspirant middle class and migrant workers’ children. Though some measures have been taken to dampen the property market, they have been rather limited and social unrest continues. Part five ends with some comments on the contribution of the cultural political economy approach in understanding the role of ‘BRIC’ as well as other new acronyms such as ‘MINT’ and ‘MIST’ as economic imaginaries.
Key Words: Cultural Political Economy, Financial Imaginaries, BRIC, China

Full Paper