'Capitalism' tag archive

News Headed west on the A30International Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies, Changshu, November 2006The A30 in question runs west of Shanghai Pudong Airport through what can only be described as ʻanother Canary Wharf every 5 milesʼ. The occasion for the road trip was the ʻInternational Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studiesʼ, organized by Nanjing University and […]

Commentary The hungry of the earth Raj patel The price of food is soaring. The ability of the world’s poorest to pay for it isn’t. The results are predictably catastrophic. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has explained that the people starving and taking to the streets in countries like India and […]

Aporias of free trade The nature of biodiversity Diana reese and lecia rosenthal Primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus1In a climate rife with threats of species extinction, we propose a genealogy of the discourse of the late twentieth century in […]

Commentary The global moment Seattle, ten years on Rodrigo nunes What are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009 may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8 into a G20 (and […]

A curious set of metaphors marks the jargon of postcommunist transition: education for democracy, classrooms of democracy, democratic exams, democracy that is growing and maturing, but which might still be in diapers or making its first steps or, of course, suffering from children’s il nesses. [1] This language of postcommunism discloses a paradox that points […]

In Eastern Europe, 1989–2009 has been a time of fundamental changes in the meaning of social and political concepts, accompanied at different speeds by the radical transformation of society. I consider transition the fundamental thematic concept of this historical shift, its operative terms being integration and accession. Of course, transition had been also the fundamental […]

There is a place in northern Moscow that represents, in a very focused and concentrated way, the tremendous change that has taken place in Russia since the start of market transition. This is VDNKh, the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. Its current name is different, but everybody stills knows it by its […]

Economists tell us that Russia is on its way to completing the transition to capitalism. The only problem remaining now is a political one – the paradise of a fully fledged ‘free-market’ economy is suspended by the lack of liberal democracy, while, conversely, the lack of a free market stops the development of liberal democracy. […]

Comment Rentier capitalism and the iranian puzzle dariush m. doust The word ‘Iran’ usually signifies unpredictability, offering either raw material for the narratives of news agencies, or a fascinating enigma. Recent events have once again underlined the fact that the 1979 Iranian Revolution is still poorly conceptualized. To state the obvious: the outcome of the […]

Marxism and war Étienne balibar War for Marxism is not exactly a concept, but it is certainly a problem.* While Marxism could not invent a concept of war, it could re-create it, so to speak – that is, introduce the question of war into its own problematic, and produce a Marxist critique of war, or […]

A sudden topicality Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis Peter osborne Karl Marx was a thinker of crisis. But in what sense was he a theorist of crisis? In what sense did he propound something that might legitimately be called a ‘crisis theory’?*The question may seem an odd one. After all, although there is […]

Look at this place! It’s buzzing… [Bomb explosion. People screaming. Chaos] Were you caught off-guard? That’s the problem. Can you imagine life without the places where we congregate? These are convenient places, places where we want to go, are free to go. In airports and stadiums you can monitor access, they are contained. Public spaces […]

In our recent highlight from RP163, David Cunningham examines the relationship between Lukács' 'The Theory of the Novel' and his later Marxist works, and its asks how we are to read this work today.

Who needs postcoloniality? A reply to Lindner Harry harootunian In Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune on British colonialism in India and the events leading to the Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the structure of […]

Commentary The global capital leviathan William i. Robinson The money mandarins of global capitalism and their political agents are utilizing the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending […]