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achieves through a lengthy process of practices, actions, and lifestyle performances that must then be evaluated by the squatters movement as authentic. Achieving the status of authentic squatter requires, first, the ability to demonstrate a complicated mix of functional skills and activist performances with a sense of naturalness and ease – which I term squatter capital. The second characteristic of authenticity is how a squatter defines themselves, in hostile opposition, to a series of imagined Others
The starting-point for the book is its chapter on methodology. Found here are not only critiques of conventional Soviet Marxism-Leninism and post-modernism, but also a new rethinking of the classic dialectic. For the most part, however, the book focuses on revealing the new quality now assumed by commodities, money, and capital within the global economy. The market has become not only global, but a totalitarian force that is not a ‘socially neutral mechanism of coordination’. It is now a product of the hegemony of corporate capital, featuring the growth of new types of commodity: information, simulacra, and so forth. The book demonstrates the new qualities acquired by value, use value, price, and commodity fetishism within this new market, while exploring the contradictions of non-limited resources (such as knowledge) and the commodity form of their existence.
Money is now a virtual product of fictitious financial capital, possessing a new nature, contradictions, and functions. This analysis of the new nature of money helps to reveal the essence of so-called financialisation.
Capital has become the result of a complex system of exploitation. In the twenty-first-century context this exploitation includes the ‘classic’ extraction of surplus value from industrial workers combined with internal corporate redistribution of income by ‘insiders’; international exploitation; and the exploitation of creative labour through the expropriation of intellectual rent.
The book is a comparative analysis of Scotland, Ireland and Wales’s participation in the English East India Company between c.1690 and c.1820. It explains the increasing involvement of individuals and networks from these societies in the London-based corporation which controlled contact between the early modern British and Irish Isles and one hemisphere of world trade. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh evidence is used to consider wider questions on the origins, nature and consequences of the early modern phase of globalisation, sometimes referred to as ‘proto-globalisation’. The book contributes to such debates by analysing how these supposedly ‘poorer’ regions of Europe relied on migration as an investment strategy to profit from empire in Asia. Using social network theory and concepts of human capital it examines why the Scots, Irish and Welsh developed markedly different profiles in the Company’s service. Chapters on the administrative elite, army officers and soldiers, the medical corps and private traders demonstrate consistent Scottish over-representation, uneven Irish involvement and consistent Welsh under-representation. Taken together they explore a previously underappreciated cycle of human capital that involved departure to Asia, the creation of colonial profits, and the return back of people and their fortunes to Britain and Ireland. By reconceptualising the origins and the consequences of involvement in the Company, the study will be of interest to historians of early modern Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Britain, the East India Company and the early phases of British imperialism in Asia.
conditions in which they arise? Inspired by Engels's declaration regarding the class-based nature of morality, this chapter sets out a materialist analysis of ethical debates and settlements throughout capital's history. The intention is to reveal the dialectical relationship between those ethical debates and their historical context. This opens the possibility, taken up in later chapters, to analyse current ethical debates as a product of current material conditions: the form that ethical debates and settlements take is historically specific. The
4 Steve Millett Technology is capital: Fifth Estate’s critique of the megamachine Introduction ‘How do we begin to discuss something as immense as technology?’, writes T. Fulano at the beginning of his essay ‘Against the megamachine’ (1981a: 4). Indeed, the degree to which the technological apparatus penetrates all elements of contemporary society does make such an undertaking a daunting one. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that the US journal and collective Fifth Estate has attempted. In so doing, it has developed arguably the most sophisticated and
the high end of the death denial continuum. With capitalism, economic activity is individualised and de-sacralised and the dead and death are banished, resulting in unpayable debts. Capital accumulation is the primary psychological defence mechanism, a power intended to stave off mortal dread. But because accumulation rests on linear time and is shorn of redemptive and sacrificial ritual, guilt and
As we noted in the Foreword to the English Edition, the best proof of the correctness of Marxism has to be its ability to answer the challenges of the modern epoch. 1 What have Marxists achieved in the past half-century in the quest for a new Capital , and what have they not achieved? What needs to be done if such a work is to emerge? While positivism and postmodernism, which do not even recognise the challenge of developing Marxism, have dominated the modern social
flourish under the marquees of England.’ (St Aubyn, 2016 : 417) Set in 1990, St Aubyn's aristocrats lament new wealth and the expansion of parvenus through novel capital accumulation, directed in this scene of the novel at the Anglo-Irish aristocrats, the Guinness family. Indeed, one has a picture here of English aristocrats as unable to face the sea change of capital, a vision of a class dying out through their own hubris, snobbish endogamy and economic complacency. It is a familiar
False profits of ethical capital analyses several dimensions of sustainability capitalism, to expose not only its inadequacies as a vehicle for social and political change, but also the ways in which it is productive for capital. Positioning ESG investing, sustainability reporting and corporate branding initiatives as part of a speculative moral economy, False profits shows how ethics are alienated from the human being and incorporated into the accumulation process. Engaging literatures of moral economy, financialisation, value theory and critical accounting, this book reveals that the accumulation of capital via ethical claims also generates points of contestation that exacerbate its contradictions.
Far from signifying ‘free trade’ or removal of all international barriers, the neoliberal period was characterised by only relative trade freedom and open capital markets compared with other periods of monopoly capitalism. Nevertheless, the policy reveals, among other things, the high degree of economic power enjoyed by the imperialist states collectively and the domination