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Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.
07c Globalisation 164-190 2/2/11 15:11 Page 164 7 Capitalism’s final phase: the case of the Socialist Workers’ Party The Socialist Workers’ Party is the largest far-left organisation in Britain. It is also the dominant member of the International Socialist Tendency (IST), a partnership with similar parties in several Western countries. The SWP is usually identified as a Trotskyist party. It is probably more accurately described as neoTrotskyist, given its origins in Tony Clift’s ‘state capitalism’ thesis (his reinterpretation of the Soviet Union) and
The notion of ‘clickbait’ speaks to the intersection of money, technology, and desire, suggesting a cunning ruse to profit from unsavoury inclinations of one kind or another. Clickbait capitalism pursues the idea that the entire contemporary economy is just such a ruse, an elaborate exercise in psychological capture and release. Pushing beyond rationalist accounts of economic life, this volume puts psychoanalysis and political economy into conversation with the cutting edges of capitalist development. Perennial questions of death, sex, aggression, enjoyment, despair, hope, and revenge are followed onto the terrain of the contemporary, with chapters devoted to social media, online dating apps, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and meme stocks. The result is a unique and compelling portrait of the latest institutions to stage, channel, or reconfigure the psychic energies of political and economic life.
The term ‘late capitalism’ was used in the works of Mandel, Jameson, and other Marxist theoreticians (Mandel 1972 ; Habermas 1973 ; Jameson 1991 ). 1 We too use it, but give it an original meaning of our own. Our position is that at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century a special period in the development of capitalism begins. It is characterised by a partial evolutionary adaptation of capital to new conditions, generated both by the ‘decline’ of the
5 Coercive Capitalisms: Politico-economies of Slavery, Indentured Labour and Debt Peonage This chapter develops the short section appearing in MEAB, and asks the question: why is slavery centrally important for an understanding of capitalist political economies?1 Much attention has been paid to the exploitative nature of capitalism, and the consequently systemic and extreme inequalities of monetary wealth, to which we have added inequalities in rights to public goods and resources. In the analysis so far, these inequalities are seen to be inherently gendered
4 Responsible capitalism: Labour’s industrial policy and the idea of a National Investment Bank during the long 1980s Richard Carr This chapter considers two overlapping issues: Labour’s conception of the economy, and its overall electability. As to the first, it is widely asserted in both academic and political circles that ‘the absence of economic policy credibility was absolutely central to Labour’s failure to regain office until 1997’.1 This was certainly true of the 1983 general election when, as Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour remarked, ‘even 28 per cent
This book is a tribute to Enzo Mingione and his contribution to the fields of sociology and urban studies on the occasion of his retirement. It touches upon the processes of transformation of cities to the informal economy, from the Fordist crisis to the rediscovery of poverty, from the welfare state and welfare policies to migration and the transformation of work. These themes constitute the analytical building blocks of this book on the transitions that Western capitalist societies are undergoing. The book focuses on social foundations of Western capitalism, explaining how socio-economic and institutional complementarities that characterised postwar capitalism created relatively integrated socio-economic regimes, It has five thematic sections reflecting five areas of capitalism, the search interests of Enzo Mingione. The first discusses the transformations of global capitalism, addressing how capitalism works and how it changes. The second provides insights into the mechanisms of re-embedding, in particular how welfare policies are part of a societal reaction to capitalism's disruptive dynamic. The third addresses some main challenges that citizenship systems established in the post-war period have had to face, from the spread of new employment regimes to new migratory flows. The fourth addresses cities and their transformation and the final section addresses poverty and its spatial dimension as a crucial lens through which to understand the differentiated impact of the processes of change in Western capitalist societies, both in socio-economic and spatial terms.
2 Ancient markets, modern capitalism: China and the problem of Eurocentrism [N]one of the standard models of economic and political theory can explain China. … China still does not have well-specified property rights, town-village enterprises hardly resemble the standard firm of economics, and it remains to this day a communist dictatorship. Douglass North (2005) It is merely in the night of our ignorance that all alien shapes take on the same hue. Perry Anderson (1974) If, as I argue in this book, it is necessary to reconceptualize the institutional
1 Alberta Andreotti, David Benassi and Yuri Kazepov Western capitalism in transition: global processes, local challenges Capitalism is not merely a way of organising production and consumption based on the private ownership of the means of production, driven by alleged natural human behaviour (selfishness, self-interest) and aimed at maximising profit. The sociological understanding of capitalism defines it as a model for the structure of the whole of society, where economic momentum is ‘only’ one of the aspects of such a structure. In this introduction we
6 Carnival Against Capitalism: global days of action and photographs of resistance C a r n i va l s A g a i n s t C a p i t a l were mounted on numerous Global Days of Action in the late 1990s, signalling the emergence of a movement against neoliberal globalisation and for global justice. The first global street party was called on 16 May (M16) 1998 by London Reclaim the Streets (RTS) and the newly founded People’s Global Action (PGA) to coincide with the G8 summit in Birmingham and the following week’s WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva. Over thirty street