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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.
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
Lucien Goldmann has called ‘reification’. He argues that the later periods of western capitalism, especially the imperialist period between 1912 and 1945, can be identified by the gradual disappearance of the individual and by the appearance of a world increasingly dominated by objects with their own autonomy. 15 It is certainly true that the new technology of aeronautics plays a
enterprises centred on the advanced economies of Western Europe and North America. Domestically, they absorbed the material values and aspirations of western capitalism and accepted, pretty much, the ethics of free economic enterprise, in which capital purchased goods and services as cheaply as possible and endeavoured to sell them as dearly as possible, and in which a supposedly free market in labour determined its price, otherwise known as wages. Consumption patterns were also similar, the goods and services purchased resembling those in other westernised economies
This chapter focuses on the undervalued importance of the voice of immigrant workers to the French New Left after 1968. The dominant image of 1968 has been middle-class students attempting to unite with the French working class. Those on the left most imprinted by their experience in May 1968 also sought, however, to find, nurture, and channel the voice of France’s semi-skilled or unskilled immigrant industrial workers, mostly recruited from its former colonies and Mediterranean hinterlands, into a collective project of total social transformation. As such, immigrant workers had the potential to connect anticolonial revolts in the Third World with working-class rebellion in the heart of Western capitalism. New Left organisations which emerged from the libertarian and anti-hierarchical culture of 1968’s student milieu attempted to create spaces where they could capture this multinational group’s right to speak. New understandings of class solidarity broke from the confines of the nation-state and novel emotional registers emerged. An inclusive category of class provided the French New Left with a language to imagine an amalgam of culturally diverse national groups employed in French Fordist industry as a political subject. This chapter shows how immigrant workers were essential in developing new conceptions of global transnational solidarity and, as a consequence, sustaining a brief moment of global revolutionary hope. The growing absence of this voice in French public life after the early 1980s encouraged both left-wing melancholy and radically different experiences of time.
shall put the contemporary tensions of social change into an interpretative frame freely inspired by the Polanyian concept of the double movement (Polanyi 1944). I shall interpret the double movement as a simultaneous combination of dis-embeddedness which destroys established social bonds and habits in order to accommodate new market opportunities (here the market is intended as a competitive force that destroys social relations), and re-embeddedness creating new social bonds and institutions. I shall also 292 Perspectives on the future of Western capitalism
-Western thinking do get blurred now and again along the way (Thoreau’s influence on Gandhi being a classic example), so now and again, non-Western thinkers have small walk-on parts. However, the specific shifts from thrift as thriving to thrift as frugality, and vice versa, are intricately linked with Western thought, largely due to the way in which thrift has played such a specific part in the development of Western capitalism. Thrift, on the whole, cannot be understood in the same way when viewed from a non-Western context. Therefore, this book only attempts to deal with
history, since communism in the East was an archaic, dinosaur-like formation. On its side, eastern European Marxist politics affirmed that the logic of human emancipation would lead to the elimination of western capitalism. As a CIA 1962 report relays Nikita Khrushchev’s statements in 1956, he asserted that “We Leninists are convinced that our social
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
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.