The End of History and the Last Man

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James

Social investment innovation and the ‘social turn’ of neoliberal finance

All labour is productive and unproductive

We look to mythic resources to help us narrativise and conceptualise instances of ‘affective contagion' within social movements. We first review ‘Crowd Theory', from Gustave Le Bon to Freud, and then the mimetics of Richard Dawkins and his followers. We find both theories lacking when it comes to accounting for collective agency. Next we turn to the work of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, drawing on their conception of capitalist sorcery and their suggestion of crafting techniques to protect oneself against capitalism's spells, to ‘denaturalise' capitalism and thus to repotentialise the world. While Pignarre and Stengers draw inspiration from neo-pagan witches, we instead look to the annals of pop history, where we discover the 1960s' band The Troggs struggling to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. We take their ‘sprinkling of fairy dust' notion and apply it to anti-capitalist struggles.

On the uses of fairy dust: Contagion, sorcery and the crafting of other worlds

Since autumn 2010, the United Kingdom has witnessed various apparently disparate protests and movements against austerity. These include: a students' movement, UK Uncut, a series of public-sector worker demonstrations and strikes, Occupy, and--arguably, for many commentators have insisted they were apolitical--four days of rioting across English cities in August 2011. The authors suggest that these protests, movements, and events (including the riots) can be understood together as responses to a crisis of care--one that is intimately connected to the wider economic crisis. Rejecting as insufficient explanations for these current crises that rely on personal "morality" (e.g., "greedy bankers," "feral youth"), the authors propose that the concept of social reproduction provides a better lens through which to understand their unfolding. This lens allows them to posit an historical relationship between "regimes of accumulation" and what they call "regimes of care." Understanding the crisis of care as a crisis of social reproduction--which is analytically separate from the crisis of capital accumulation--also allows the authors to highlight the politics, that is, the antagonistic class interests that lie at the heart of both crises.

David Harvie

Papers

Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James

Social investment innovation and the ‘social turn’ of neoliberal finance

All labour is productive and unproductive

On the uses of fairy dust: Contagion, sorcery and the crafting of other worlds

Careless talk: social reproduction and fault-lines of the crisis in the UK