The Rise of the Creative Class

Social Justice and the City

to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

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Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

In recent decades, we in the western world have almost prided ourselves on our move towards a 'classless' society. Yet a divide of the haves and have-nots is replacing it, especially in health. This is the main thrust of Richard Wilkinson's book.

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The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier

BOOK REVIEW: Harvey, David. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. New York,. NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN13: 9780199758715David Harvey, a public intellectual and Marxist geographer published, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism in 2010. While particularly relevant directly following the United States' Great Recession, this book is an academic tour de force that continues to be an essential read for anyone interested in the historical expansion of the economic crisis and the global social response, including the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The book is built upon identifying what capital is and how instability is inherently part of capitalism; this idea is what Harvey identifies as the 'crisis -prone' nature of the system. Often noted for his public discourse, Harvey has written this book to be accessible to a broad audience, providing an interesting read for both academics and laymen unfamiliar with Marxism, neoliberalism and related concepts. In The Enigma of Capital, audiences will not only find detailed critical and historical analyses of the movement of capital, but will also find fresh descriptions and innovative examples of the process.Those who know of Harvey's work may be most familiar with The Limits to Capital (1982), often noted as Harvey's magnum opus, which provides the theoretical foundations to many of his subsequent texts. The Enigma of Capital differs significantly from The Limits to Capital in a number of ways. Most importantly, The Enigma of Capital was written and published during an economic crisis. Harvey uses this juncture of crisis to identify the historical trends in the political economy that led to its current state. The organization of the book is reminiscent of A Brief History of Neoliberalism as published in 2005, in which Harvey not only defines neoliberalism as, "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade" (p. 2), but also identifies the global adoption of neoliberalism from the 1960s forward. In The Limits to Capital, Harvey asserts that capitalism may not have a limit because of technological innovations; however, he revises this claim in The Enigma of Capital, proposing the "3 percent compound thesis". The thesis argues that in order for capitalism to produce acceptable returns, it must grow by three percent per annum. The compounded nature of this growth implies that raw growth is perpetually needed. Harvey contends that, "compound growth forever is not possible and the troubles that have beset the world these last thirty years signal that the limit is looming to continuous capital accumulation that cannot be transcended except by creating fictions that cannot last" (p. 227-228).In support of his thesis, Harvey uses a systems approach to identify seven dialectally interrelated parts of capitalism or what he terms "activity spheres": technologies and organizational forms, social relations, institutional and administrative arrangements, production and labor processes, relations to nature, the reproduction of daily life and the species and 'mental conceptions of the world'. These seven dimensions co-evolve in history, where capital and the accumulation of capital arises from movement within and between these spheres. Sources of crises are found in the barriers to capital movement and accumulation within and between these spheres. …

The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism

During the last twenty-five years, housing policy in Sweden has radically changed. Once forming a pillar of the comprehensive welfare system, abbreviated the “Swedish model,” neoliberal housing pol ...

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Neoliberalization of Housing in Sweden: Gentrification, Filtering, and Social Polarization

Forced or free movers? : The motives, voluntariness and selectivity of interregional migration in the Nordic countries

Forced or free movers? The motives, voluntariness and selectivity of interregional migration in the Nordic countries

Restructuring of rural Sweden : employment transition and out-migration of three cohorts born 1945–1980

The purpose of this study is to investigate interregional migration in Sweden during the last three decades and to discuss the effects that changes on the labour market and in household structures ...

Are movers still the same? characteristics of interregional migrants in sweden 1970–2001

As the large post-war cohorts reach retirement age, there is a growing potential for later-life migrants. Not only are these cohorts large in number; they are also healthier and can make plans for ...

Emma Lundholm

Papers

Neoliberalization of Housing in Sweden: Gentrification, Filtering, and Social Polarization

Forced or free movers? The motives, voluntariness and selectivity of interregional migration in the Nordic countries

Restructuring of rural Sweden : employment transition and out-migration of three cohorts born 1945–1980

Are movers still the same? characteristics of interregional migrants in sweden 1970–2001

Returning home? Migration to birthplace among migrants after age 55