The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

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

Europe and the People without History

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Silencing the past: power and the production of history

"Debt as power is a timely and innovative contribution to our understanding of one of the most prescient issues of our time: the explosion of debt across the global economy and related requirement of political leaders to pursue exponential growth to meet the demands of creditors and investors. The book is distinctive in offering a historically sensitive and comprehensive analysis of debt as an interconnected and global phenomenon. Rather than focusing on the historical emergence of debt as a moral obligation, the authors argue that debt under capitalism can be conceived of as a technology of power, intimately tied up with the requirement for perpetual growth and the differential capitalization that benefits ‘the 1%’. Their account begins with the recognition that the histories of human communities and their natural environment are interconnected in complex spatial and hierarchical relations of power and to understand their development we need to not only examine the particularities of a given case, but more importantly their interconnected, interdependent and international relations. Since debt under capitalism is increasingly ubiquitous at all levels of society and economic growth is now the sole mantra of dominant political parties around the world, the authors argue that tracing the evolution and transformation of debt as a technology of power is crucial for understanding the ‘present as history’ and possible alternatives to our current trajectory."

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/161429/1/2016_di_muzio_robbins_debt_as_power.pdf

Debt as Power

Modern civilization and the social reproduction of capitalism are bound inextricably with fossil fuel consumption. But as carbon energy resources become scarcer, what implications will this have for energy-intensive modes of life? Can renewable energy sustain high levels of accumulation? Or will we witness the end of existing capitalist economies? This book provides an innovative and timely study that mobilizes a new theory of capitalism to explain the rise and fall of petro-market civilization. Di Muzio investigates how theorists of political economy have largely taken energy for granted and illuminates how the exploitation of fossil fuels increased the universalization and magnitude of capital accumulation. He then examines the likelihood of renewable resources providing a feasible alternative and asks whether they can beat peak oil prices to sustain food production, health care, science and democracy. Using the capital as power framework, this book considers the unevenly experienced consequences of monetizing fossil fuels for people and the planet.

Carbon Capitalism: Energy, Social Reproduction and World Order

FROM THE ARTICLE: . . . what many critics of the war on terror or US imperialism have so far failed to appreciate is how this project would be impossible without the capitalisation of the state. In this article, I therefore want to suggest that Marx’s re-theorisation of the concept of primitive accumulation, combined with a non-Marxist theorisation of state power offered by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, can help us account for the intimate connection between ongoing primitive accumulation and the capitalisation of the US government. . . . I try to show that we can accept their novel theory of capital as a capitalised and commodified form of power, but argue that the concept of primitive accumulation still has considerable analytical value for theorising the extension and depth of capitalist social property relations within and across political jurisdictions.

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The ‘Art’ of Colonisation: Capitalising Sovereign Power and the Ongoing Nature of Primitive Accumulation

This article offers a critique of Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu’s "How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism". We argue that while all historiography features a number of silences, shortcomings or omissions, the omissions in "How the West Came to Rule" lead to a mistaken view of the emergence of capitalism. There are two main issues to be confronted. First, we argue that Anievas and Nisancioglu have an inadequate and misleading understanding of 'capital' and 'capitalism' that tilts them towards a theoretical stance that comes very close to arguing that everything caused capitalism while at the same time having no clear and convincing definition of ‘capital’ or ‘capitalism’. Second, there are at least three omissions -- particular to England/Britain within a geopolitical context -- that should be discussed in any attempt to explain the development of capitalism: the financial revolution and the Bank of England, the transition to coal energy and the capitalization of state power as it relates to war, colonialism and slavery. We conclude by calling for a connected histories approach within the framework of capital as power.

Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West

Recent literature has focused on the ways in which civil society organizations are contributing to practices of global governance in an era of neo-liberalism. As UN Habitat has pointed out, what has also coincided with the shift to neoliberalism is the proliferation and growth of global slums. As slums have become an increasingly widespread form of human settlement, a global campaign to improve the life of slum dwellers has emerged under the Millennium Development Goals. In this article, I argue that this project can be conceived of as a biopolitical campaign where nongovernmental and community-based organizations are viewed as a kind of panacea for the problem of slums. This view is misguided given the scale of the problem and the apartheid of life chances that has accompanied neoliberalism. KEY WORDS: Governance, neoliberalism, slums, nongovernmental organizations, community-based organizations, biopolitics. Recent literature has focused on the ways in which private authorities in the "third sector" are both reshaping and contributing to practices of global liberal governance and development. (1) In part, this growing research agenda can be attributed to the massive growth and proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) during the last decades of the twentieth century, the diversity of their concerns, and the willingness of other actors to view them as legitimate forms of authority. Although there is debate over the exact reasons for the growth of these organizations, there seems to be a general consensus that their importance in the governance process has coincided with the worldwide neoliberal revolution in economic policy and the privileging of polyarchical forms of democracy. (2) As UN Habitat has pointed out, what has also coincided with the shift to neoliberalism and democracy promotion is the proliferation and growth of global slums. (3) As slums have become an increasingly widespread form of human settlement, a complex nexus of multilevel governance initiatives has developed to combat the dismal life conditions manifest in slums. (4) The agents involved in slum interventions range from supranational institutions such as UN Habitat and the World Bank to local governments, NGOs, and CBOs. (5) Although any study concerning the governance of slums should take care to realize that interventions are often multifaceted, the current governance agenda appears to coalesce around Goal 7, Target 11 of the Millennium Development Goals--"the world's targets for dramatically reducing extreme poverty in its many dimensions by 2015." (6) Under Goal 7, which emphasizes environmental sustainability, Target 11 directs supranational institutions, national and local governments, and civil society organizations to "achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020." (7) Initially, this may sound like a sufficiently ambitious goal until one realizes that about 1 billion people on the planet currently live in informal settlements where the healthy, productive, and sustainable reproduction of social life is under constant threat. The modesty of this goal is further compounded by the fact that the planet's slum inhabitants are projected to swell to well beyond 1 billion if current patterns of uneven development and income inequality persist. While this goal may appear to some to be a miserly attempt to combat the problem of global slums, I argue in this article that it is more important to understand the governance of global slums as an increasingly important dimension of the Western biopolitical project to enhance and optimize the life chances of the "global poor." Within this project, slum dwellers are considered a particular subset of the global poor, primarily distinguished by their forms of shelter, the deprivations they experience, and their exclusion from the formal economy. However, although slum residents represent an increasingly important target population for the agents of global liberal governance and their biopolitical imperatives to improve life, their strategic interventions are likely to fail in an age where neoliberal dogma continues to dominate the policy agenda of governments and supranational institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). …

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Tim Di Muzio

Papers

Debt as Power

Carbon Capitalism: Energy, Social Reproduction and World Order

The ‘Art’ of Colonisation: Capitalising Sovereign Power and the Ongoing Nature of Primitive Accumulation

Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West

Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11