Socialist Register 

About: Socialist Register is an academic journal published by Routledge. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Capitalism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0081-0606. Over the lifetime, 691 publications have been published receiving 10105 citations. The journal is also known as: The socialist register.

The 'New' Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession

Abstract: Global capitalism has experienced a chronic and enduring problem of overaccumulation since the 1970s. I interpret the volatility of international capitalism during these years, however, as a series of temporary spatio-temporal fixes that failed even in the medium run to deal with problems of overaccumulation. It was, as Peter Gowan argues, through the orchestration of such volatility that the United States sought to preserve its hegemonic position within global capitalism. The recent apparent shift towards an open imperialism backed by military force on the part of the US may then be seen as a sign of the weakening of that hegemony before the serious threat of recession and widespread devaluation at home, as opposed to the various bouts of devaluation formerly inflicted elsewhere (Latin America in the 1980s and early 1990s, and, even more seriously, the crisis that consumed East and South-East Asia in 1997 and then engulfed Russia and much of Latin America). But I also want to argue that the inability to accumulate through expanded reproduction on a sustained basis has been paralleled by a rise in attempts to accumulate by dispossession. This, I then conclude, is the hallmark of what some like to call ' the new imperialism' is about.

Nature as Accumulation Strategy

Abstract: A commodity, according to the classical political economists, comprises and combines a use value and an exchange value. Value, they recognized, was the product of human labour; for Marx it was measured by socially necessary labour time. Capital, he argued, was 'value in motion', and capital accumulation was the process by which capitalist societies multiplied social value through the exploitation of labour. Capitalism has always employed labour power to invest value in use values harvested from nature, and so what could it mean to suggest, as the title of this paper does, that nature has become an accumulation strategy? It is increasingly evident, I want to argue that in the past three decades a new dimension of the capitalist production of nature has considerably transformed the social relationship with the natural world.

El "nuevo" imperialismo: acumulación por desposesión

Abstract: La larga supervivencia del capitalismo, a pesar de sus multiples crisis y reorganizaciones y de los presagios acerca de su inminente derrota provenientes tanto de la izquierda como de la derecha, es un misterio que requiere aclaracion. Henry Lefebvre pensaba que habia encontrado la clave del mismo, en su famosa idea de que el capitalismo sobrevive a traves de la produccion del espacio, pero no explico exactamente como sucedia esto. Tanto Lenin como Rosa Luxemburgo, por razones muy distintas, y utilizando tambien diferentes argumentos, consideraban que el imperialismo -una forma determinada de produccion del espacio- era la respuesta al enigma,aunque ambos planteaban que esta solucion estaba acotada por sus propias contradicciones.

The Peculiarities Of The English

Abstract: In the last year or two, an ambitious work of analysis of British history and social structure has been set in train by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in New Left Review This work also bears, though mainly by implication, on some major aspects of Marxist theory and analysis The present essay is concerned to discuss some of the issues and themes which the two authors raise These articles, taken together, represent a sustained attempt to develop a coherent historical account of British society Undoubtedly the seminal article is Anderson's "Origins of the Present Crisis" But, if Nairn's work is less inspired, nevertheless both writers clearly inhabit the same mental universe Both feel themselves to be exiles from an "English ideology" which "in its drooling old age gives rise to a kind of twilight, where 'empiricism' has become myopia and 'liberalism' a sort of blinking uncertainty"

The Art of Rent: Globalisation, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture

Abstract: That culture has become a commodity of some sort is undeniable Yet there is also a widespread belief that there is something so special about certain cultural products and events (be they in the arts, theatre, music, cinema, architecture or more broadly in localized ways of life, heritage, collective memories and affective communities) as to set them apart from ordinary commodities like shirts and shoes While the boundary between the two sorts of commodities is highly porous (perhaps increasingly so) there are still grounds for maintaining an analytic separation It may be, of course, that we distinguish cultural artefacts and events because we cannot bear to think of them as anything other than authentically different, existing on some higher plane of human creativity and meaning than that located in the factories of mass production and consumption But even when we strip away all residues of wishful thinking (often backed by powerful ideologies) we are still left with something very special about those products designated as 'cultural' How, then, can the commodity status of so many of these phenomena be reconciled with their special character?