Showing papers on "Capitalism published in 2008"

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State

Abstract: Presents a story of two Chinas – an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marked its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.

Institutional change in varieties of capitalism

Abstract: Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops an approach to institutional change more extended than the one provided in Hall and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001) but congruent with its varieties-of-capitalism perspective. It begins by outlining an approach to institutional stability, which suggests that the persistence of institutions depends not only on their aggregate welfare effects but also on the distributive benefits that they provide to the underlying social or political coalitions; and not only on the Pareto-optimal quality of such equilibria but also on continuous processes of mobilization through which the actors test the limits of the existing institutions. It then develops an analysis of institutional change that emphasizes the ways in which defection, reinterpretation and reform emerge out of such contestation and assesses the accuracy of this account against recent developments in the political economies of Europe. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this perspective for contemporary analyses of liberalization in the political economy.

Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Life Beyond the Limits: Inventing the Bioeconomy 2. On Pharmaceutical Empire: AIDS, Security, and Exorcism 3. Preempting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror Intermezzo 4. Contortions: Tissue Engineering and the Topological Body 5. Labors of Regeneration: Stem Cells and the Embryoid Bodies of Capital 6. The Unborn Born Again: Neo-Imperialism, the Evangelical Right, and the Culture of Life Epilogue Notes References Index

Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction I Creative Workers and Rent-Seeking 1 The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policymaking in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States 2 China's Next Cultural Revolution? 3 The Olympic Goose That Lays the Golden Egg II Sustainability and the Ground Staff 4 Teamsters, Turtles, and Tainted Toys 5 Learning from San Ysidro III Instruments of Knowledge Capitalism 6 The Copyfight over Intellectual Property 7 The Rise of the Global University Conclusion: Maps and ChartersNotesReferences Index About the Author

Occupational Choice and the Spirit of Capitalism

Abstract: The British Industrial Revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. We propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern. Parents shape their children’s preferences in response to economic incentives. Middle-class families in occupations requiring effort, skill, and experience develop patience and a work ethic, whereas upper-class families relying on rental income cultivate a refined taste for leisure. These class-specific attitudes, which are rooted in the nature of preindustrial professions, become key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape. I. INTRODUCTION The Industrial Revolution was more than capital accumulation and growth. It also set off a social and political transformation that redefined hierarchies in society and reshaped the distribution of income and wealth. Before the onset of industrialization in eighteenth-century Britain, wealth and political power were associated with the possession of land. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a new class of entrepreneurs and businessmen emerged as the economic elite. For the most part, the members of this class rose from humble beginnings and had their social origins in the urban middle classes. The landed elite was left behind and eventually lost its political and economic predominance. Many observers of the time linked this reversal in economic fortunes to differences in values, attitudes, and ultimately preferences across social classes. There are countless examples, both in scholarly and in fictional writing, of portrayals of members of the landowning class as averse to work, unwilling to save, ill-disposed tocommercialactivity,andunabletoconsidermoneyassomething

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: Despite his even-handed writing style and quite voice, Muhammad Yunus puts forth a bold vision in his book, Creating a World Without Poverty. His boldness is not captured in his statements concerning global inequality and financial imperialism. No, the depth of his boldness is best captured in his belief that the poor themselves are agents of the economy not objects, and that we need to make a place in our capitalist world economy for companies that do not intend to make a profit. In this way, he challenges some core tenants of capitalism as we know it today.

Varieties of residential capitalism in the international political economy : old welfare states and the new politics of housing

Abstract: Comparative and international political economy (CPE and IPE) are justifiably obsessed with finance as a source of power and as a key causal force for domestic and international economic outcomes. Yet both CPE and IPE ignore the single largest asset in people's everyday lives and one of the biggest financial assets in most economies: residential property and its associated mortgage debt. This special issue argues that residential housing and housing finance systems have important causal consequences for political behavior, social stability, the structure of welfare states, and macro-economic outcomes. The articles examine specific instances across a range of countries. This introduction has broader aims. First, it shows that housing finance systems are not politically neutral. We argue that the kind of housing people occupy and the property rights surrounding housing can constitute political subjectivities and objective preferences not only about the level of public spending, but also the level and nature of inflation and taxation. Second, like the varieties of capitalism literature, we show that housing finance systems also have important complementarities with the larger economy. But we diverge from the varieties literature, suggesting that ‘varieties of residential capitalism’ are not explained by domestic institutional complementarities alone. Rather, what we refer to as financially repressed and financially liberal systems are globally interdependent. While welfare and taxation systems show high degrees of path dependence, transnational trends in the deregulation of housing finance have altered incentives and preferences for financial institutions, home owners, and would-be home owners. Finally, the introduction offers some speculation about how pocketbooks will drive politics as the global housing busts tightens mortgage belts around the waists of average Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development home owners.

Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries

Abstract: How do social movements promote diversity and alternative organizational forms? We address this question by analyzing how cooperative enterprise was affected by the Grange—a leading anticorporate movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State-level analyses across three industries yield three findings. First, the Grange had positive effects on cooperatives and mutuals during the nineteenth-century populist struggles over corporate capitalism. Second, these effects were stronger where corporations counter-mobilized to block challengers' political efforts. Grangers pursued economic organization as an alternative to politics and in response to blocked political access. Third, the Grange continued to foster cooperatives even as populist revolts waned. It did so, however, by buffering cooperatives from problems of group heterogeneity and population change, rendering them less dependent on supportive communities and specific economic conditions. These findings advance research at the movements/organizations interface by documenting movement effects and by isolating different causal pathways through which mobilization, counter- mobilization, and political opportunity shape economic organization. The results also provide economic sociology with new evidence on how social structure moderates economic forces, and help revise institutional analyses of American capitalism by showing how cooperatives emerged as significant, rather than aberrant, elements of the U.S. economy.

Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism

Abstract: Every laborer in a market economy is disposable. This book argues that globalization renders some workers so vulnerable that their disposability is scripted, told, and retold in the form of a myth ...

State/Space:A Reader

Abstract: This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse analyses of state space in historical and contemporary capitalism. The first volume to present an accessible yet challenging overview of the changing geographies of state power under capitalism. A unique, interdisciplinary collection of contributions by major theorists and analysts of state spatial restructuring in the current era. Investigates some of the new political spaces that are emerging under contemporary conditions of 'globalization'. Explores state restructuring on multiple spatial scales, and from a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives. Covers a range of topical issues in contemporary geographical political economy. Contains case study material on Western Europe, North America and East Asia, as well as parts of Africa and South America.

Social Economy of the Metropolis: Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism and the Global Resurgence of Cities

Abstract: This book is about the renaissance of cities in the twenty first century and their increasing role as centers of creative economic activity. It attempts to put some conceptual and descriptive order around issues of urbanization in the contemporary world, emphasizing the idea of the social economy of the metropolis, which is to say, a view of the urban organism as an intertwined system of social and economic life played out through the arena of urban space. The book opens with a review of some essentials of urban theory, the book aims to re-articulate the urban question in a way that is relevant to city life and politics in the present era. It then analyses the functional characteristics of the urban economy, with special reference to the rise of a group of core sectors such as media, fashion, music, etc., focused on cognitive and cultural forms of work. These sectors are growing with great rapidity in the world's largest cities at the present time, and they play a major role in the urban resurgence that has been occurring of late. The discussion then explores the spatial ramifications of this new economy in cities and the ways in which it appears to be ushering in major shifts in divisions of labor and urban social stratification, as marked by a growing divide between a stratum of elite workers on the one side and a low-wage proletariat on the other. Allen Scott is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the economies of modern cities, and in this book presents a concise introduction to his innovative and insightful perspective.

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style

Abstract: Preface vii Introduction: The Spirit of Capitalism 1 1. The Volatility of Capitalism 17 2. The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine 39 3. Between Science and Faith 69 4. Is Eco-egalitarian Capitalism Possible? 93 5. Christianity, Capitalism, and the Tragic 119 Notes 147 Index 169

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

Abstract: There can be no mistake that Robert Reich has been there, done that. Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor (and tapped for a senior economic policy role in a potential Barack Obama administration), Rei...

The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook

Abstract: Much excitement surrounds Facebook, the social networking site based on user-generated content that has attracted 64 million active users since its inception in 2004. This paper begins to outline a political economy of Facebook in an attempt to draw attention to the underlying economic relations that structure the website, and the way in which the site fits into larger patterns of contemporary capitalist development. Although Web 2.0 has presented a shift away from “old” top-down media models, there remains continuity through change: Facebook continues familiar models of extensive commodification, with surveillance playing a key role in this process. The emerging reliance on general intellect and free labour for the purpose of capital accumulation does represent a move away from a more passive conception of the audience commodity, yet it demonstrates the continuous march of capitalism into cyberspace under post-Fordist conditions.

German economic performance: disentangling the role of supply-side reforms, macroeconomic policy and coordinated economy institutions

Abstract: Since unification, the debate about Germany's poor economic performance has focused on supply-side weaknesses, and the associated reform agenda sought to make low-skill labour markets more flexible. We question this diagnosis using three lines of argument. First, effective restructuring of the supply side in the core advanced industries was carried out by the private sector using institutions of the coordinated economy, including unions, works councils and blockholder owners. Second, the implementation of orthodox labour market and welfare state reforms created a flexible labour market at the lower end. Third, low growth and high unemployment are largely accounted for by the persistent weakness of domestic aggregate demand, rather than by the failure to reform the supply side. Strong growth in recent years reflects the successful restructuring of the core economy. To explain these developments, we identify the external pressures on companies in the context of increased global competition, the continuing value of the institutions of the coordinated market economy to the private sector and the constraints imposed on the use of stabilizing macroeconomic policy by these institutions. We also suggest how changes in political coalitions allowed orthodox labour market reforms to be implemented in a consensus political system.

The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Agricultural Modernization, Agribusiness and Collective Land Rights

Abstract: In what forms are agribusinesses entering agriculture and interacting with farmers? How are land, labor and capital now controlled by corporate and individual actors, and then organized into agricultural production? How does such control and organization shape the relationships between the actors? In this article we argue that agrarian capitalism is expanding in China The means of production, such as capital and land, are increasingly controlled by agribusiness, while direct producers increasingly sell their labor for a living We document various forms in which agribusiness companies are conducting transactions with individual agricultural producers We also argue that China's unique system of land rights featuring collective ownership but individualized usage rights has acted as a powerful force in shaping interactions between agribusiness and direct producers It provides farmers with a source of economic income and political bargaining power, and restricts corporate actors from dispossessing farmers of their land We find strong norms protecting farmers' collective land rights in the agricultural sector, contrary to the received wisdom about weak protection of land rights in China In the rest of the paper, we first review the policy context in which this transformation has taken place Next we introduce our method of data collection, summarize the five forms of agribusiness-farmer interaction found in our study, and analyze each of the five forms in depth We conclude with a discussion of the causes and characteristics of the rise of agrarian capitalism, with a focus on the role of the land rights system

Co-creating Second Life Market—Consumer Cooperation in Contemporary Economy

Abstract: In this article, we draw on our participant observation in the virtual-technology context of Second Life to explore cocreation's prepossessing claim of consumer empowerment and its connections to contemporary forms of social organization We conclude that while consumers are genuinely empowered by co-creation practices, this empowerment that frees the consumer in a diversity of ways also offers significant avenues for entrapping the consumer into producing for the firm In the end, co-creation is a veneer of consumer empowerment in a world where market power, in large measure, still resides in capital On this basis, we suggest that the seeming demise of capitalism espoused by some scholars is premature to the extent that capitalism has the uncanny ability to meld into newer social formations such as those afforded by Second Life Thus, a more realistic vision is an interloping of the ethical and capitalist economies

Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy

Abstract: The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is one of the core theorists of the Italian postfordist movement, along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). But although his work is often cited by scholars (particularly by those in the field of "Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing has never appeared in English. This translation of his most recent work, Capital and Language (published in Italian in 2002), finally makes Marazzi's work available to an English-speaking audience. Capital and Language takes as its starting point the fact that the extreme volatility of financial markets is generally attributed to the discrepancy between the "real economy" (that of material goods produced and sold) and the more speculative monetary-financial economy. But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the postfordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication. In Capital and Language Marazzi argues that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (that is, its reliance on abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are just two sides of the same coin. Capital and Language focuses on the causes behind the international economic and financial depression of 2001, and on the primary instrument that the U.S. government has since been using to face them: war. Marazzi points to capitalism's fourth stage (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist culmination of the New Economy): the "War Economy" that is already upon us. Marazzi offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic stage and crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form. Capital and Language also provides a warning call to a Left still nostalgic for a Fordist construct--a time before factory turned into office (and office into home), and before labor became linguistic.

The dismal science : how thinking like an economist undermines community

Abstract: See "Stephen Marglin on the Future of Capitalism" at FORA.tv. Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback - say the barn burned down - neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations. Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.

Globalization and the State in Central and Eastern Europe: The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment

Abstract: Introduction 1. Understanding convergence towards the competition state: The transnational constitution of domestic politics 2. The rise of the competition state: Towards the Porterian workfare postnational regime 3. Creating national capitalism against the odds: The internally oriented project in the Czech Republic 4. The internally oriented pathways in the early nineties: By default or by design? 5. The time of the comprador service sector: How Czechs ignited competition for FDI 6. Political support of the competition state: The comprador service sector and its allies 7. The investment promotion machines: Everyday politics and the multi-scalar constitution of the competition state. Conclusion. Bibliography

Introduction: elites: remembered in capitalism and forgotten by social sciences

Abstract: By any account, the last twenty years of the 20th century have seen the most rapid and dramatic shift of income, assets and resources in favour of the very rich that has ever taken place in human history. This ‘raiding of the commons’ has been most evident in the former communist nations, especially Russia after 1989, where an arriviste plutocracy emerged in little over a decade from the hasty, even squalid, privatization of state assets and public resources. We can see the rise of the ‘super rich’ in the ‘old’ capitalist nations, especially those such as the UK and USA, which have enthusiastically embraced neo-liberalism from the early 1980s. In both countries the top one or five percent of income earners have more or less doubled their share of total income since the early 1980s and we have now almost returned to pre-1914 levels of income inequality (Atkinson, 2003). There is no historical precedent for such regressive redistribution within one generation without either change in legal title or economic disaster such as hyper-inflation. For reasons which nobody yet understands, corporate chief executive officers have for two decades obtained real wage increases of 20 per cent each year and the much larger number of intermediaries earning multi-million $/£ incomes in and around finance has hugely increased. Where, however, are the social theorists who focus on these processes as central to understanding the contemporary dynamics of social change? As the rich draw away and inhabit their ever more privileged worlds, one might expect a revival of elite studies from contemporary critical writers who are concerned about such developments. After all, earlier generations of theorists were in no doubt about the importance of elites and elite formations for understanding the social dynamics of their nations. Max Weber’s first major sociological work was an account of the challenge to patriarchal relations on Prussian landed estates at the end of the 19th century (see Poggi, 2005, chapter 1). Karl Marx’s focus on the ruling class needs no demonstration, and his famous chapter on ‘Primitive Accumulation’ in Capital (Marx, 1961), which focuses on how a new capitalist class enriched itself from the enclosure of land and thereby set in train the process of capital accumulation, certainly repays reading in light of current events. Other early 20th century sociologists, notably Pareto and Mosca, also saw the nature of elites as fundamental to understanding the characteristics of their societies (see the discussion in Scott, 1996: chapter 5). Yet, from the middle

The temporalities of capitalism

Abstract: The temporalities of capitalism are in certain respects unique. The temporalities of social life in general are 'eventful', i.e. irreversible, contingent, uneven, discon- tinuous and transformational. Although capitalist social processes are in certain respects super-eventful, the extreme abstraction that is a signature of capitalist development enables core processes of capitalism to escape from the irreversibil- ity of time and to sustain a recurrent logic at their core. This means that the tem- porality of capitalism is composite and contradictory, simultaneously still and hyper-eventful. Recognizing this contradiction at the core of capitalism poses important conceptual and methodological challenges for those who study it. Mainline quantitative American social scientists, the economists foremost among them, have tended to see time as a kind of neutral Newtonian grid in which social processes are determined by variables that act upon each other by a smooth, predictable, gradual and linear social gravity (Abbott, 1988). An eventful temporality—the kind of temporality taken for granted by most historians— would imply that social processes are, instead, lumpy, unpredictable, uneven and discontinuous. Although historians are generally reticent about engaging in explicit theoretical discourse, they have a highly sophisticated and nuanced implicit conceptualization of temporality. They see time as fateful, as irreversible in the sense that a significant action, once taken, or an event, once experienced, irrevocably alters the situation in which it occurs. The conceptual vehicle histor- ians use to construct or analyse the temporal fatefulness and contingency of social life is the event. Historians see the flow of social life as being punctuated by sig- nificant happenings, by complexes of social action that somehow change the † This paper will be part of the SYMPOSIUM: How History Matters.

The political economy debate on ‘financialisation’ – a macroeconomic perspective

Abstract: A number of important contributions to the political economy literature have argued that changes in the financial sector have been amongst the main reflections, or even the driving forces, of recent transformations of capitalism in the rich countries. This hypothesis has been referred to as 'financialisation'. We argue in this article that the interdisciplinary literature could be enriched if the macroeconomic dimension of financialisation was more explicitly taken into account. In particular, important macroeconomic constraints regarding the determination of profits, in the face of a decreasing importance of physical investment and an increased importance of financial operations, are often not explicitly considered. We compare our macroeconomic approach with contributions from different strands in the existing literature, including empirical analyses of new patterns of profit generation, the 'varieties of capitalism' approach, the British 'social accounting' literature, and the French 'regulationist' literature. Our theoretical framework is illustrated by means of an empirical comparison of the effects of financialisation in the USA and in Germany.

A neorealist approach to institutional change and the diversity of capitalism

Abstract: This article proposes a theoretical approach to the political economy of institutional change and comparative capitalism. It argues that the firm-based approach of the Varieties of Capitalism literature cannot satisfactorily integrate the political aspects of institutional change and must in one way or another rely on some type of economic functionalism. By linking explicitly political strategies and demands for institutional change, a neorealist approach can exploit the concepts of complementarity and hierarchy of institutions. Different types of institutional change may take place in situations of political equilibrium, political crisis or systemic crisis.

Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class

Abstract: labour lying idle so that its form (gold) can symbolically play the role of the equivalent form of value. Distinctly capitalist commodity money would be a living part of accumulation, not a congealed, dormant, labour numeraire! How is this problem to be framed within Marxist theory? As well as money being a produced commodity like other commodities, it has to be a commodity that can guarantee value, but without reliance on the imprimatur of the state. This money commodity has to resolve temporal and spatial variability in value: it has to, in itself, resolve the problem of conventional state money, that a process of exchange of equivalent values is always expressed at a given time and in a given monetary unit. For conventional state money, this means that there are volatile exchange rates and a range of interest rate regimes for each currency: the equivalence of exchange cannot be verified. There is, in Marxist terms, a spatial and temporal problem in the commensuration of value: there is a discontinuity in the measured value of capital in different forms and at different locations, and this discontinuity needs to be reconciled.23 The new commodity money has to have the capacity to absorb that discontinuity into itself as (one of) its defining characteristics, so that money can, indeed, secure equivalence (commensurate value) across time and space. This process of commensuration is what Marx attached to the function of money: money is the means by which ‘[different] commodities become magnitudes of the same kind, of the same unit, i.e. commensurable’ (Marx 1939: 143). But how different moneys are commensurated within a theory of value, and what it means to commensurate packages of financial assets whose underlying value is not itself being exchanged were questions not posed by Marx, nor since Marx. It is this issue that brings financial derivatives to the centre of a Marxist theory of capitalist money. Marx’s theory of money: its link to financial derivatives The investigation of the rudiments of a theory of money consistent with financial derivatives must look beyond the form of gold. It is to Marx’s earlier writings, particularly on alienation, that we look for conceptual propositions about the nature of money and finance.24 For example, reviewing James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, Marx (1844) emphasised the importance of contingency in relation to ‘laws’ about money and the essential role of money as a mediating process. Here Marx goes on to explain the basic characteristics of capitalist money, and it warrants citing at some length: The essence of money is not, in the first place, the property alienated in it, but that the mediating or movement ... is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money. ... The personal mode of existence of money as money – and not only as the inner, implicit, hidden social relationship or class relationship between New, Global, Capitalist Money 159 23 The concept of discontinuities is explored in detail in Chapter 7. 24 Marx’s writing at this time, being strongly influenced by Feuerbach, is drawing on parallels between money and religion and both as alienated forms of social relations. commodities – this mode of existence corresponds the more to the essence of money, the more abstract it is, the less it has a natural relationship to the other commodities, the more it appears as the product and yet as the non-product of man, the less primitive its sphere of existence, the more it is created by man or, in economic terms, the greater the inverse relationship of its value as money to the exchange value or money value of the material in which it exists. Hence paper money and the whole number of paper representatives of money (such as bills of exchange, mandates, promissory notes, etc.) are the more perfect mode of existence of money as money and a necessary factor in the progressive development of the money system. In the credit system, of which banking is the perfect expression, it appears as if the power of the alien, material force were broken, the relationship of self-estrangement abolished and man had once more human relations to man. The important point Marx was contending above is that the more money is ‘lifted above’ direct commodity relations by ‘losing’ the characteristics of other commodities, the more ‘perfect its mode of existence’ because the social relations of capital, expressed in commodity production, are not being contaminated by the particularities of the chosen money commodity.25 Gold is, in this regard, an extremely primitive form of capitalist money: indeed, we know it historically as pre-capitalist money. Financial derivatives, on the other hand, as advances beyond promissory notes and bills of exchange – contracts that are man-made and having no ‘natural relationship’ to the products from which they derive, appear as a highly advanced form of money. Nonetheless, the requirement for a global monetary system is precisely as Marx conceived of it in the abstract – a role for commodities that are both part of other commodities, but also discrete commodities in themselves. But gold is a single (or at best dual) dimensional commodity.26 There are too many types of discontinuities in the global financial system to be reconciled by a single commodity in the role of money. The multiple forms of risk-exposure, reflecting the range of possible inter-temporal, inter-spatial, inter-financial-instrument price relativities requires intermediation in a form that is itself flexible and able to reflect the range of possibilities in these relativities. Gold does not meet this requirement, especially in an era when money capital increasingly takes the form of different types of credit money and other financial assets. Derivatives, on the other hand are commodities produced and traded for precisely this purpose. Derivatives: commodities commensurating monetary discontinuities We have seen that, in terms of Marx’s benchmark of the ‘progressive development of the money system’, derivatives meet the requirement of a more ‘perfect mode 160 Capitalism with Derivatives 25 Notice also that Marx could contemplate an association of ‘perfect money’ with something as basic as the credit system and paper representations of money. That now seems a rather low bar for depicting perfection. 26 The duality relates to Marx’s emphasis that gold never traded at its costs of production. of existence’ by being abstracted from ‘a natural relationship’ with other commodities. But are derivatives themselves commodities, and how can Marx’s conception of money reconcile the need for commodity money, yet for commodity money to appear as ‘not the product of man’? Marx’s conception of commodity money was both advanced and constrained by the Gold Standard within which it was conceived. It was advanced by recognition that money must have a commodity basis if it is to be an integral component of capital accumulation and not just a numeraire. But Marx’s conception was also constrained by the then widely held belief that one commodity, gold, could act as a universal equivalent form of value and furthermore, that the robustness of its status resided in its defined and finite quantity. In Marx’s time, the expectation was that one particular commodity (gold) could traverse and reconcile all the discontinuities within the money system. Derivatives, however, confront that image. Any single unit of measure such as gold can represent only a balance of multiple processes of commensuration, and thereby actually reconcile perhaps none at all. Derivatives, on the other hand, are literally thousands of types of commodities whose specific characteristics are designed to secure commensurability between different forms of capital and their spatial and temporal characteristics. If money is defined by its role in the process of commensuration (or, as Marx also put, it in the ‘mediating’ process), there is no logical preclusion that a range of ‘commodities’ could not fulfil the function of the equivalent form of value when there are clearly articulated mechanisms of commensuration between the various monetary commodities. New, Global, Capitalist Money 161

Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective

Abstract: This ambitious volume chronicles and analyzes from a critical globalization perspective the social, economic, and political changes sweeping across Latin America from the 1970s through the present day. Sociologist William I. Robinson summarizes his theory of globalization and discusses how Latin America's political economy has changed as the states integrate into the new global production and financial system, focusing specifically on the rise of nontraditional agricultural exports, the explosion of maquiladoras, transnational tourism, and the export of labor and the import of remittances. He follows with an overview of the clash among global capitalist forces, neoliberalism, and the new left in Latin America, looking closely at the challenges and dilemmas resistance movements face and their prospects for success. Through three case studies-the struggles of the region's indigenous peoples, the immigrants rights movement in the United States, and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela-Robinson documents and explains the causes of regional socio-political tensions, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the present turbulence, and suggests possible outcomes to the conflicts. Based on years of fieldwork and empirical research, this study elucidates the tensions that globalization has created and shows why Latin America is a battleground for those seeking to shape the twenty-first century's world order.

Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India

Abstract: The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels' intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies' critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation. Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism. Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.

From value to values: sustainable consumption at farmers markets

Abstract: Advocates of environmental sustainability and social justice increasingly pursue their goals through the promotion of so-called “green” products such as locally grown organic produce. While many scholars support this strategy, others criticize it harshly, arguing that environmental degradation and social injustice are inherent results of capitalism and that positive social change must be achieved through collective action. This study draws upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two farmers markets located in demographically different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area to examine how market managers, vendors, and regular customers negotiate tensions between their economic strategies and environmental sustainability and social justice goals. Managers, vendors, and customers emphasize the ethical rather than financial motivations of their markets through comparisons to capitalist, industrial agriculture and through attention to perceived economic sacrifices made by market vendors. They also portray economic strategies as a pragmatic choice, pointing to failed efforts to achieve justice and sustainability through policy change as well as difficulties funding and sustaining non-profit organizations. While market managers, vendors, and customers deny any difficulties pursuing justice and sustainability through local economics, the need for vendors to sustain their livelihoods does sometimes interfere with their social justice goals. This has consequences for the function of each market.

The rise of China and the demise of the capitalist world-economy

Abstract: In recent years, China has become a major actor in the global economy, making a remarkable switch from a planned and egalitarian socialism to a simultaneously wide-open and tightly controlled market economy. Against the establishment wisdom, Minqi Li argues in this provocative and startling book that far from strengthening capitalism, China s full integration into the world capitalist system will, in fact and in the not too distant future, bring about its demise. The author tells us that historically the spread and growth of capitalist economies has required low wages, taxation, and environmental costs, as well as a hegemonic nation to prevent international competition from eroding these requirements. With the decline of the economic power of the United States, its current hegemonic role will deteriorate and the unprecedented growth of China will so erode the foundations of capital accumulation by pushing wages and environmental costs up, for example that the entire capitalist system will be shaken to its core. This is essential reading for those who still believe that there is no alternative."