Showing papers on "Capitalism published in 2012"

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

Abstract: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

Globalization and its Discontents

Abstract: In this issue of the journal, William Robinson offers his analysis of the rise of transnational elites emerging outside of the traditional frame of nation-based capitalism. What is significant, in large part, is that unlike their national-capital predecessors, this new cadre has little concern for all that we refer to as social reproduction, industrialization, and local development. In its place, argues Robinson, are elites guided by a definition of global development rooted in the expansion of global markets and the integration of national economies into a global capitalist reality. This picture is a logical extension of a narrative that takes capitalism from a period of internationalization to globalization, and while the distinction between these two periods of capitalist development remains somewhat unclear we can agree significant changes are underway. The pages of this journal have recently explored the nature of class politics in globalization (Berberoglu, 2009; Kollmeyer, 2003; and Sakellaropoulos, 2009), the reconceptualization of globalization through a gender lens (Acker, 2004; Gottfried, 2004; and Ng, 2004), the impact of globalization on workers (Archibald, 2009a, 2009b) and the way the rhetoric of the core penetrates other regions of a globalizing economy (Barahona, 2011). Robinson’s article, and the critical exchange between Robinson and commentators in this issue, shifts our attention away from what we mean by globalization and its impact, and towards the question of who now manages this new global economy and what that means. The neoliberal agenda, and apparently the focus of transnational elites, is the expansion and reliance on ‘the market’ and a return to pure laissez-faire practices. The role of markets is the central piece, for example, in the current efforts to restructure the failing economies in Europe and the underpinning of the criticism that markets should be freed from the fetters of government regulations that introduce inefficiencies and are to blame for the economic ills that have befallen the major capitalist economies of the world (Fuchs, 2010). We now know all too well, so we are told, that a correction requires a heavy dose of austerity and the shrinking of the social supports provided by national governments. Otherwise local economies will fail to participate in the growing global economy and nations will fall into unimaginable poverty. The writings of Andre Gunder Frank (especially 1966, 1971) foreshadow the current argument, though I am certain not in the way he would have imagined. For Frank, while post-World War II capitalist countries may have been undeveloped at some point, the rest of the post-colonial world suffered from underdevelopment – that is, from a process that maintained poverty and economic hardship as a result of their relationships with so-called modern capitalist countries. The very forces of capitalism instituted well-documented practices of extracting resources and maintaining low wages in order to increase profits (practices that persist today, if not in the same form). At the same time, to ‘encourage’ development, governments and global financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank provided huge loans so that these countries could ‘afford’ to modernize rapidly. These loans were accompanied by massive intervention 440404 CRS0010.1177/0896920512440404EditorialCritical Sociology 2012

Transnational Capitalist Class

Abstract: The transnational capitalist class (TCC) as a theoretical concept and an empirical reality has its origins in theories of capitalist globalization developed since the 1960s. Traditional Marxist theories of the international bourgeoisie tend to be conceptualized in state-centrist terms and to focus mainly on business leaders, usually big capitalists, and their corporations in rich and powerful countries exploiting capitalists, workers and peasants in poor countries. The transnational corporation (TNC), in contrast, transcends national class structures and, for some researchers, includes groups whose members do not directly own the means of production but, nevertheless, directly serve the interests of global capitalism.

The cultures of globalization

Abstract: A pervasive force that evades easy analysis, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. The Cultures of Globalization presents an international panel of intellectuals who consider the process of globalization as it concerns the transformation of the economic into the cultural and vice versa; the rise of consumer culture around the world; the production and cancellation of forms of subjectivity; and the challenges it presents to national identity, local culture, and traditional forms of everyday life. Discussing overlapping themes of transnational consequence, the contributors to this volume describe how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends. Appropriate to such diversity of material, the authors approach their topics from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and the law. Essays examine such topics as free trade, capitalism, the North and South, Eurocentrism, language migration, art and cinema, social fragmentation, sovereignty and nationhood, higher education, environmental justice, wealth and poverty, transnational corporations, and global culture. Bridging the spheres of economic, political, and cultural inquiry, The Cultures of Globalization offers crucial insights into many of the most significant changes occurring in today’s world. Contributors . Noam Chomsky, Ioan Davies, Manthia Diawara, Enrique Dussel, David Harvey, Sherif Hetata, Fredric Jameson, Geeta Kapur, Liu Kang, Joan Martinez-Alier, Masao Miyoshi, Walter D. Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Paik Nak-chung, Leslie Sklair, Subramani, Barbara Trent

Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History

Abstract: An introduction to my forthcoming book, this essay takes a broad, sweeping look at second-wave feminism, situating the movement's unfolding in relation to three moments in the history of capitalism. In the first moment, feminism posed a radical challenge to the pervasive androcentrism of "state-organized capitalism". In the second, the movement unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the "new spirit" of neoliberal capitalism. In the third (present) moment, of capitalist crisis, feminists have the chance to reactivate the movement's emancipatory promise.

Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit

Abstract: This book examines the ways in which our ideas about language and identity which used to be framed in national and political terms as a matter of rights and citizenship are increasingly recast in economic terms as a matter of added value. It argues that this discursive shift is connected to specific characteristics of the globalized new economy in what can be thought of as "late capitalism". Through ten ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the complex ways in which older nationalist ideologies which invest language with value as a source of pride get bound up with newer neoliberal ideologies which invest language with value as a source of profit. The complex interaction between these modes of mobilizing linguistic resources challenges some of our ideas about globalization, hinting that we are in a period of intensification of modernity, in which the limits of the nation-State are stretched, but not (yet) undone. At the same time, this book argues, this intensification also calls into question modernist ways of looking at language and identity, requiring a more serious engagement with capitalism and how it constitutes symbolic (including linguistic) as well as material markets.

The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism

Abstract: 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 making of the indebted man : essay on the neoliberal condition

Abstract: A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist "new economy" through the political lens of the debtor/creditor relation. "The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor." -from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt-both public debt and private debt-has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies. Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of "public safety" through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human capital." In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

Impact at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’: The Role of Social Capital in Capability Development and Community Empowerment

Abstract: Rooted in the notion of inclusive capitalism, the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) approach argues for the simultaneous pursuit of profit and social welfare by creating markets for the poor. This idea has been both celebrated and criticized in the literature. We do neither in this paper. Instead, by leveraging insights from Amartya Sen's work on capability development and the literature on social capital, we offer a more socially embedded and community-centric BoP approach. By redefining poverty not just as a lack of income, but also as a lack of ‘capabilities’ in Sen's sense that can be developed through leveraging social capital, we offer a systemic framework for understanding the societal impact of business-driven ventures in the BoP and empowering BoP communities through these ventures. Specifically, we argue that any business initiative in the BoP ought to be evaluated on the basis of whether it advances capability transfer and retention by (a) enhancing the social capital between a particular community and other more resource rich networks, and (b) preserving the existing social capital in the community.

The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy

Abstract: Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in "The Moral Neoliberal" morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensable tool for capitalist transformation. Setting her investigation within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state's withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic volunteers thinking of theirs as an expression of charity and love. Such interpretations pave the way for a mass mobilization of an ethical citizenry that is put to work by the state. Visiting several sites across the region, from Milanese high schools to the offices of state social workers to the homes of the needy, Muehlebach mounts a powerful argument that the neoliberal state nurtures selflessness in order to cement some of its most controversial reforms. At the same time, she also shows how the insertion of such an anticapitalist narrative into the heart of neoliberalization can have unintended consequences.

A Woman's Place

Abstract: The nineteenth century saw the expansion of capitalist relations of production in Britain. It was a geographically uneven and differentiated process, and the resulting economic differences between regions are well known: the rise of the coalfields, of the textile areas, the dramatic social and economic changes in the organization of agriculture, and so forth. Each was both a reflection of and a basis for the period of dominance which the UK economy enjoyed within the nineteenth-century international division of labour. In this wider spatial division of labour, in other words, different regions of Britain played different roles, and their economic and employment structures in consequence also developed along different paths. But the spread of capitalist relations of production was also accompanied by other changes. In particular it disrupted the existing relations between women and men. The old patriarchal form of domestic production was torn apart, the established pattern of relations between the sexes was thrown into question. This, too, was a process which varied in its extent and in its nature between parts of the country, and one of the crucial influences on this variation was the nature of the emerging economic structures. In each of these different areas ‘capitalism’ and ‘patriarchy’ were articulated together, accommodated themselves to each other, in different ways. It is this process that we wish to examine here. Schematically, what we are arguing is that the contrasting forms of economic development in different parts of the country presented distinct conditions for the maintenance of male dominance.

Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China

Abstract: More than 630 million Chinese have escaped poverty since the 1980s, reducing the fraction remaining from 82 to 10 percent of the population. This astonishing decline in poverty, the largest in history, coincided with the rapid growth of a private enterprise economy. Yet private enterprise in China emerged in spite of impediments set up by the Chinese government. How did private enterprise overcome these initial obstacles, to become the engine of China's economic miracle? Where did capitalism come from? Studying over 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, Victor Nee and Sonja Opper argue that China's private enterprise economy bubbled up from below. Through trial and error, entrepreneurs devised institutional innovations that enabled them to decouple from the established economic order to start up and grow small, private manufacturing firms. Barriers to entry motivated them to build their own networks of suppliers and distributors, and to develop competitive advantage in self-organized industrial clusters. Close-knit groups of like-minded people participated in the emergence of private enterprise by offering financing and establishing reliable business norms. This rapidly growing private enterprise economy diffused throughout the coastal regions of China and, passing through a series of tipping points, eroded the market share of state-owned firms. Only after this fledgling economy emerged as a dynamic engine of economic growth, wealth creation, and manufacturing jobs did the political elite legitimize it as a way to jump-start China's market society. Today, this private enterprise economy is one of the greatest success stories in the history of capitalism.

The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India

Abstract: Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of ‘land wars’ across India, with farmers resisting the state's forcible transfer of their land to capitalists. Based on 18 months of research focused on an SEZ in Rajasthan, this paper illuminates the role of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its consequences for rural India. It argues that the existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seeks to reconstruct Harvey's theory of ABD to adequately account for it. It then shows the specific kind of rentier- and IT-driven accumulation that dispossession is making possible in SEZs and the non–labor-absorbing, real-estate–driven agrarian transformation this generates in the surrounding countryside. Land speculation amplifies class and caste inequalities in novel ways, marginalizes women and creates an involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverish...

Measurement and alienation: making a world of ecosystem services

Abstract: The development of markets in water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration signals a new intensification and financialisation in the encounter between nature and late capitalism. Following Neil Smith’s observations on this transformation, I argue that the commodification of such ‘ecosystem services’ is not merely an expansion of capital toward the acquisition or industrialisation of new resources, but the making of a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual human labours became social labour under capitalism. Technologies of measurement developed by ecosystem scientists describe nature as exchange values, as something always already encountered in the commodity form. Examining these developments through specific cases in US water policy, I propose that examining this transformation can provide political ecology and the study of ‘neoliberal natures’ with a thematic unity that has been absent. I understand capital’s encounter with nature as a process of creating socially-necessary abstractions that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation. Such an argument supersedes the issue of nature’s materiality and points toward a common language for the analysis of both humans and nature as two participants in the labour process. Political ecologists struggling with the commodification of nature have tended to overlook the social constitution of nature’s value in favour of explicit or implicit physical theories of value, often as more-or-less latent realisms. I suggest that critical approaches to nature must retain and elaborate a critical value theory, to understand both the imperatives and the silences in the current campaign to define the world as an immense collection of service commodities.

The Making Of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Empire

Abstract: Panitch and Gindin's monumental study offers a significant rethinking of the development of global capitalism. Transcending classical theories of interimperialist rivalry and the false dichotomy between states and markets in the neoliberal era, this book produces an exceptionally rich account of postwar global capitalism to the present day. Focussing on the American state, Panitch and Gindin argue that its distinctiveness rests in its capacity to identify the interests of its own capital with that of capital in general, while restructuring other states to the end of spreading capitalist social relations and preventing economic crises from interrupting capital's globalizing tendencies. Examining recent economic crises, the authors identify social conflict occurring within, rather than between, states, producing political fault-lines replete with possibilities for the emergence of new movements to transcend capitalist markets and states.

Varieties of Capitalism: Trajectories of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity

Abstract: This essay reviews recent literature on varieties of capitalism, drawing on insights from existing studies to propose a new, more differentiated way of thinking about contemporary changes in the political economies of the rich democracies. The framework offered here breaks with the “continuum models” on which much of the traditional literature has been based, in which countries are arrayed along a single dimension according to their degree of “corporatism” or, more recently, of “coordination.” In so doing, it reveals combinations—continued high levels of equality with significant liberalization, and declining solidarity in the context of continued significant coordination—that existing theories rule out by definition. I argue that these puzzling combinations cannot be understood with reference to the usual dichotomous, structural variables on which the literature has long relied, but require instead greater attention to the coalitional foundations on which political-economic institutions rest. A coalitional approach reveals that institutions that in the past supported the more egalitarian varieties of capitalism survive best not when they stably reproduce the politics and patterns of the Golden Era but rather when they are reconfigured—in both form and function—on the basis of significantly new political support coalitions.

The economics and politics of the Euro crisis

Abstract: This article addresses puzzles raised by the Euro crisis: why was EMU established with limited institutional capacities, where do the roots of the crisis lie, how can the response to the crisis be explained, and what are its implications for European integration? It explores how prevailing economic doctrines conditioned the institutional shape of the single currency and locates the roots of the crisis in an institutional asymmetry grounded in national varieties of capitalism, which saw political economies organised to operate export-led growth models joined to others accustomed to demand-led growth. The response to the crisis is reviewed and explained in terms of limitations in European institutions, divergent economic doctrines and the boundaries of European solidarity. Proposed solutions to the crisis based on deflation or reflation are assessed from a varieties of capitalism perspective and the implications for European integration reviewed.

The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression

Abstract: Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world. Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood. It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.

Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

Abstract: As seen on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday A New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller In this book, Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue for the inherent good of both business and capitalism. Featuring some of today's best-known companies, they illustrate how these two forces can--and do--work most powerfully to create value for all stakeholders: including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment. These "Conscious Capitalism" companies include Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Costco, Google, Patagonia, The Container Store, UPS, and dozens of others. We know them; we buy their products or use their services. Now it's time to better understand how these organizations use four specific tenets--higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management--to build strong businesses and help advance capitalism further toward realizing its highest potential. As leaders of the Conscious Capitalism movement, Mackey and Sisodia argue that aspiring leaders and business builders need to continue on this path of transformation--for the good of both business and society as a whole. At once a bold defense and reimagining of capitalism and a blueprint for a new system for doing business grounded in a more evolved ethical consciousness, this book provides a new lens for individuals and companies looking to build a more cooperative, humane, and positive future.

Nature™ Inc.: Changes and Continuities in Neoliberal Conservation and Market‐based Environmental Policy

Abstract: Nature™ Inc. describes the increasingly dominant way of thinking about environmental policy and biodiversity conservation in the early twenty-first century. Nature is, and of course has long been, ‘big business’, especially through the dynamics of extracting from, polluting and conserving it. As each of these dynamics seems to have become more intense and urgent, the capitalist mainstream is seeking ways to off-set extraction and pollution and find (better) methods of conservation, while increasing opportunities for the accumulation of capital and profits. This has taken Nature™ Inc. to new levels, in turn triggering renewed attention from critical scholarship. The contributions to this Debate section all come from a critical perspective and have something important to say about the construction, workings and future of Nature™ Inc. By discussing the incorporation of trademarked nature and connecting what insights the contributions bring to the debate, we find that there might be what we call an intensifying dialectic between change and limits influencing the relations between capitalism and nature. Our conclusion briefly points to some of the issues and questions that this dialectic might lead to in future research on neoliberal conservation and market-based environmental policy.

Sino-Capitalism: China's Reemergence and the International Political Economy

Abstract: There is little doubt that China's international reemergence represents one of the most significant events in modern history. As China's political economy gains in importance, its interactions with other major political economies will shape global values, institutions, and policies, thereby restructuring the international political economy. Drawing on theories and concepts in comparative capitalism, the author envisages China's reemergence as generating Sino-capitalism—a capitalist system that is already global in reach but one that differs from Anglo-American capitalism in important respects. Sino-capitalism relies more on informal business networks than legal codes and transparent rules. It also assigns the Chinese state a leading role in fostering and guiding capitalist accumulation. Sino-capitalism, ultimately, espouses less trust in free markets and more trust in unitary state rule and social norms of reciprocity, stability, and hierarchy. After conceptualizing Sino-capitalism's domestic political economy, the author uses the case of China's efforts to internationalize its currency, the yuan or renminbi, to systematically illustrate the multifarious manner in which the domestic logic of Sino-capitalism is expressed at the global level. Rather than presenting a deterministic argument concerning the future international role of China, he argues that China's stance and strategy in the international political economy hew quite closely to Sino-capitalism's hybrid compensatory institutional arrangements on the domestic level: state guidance; flexible and entrepreneurial networks; and global integration. Sino-capitalism therefore represents an emerging system of global capitalism centered on China that is producing a dynamic mix of mutual dependence, symbiosis, competition, and friction with the still dominant Anglo-American model of capitalism.

Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet

Abstract: We engage with recent applications of the Marxist “labor theory of value” to online prosumer practices, and offer an alternative framework for theorizing value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. One, value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Two, the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs in financial markets, rather than in direct commodity exchange. In an alternative framework, we offer an understanding of value creation as based primarily on the capacity to initiate and sustain webs of affective relations, and value realization as linked to a reputation based financial economy. We argue that this model describes the process of value creation and appropriation in the context of online prosumer platforms better than an approach based on the Marxist labor theory of value. We also suggest that our approach can cast new light on value creation within informational capitalism in general.

How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia

Abstract: Anders Aslund foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union in his book Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform (1989). He depicted the success of Russia's market transformation in How Russia Became a Market Economy (1995). After Russia's financial crisis of 1998, Aslund insisted that Russia had no choice but to adjust to the world market (Building Capitalism, 2001), though most observers declared the market economic experiment a failure. Why did Russia not choose Chinese gradual reforms? Why are the former Soviet countries growing much faster than the Central European economies? How did the oligarchs arise? Who is in charge now? These are just some of the questions answered in How Capitalism Was Built, covering twenty-one former communist countries from 1989 to 2006. Anybody who wants to understand the confusing dramas unfolding in the region and to obtain an early insight into the future will find this book useful and intellectually stimulating.

Transatlantic moves to the market: the United States and the European Union

Abstract: The theory of academic capitalism is used to explore US and EU marketization trajectories. Comparisons are made along the following dimensions: creation and expansion of intermediating organizations external to universities that promote closer relations between universities and markets; interstitial organizations that emerge from within universities that intersect various market oriented projects; narratives, discourses and social technologies that promote marketization and competition; expanded managerial capacity; new funding streams for research and programs close to the market; and new circuits of knowledge that move away from peer review and professional judgment as arbiters of excellence. We also consider the status of fields not closely integrated with external markets, and see fragmentation of the humanities, fine arts and (some) social sciences to be a sign of research universities marketization. We conclude that the US and EU are following very different paths to bring higher education closer to the market. The US move to the market was incremental and frequently led by a wide variety of non-governmental organizations, often with strong ties to the for-profit sector and participation by segments of universities prior to federal legislation or mandates. The European Commission is reverse engineering Anglo-American higher education models to reconstruct technologies of governance in uniquely European contexts that embed competition in nation-state initiatives. Although the discourse surrounding university marketization promises growth of high paying jobs prosperity, evidence to date suggests very uneven results for both the US and EU.

Weighing in: Obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism

Abstract: In the case of obesity, writes Julie Guthman, ‘the solution in some sense wags the dog of the problem statement’ (p. 16). In this compelling book, Guthman offers a lucid account of the ‘obesity epidemic’ said to plague the USA. The book’s core argument is twofold: first, that obesity is an ecological condition, and second, that the political, sociocultural and economic dimensions of ecologies have been largely absent from both popular and scholarly discussions about obesity. At the outset, Guthman is clear that the book’s purpose ‘is not to falsify myths * or even necessarily to reveal another certain explanation’ in terms of the purported causes of weight gain trends (p. 16). This is what is perhaps most crucial about Weighing In. It is not another attempt to explain away the field of possible causes and feel-good solutions for weight gain, in favour of a magic bullet. To be sure, it is a well-researched book about public health, food systems and alternative food movements. But it is at its heart a book about capitalism, and as such offers health scholars of all methodological stripes an outstanding example of how to foreground the political. Conceptually, the book traces how late twentieth-century neoliberal ideologies permeated American socio-economic structures, and how the infusion of freemarket values into public goods shifted city planning, labour conditions, environmental regulations and agricultural policies. In this same space, Guthman argues, neoliberal ideals of self-governance, self-control, interpersonal competition and personal risk management transformed aesthetic values of thinness into matters of good health. This political ecological framework acknowledges that people may be getting bigger, but it also asserts that many definitions of the obesity ‘problem’ (often unintentionally) inhibit social justice and leave weight gain and its ‘logical’ fixes as foregone conclusions. If obesity is the material result of capitalism in neoliberal times, then we must reckon with how ‘bodies as material entities are literally absorbing the conditions and externalities of production and consumption’ (p. 182). The book’s structure examines specific potential causes and consequences of obesity. Chapter 2 asks how we know obesity to be a problem, and unravels the politics of body mass index that underlie the medicalisation of body size. Chapter 3 examines some of the discursive threads that constitute the notion of ‘healthy lifestyle’, namely the concept of ‘healthism’ as an ideology that pins the responsibility for good health onto individuals. Guthman contextualises healthism Global Public Health Vol. 7, No. 8, September 2012, 911 913

The Macroeconomics of Finance-Dominated Capitalism - and Its Crisis

Abstract: Contents: Preface 1. Introduction 2. Finance-dominated Capitalism and Re-distribution of Income 3. Finance-dominated Capitalism, Capital Accumulation and Macroeconomic Regimes 4. Finance-dominated Capitalism and Long-run Productivity Growth 5. Finance-dominated Capitalism, Consumption, Household Debt and Instability 6. Finance-dominated Capitalism, Global Imbalances and Crisis 7. Requirements for Income-led Recovery and a Global Keynesian New Deal 8. The European Financial and Economic Crisis: Alternative Solutions from a Post-Keynesian Perspective 9. Summary and Conclusions References Index

China and Globalization : The Social, Economic and Political Transformation of Chinese Society

Abstract: 1. The Economies of Radical Change in China 2. Setting the Stage: A Primer to the Study of China's Economic Reforms 3. Economic Development in China 4. Changing Social Institutions 5. Changing Life Chances 6. Economic Reform and the Rule of Law 7. Prospects for Democracy 8. China's Integration into the Global Economy: Communism, Capitalism, and Human Rights

The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression

Abstract: Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world. Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood. It was only in the 1960s and ’70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin’s brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.

‘Free us up so we can be responsible!’ The co-evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility and neo-liberalism in the UK, 1977–2010

Abstract: This article challenges the notion that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is incompatible with neo-liberalism. It argues that CSR is not a countervailing force that follows neo-liberal market exposure. Instead of re-embedding global liberalism, CSR complements liberalization and substitutes for institutionalized social solidarity. Evidence from the UK, one of the world’s leading jurisdictions for responsible business, supports these claims. In Britain during the past 30 years, neo-liberalism and CSR have co-evolved. CSR has been a quid pro quo for lighter regulation; it has compensated for some of the social dislocations that result from unfettering markets, thereby legitimating business during the ‘unleashing’ of capitalism, and it appeals to moral sensibilities, justifying and legitimating business leaders in a way that instrumental rationality alone cannot. The paper draws on original sources to shed light on the origins and growth of Business in the Community, one of the world’s leading business-led CSR coalitions, since the 1970s.