Capitalism

About: Capitalism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 27714 publications have been published within this topic receiving 858042 citations.

South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence

Abstract: This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.

Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes

Abstract: Large multinational corporations shape our lives to an enormous extent. How is the growth, power, and significance of big business to be explained and understood? Focusing on the issues of ownership, control, and class formation, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes explores the implications of changes in the nature of big business, which affect both the businesses themselves, and the economic and political milieu in which these multinationals operate. Up-to-date empirical evidence is reviewed in a wide-ranging comparative framework that covers Britain and the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and many other societies, including emerging forms of capitalism in China and Russia. Unlike other specialist texts in the area, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes relates its concerns to issues of social stratification and class structure. The first and second editions of the book (under the title Corportations, Classes and Capitalism) were enthusiastically received, and the present edition reviews new theoretical ideas and empirical evidence that has emerged in the ten years since the second edition appeared. The text has been completely re-written and re-structured, and it relates its concerns to contemporary debates over 'disorganized capitalism' and post-industrialism.

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.

Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation

Abstract: Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are becoming poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the 'mistakes' of such elites, this title contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.