Capitalism

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

Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism

Abstract: George Soros's The Crisis of Global Capitalism became an international bestseller and an instant classic; a must read for anyone concerned with the complex market forces that rule our global economy and create both prosperity and instability. Now, in Open Society, Soros takes a new and provocative look at the arguments he made in that book, incorporating the latest global economic and political developments into his analysis. He shows how our economic and political arrangements are out of sync. Recognizing that our existing institutions are under the sway of sovereign states, he proposes an "open society alliance" with the dual purpose of fostering open societies in individual countries and laying the groundwork for a global open society. In leading up to his inspiring vision, Soros presents an iconoclastic view of the world that has guided him both in making money and spending it on his network of Open Society Foundations. This book sums up the life's work of an exceptional individual. George Soros is the best fund manager in history, a stateless statesman, and an original thinker.

Political economy and capitalism: notes on Dobb's theory of crisis

Abstract: I began the formal study of economics in the late 1960s, when the cry for 'relevance' was sweeping the US. Though at the time we were frequently unclear about just what our demand for 'relevance' implied, we were certain of one thing: it did not imply any further meditation on the arcane mysteries of perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect greed. Not surprisingly, many of us turned elsewhere to acquire the knowledge which was so conspicuously absent from our education. And as we did so, we came to realise that 'relevance' meant much more than just focusing on the concrete history and existence of our world: it meant having a practice which made such a study necessary, and a theoretical structure which made its results intelligible. Maurice Dobb had such a practice and theory-Marxism-and he illuminated it with a guiding intelligence which makes his work 'relevant' in the precise sense of the word: it continues to be important to our understanding of the conditions in which we live. In these few pages, it is obviously impossible to do justice to the scope and depth ofDobb's contribution to Marxist economic theory. I do not intend even to try. Instead, what I would like to do is to try to focus on one particularly important work of his, Political Economy and Capitalism. On re-reading this book, which was written in 1937, I was especially struck by the timeliness of Dobb's discussion of the contradictions in capitalist accumulation. The current crisis in world capitalism has made crisis theory respectable once again, thus giving rise to a fresh round of debates on many of the very same issues which Dobb analysed almost 40 years ago. Of course, to a certain extent Maurice Dobb's contributions are already incorporated into the current discussions; nonetheless, there are still many lessons to be learned from this book alone. One of the most important points Dobb makes in his analysis of crises is to emphasise that, within Marxist analysis, a crisis is not to be viewed as a departure from equilibrium; instead, a crisis is the equilibrating mechanism itself. It 'appears as catharsis as well as retribution: as the sole mechanism by which, in [the capitalist system], equilibrium can be enforced' (Dobb, 1937, pp. 102-103); to 'study crises [is] ipso facto to study the dynamics of the system', for they are its 'dominant form of movement' (p. 80). This is a crucial point to make, for otherwise Marxist analysis is saddled with a notion of 'equilibrium' which is imported wholesale from orthodox economics. Marx's own

Planetary Rent Gaps

Abstract: In this paper I recapitulate the origins, structure, and purpose of Neil Smith's rent gap theory, and assess the frequently discussed but rarely dissected empirical studies of rent gaps, in order to trace the key analytical and political shifts Smith effected (from consumer preference to mortgage capital circulation, from “natural areas” to state structures, from house prices to capital depreciation, and from middle class demand to class struggle), as well as posit some possible extensions of the theory vis a vis territorial stigmatisation and displacement. This tracing and extending in place, I then consider the rent gap in the context of the emerging body of work on planetary urbanisation, and argue that the theory helps to expose and confront new geographies of structural violence—planetary rent gaps—where the constitutive power of speculative landed developer interests in processes of capitalist urbanisation can be analysed and challenged. If, as David Harvey has recently argued, rent “has to be brought forward into the forefront of analysis … [to] bring together an understanding of the ongoing production of space and geography and the circulation and accumulation of capital” (2010:183, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, Profile), then it is important to consider what we can learn from the rent gap today, rather than relegate it, as so many seem to do, to something that has already been debated or exhausted in the large literature on gentrification.

Domestic structures, foreign economic policies and global economic order: Implications from the rise of large emerging economies

Abstract: The rise of the large emerging economies of Brazil, India and China can easily be counted among the most important contemporary structural changes in the global political economy. This article attempts to determine whether these countries have a common institutional model for governing their economies and addresses the implications of these commonalities for global economic institutions. The approach consists of three major steps: first, a general ideal type for encompassing capitalism in these large emerging economies is constructed, and dubbed ‘state-permeated market economy’; second, we compare these countries empirically, with regard to the features highlighted by the ideal type and in contrast to other varieties of capitalism; and, finally, we extrapolate some long-term implications for the global economic order, based on the assumption that foreign economic policies will be informed by domestic institutional structures. Based on these three steps, we conclude that a further deepening of the liberal global order is highly unlikely