Capitalism

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

Putin: Russia's Choice

Abstract: Part 1: The Path to Power 1. The unlikely making of a leader 2. The succession operation Part 2: Russia at the Turn of the Millenium 1. Who is Mr Putin? 2. The nature of the system 3. The ideas behind the choice 4. Planning for the future 5. The state of the nation 6. The politics of 'nornalisation' Part 3: The Putin Way 1. Building the Putin bloc 2. Putin and the people 3. Leadership style 4. Putin's path: towards a Russian 'third way'? Part 4: State and Society 1. State and regime 2. State strengthening as politics or law 3. The 'liquidation of the oligarchs as a class' 4. Freedom of speech and the media 5. Judicial reform and human rights Part 5: Restructuring the Political Space 1. Changes to the party system 2. Changes to electoral legislation 3. Parliamentary realignment 4. Regime and opposition 5. Democracy and civil society Part 6: Putin and the Regions 1. Segmented regionalism 2. Segmented regionalism and state reconstitution 3. Establishing the presidential 'vertical' 4. Reorganising federal relations 5. Regional governors and legislatures 6. State reconstitution and federalism Part 7: Reforging the Nation 1. Images of the nation and symbols of the state 2. Social aspects of national identity 3. Chechnya: tombstone or crucible of Russian power? Part 8: Russian Capitalism 1. Entering the market 2. Models of capitalism: oligarchical democracy? 3. State economy and society Part 9: Putin and the World 1. The normalisation of foreign policy 2. Putin's choice 3. Practising normality Part 10: Conclusion 1. Out of the wilderness? 2. Putin and the power of contradiction

Compressed modernity and its discontents: South Korean society in transtion

Abstract: According to conventional economic indicators, since late 1997 history has been reversed for South Koreans since late 1997. Their current financial crisis, which would have led to a moratorium without the emergency bail-out packae from teh International Monetary Fund, seems to require not only economic austerity for business firms and citizen but also a total devaluation of their developmental ‘micacle’ in the latter half of the twentieth century. South Koreans' dilemma, if evaluated from a broad historical and theoretical perspective on their compresed modernity, is that the vary mechanisms which made their explosive economic growth possible tend to create various hazardous consequences in social, political, cultural as well as economic life. Patriarchal political authoritarianism chaebol's despotic and monopolistic business practice, abuse and exclusion of labour, neglect of basic welfare rights, ubiquitous physical dangers, and ideological self-nagation are particularly serious examples of such hazards...

Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India

Abstract: The recent economic rise of China and India has attracted a great deal of attention--and justifiably so. Together, the two countries account for one-fifth of the global economy and are projected to represent a full third of the world's income by 2025. Yet, many of the views regarding China and India's market reforms and high growth have been tendentious, exaggerated, or oversimplified. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay scrutinizes the phenomenal rise of both nations, and demolishes the myths that have accumulated around the economic achievements of these two giants in the last quarter century. Exploring the challenges that both countries must overcome to become true leaders in the international economy, Pranab Bardhan looks beyond short-run macroeconomic issues to examine and compare China and India's major policy changes, political and economic structures, and current general performance. Bardhan investigates the two countries' economic reforms, each nation's pattern and composition of growth, and the problems afflicting their agricultural, industrial, infrastructural, and financial sectors. He considers how these factors affect China and India's poverty, inequality, and environment, how political factors shape each country's pattern of burgeoning capitalism, and how significant poverty reduction in both countries is mainly due to domestic factors--not global integration, as most would believe. He shows how authoritarianism has distorted Chinese development while democratic governance in India has been marred by severe accountability failures. Full of valuable insights, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay provides a nuanced picture of China and India's complex political economy at a time of startling global reconfiguration and change.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996: The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. Oxford: Blackwell

Abstract: Commentary 1 Even the title is a classic. A dramatic assertion – surely that can’t be right? – followed immediately by a teasingly ambivalent parenthesis. So not the end just yet. Just the end of what we had become accustomed to. Or is it, rather, the end of how we had come to know capitalism as the overwhelming structures and effects of ‘a discourse of Capitalism’ (p. 252)? Reading further is, clearly, not just desirable but necessary. The subtitle is critically important too. Taking its lead from relational thinking in feminism – ‘[I]dentity, whether of the subject or of society, cannot ... be seen as the property of a bounded and centred being that reveals itself in history. Instead, identity is open, incomplete, multiple, shifting’ (p. 12) – the book applies it to Capitalism (as we had come to know it). Thus is the profound agenda of this book announced – tightly, provocatively and, above all, with deep political and intellectual sensitivity. This is the way it is throughout. Of course, many books scale such heights, but there is more here, much more. Much of this derives, I think, from the collaboration which drives the book. Collaboration involves far more than mere cooperation. More than the ability to develop a productive division of labour better to handle complex and profound issues. More even than the engagement in, as JKGG put it (p. xii), ‘a much more adventurous approach to reading, writing and the practice of research’. It involves, above all, an openness to argument, to positive self-critique and self-decentring. In short, an openness to difference and to other. But collaboration is not merely a (highly) effective authorial strategy. In this book, it extends to countless others – the range of whom may be discerned from the Community Economies website (www.community economies.org) and the Diverse Economies mail list and online bibliography (http://phg .sagepub.com) – and to the ‘more arduous project’ (p. 5) of practice in diverse communities around the world. This, then, is a book which, through collaboration, engages. It goes far beyond declamation – no matter how intellectually well-founded that may be – to expose futures realizable not just in thought, but through thought and action. So it engages not just with ideas but with politics, with possibilities, with people. Not only collaborative then, but generous and humane. Its concern is with those distant others whom, by its very nature, it is able to reach and to mobilize. Collaboration also involves commitment beyond the immediate here and now. This book was never a one-off to be followed (or not) merely by other one-offs. Ten years after its initial publication, not only did the University of Minnesota Press put out a second edition (Gibson-Graham, 2006b) but, at the same time, published the post-deconstructive sequel (Gibson-Graham, 2006a) setting out a map of potential futures. Thus The end of capitalism

Of patriarchy born: the political economy of fertility decisions

Abstract: If feminist theory does offer a unique insight into womens position in society it must also provide some distinctive contribution to the explanation of fertility decline. Similarly if forms of social control over womens reproductive capacity represent an important component of patriarchal inequality an analysis of changes in the utilization of that reproductive capacity must help reveal some of the laws of motion of patriarchy. Both of these claims are explored in some detail. It is argued that the transition to capitalism modifies some traditional patriarchal inequalities increasing the cost of children to parents and to men in particular. In developng this argument no assumption is made that family decisions can be reduced to a consideration of material costs and benefits merely that they are affected in the long run by economic constraints. Demographic literature which centers on a critique of neoclassical economic theories of fertility decline is reviewed followed by the initial part of the argument that patriarchal inequalities affect the costs of children. Reviewing a large and diverse body of literature describing societies in which elder males own or control access to the means of production 2 distinct but interrelated hypotheses are defended. These are: 1) patriarchal control over adult children enhances parents ability to enjoy positive economic benefits and/or to substantially defray the costs of children and 2) patriarchal control over women enhances mens ability to shift a significant proportion of the cost of children to individual mothers by increasing the length of their workday and lowering the opportunity cost of their time. Finally changes in these particular forms of patriarchal control are linked to the growth of market production and wage labor. The transition to capitalism leads to the genesis of new motives and mechanisms for control over womens labor power yet it diminishes partriarchal authority over adult children. Consequently it reduces the economic benefits of large families. Thus it contributes to a decline in desired family size which weakens resistance to womens demands for control over their own reproduction and modifies the traditional sexual division of labor. Both these changes contribute to the continuing process of fertility decline. The demographic and economic changes described have not led to any visible lessening of the sexual wage differential but they have improved womens position within the family. They have also undermined the economic stability of family life. Feminists must move beyond critical analysis to a more explicit consideration of the ways in which parenthood could and should be organized.