Capitalism

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

The fiscal crisis of the state

Abstract: Fiscal Crisis of the State refers to the tendency of government expenditures to outpace revenues in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its relevance to other countries of the period and also in today's global economy is evident. When government expenditure constitutes a larger and larger share of total economy theorists who ignore the impact of the state budget do so at their own (and capitalism's) peril. This volume examines how changes in tax rates and tax structure used to regulate private economic activity. O'Connor theorizes that particular expenditures and programs and the budget as a whole can be understood only in terms of power relationships within the private economy. O'Connor's analysis includes an anatomy of American state capitalism, political power and budgetary control in the United States, social capital expenditures, social expenses of production, financing the budget, and the scope and limits of reform. He shows that the simultaneous growth of monopoly power and the state itself generate an increasingly severe social crisis. State monopolies indirectly determine the state budget by generating needs that the state must satisfy. The state administration organizes production as a result of a series of political decisions. Over time, there is a tendency for what O'Connor calls the social expenses of production to rise, and the state is increasingly compelled to socialize these expenses. The state has three ways to finance increased budgetary outlays: create state enterprises that produce social expenditures; issue debt and borrowing against further tax revenues; raise tax rates and introduce new taxes. None of these mechanisms are satisfactory. Neither the development of state enterprise nor the growth of state debt liberates the state from fiscal concerns. Similarly, tax finance is a form of economic exploitation and thus a problem for class analysis. O'Connor contends that the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state is the inev

Neoliberalism as exception

Abstract: Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific. Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Abstract: The classic of common-sense economics. "Enormously broad in scope, pithily weaving together threads from Galbraith and Gandhi, capitalism and Buddhism, science and psychology."-- The New Republic

Capitalist development and democracy

Abstract: It is a commonplace claim of Western political discourse that capitalist development and democracy go hand in hand. Crossnational statistical research on political democracy supports this claim. By contrast, comparative historical studies carried out within a political economy approach argue that economic development was and is compatible with multiple political forms. The authors offer a fresh and persuasive resolution to the controversy arising out of these contrasting traditions. Focusing on advanced industrial countries, Latin America, and the Caribbean, they find that the rise and persistence of democracy cannot be explained either by an overall structural correspondence between capitalism and democracy or by the role of the bourgeoisie as the agent of democratic reform. Rather, capitalist development is associated with democracy because it transforms the class structure, enlarging the working and middle classes, facilitating their self-organization, and thus making it more difficult for elites to exclude them. Simultaneously, development weakens the landed upper class, democracy's most consistent opponent. The relationship of capitalist development to democracy, however, is not mechanical. As the authors show, it depends on a complex interplay of three clusters of power: the balance of power among social classes, power relations between the state and society, and transnational structures of economic and political power. Looking to the future, the book concludes with some reflections on current prospects for the development of stable democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe.