Is Neo-Liberal Capitalism Eating Itself or Its Young?

Using the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible as a test case, this article illustrates some of the important ways in which the Bible is understood and consumed and how it has continued to survive in an age of neoliberalism and postmodernity. It is clear that instant recognition of the Bible-as-artefact, multiple repackaging and pithy biblical phrases, combined with a popular nationalism, provide distinctive strands of this understanding and survival. It is also clear that the KJV is seen as a key part of a proud English cultural heritage and tied in with traditions of democracy and tolerance, despite having next to nothing to do with either. Anything potentially problematic for Western liberal discourse (e.g. calling outsiders “dogs,” smashing babies heads against rocks, Hades-fire for the rich, killing heretics, using the Bible to convert and colonize, etc.) is effectively removed, or even encouraged to be removed, from such discussions of the KJV and the Bible in the public arena. In other words, this is a decaffeinated Bible that has been colonized by, and has adapted to, Western liberal capitalism.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198809982.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Andrea Henderson

Keyword(s):

Mathematical Formalism ◽

Victorian England ◽

The World ◽

Liberal Capitalism ◽

Internal Coherence ◽

Referential Practice

Victorian England witnessed a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. The value of a mathematical claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. Victorian mathematics thus contributed to the development of liberal capitalism by justifying abstraction: liberals proclaimed that formal consistency was the foundation of a rational, equitable order, and marginalist economists insisted that value was not inherent but relational, and made economics a branch of mathematics. Marx, meanwhile, profited from the insights of mathematical formalism even as he resisted its mystification. In its privileging of formal relationships Victorian mathematics redefined all fields around it, even redefining Kantian formalism such that mathematics and art came to share the same virtues: they couldn’t claim to offer truths about the world itself but they insisted that they told a deeper, formal truth.

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Shifts and continuities in Zulu personal naming practices

Literator ◽

10.4102/lit.v34i1.431 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Sihawukele Ngubane ◽

Nompumelelo Thabethe

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Cultural Environment ◽

Political Factors ◽

Strong Argument ◽

Personal Names ◽

Major Transformation ◽

Liberal Capitalism ◽

Political Conditions ◽

Historical Moment ◽

Naming Practices

It is widely accepted that, in all societies, personal naming practices and culture are intertwined. Given that culture is not static, but dynamic and ever changing, personal names have undergone a major transformation due to socio-cultural and political factors. This article reflects on shifts and continuities in the practice of personal naming amongst the Zulu people. Emerging data demonstrate the evolution from pre-colonial Africa to the post-1994 period in South Africa. It is further illustrated that the reclaiming of indigenous names in the new democratic dispensation is perceived as a way for Africans to re-define and re-affirm their identities, thus de-stigmatising their culture. Ultimately, this article makes a strong argument that personal naming, in any society, is not detached from the socio-cultural environment. Rather, personal naming and culture are inextricably linked to socio-political conditions at any historical moment. This is demonstrated in the shift from personal naming practices greatly inspired by communal values to those steeped in contradictions within the epoch of neo-liberal capitalism. It is, therefore, concluded that shifts in people’s consciousness lead to fundamental shifts in personal naming practices.

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Indirect Subjects

10.1215/9781478021506 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew H. Brown

Keyword(s):

Power Relations ◽

Television Programs ◽

Culture Industries ◽

Screen Media ◽

African People ◽

Local Practices ◽

Global Power ◽

Liberal Capitalism ◽

Nigerian Film ◽

Indirect Rule

In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.

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Neo-Liberal Capitalism and the War on Young People: Growing Up with the Illusion of Choice and the Ambivalence of Freedom

Young People and the Politics of Outrage and Hope ◽

10.1163/9789004387492_008 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 105-119

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Growing Up ◽

Liberal Capitalism

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FIELDS OF DREAMS, FIELDS OF SCHEMES: PONZI FINANCE AND MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING IN SOUTH AFRICA

Africa ◽

10.1017/s0001972011000738 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 82 (1) ◽

pp. 69-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

Detlev Krige

Keyword(s):

Cultural Values ◽

Risk Taking ◽

Rapid Change ◽

Marketing Strategies ◽

New Members ◽

Work From Home ◽

Liberal Capitalism ◽

Multi Level ◽

Pyramid Schemes ◽

Social Logics

ABSTRACTThe structural conditions associated with increased inequality amidst rapid change brought about by growing financialization and efforts to get the ‘unbanked’ sections of society into the formal financial system have created the conditions under which illegal pyramid and ponzi schemes, fake investment schemes, and legal multi-level marketing companies have been able to flourish. In contemporary Johannesburg and Soweto the originators of money multiplication schemes and the agents who ‘work’ to recruit new members position themselves in this context as financial entrepreneurs and brokers who embody a range of seemingly contradictory discourses, drawing on discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘self-help’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘religiously sanctioned wealth and prosperity’ in the course of their risk taking in the field of finance. Based on a series of case studies of female agents of ‘push-push’ schemes, the article shows how many of these discourses reflect some of the conditions of contemporary capitalism: citizens are expected to be active investors, active entrepreneurs and hard workers who are able to work from home and without a boss. Moreover, the schemes use sophisticated technologies, marketing strategies and other practices which simulate formality, legality and sincerity – echoing religious practices and discourses. At the same time a set of cultural values and social logics that are not necessarily produced by neo-liberal capitalism and financialization, but are certainly activated by them, makes it hard for citizens to recognize or admit the forms of deception involved, unless deception is seen to be central to the operation of the modern state or the present ‘get-rich-quick’ culture. Risk taking, and pursuit of social mobility, originate in dual economy legacies, with their unfulfilled expectations, wealth disparities and frustrated class aspiration. Participants in pyramid schemes have ideologies combining ‘progress’ with ‘imminent doom’, entrepreneurship with greed: contradictory attitudes reflective of financialization in the broader world.

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Beckett's Present Moments

Journal of Beckett Studies ◽

10.3366/jobs.2021.0326 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 8-25

Author(s):

Rodney Sharkey

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Middle Class ◽

European Society ◽

Present Moment ◽

Aesthetic Theory ◽

Contemporary World ◽

Aesthetic Form ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Liberal Capitalism ◽

Late Twentieth Century

As a comfortable middle-class Protestant in Southern Ireland, Beckett was well placed to live the life of what Badiou ironically refers to as ‘the deserving body’ (59). However, Beckett moved beyond such home comforts to witness at close hand some of the most disruptive moments of twentieth century European history. This essay proposes that his work is both a manifestation of that history and a complex response to it in its content, and, particularly, in its form. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodore Adorno proposes that ‘the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’ (7). Exemplifying Adorno's proposition that ‘aesthetic form is sedimented context’ (9) Beckett's work remains disruptive of Western late capital commodification through the restatement of historical antagonisms that involve characters having to choose between privilege and impoverishment, quietism and protest, and being and its obliteration. The result is a body of work that continues to present, for its readers’ consideration, the parameters of a politics of choice which are repeatedly instantiated by the traces of the tumultuous history the work carries within itself. As the decisions facing Beckett's characters reflected those faced by late twentieth century European society, so too his work now resonates in the present moment as the contemporary world struggles in the shadow of neo-liberal capitalism and COVID-19.

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Politics of Development in Pakistan: From the Post-Independence Modernization Project to ‘Vision 2025’

Journal of South Asian Development ◽

10.1177/09731741211034018 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 097317412110340

Author(s):

Aliya Abbasi

Keyword(s):

Critical Evaluation ◽

Development Project ◽

Critical Discussion ◽

Income Support ◽

Policy Reforms ◽

Support Programme ◽

Poor Families ◽

Development Trajectory ◽

Underlying Causes ◽

Liberal Capitalism

This article critically analyses Pakistan’s development project since its independence in 1947 up till Vision 2025 of 2014. Vision 2025 aspires to ‘inclusive growth’ through the expansion of the market as the basis for a ‘people-centric’ approach to development. Based on a critical evaluation of Pakistan’s development trajectory, I argue that a reliance on economic growth via liberal capitalism to address poverty has failed in Pakistan. Post-independence aspirations of decent livelihoods became disrupted by the development project, which evolved through Cold War politics. Premised upon the privileging of liberal capitalism, this modernization project was executed by authoritarian regimes that initiated new processes of dispossession and accentuated existent inequalities. Moreover, a critical analysis of Pakistan’s development crises must consider how poverty intersects with social inequality justified through zat or caste to reproduce entrenched positions of privilege and disadvantage. Mainstream Pakistani society comprises an efficacious trope of inequality normalized through the ‘othering’ of poor families, resistance to which is misrepresented as a lack of character and industry. Impoverished communities bear disproportionate costs of development, which compel them to find shelter in segregated communities in slums and earn a living as servants, vendors and through begging, including children on the streets. In the wake of neo-liberal policy reforms, the Benazir Income Support Programme provides temporary monetary relief to some but leaves intact the underlying causes of worsening inequality. A critical discussion of Pakistan’s development trajectory challenges the ideological premises of Vision 2025 and its promise of universal wellbeing.

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