Green versus Ecosocialist Economic Programmes: The Market Rules OK?

1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Eckersley

Since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall there has been a chorus sounding the death of the command economy and the triumph of liberal capitalism. It does seem to be the case that ‘capitalism is everywhere receiving the flattery of imitation’.1 It is also the case that socialist thought – both western and eastern – is undergoing a profound shake-up in response to the economic and ecological challenges of the late twentieth century. Whether a new socialism will withstand these momentous challenges and emerge as the political saviour of our time is an open question. What is clear, however, is that the growing momentum of the ecological critique of capitalism is likely to ensure that the 200-year-old debate concerning the respective merits and demerits of the market versus economic planning is not going to disappear, although the debate is likely to be considerably reformulated. This paper is concerned to review the arguments for and against the market economy versus the planned economy in the light of the social and ecological problems of the late twentieth century and to compare and evaluate the alternative economic programmes defended by ecosocialists and Green economists in response to these problems.

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
Rodney Sharkey

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 420-444
Author(s):  
Greg Bak

ABSTRACT Helen Samuels sought to document institutions in society by adding to official archives counterweights of private records and archivist-created records such as oral histories. In this way, she recognized and sought to mitigate biases that arise from institution-centric application of archival functionalism. Samuels's thinking emerged from a late-twentieth-century consensus on the social license for archival appraisal, which formed around the work of West German archivist Hans Booms, who wrote, “If there is indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy to archival appraisal, it is society itself.” Today, archivists require renewed social license in light of acknowledgment that North American governments and institutions sought to open lands for settlement and for exploitation of natural resources by removing or eliminating Indigenous peoples. Can a society be said to “lend legitimacy” to archival appraisal when it has grossly violated human, civil, and Indigenous rights? Starting from the question of how to create an adequate archives of Canada's Indigenous residential school system, the author locates Samuels's work amid other late-twentieth-century work on appraisal and asks how far her thinking can take us in pursuit of archival decolonization.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro

The introduction sketches the contours of the book. It details the construction of a moral panic concerning the abduction of children by strangers in the late twentieth century and lays out the political and cultural ramifications of this panic. As the introduction indicates and the rest of the book demonstrates, this panic—precipitated by the bereaved parents of missing and slain children, the news media, and politicians—led to the consolidation of a “child safety regime” and the expansion of the American carceral state. The introduction situates this argument within the existing historiography of late twentieth-century United States politics and culture, as well as the growing literature on carceral studies.


2018 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
David Biggs

The environmental history of war, especially its impacts on landscape, encompasses a much broader scope than the conflicts and the historiography of the late twentieth century. Ideas on the social and environmental processes of conflict draw from a much longer, global discourse. This chapter uses the ancient-to-modern conflict landscape of central Vietnam to argue for a multi-layered, broader analysis of the environmental history of conflict.


Author(s):  
Richard K. Wolf

Based on extensive research in India and Pakistan, this book examines the ways drumming and voices interconnect over vast areas of South Asia and considers what it means for musical instruments to be voice-like and carry textual messages in particular contexts. The book employs a hybrid, novelistic form of presentation in which the fictional protagonist Muharram Ali, a man obsessed with finding music he believes will dissolve religious and political barriers, interacts with the book's field consultants, to communicate ethnographic and historical realities that transcend the local details of any one person's life. The result is a daring narrative that follows Muharram Ali on a journey that explores how the themes of South Asian Muslims and their neighbors coming together, moving apart, and relating to God and spiritual intermediaries resonate across ritual and expressive forms such as drumming and dancing. The story charts the breakdown of this naiveté. A daring narrative of music, religion and politics in late twentieth century South Asia, the book delves into the social and religious principles around which Muslims, Hindus, and others bond, create distinctions, reflect upon one another, or decline to acknowledge differences.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Marco Burgalassi ◽  
Eleonora Melchiorre

In Italy the social services have always been a marginal part of social protection system and only since the late twentieth century had a development. This development, however, at some time has stopped. The process of “liability reduction” of the national government towards the local welfare system and recent cuts in social funding, in fact, have led to a new decline of social services. This essay presents a longitudinal view of the issues that concerned the social services sector over the course of the last two decades. The objective of the analyses is to demonstrate that the recent decline in the social services system is tied to the economic recession of 2008, but was above all caused by the reaffirmation of the traditionally marginal position of social services on the agenda of the national government. The theoretical framework used considers the development of social services of the years of the late twentieth century as a passage of the extension and consolidation process of the Italian system of social protection built since the '60s. However, in this process the social services was placed at the edge of the main path and this determined the weakness of their position. Thus, the external event represented by the international financial crisis has had a negative impact almost exclusively on social services, while the historical features and the path of structuring of the Italian system of social protection has prevented the same happen for the other sectors (pensions, health).


Author(s):  
Ирина Львовна Ефремова

В статье рассматриваются мотивы повести выдающегося отечественного прозаика Юрия Красавина «Хуторок», которые можно трактовать как экзистенциальные: мотив одиночества, мотив отчуждения, мотив бессмысленности существования человека, заброшенного в бездну бытия. Произведение реалистично передаёт атмосферу эпохи, социально-нравственный кризис, переживаемый обществом в период перестройки конца ХХ века. Мечты героя помогают преодолевать трудности жизни и в конечном итоге раскрывают путь нравственного перерождения и духовного спасения. The article considers the motives of the story «Khutorok» by the outstanding Russian prose writer Yuri Krasavin, which can be interpreted as existential: the motive of loneliness, the motive of alienation and the motive of meaningless existence of a person thrown into the abyss of being. The work realistically conveys the atmosphere of the era, the social and moral crisis experienced by society during the period of Perestroika in the late twentieth century. The hero’s dreams help him overcome the difficulties of life and ultimately reveal the path of moral rebirth and spiritual salvation.


Author(s):  
Alys Moody

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...


Author(s):  
Marie McCarthy

This chapter revisits the writings of music sociologist and educator Max Kaplan (1911–1998) to inform efforts to bring together the domains of leisure and music making in the twenty-first century. The chapter begins with a brief description of Max Kaplan’s life that explains his orientation to the social functions of music, sociology, and leisure studies, and that situates his contributions in the context of his time—the mid and late twentieth century. Following the introduction, the chapter is organized around themes from Kaplan’s published works and projects: patterns of development in leisure and recreation, 1900–1960; changing conceptions of leisure and recreation in the mid-twentieth century; a theory of recreational music; community as fertile ground for observing leisure in action; music making in the context of leisure; and moving forward with Kaplan’s vision.


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