Capitalism, Crisis, and Contention: Race, Racism, and Resistance

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 151-167
Author(s):  
Lauren Langman
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Educational Status ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
The Face ◽  
Free Development ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Combination Of Material

Abstract For Marx, the alienation of wage labor and inherent crisis tendencies of capital would foster collective grievances and support for communist movements promising revolution and the abolition of private property, creating a society wherein “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” But a combination of material factors, the rise of the welfare state, increased wages, and later consumerism as well as ideologies such as religion and/or nationalism, thwarted revolutionary fervor in industrial societies. Nevertheless, Marxist theory provides a number of important insights that help us understand contemporary social mobilizations beginning with noting how historical legacies, materials conditions, class interests, and episodic crises dispose many movements, even those that take place on cultural terrains in public spheres and spaces while political economic/historical factors may not be evident. This can clearly be shown by understanding the nature of racism and the massive protests following the murder of George Floyd. The roots of racism, qua white ‘superiority’ were rooted in the colonial era in which the settlers enslaved Africans and forcibly displaced the native populations for clear economic gains. This was ideologically ‘legitimated’ by the dehumanization of racialized Others, it also provided ‘superior’ status and identity to Christian Caucasians. Moreover, such ideologies were sustained through violence, whether armed plantation owners, slave catchers, militias, and later police. For a variety of reasons, slavery ended but racism endures to this very day. But that said, between the growing economic and educational status of Africans Americans and the more progressive cosmopolitan/inclusive values and practices of the young, racism, for many, has waned. But police violence has not. In the face of growing inequality, the pandemic crisis that led to an economic crisis, especially onerous for the young and peoples of color, the murder of George Floyd, going viral, indicated how a number of the crises of neoliberal transnational capitalism migrated to the culture and led to massive protests and resistance against racism and police brutality.

scholarly journals Functions of Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-295
Author(s):  
Sikiru Adeyemi Ogundokun
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Creative Art ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Political Economic

Literature is an open concept and a creative art which expresses human history, experiences, imagination, observations, predictions and suggestions at a particular time in a given society. Either as fiction or non-fiction, literature can be rendered in both spoken and written words. It is often argued whether literature is for itself or the development of the society that produces it. This study, therefore, interrogates how the selected Francophone African novels, namely Sembène Ousmane’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu, Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, Ferdinand Oyono’s Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Aminata Sow Fall’s La grève des bàttu, Patrick Ilboudo’s Les vertiges du trône and Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle, depict the function of literature. The novelists are selected because of their inclination towards the social transformation paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to raise people’s awareness and mobilize them towards positive change. Based on close reading, the paper is built around Marxist theory which is interested in the class struggle as demonstrated in a literary text, with a view to deconstructing the existing capitalist tendencies in a given society. The findings reveal that the selected novels are focused on the poor conditions socio-politically, economically, culturally and psychologically that exist both during and after the colonial era. The paper concludes that literature helps readers to cope with the socio-cultural, political, economic, religious and other challenges of their immediate as well as remote environments through the process of self-discovery. As such, positive social change is possible through literature.

A Public Empire

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Pravilova
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Private Ownership ◽  
State Reform ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Public Status ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
The Face

“Property rights” and “Russia” do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. This book refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, the book shows the emergence of the new practices of owning “public things” in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, the book looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing “the public” through the reform of property rights.

National Liberalisms in Historical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark I. Vail
Keyword(s):  
Economic Model ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Market Making ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This chapter analyzes the development of French, German, and Italian liberalism from the nineteenth century to the 1980s, giving particular attention to each tradition’s conceptions of the role of the state and its relationship to groups and individual citizens. Using a broad range of historical source material and the works of influential political philosophers, it outlines the analytical frameworks central to French “statist liberalism,” German “corporate liberalism,” and Italian “clientelist liberalism.” It shows how these evolving traditions shaped the structure of each country’s postwar political-economic model and the policy priorities developed during the postwar boom through the early 1970s and provides conceptual touchstones for the direction and character of these traditions’ evolution in the face of the neoliberal challenge since the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates that each tradition accepted elements of a more liberal economic order while rejecting neoliberalism’s messianic market-making agenda and its abstract and disembedded political-economic vision.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 353-366
Author(s):  
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Housing Security ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
National Borders

Migration is a shared condition of all humanity. We have all been strangers in a strange land. All humanity lives today as a result of migration, by themselves or their ancestors. Migration is a matter sometimes of choice, often of need, and always an inalienable right. All helpless people deserve to be helped. Offering such help is a commandment and a blessing shared among all religions. Accordingly, as Pope Francis reminds us, our duties to migrants include “to welcome”, “to protect”, “to promote”, and “to integrate.” National borders are not a result of primary natural law, as aren’t private property and clothes, “because nature did not give [humans] clothes, but art invented them”. National borders depend on social, political and geographical factors. Therefore, faced with current waves of mass migration, in order to establish practices that respond to the common good we need to be guided by three levels of responsibility. The first principle being that “in case of need all things are common”, because “every man is my brother”. This principle is relative to existence or subsistence and conditions other related issues (such as accommodation, food, housing, security, etc.). Secondly, as part of the fundamental rights of people, legal guarantees of primary rights that foster an “organic participation” in the economic and social life of the nation. Access to these economic and social goods, including education and employment, will allow people to develop their own abilities. Thirdly, a deeper sense of integration, reflecting responsibilities related to protecting, examining and developing the values that underpin the deep, stable, unity of a society— and, more fundamentally, create a horizon of public peace, understood as St. Augustine’s "tranquility in order". In particular, with regards to the aforementioned context, policies on migration should be guided by prudence, but prudence must never mean exclusion. On the contrary, governments should evaluate, “with wisdom and foresight, the extent to which their country is in a position, without prejudice to the common good of citizens, to offer a decent life to migrants, especially those truly in need of protection. Strangely enough, the response of most governments in the face of this phenomenon only seems to value the third principle, completely disregarding the first two.

“All the World Was America”

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-43
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Process And Outcome ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

Though ubiquitous in contemporary political discourse, the trope of “security” is under-historicized. Countering ahistorical accounts of “post-9/11” political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security rhetoric and practice within the long history of colonial modernity at large. It proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice. And the enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state.

The Crisis of Free Society

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-136
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Calvo
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Face ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

This chapter focuses on American conservative economic thought, concentrating on George Fitzhugh, George Frederick Holmes, Thomas Skidmore, and Langton Byllesby. Material and intellectual capitalism are described as revolutionary movements that American conservatives organized against. Antebellum conservatives rejected bourgeois capitalist values, further illustrating the absence of a Smithian-inspired laissez-faire consensus. Combining these thinkers into a single chapter offers a fresh perspective on what constituted economic conservative thought in the face of capitalist revolution. Southern conservatives like Fitzhugh and Holmes reserved special animus towards Smith’s Wealth of Nations, highlighting the moral and social perils of free labor, competition, and industrialization, while celebrating the benefits of paternal slavery. In Northern industrial quarters, socialists like Skidmore and Byllesby challenged the foundational principles of bourgeois capitalism, denouncing profits, private property, the maldistribution of wealth, and the social and psychological externalities of industrialization. Skidmore and Byllesby voiced a home-grown version of socialist ideology then emerging among America’s working class.

Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Chinese Economy ◽  
Centralized Control ◽  
Market Pricing ◽  
Local Initiative ◽  
Agriculture Industry ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Economic

In December 1978, faced with the dual difficulties of political uncertainty in the wake of Mao’s death in 1976 and several years of economic stagnation, the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping announced a programme of economic reform. We may never know for sure whether Deng was all along a secret ‘capitalist roader’ (as Mao had claimed during the Cultural Revolution) or whether the reforms were simply a desperate move to ensure China’s economic security and bolster its prestige in the face of the rising tide of capitalist development in the rest of East and South- East Asia. The reforms just happened to coincide––and it is very hard to consider this as anything other than a conjunctural accident of world-historical significance––with the turn to neoliberal solutions in Britain and the United States. The outcome in China has been the construction of a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control. Elsewhere, as in Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the compatability between authoritarianism and the capitalist market had already been clearly established. While egalitarianism as a long-term goal for China was not abandoned, Deng argued that individual and local initiative had to be unleashed in order to increase productivity and spark economic growth. The corollary, that certain levels of inequality would inevitably arise, was well understood as something that would need to be tolerated. Under the slogan of xiaokang––the concept of an ideal society that provides well for all its citizens––Deng focused on ‘four modernizations’: in agriculture, industry, education, and science and defence. The reforms strove to bring market forces to bear internally within the Chinese economy. The idea was to stimulate competition between state-owned firms and thereby spark, it was hoped, innovation and growth. Market pricing was introduced, but this was probably far less significant than the rapid devolution of political-economic power to the regions and to the localities. This last move proved particularly astute. Confrontation with traditional power centres in Beijing was avoided and local initiatives could pioneer the way to a new social order.

Althusser, Louis Pierre (1918–90)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Callinicos
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Communist Movement ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Movements

Louis Althusser was the most influential philosopher to emerge in the revival of Marxist theory occasioned by the radical movements of the 1960s. His influence is, on the face of it, surprising, since Althusser’s Marx is not the theorist of revolutionary self-emancipation celebrated by the early Lukács. According to Althusser, Marx, along with Freud, was responsible for a ‘decentring’ of the human subject. History is ‘a process without a subject’. Its movement is beyond the comprehension of individual or collective subjects, and can only be grasped by a scientific ‘theoretical practice’ which keeps its distance from everyday experience. This austere version of Marxism nevertheless captured the imagination of many young intellectuals by calling for a ‘return to Marx’, with the implication that his writings had been distorted by the official communist movement. In fact, Althusser later conceded, his was an ‘imaginary Marxism’, a reconstruction of historical materialism reflecting the same philosophical climate that produced the post-structuralist appropriations of Nietzsche and Heidegger by Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. Most of the philosophical difficulties in which Althusser found himself can be traced back to the impossibility of fusing Marx’s and Nietzsche’s thought into a new synthesis.

scholarly journals Literacy, Advocacy and Agency: The Campaign for Political Recognition of Dyslexia in Britain (1962–1997)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Power And Agency ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Productive Worker

Summary This article charts the campaign for political recognition of dyslexia in Britain, focusing on the period from 1962 when concerted interest in the topic began. Through the Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children (1963–72), and the organisations that followed, it shows how dyslexia gradually came to be institutionalised, often in the face of government intransigence. The article shows how this process is best conceived as a complex interplay of groups, including advocates, researchers, civil servants and politicians of varying political stripes. Necessarily, the campaign was mediated through broader political, economic and social changes, including the increasing requirement for literacy in the productive worker, but it is not reducible to these factors. In this way, the article reflects on the conceptualisation of power and agency in accounts of the history of dyslexia to date and its broader relevance to the history of learning difficulties and disabilities.

Re-centreing the city: Spirits, local wisdom, and urban design at the Three Kings Monument of Chiang Mai

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Chiang Mai ◽  
Spirit Mediumship ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Face ◽  
Cultural Domination ◽  
Political Economic

Recent political events, such as the coup of 2006 or the ‘Red Shirt’ uprisings of 2010 underlined the divisions in Thai society between the provinces and the capital. As one of the world's most primate cities, Bangkok exerts a tremendous political, economic and cultural force upon the rest of Thailand. But how is such pressure interpreted, internalised and/or subverted? In this article, I look at Thailand's second-largest city, Chiang Mai, in Thailand's North, and the struggle to cure an increasing sense of urban crisis and thereby assert the former independent capital's symbolic authority vis-à-vis Bangkok. I examine this by looking at two specific discourses: that of architecture and spirit mediumship. Northern Thai architects attempt to cure Chiang Mai's ills through recourse to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the city's urban space, while spirit mediums call upon the sacred power of that space in order to restore Chiang Mai's ‘lost’ prosperity. The focal point for each effort lies at the city's centre: the Three Kings Monument and its surrounding plaza (khuang). Here, each group casts themselves as those most able to put Chiang Mai's past in physical form and thereby ensure Chiang Mai's future. In this article, I examine how ideas of cultural heritage become entwined with magico-religious concepts of power (sak). In each, there is a search for efficacious power in the face of political and cultural domination from Bangkok.

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