Extractivism and Labour Control: Reflections of Turkey’s ‘Coal Rush’ in Local Labour Regimes

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110462
Author(s):  
Coşku Çelik
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Community Dynamics ◽  
Control Strategies ◽  
Geological Structure ◽  
Extractive Industries ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Local Labour ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
State Capital ◽  
Workforce Composition

This study analyses labour processes and local labour control strategies in the extractive industries and regions as the reflections of state-capital-labour-nature relations. I argue that, for the analysis of labour control in extractive industries, there is a need to pay attention to (i) the significance of the natural resource for global capital accumulation processes and for the development policies of the state; (ii) the formation of the local labour market through proletarianization of rural population and other means of labour supply; (iii) the organization of work considering both natural limits (such as geological structure of the basin) and workforce composition; and (iv) the use of local political, institutional and community dynamics. Drawing upon the fieldwork carried out in Soma Coal Basin, this paper shows how Turkey’s coal rush shapes local labour control strategies.

Physical capital stock, technological upgrading and modernisation in Hungary

2005 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Szalavetz
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Physical Capital ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Technology Generation ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Specific Factors ◽  
Physical Capital Accumulation

This paper discusses the relation between the quality and quantity indicators of physical capital and modernisation. While international academic literature emphasises the role of intangible factors enabling technology generation and absorption rather than that of physical capital accumulation, this paper argues that the quantity and quality of physical capital are important modernisation factors, particularly in the case of small, undercapitalised countries that recently integrated into the world economy. The paper shows that in Hungary, as opposed to developed countries, the technological upgrading of capital assets was not necessarily accompanied by the upgrading of human capital i.e. the thesis of capital skill complementarity did not apply to the first decade of transformation and capital accumulation in Hungary. Finally, the paper shows that there are large differences between the average technological levels of individual industries. The dualism of the Hungarian economy, which is also manifest in terms of differences in the size of individual industries' technological gaps, is a disadvantage from the point of view of competitiveness. The increasing differences in the size of the technological gaps can be explained not only with industry-specific factors, but also with the weakness of technology and regional development policies, as well as with institutional deficiencies.

scholarly journals Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pun Ngai ◽  
Jenny Chan
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Frontline Workers ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Work Pressure ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Chinese Workers ◽  
Technology Group ◽  
The One

In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of capital expansion because of the incomparable speed and scale of its capital accumulation in all regions of China. This article explores how the workers at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, have been subjected to work pressure and desperation that might lead to suicides on the one hand but also open up daily and collective resistance on the other hand.

Globalization and Corporatism: The Growth and Decay of Organized Labor in Venezuela, 1900–1998

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 180-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudie Coker
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Foreign Debt ◽  
The State ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Private Capital ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
State Capital ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

The contradictory goals of state capital accumulation and redistribution eventually led to the demise of corporatism in Venezuela and probably in much of Latin America. When the Venezuelan state was at its zenith of intervention in the economy, it globalized accumulation via foreign debt. Rather than emphasize accumulation and redistribution as it had during the 1960s and 1970s, accumulation to service the debt became the state's central goal by the 1980s. Declining oil prices by the early 1980s highlighted the weakness of a state caught in the grips of antithetical demands from labor and an increasingly impoverished population, on the one hand, and private capital demanding debt repayment, on the other hand. By definition, corporatism creates a dependency between the state and organized labor. Historically, labor depended on the state for economic subsidies, and the state relied on labor to maintain legitimacy. By the late 1990s, lack of labor autonomy literally dragged labor down with a state drowning in debt and incapacitated by lack of legitimacy. While corporatism is more a relic of things past, the positive implications of increasing labor autonomy are dismal as organized labor has been disarticulated and the democratic state is all but a skeleton.

Revisiting Cognitive Mapping

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global North ◽  
State Capital ◽  
The Aesthetic

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide.

scholarly journals 'IF YOU CAN WORK FROM ANYWHERE, WHY WORK ANYWHERE ELSE?': FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP, REGIMES OF MOBILITY, AND THE DISCOURSE OF DIGITAL NOMADISM

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Elizabeth Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Office Work ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Central Resource ◽  
Citizenship Regimes ◽  
Traditional Structures

Digital nomadism is a term that has entered the cultural lexicon relatively recently to describe a lifestyle unbound from the traditional structures and constraints of office work (Makimoto and Manners, 1997; Cook, 2020; Thompson, 2018). This identity is organized around the digital technologies and infrastructures that make “remote work” possible, allowing digital nomads to claim “location independence” and granting them the freedom to travel while working (Nash et al., 2018). Largely employed as freelancers or as self-styled entrepreneurs, digital nomads assert their independence from the traditional strictures of work through the digital technologies they use at the same time that they remain “plugged in” to the infrastructures, economies, and lifeworlds of Silicon Valley (McElroy, 2019, p. 216). As such, the digital nomad represents a key site to examine privileged transnationalism and the enduring forms of coloniality that inform contemporary “regimes of mobility” (Hayes and Pérez-Gañán, 2017; Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013, p. 189). This paper considers how discourses of digital nomadism have been constructed, circulated, and leveraged by governments offering “digital nomad visas,” “remote work visas,” or “freelancer visas” to examine how regimes of mobility have been imagined and enacted. Utilizing discourse analysis to examine popular press articles, Instagram posts from the official accounts of tourism boards, and governmental websites, I examine the ways digital nomadism was constructed during the COVID-19 pandemic and consider how this lifestyle has been formalized and institutionalized. I argue that mobility itself has become a central resource through which nations compete for global capital accumulation.

scholarly journals A DNS-curve in a two-state capital accumulation model: a numerical analysis

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 701-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef L. Haunschmied ◽  
Peter M. Kort ◽  
Richard F. Hartl ◽  
Gustav Feichtinger
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Analysis ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Accumulation Model ◽  
State Capital

scholarly journals Variegated Privatisation: Class, Capital Accumulation and State in Turkey’s Privatisation Process in the 1980s and 1990s

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-156
Author(s):  
Ahmet Zaifer
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Privatisation Process ◽  
Domestic Capital ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
Alternative Approach

This article seeks to illustrate a problematic aspect of dominant-contemporary Marxian literature on privatisation: an overgeneralised explanation that shifting structural imperatives of contemporary capitalism, global powers and international financial institutions externally imposed privatisation downwards on all national-domestic political spaces. I suggest an alternative approach that emphasises the complex interplay of three internal factors – class agency, capital accumulation strategies, and state institutions – in mediating and shaping external pressures towards privatisation. Through a study of the Turkish privatisation process in the 1980s and 1990s, I illustrate that even though privatisation was thrust on Turkey by the structural dynamics, the World Bank, the IMF and global capital, its implementation has been contested inside and outside of the state apparatus by the Turkish power bloc (i.e. fractions of capital) within the constitutive context of the prevailing strategies of the domestic capital accumulation regime of Turkey at the time.

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