scholarly journals Infinite Capital Accumulation Through the Endless Harvesting of Limitless Dead Souls. Criminogenic Asymmetries, Structural Inequalities, Mimesis, and Parallel Oligarchies

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 60-76
Author(s):  
E. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Analytical Study ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Research Paradigm ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Criminogenic Asymmetries ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
Near Future ◽  
General Concern

   This article is neither an empirical nor an analytical study; rather, it is a concise statement of a research paradigm that reflects the personal (and perhaps idiosyncratic) concerns of its author, which he wishes to continue and elaborate upon in much further detail at some point in the near future (if any). The general concern is with devising a functional criminological taxonomy of the multitudinous mutabilities migrating between neo-liberal political economy and organised and semi-organised criminality, here defined as criminogenic asymmetries. My central premise is this: although frequently associated in the scholarly literature with corruption, underdevelopment, anomie, and the breakdown of the brokerage of trust, neo-liberalism itself is the sufficient explanation for criminogenic asymmetries. As should be expected, the “moral panic” over the “death of democracy”, already part of our post-1989 history but currently symbolised by the “power crime” presidency of Donald J. Trump, w ill be utilised as the primary empirical example of these trends, both concurrent and convergent.

scholarly journals The Sociology of Agriculture in Transition: The Political Economy of Agriculture after Biotechnology

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Pechlaner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Agricultural Biotechnology ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Patent Infringement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Corporate Ownership ◽  
Seed Saving ◽  
Traditional Agricultural Practices ◽  
Sociology Of Agriculture

ABSTRACT Due to its particularities as a nature-based process, agriculture’s ‘exceptionalism’ to capitalist industrialization has garnered much debate. One of the more productive consequences of this debate has been the development of conceptual tools that account for its distinction from typical capital accumulation patterns, such as Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson’s (1987) classic concepts of “appropriationism” and “substitutionism.” The advent of agricultural biotechnology is now testing the limits of even these more refined conceptualizations, however, as the technology’s associated proprietary framework is reorganizing many traditional agricultural practices. Drawing on empirical examples of biotechnology-induced change—e.g. restrictions on seed saving, grower contracts, and patent infringement lawsuits—this paper argues that there is a need for a new concept in political economy of agriculture theory, which I term “expropriationism.” This concept identifies several aspects of an agricultural reorganization premised on legal means to enhance capital accumulation and on separating corporate ownership from liability.

POLITY AND ECONOMY IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Loren Lomasky
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
Liberal Political Economy

AbstractAlthough the architectonic of Plato’s best city is dazzling, some critics find its detailed prescriptions inimical to human freedom and well-being. Most notably, Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies sees it as a proto-totalitarian recipe, choking all initiative and variety out of the citizenry. This essay does not directly respond to Popper’s critique but instead spotlights a strand in the dialogue that positions Plato as an advocate of regulatory relaxation and economic liberty to an extent otherwise unknown in the ancient world and by no means unopposed in ours. His contribution to liberal political economy thereby merits greater attention and respect.

scholarly journals Free Trade and Empire in the Anglo-Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Free Trade Area ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Trade Area ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The Right ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
Open Markets

AbstractWilliam Pitt's 1785 proposal for a free trade area between Britain and Ireland attempted to use free trade as a mechanism of imperial integration. It was a response to the agitation for political reform in Ireland and followed the attainment of legislative independence in 1782. The proposal aimed at coordinating economic and fiscal policy between the kingdoms without imposing explicit political controls. This article establishes that the measure failed because of the lack of consensus around the idea of free trade. Three contrasting ideas of free trade became apparent in the debates around the propositions of 1785: imperial or neomercantilist free trade, Smithean free trade, and national or neo-Machiavellian free trade. Imperial free trade was critical of monopolies but sought to organize trade to the benefit of the imperial metropole; Smithean free trade saw open markets as a discipline that assured efficiency but required imperial institutional frameworks, legally secured, to function. Neo-Machiavellian free trade asserted the right of every political community to organize its trade according to its interests. The article establishes the genealogy of these three positions in pamphlet debates and political correspondence in Britain and Ireland from 1689 to 1785. It argues that majority political opinion in Ireland, with exceptions, understood free trade in a neo-Machiavellian sense, while Pitt was committed to a Smithean ideal. The propositions collapsed because these internal tensions became more evident under the pressure of criticism. Liberal political economy did not of itself offer a route to a British exceptionality that finessed the tensions inherent in empire.

scholarly journals Distributing productive play: a materialist analysis of Steam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Interaction Design ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sales Promotions ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
New Space ◽  
A Site

Valve Corporation’s digital game distribution platform, Steam, is the largest distributor of games on personal computers, analyzed here as a site where control over the production, design and use of digital games is established. Steam creates and exercises processes and techniques such as monopolization and enclosure over creative products, online labour, and exchange among game designers. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework places communication at the centre of the political economy, here of digital commodities distributed and produced by online platforms like Steam. James Gibson’s affordance theory allows the market Steam’s owners create for its users to be cast in terms of visuality and interaction design. These theories are largely neglected in the existing literature in game studies, platform studies, and political economy, but they allow intervention in an ongoing debate concerning the ontological status of work and play as distinct, separate human activities by offering a specific focus on the political economy of visual or algorithmic communication. Three case studies then analyze Steam as a site where the slippage between game-play and work is constant and deepening. The first isolates three sales promotions on Steam as forms of work disguised as online shopping. The second is a discourse analysis of a crisis within the community of mod creators for the game Skyrim, triggered by changes implemented on Steam. The third case study critiques Valve Corporation’s positioning of Steam as a new space to extract value from play by demonstrating historical continuity with consumer monopolies. A concluding discussion argues Steam is a platform that evolves to meet distinct crises and problems in the production and circulation of its digital commodities as contradictions arise. Ultimately, Steam shows how the cycle of capital accumulation encourages monopolization and centralization.

Conclusion: Thailand at the Margins

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Glassman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Industrial Transformation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legitimate Concern ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
Full Force ◽  
The Cold War

The economic crisis and the rise of the Thai Rak Thai Party supplies a paradoxical dénouement to a half-century of rapid Thai economic growth and industrial transformation—as well as to a much longer period of internationalization and general social change. The paradox, however, is not an unsolvable riddle but rather the contradictory character of dependent capitalist development, which inevitably brings destruction along in the train of creation, predicating new possibilities of accumulation on processes of violent devaluation. The Thai political economy now experiences this volatility in virtually full force, having been ‘opened’ and integrated into the rhythms of global capital accumulation over the course of more than a century. The seeming stability and predictable growth of the years between 1950 and 1995 were facilitated tremendously by Thailand’s integral role in the Cold War system, which created various ‘conjunctural’ cushions against the underlying volatility (e.g. US aid, favoured trade status). With the end of the Cold War system, the Thai political economy is now being increasingly thrust into the less predictable world of global neo-liberalism and post-Fordism and is thus less cushioned against capitalism’s ‘gales of creative destruction’. To say this is not to say that growth and industrialization are now on hold. The crisis may well open new opportunities for accumulation and even resumption of rapid growth. But even successful capitalist growth has always done damage to a significant portion of the population—creating and perpetuating enormous socio-spatial disparities—and it will very likely continue to do so in the future. At the same time, the vagaries of the era of ‘globalization’ may make the growth dynamic much rockier than in the past. Boosters of East Asian ‘miracles’ should be reminded that other political economies—e.g. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina—have been regarded as ‘miracles’ in the past, and while these remain important industrial producers today, they would hardly be invoked as models for improvement of livelihoods and social welfare. A legitimate concern regarding many of the Asian NICs, including Thailand, may well be whether or not the international accumulation processes in which they are integrated will lead in the directions previously traversed by so many of the former ‘miracle’ economies of Latin America.

Subverting Lineage Power

Tracing China ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen F. Siu
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
State Culture ◽  
Agrarian Societies ◽  
General Concern

The analysis of lineage, community, and politics in this essay illustrates some general concern of historical anthropology: how do historical events take into account inequalities of power, and how are social institutions and cultural perceptions understood in the spatial context of an evolving, differentiating political economy? In state agrarian societies where hierarchies of power and diverse bases of authority exist and are often contested, stability rests on the ways local elites anchor themselves in the community as well as within the larger polity. The evolution of local legitimacy involves the percolation of a state culture, be it imperial or revolutionary. In numerous arenas, the locally powerful and those they dominated were engaged in shaping this process. As in other times, discourses on lineage and community in the 20th century were ways by which several generations of political actors created a new language by means of inherited words.

What’s Behind the WTO Crisis? A Marxist Analysis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémi Bachand
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Dispute Settlement ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Wto Dispute Settlement ◽  
Marxist Analysis ◽  
Rate Of Profit

Abstract The main objective of this article is to explore the background of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) crisis using Marxist, neo-Marxist or, at least, Marxist-influenced theories of political economy and international relations. Its purpose is twofold. First, to propose an interpretation of the actual WTO crisis that will address alternative interpretations’ gaps. Second, to advance theoretical inputs founded on Marxist or Marxist-influenced writing in political economy, inputs which could be useful elsewhere in critical studies in international law. At the root of the crisis lies the functioning of neoliberalism (understood as the regime of accumulation promoted by US-dominant classes) and the institutions it uses to regulate itself, to deal with contradictions that hurt its capacity to produce profit, and to allow capital accumulation. One of the most important of these institutions, at the international level, is the WTO. We argue that neoliberalism’s incapacity to continuously provide, since the Asian crisis in 1997, a satisfying rate of profit to US capitalists (and to Western capitalists in general, even if our argument focuses on the former) lured it into a crisis. Since the WTO’s main function is to prevent neoliberalism from being hurt by contradictions that would limit its capacity to provide profits allowing capital accumulation, it was inevitable that one day or another, the struggle faced by the latter would also drag the former down in an institutional crisis.

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