Encounter Three: Art and the Socialist State

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Jan Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism

This chapter traces the tactics used by the art Slovenian collective, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), specifically the art section, Irwin and the music group, Laibach, to criticise the socialist state of Yugoslavia. The chapter offers a brief overview of the political climate at the time leading up to and during the Yugoslavian wars (1980s and ‘90s). Closely analysed is NSK’s use of ambiguity and parody to hold a mirror up to authoritarianism and Irwin’s appropriation of early Russian avant-garde motifs to criticise socialist-realism and the State’s ‘misuse’ of art. As protection against retaliation by the state, NSK never prescribed their intentions, so audiences and viewers needed to bring their own context and perspective to events. Once Slovenia left the Yugoslavian Federation to enter into free-market capitalism, NSKs tactics seemed far less potent, flowing neatly into a 1980s western art context (a moment in history) that embraced ambivalence and indeterminacy. As an approach that hides a work’s political intent, allowing its viewers to have their own political views affirmed, it is argued that such a tactic fails to shake the political aesthetic. [181]

Economy

Religion ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 89-103
Author(s):  
David Chidester
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Market ◽  
American Petroleum Institute ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sacred Values ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Economy Of The Sacred ◽  
Market Capitalism

This chapter explores possibilities for locating religious formations at the intersections of culture and economy. Not solely the preserve of professional economists, economy is a term that has expanded in scope to include economies of signs and desires that generate values beyond the pricing mechanisms of the modern capitalist market. To illustrate how religion can be situated in a cultural economy, this chapter focuses on how one animated film, Destination Earth (1956), sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, serves to illustrate a political economy of the sacred in which the oppression of communist collectivism is opposed to the freedom promised by American free-market capitalism. Viewing this film provides an occasion for highlighting three features of the political economy of the sacred: mediations between economic and sacred values; mediations between economic scarcity and sacred surplus; and mediations among competing claims to legitimate ownership of the sacred.

Religion in Post-1945 America

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren Dochuk
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Five Dimensions ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Born Again ◽  
Market Capitalism ◽  
State Functions

Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence Speech” of July 1979 was a critical juncture in post-1945 U.S. politics, but it also marks an exemplary pivot in post-1945 religion. Five dimensions of faith shaped the president’s sermon. The first concerned the shattered consensus of American religion. When Carter encouraged Americans to recapture a spirit of unity, he spoke in a heartfelt but spent language more suitable to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency than his own. By 1979, the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish consensus of Eisenhower’s time was fractured into a dynamic pluralism, remaking American religion in profound ways. Carter’s speech revealed a second revolution of post-1945 religion when it decried its polarization and politicization. Carter sought to heal ruptures that were dividing the nation between what observers, two decades hence, would label “red” (conservative Republican) and “blue” (liberal Democratic) constituencies. Yet his endeavors failed, as would be evidenced in the religious politics of Ronald Reagan’s era, which followed. Carter championed community values as the answer to his society’s problems aware of yet a third dawning reality: globalization. The virtues of localism that Carter espoused were in fact implicated in (and complicated by) transnational forces of change that saw immigration, missionary enterprises, and state and non-state actors internationalizing the American religious experience. A fourth illuminating dimension of Carter’s speech was its critique of America’s gospel of wealth. Although this “born-again” southerner was a product of the evangelical South’s revitalized free-market capitalism, he lamented how laissez-faire Christianity had become America’s lingua franca. Finally, Carter wrestled with secularization, revealing a fifth feature of post-1945 America. Even though faith commitments were increasingly cordoned off from formal state functions during this time, the nation’s political discourse acquired a pronounced religiosity. Carter contributed by framing mundane issues (such as energy) in moral contexts that drew no hard-and-fast boundaries between matters of the soul and governance. Drawn from the political and economic crises of his moment, Carter’s speech thus also reveals the all-enveloping tide of religion in America’s post-1945 age.

scholarly journals ‘#Refugees can be entrepreneurs too!’ Humanitarianism, race, and the marketing of Syrian refugees

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis Turner
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Refugee Camp ◽  
Political Support ◽  
The Political ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
African Refugees ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism ◽  
Humanitarian Work

AbstractIn the context of a greater focus on the politics of migration, the ‘refugee entrepreneur’ has become an increasingly important figure in humanitarian, media, and academic portrayals of refugees. Through a focus on Jordan's Za‘tari refugee camp, which has been deemed a showcase for refugees’ ‘entrepreneurship’, this article argues that the designation of Syrian refugees as ‘entrepreneurs’ is a positioning of Syrians within colonial hierarchies of race that pervade humanitarian work. For many humanitarian workers in Jordan, Syrians' ‘entrepreneurship’ distinguishes them from ‘African’ refugees, who are imagined as passive, impoverished, and dependent on humanitarian largesse. Without explicit racial comparisons, humanitarian agencies simultaneously market Syrian refugees online as ‘entrepreneurs’, to enable them to be perceived as closer to whiteness, and to thereby render them more acceptable to Western audiences and donors, who are imagined as white. This article extends scholarly understandings of the understudied relationship between race and humanitarianism. Furthermore, it asks critical questions about the political work and effects of vision of the ‘refugee entrepreneur’, which it locates within the context of the increasingly neoliberalised refugee regime. ‘Refugee entrepreneurs’ do not need political support and solidarity, but to be allowed to embrace the forces of free-market capitalism.

The Legacy of Iraq

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism

This book critically reflects on the failure of the 2003 intervention to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy, underpinned by free-market capitalism, its citizens free to live in peace and prosperity. The book argues that mistakes made by the coalition and the Iraqi political elite set a sequence of events in motion that have had devastating consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and for the rest of the world. Today, as the nation faces perhaps its greatest challenge in the wake of the devastating advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and another US-led coalition undertakes renewed military action in Iraq, understanding the complex and difficult legacies of the 2003 war could not be more urgent. Ignoring the legacies of the Iraq War and denying their connection to contemporary events could mean that vital lessons are ignored and the same mistakes made again.

scholarly journals Estonia’s Digital Transformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Kattel ◽  
Ines Mergel
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Distinct Features ◽  
Market Capitalism

Estonia’s transition to free-market capitalism and liberal democracy is marked by three distinct features: economic success, digital transformation of its public sector, and a rapid increase and persistence of social inequality in Estonia. Indeed, Estonia has become one of the most unequal societies in Europe. Economic success and increasing social inequality can be explained as different sides of the same coin: a neoliberal policy mix opened markets and allowed globalization to play out its drama on a domestic stage, creating winners and losers. Yet Estonia has been highly successful in its digital agenda. Particularly interesting is how the country’s public sector led the digital transformation within this highly neoliberal policy landscape. While within economic policy, Estonia did indeed follow the famed invisible hand in rapidly liberalizing markets, in ICT, Estonia seems to have followed an entirely different principle of policymaking. In this domain, policy has followed the principle of the hiding hand, coined by Albert Hirschman: policy-makers sometimes take on tasks they think they can solve without realizing all the challenges and risks involved— and this may result in unexpected learning and creativity. The success of Estonia’s e-government has much to do with the principle of the hiding hand: naïvety and optimism propelled initial ‘crazy ideas’ in the early 1990s to become ingrained in ICT policy, enabling the creation of multiple highly cooperative and overlapping networks that span public–private boundaries.

I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
The Impact

Beginning in the 1970s, the French jazz press became the first community of critics seriously to consider the new African-American experimental music being put forth by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). More than any other aspect of their music, the incorporation of instrumentations, concepts, and musical forms normally associated with Western art music challenged assumptions within both the European and the American jazz communities. The response to these musicians in publications like Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot was complex and multi-dimensional. A genuine fascination with this new music was nevertheless tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom. The political climate in France after the student demonstrations of 1968 provided a context which also may have been important for at least some French jazz critics. The impact of the French jazz press on the field of improvised music in France in the 1970s was only one component of a transactional process of resistance by critics and conscious counter-resistance by key musicians/composers who wanted to expand notions of what jazz could encompass. Based on archival research and interviews with both musicians and French critics and scholars I intend to examine this dialogue between the French jazz press and the musicians themselves, in an effort to better understand how each community affected the other in France from 1970 to 1980.

Planetary Ambitions

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Joshua Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Market Capitalism

This chapter reads Lydie Salvayre's Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique (2007). In this novel, Salvayre’s anxieties about allowing oneself—and even herself as author—to be domesticated by the logic of global capitalism are condensed into the pathological relationship between her narrator avatar (who incarnates politically-engaged literature) and the satirical Jim Tobold, the richest man on the planet and ‘uncontested champion of globalization’—a character who, incidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Trump. Tobold sees the world at the level of the master, corporate map, from which he can make boardroom decisions in perfect disregard for their harmful, ground-level side effects. This chapter revisits and further explores Bruno Latour on cartographic megalomania, and draws on Fredric Jameson on cognitive mapping, and David Harvey on the self-defeating contradictions of the infinite expansion paradigm of capitalism in a world of increasingly finite resources. Moreover, it develops the Salvaryean notion of the paralipomenon, offering a new perspective on Salvayre’s underlying (engaged) literary strategy, one that, by focusing on the seemingly insignificant details of a hegemonic discourse—such as that of free-market capitalism—reveals its inherent contradictions and flaws.

The Bible and the Religious Right

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Barrett-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
American Law ◽  
Conservative Christians

This chapter identifies the doctrines that are central to conservative American Christians’ interpretation of biblical texts. Such believers view their scriptures as inerrant, literal, divinely inspired, authoritative, easily understood, internally consistent, and coherent, a vision of the Bible that does not necessarily lead to conservative social and political views, even as those conservative Christians who participate in conservative politics insist that it must. Those who use conservative faith to justify conservative politics form the Religious Right, which seeks to form a “Bible-based” America, one in which a limited government promotes a strong international presence, free-market capitalism, and individual liberty. This chapter traces how the Religious Right promotes the Bible as the root of American law, a hierarchy that allows them to argue that all those in the United States, not merely conservative Christians, are under the authority of the Bible, creating a mandate for Christians to seek and maintain power.

Giovanni Arrighi in Beijing: An Alternative to Capitalism?

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Panitch
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Market Society ◽  
World State ◽  
The Us ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Chinese Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism

AbstractGiovanni Arrighi made a remarkably broad-ranging and original contribution to comparative political economy and historical sociology over five decades. His last book shares these qualities. But Adam Smith in Beijing is unfortunately not mainly about the origins and dynamics of Chinese capitalism over the past three decades. It presents Adam Smith not as the apostle of free-market capitalism, but rather of a ‘non-capitalist market society’; and it uses this to make the case that since China’s economic development takes place outside the European/North American capitalist ‘core’, it must, almost by definition, not be capitalist. Markets are conceived here as the instruments of states, yet the theory of the state advanced is severely undeveloped. Arrighi’s argument that China’s economic development is part and parcel of the demise of the US project for establishing itself as the ‘world state’ misinterprets the nature of the US empire as well as misses the extent of China’s integration with US-led capitalist globalisation.

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