scholarly journals The Necropolice Economy: Mapping Biopolitical Priorities and Human Expendability in the Time of COVID-19

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Mark Howard
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World Market ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Risk And Uncertainty ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The World

Necropolitics centers on the dark side of biopolitics, but if we are to take seriously Jacques Ranciere’s reassignment of ‘politics’ and ‘police,’ then what is revealed by necropolitical analysis is not simply the capacity to ‘make and let die’, but also the policing of a contingent order sustained by necropolitics. I describe this process as the necropolice-economy, and in this paper demonstrate its contours with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic which, I argue, has revealed the expendability of particular populations under conditions of risk and uncertainty. My analysis proceeds in three parts. First, I present the thesis of necropolice economy, arguing that the capitalist system has historically produced not simply a political economy, but a policed economy that induces a necropolitics of dispensability for unproductive or replaceable populations. Second, I develop this thesis by examining the relegation of society in relation to the economy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, I argue that the inability of states to be decisive in the pandemic reveals that the sovereign prerogative to decide on the exception is constrained by capitalist forces. This suggests that the world market is itself a sovereign force, though it is one that remains ever dependent on state violence. To conclude, I ask whether we can channel the trauma of death made visible into processes of memorialization that might catalyze revolutionary action, rather than accelerating the evolution of our necropolice economy into its next capitalist guise—I ask, provocatively, whether an emancipatory necropolitics might yet result from the contemporary moment.

Beyond Inevitability: The Opening of Philippine Provincial Ports in 1855

1994 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
World Market ◽  
Socioeconomic Change ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Direct Incorporation

The opening of Philippine provincial ports to the world market in 1855 served to solidify the direct incorporation of regions outside Manila into the international capitalist system. This article reconstructs the events surrounding this important episode by situating it in the context of global capitalist dynamics and Spanish imperial decay, and the conjuncture in which local interest groups manoeuvred to intervene in the colonial state processes of the Spanish Philippines. In line with Philip Abrams' vision of history as the nexus of structure and action, the 1855 ports policy is reinterpreted as issuing from the articulation of macro and micro spheres, a perspective which allows for contingency in so far as the possibilities of human actors confronting structured totalities are multiple yet theoretically bounded. By eschewing the overdetermined view of socioeconomic change and by accounting for human agency in history, this article serves as a case study to overcome the notion of inexorability that, as David Booth rightly points out, has been frequently imputed to the epoch of global capitalist change.

scholarly journals Introduction: Globalization and Race in World Capitalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
William I. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Real World ◽  
World System ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Capitalist World

Scholars of world-systems and global political economy have wrestled for decades with the genesis of 'race' as a social construct and its historical significance for the system of world capitalism.  Transformations in the world capitalist system pose a new challenge to Western theories of race.  Older colonial structures may be giving way in the face of capitalist globalization.  Racial or ethnic dimensions of the relations of exploitation in the capitalist world-system need to be reconceptualized.  This symposium aims to generated debate and interchange among scholars on such a reconceptualization and to contribute to real world struggles against racial inequities.

scholarly journals Hour of darkness : vulnerability, security and globalization

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Watts
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Food Security ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
World Market ◽  
Amartya Sen ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
September 11Th ◽  
The World ◽  
Mike Davis

Abstract. The events of September 11th in New York and Washington DC have compelled us to focus on the links between globalization and security. I focus on this relationship by exploring the links between food security, vulnerability to hunger and the world market. Using the new book by Mike Davis on late Victorian famines, I show how his political ecology of famine challenges the work of Amartya Sen on entitlements. My contribution examines how and why entitlements need to be deepened and expanded and grounded in a sophisticated understanding of global political economy. Case materials from Africa and India are deployed to illustrate this argument.

scholarly journals Capital, Labor, and State

2015 ◽  
pp. 321-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Hanieh
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World Market ◽  
State Theory ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rentier State ◽  
The World ◽  
Oil Rents ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
The Impact

The Middle East’s pivotal position in a hydrocarbon-based global capitalism carries enormous ramifications for the region and the Gulf Arab states in particular. This chapter aims to present key debates associated with this transformation. It begins with an overview of the Rentier State Theory (RST). RST theorists foreground the impact of oil rents on Gulf states, drawing causal relationships between these rents and the characteristics of the Gulf’s political economy. The chapter turns to a critique of some of its core assumptions, notably its theorization of state and class. It argues that a more satisfactory understanding of the political economy of oil in the Gulf can be found through a return to the categories of class and capitalism, and a deeper appreciation of the ways in which the Gulf is located in the wider dynamics of accumulation in the world market.

Political Economy for Workers: A. N. Bakh’s Tsar-Golod

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Pearl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Cost

“There’s a tsar in the world, a merciless tsar; / His name is—hunger!” These lines, taken from Nikolai A. Nekrasov’s poem “Zheleznaia doroga” (1864), serve as the epigraph for one of the most popular works of Russian revolutionary propaganda literature of the late nineteenth century, the pamphlet Tsar-golod by Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakh, a People’s Will activist of the early 1880s. Nekrasov’s poem vividly depicts the cost in human suffering of the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad. As with other works by Nekrasov, the poem arouses the reader’s sympathy for Russian common folk and outrage at their plight. Bakh, when faced with the task of devising lessons for workers’ propaganda circles, picked up the striking image of Tsar Hunger, driving workers to labor and often to death, and used it as a recurring theme, while he transformed the message. Bakh’s brochure, a dissection and analysis of the capitalist system, leaves behind the world of poetry for that of cold reality. The author’s purpose is not simply to inspire sympathy for the people’s suffering, but also to lead his worker audience to understand the economic system that exploited them and to recognize the urgent need for revolution.

China und Lateinamerika

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (142) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Enrique Dussel Peters
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
World Market ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
The World ◽  
New Challenges

China's socioeconomic accumulation in the last 30 years has been probably one of the most outstanding global developments and has resulted in massive new challenges for core and periphery countries. The article examines how China's rapid and massive integration to the world market has posed new challenges for countries such as Mexico - and most of Latin America - as a result of China's successful exportoriented industrialization. China's accumulation and global integration process does, however, not only question and challenges the export-possibilities in the periphery, but also the global inability to provide energy in the medium term.

Three questions to political economy (An attempt of system introspection)

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. B. Kleiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Linear Component ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Space ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
System Paradigm

The development of the system paradigm in economic science leads to the formulation of a number of important questions to the political economy as one of the basic directions of economic theory. In this article, on the basis of system introspection, three questions are considered. The first is the relevance of the class approach to the structuring of the socio-economic space; the second is the feasibility of revising the notion of property in the modern world; the third is the validity of the notion of changing formations as the sequence of “slave-owning system — feudal system — capitalist system”. It is shown that in modern society the system approach to the structuring of socio-economic space is more relevant than the class one. Today the classical notion of “property” does not reflect the diversity of production and economic relations in society and should be replaced by the notion of “system property”, which provides a significant expansion of the concepts of “subject of property” and “object of property”. The change of social formations along with the linear component has a more influential cyclic constituent and obeys the system-wide cyclic regularity that reflects the four-cycle sequence of the dominance of one of the subsystems of the macrosystem: project, object, environment and process.

“Capital” as the key to solving modern economic problems (Offline addition to the discussion on the revival of a special seminar on Karl Marx’s “Capital”)

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-150
Author(s):  
Alexandеr V. Buzgalin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
The Relationship

In the article prepared in connection with the discussion on the use of the Marxist political economy heritage and the revival of a special seminar on Marx’s “Capital”, the author shows the dialectic of the relationship between the content and the transformed forms of the modern capitalist system; the potential of “Capital” to understand the content of the modern economy, and the potential of economics to understand its forms. On this basis, the author shows which questions of our time are answered by Marxist methodology and theory, and which are not, and concludes that Marxist political economy has significant methodological potential to become an important component of the scientific and educational process in current conditions.

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