A keyword on the footer: the Furtadian and the (re)current meaning of structural reforms

ABSTRACT A semantic change has occurred in the scope of structural reforms’ term. This article reviews Celso Furtado’s work, in particular, the ones related to this specific topic, and compares it with the current literature. It appears that structural reforms in the Furtadian conception connoted base transformations and were guided by the developmentalism school of thought. Nowadays, it is of general knowledge that, under the new-institutionalist influence, “structural reforms” are associated with liberal policies for monitoring fiscal consolidations, without consensus as to the power of effectiveness. The effort to rescue and understand the original conceptions of certain keywords in the economic development literature, as well as the way in which their interpretations and practices modify over time, is shown to be of paramount importance as the capitalist system struggle to find ways of adapting itself to the current situation of developing economies.

The Political Economy of the Mental Health System: A Marxist Analysis

The present paper analyses the functions of the mental health system in relation to the economic organisation of society, using concepts derived from Marx’s work on political economy and building on previous critiques. The analysis starts from the position that mental health problems are not equivalent to physical, medical conditions and are more fruitfully viewed as problems of communities or societies. Using the example of the United Kingdom, it traces how a public mental health system evolved alongside capitalism in order to manage the problems posed by people whose behaviour was too chaotic, disruptive or inefficient to participate in a labour market based on exploitation. The system provided a mixture of care and control, and under recent, Neoliberal regimes, these functions have been increasingly transferred to the private sector and provided in a capitalistic manner. Welfare payments are also part of the system and support those less seriously affected but unable to work productively enough to generate surplus value and profit. The increased intensity and precarity of work under Neoliberalism has driven up benefit claims at the same time as the Neoliberal state is trying to reduce them. These social responses are legitimised by the idea that mental disorders are medical conditions, and this idea also has a hegemonic function by construing the adverse consequences of social and economic structures as individual problems, an approach that has been particularly important during the rise of Neoliberalism. The concept of mental illness has a strategic role in modern societies, therefore, enabling certain contentious social activities by obscuring their political nature, and diverting attention from the failings of the underlying economic system. The analysis suggests the medical view is driven by political imperatives rather than science and reveals the need for a system that is more transparent and democratic. While the mental health system has some consistent functions across all modern societies, this account highlights one of the endemic contradictions of the capitalist system in the way that it marginalises large groups of people by narrowing the opportunities to make an economic contribution to society.

RUSSIAN SPACE IN THE PROCESS OF HISTORICAL TRANSITIONS (TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE THEORY OF POST-SOVIET SYSTEM TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SPACE)

As an object of research in the article, the phenomenon of the Russian space, taken in a long historical retrospective, appears, the subject issues of the study of which are the prerequisites, meanings and content, as well as significant cause-and-effect relationships and the dynamics of its transformations. It is shown that the processes of acquisition and development (colonization) of the country’s space took many centuries, took place in different directions, with different intensity and were initially associated with special motives, extraordinary efforts and contradictory consequences. The cornerstones of the main stages of transformation of the Russian space — pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet — are considered. A theoretical understanding of the modern stage is proposed, the deep meaning of which the author associates with the need to remove the main contradiction of the spatial organization of life in the country, due to the abrupt transition of the country «from socialism to the market». The driving forces and limitations of the formation of a new configuration of space are highlighted, the course and content of this transition process are predicted. In the author’s understanding, the ongoing transition is characterized by a complex interweaving of reforms and counter-reforms: the market-federative reversal of the 1990s (with its well-known excesses of reformation radicalism) is opposed by a mechanistic one that ignores the realities of the established market-capitalist system, and therefore counterproductive reproduction of a number of Soviet planning and placement algorithms of public administration. The conceptual approach to the consideration of the organization of the socio-economic space as a large complex dynamic open system and to the interpretation of its transformation processes as systemic transformations is substantiated. The deep Russian features of state participation in the transformation of the socio-economic space are revealed, the requirements for the current state regional policy are formulated.

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

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.

Carl Menger’s revisited theory of capital in opposition to the Classical and Marginalist scholars’

Among several contributions, Carl Menger proposed a division of economic goods in orders. This sets the foundations for the Austrian capital theory, usually maintained as a complex of higher orders goods in a production process. Curiously, Menger dismissed this concept of capital, in favor of one used in common parlance. This change of view is often overlooked, but represents a turning point in the field of capital theory. This paper assesses how Menger's popular notion of capital differs from the scientific one. To achieve this goal, we investigate the concept of capital in Classical and Marginalist economists. One of the implications is that the popular concept is related to the theory of capitalism. Capital, as used in business language for economic calculations, is better suited for analyzing the capitalist system, as it captures the usage in monetary economies and business accounting.

Prelude to America’s Downfall: The Stagflation of the 1970s

Since the end of the Bretton Woods system and the stagflation of the 1970s, the transatlantic core, under the leadership of the United States of America, has been trying to expand its model of free market capitalism embracing every part of the globe, while addressing its domestic overaccumulation crisis. This article follows a historical methodological perspective and draws from the concept of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), which helps us consider the structural reasons behind the long and protracted decline of the American economic power. In this respect, according to the UCD concept, there is no global power that can enjoy the privilege for being at the top of the global capitalist system forever in a world which develops unevenly and in a combined way. Power shifts across the world and new powers come to challenge the current hegemonic power and its alliance systems. The novelty of the article is that it locates this decline in the 1970s and considers it as being consubstantial with the state economic policy of neo-liberalism and financialisation (supply-side economics). However the financialised capitalism of the transatlantic assemblage lack industrial base producing, reproducing and recycling real commodity values. Further, the article shows that this attempt to remain at the top of the global capitalist system forever has not been successful, not least because the regime which the recovery of the core had rested upon, that of neo-liberal financialisation represents a major vulnerability of the transatlantic assemblage eroding the primacy of the United States of America in it.

Hamlet as an Arab Intellectual: A Marxist Reading of Mamduh Adwan’s Play Hamlet Wakes Up Late

The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspective to broadly examine how life under a Capitalist system along with its foreign investments and trading services can easily destroy the political, social as well as the cultural surroundings of a certain nation. Throughout his play, Adwan brilliantly adapts Shakespeare and offers a Marxist point of view to comment on how the West continues to dominate the East with its economic power. Importantly, in employing Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet as a tragic hero, Adwan uses him as a dramatic archetype to comment on one of the Shakespearean’s famous political quotes “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Seen from this perspective, the paper will read Adwan’s play from a Marxist viewpoint to demonstrate how he has in fact used Hamlet’s lack of intellectualism to criticize the Syrian policy of “The Six Day War” defeat to Israel.

Through Exchange: Karatani Compared With Marx

The following paper has as its object the political philosophy of K. Karatani, in particular its relationship with the work of Marx. Japanese philosopher, in fact, reinterprets some elements of Marxian theory in the light of Kantian categories, hybridizing the ethical and moral theory of the latter with the critique of the political economy of the former. The result of Karatani's project can be seen, in particular, in two works. With the first, Transcritique, Karatani moves into the realm of philosophy to construct a method that holds the two theoretical poles together. The concept of 'Transcritique', in fact, represents the junction between Kantian and Marxian insights. With the second work, 'The Structure of World History', the Japanese philosopher shifts the analytical focus from ethics to economics, proposing a different interpretation of capitalism and its historical cycles. The shift of the observation of the capitalist system from the sphere of production to that of exchange represents the analytical novelty. Carrying through to the end the methodology developed in the previous work, Karatani traces back to exchange all the productive, institutional and political dynamics produced over time. Cycles of accumulation thus become cycles of exchange. The author, in fact, determines a correspondence between the specific modes of exchange and the consequent political structures, highlighting the centrality that money occupies, both in the theoretical elaboration and in political reality. The prevailing mode of production, based on the exchange of commodities, relies on the absolute mobility of money and on the strength of the state political institution, which acts as a hinge between the global dimension of exchanges and the territorial need for the appropriation of surplus-value. Karatani's critique is embodied in a political proposal, articulated through two key figures: community and cosmopolitanism. With the first term, the philosopher opposes the materiality of human relationships based on reciprocity to the abstract equivalence of economic relationships. By the second term, he shows the need for an extended political practice in which the pursuit of local freedom goes hand in hand with the realization of global justice. The paper traces these themes both through direct exposure of Karatani's work and by offering critical comparisons with other authors who have addressed similar issues. Finally, the purpose of this paper is to emphasize the originality of the Japanese author's philosophical-historical work, suspended between utopia and pragmatism, also through criticism, in order to highlight its strengths and underline its potential weaknesses.

Cartels and militias in Brazil in the system of modern hybrid wars

Aim. The aim of this work is to determine the mechanisms of the destructive influence of criminal organizations on the Brazilian State and the acceleration of their evolution under the influence of the narco-industry. Methodology. The study was conducted on the example of Brazilian criminal organizations and using The Trilateral Continuum "crime-terrorism-state". The methods of systemic and comparative analysis, synthesis, generalization and interpretation of the results were used. The mechanism of the destructive influence of criminal communities on the Brazilian State is revealed, The Trilateral Continuum is improved, and an explanation is given for the effect of the acceleration of the evolution of criminal communities under the influence of the narco-industry. Research implications. The results of the study significantly expand the understanding of the influence of criminal communities on the state, and also reveal the interdependence of the crisis of the capitalist system and the growth of the narco-industry which accelerates the evolution of criminal organizations.

Dependency 4.0: Theoretical Considerations and the Brazilian Case

The liberalization of markets for goods and assets that took place beginning in the 1980s, alongside a strengthening of the resulting transnationalization of capital, did not alter the basic hierarchical organization of the global capitalist system. This new dependency, here called “dependency 4.0,” is based on the rent seeking that marks the contemporary wealth accumulation process and ongoing technological progress. Brazil’s incorporation into the international division of labor is emblematic of this type of subordination. A liberalização dos mercados de bens e ativos que teve lugar a partir dos anos 1980 e o fortalecimento da transnacionalização do capital que resultou daí não alteraram o pressuposto fundamental da prevalência de uma organização hierárquica no sistema capitalista mundial. Um novo tipo de dependência a relacionar países centrais e periféricos, dependência 4.0, estaria assentada no rentismo que marca hoje o processo de acumulação e na natureza do progresso tecnológico em curso. O caso do Brasil—a história de sua inserção na divisão internacional do trabalho—é emblemática desse novo tipo de subordinação.