Post-Symbolic Images in Platform Capitalism

Platform capitalism brings several processes to completion that were already apparent during post-industrial capitalism. One of these involves images and their gradual loss of a symbolic dimension. The mechanisms that platforms employ to direct the production of media content reduce images to objects of immediate use and consumption. Consequently, images fail to synthetise the multiplicity of the social reality: instead of inscribing it within a horizon of meaning, they simply reflect it. This article reconstructs the “de-symbolising” process of images during the various phases of capitalism and explains why a post-symbolic aesthetics should also be viewed as “impolitical”. If the political is indeed symbolic, since the giving of meaning and direction to society (a political task par excellence) also takes place through the construction of symbolic systems, the post-symbolic aesthetic is instead imposed by platforms for purely economic reasons.

When Ants Beset the Elephant: Rent Extraction and Resistance on China's E-commerce Platform

E-commerce in China has developed and expanded rapidly in recent years. Conflicts and confrontations have accumulated in parallel. Using Taobao e-marketplace – one pillar platform of the Alibaba group – as its case, this article aims to analyse the developmental logic and profit-seeking strategies of e-commerce capitalism in China and beyond. It also investigates how small online merchants responded to and resisted the particular rent-extractive and exclusive mechanisms designed by the platform. I attempt to identify the emerging responses from below to both the creative and destructive sides of this newest capitalist development in China. I argue that, despite the militancy and innovation involved in these movements, and despite the use of Maoist rhetoric borrowed from the past, the contentious collective actions (online or offline) organized by these small online merchants lack the solidarity, the shared identity and consciousness, and the powerful ideological language observed among the “traditional” working class in industrial capitalism, and hence they are more improvised, transient, and easily defeated.

Labour in Turkey during the 1960s: The Long Hot Decade of the Working Class

The 1960s were unique and sui generis years for the labour movement in Turkey. This decade not only witnessed the emergence of industrial capitalism, but also was a critical and intense period of class struggle in which the formation of the country’s working class accelerated. As the working class gained momentum, it proved itself to be a new social class after being dismissed in previous decades. At the beginning of the period, trade unions gained constitutional guarantees, thereby increasing the momentum of the labour movement, even as traditional trade unionism eroded somewhat following a period of dominance in the previous two decades. Ultimately, class-based and independent unionism grew in strength in the 1960s, while the decade also represents a critical moment in the process of working-class politicisation.

Comments on Michael Hudson: Making Capitalism Great Again? A Critique of the “Rentier Takeover” Thesis

Michael Hudson argues that a new form of financial capitalism has displaced the industrial capitalism of Marx’s day. Unlike earlier capitalists, whose pursuit of lower costs led to improvements in the organization of production, the typical wealth owner today is a passive rentier who, like a feudal landlord, merely claims the surplus from existing production processes. Some form of this vision of financialization is widely held, but, I argue, misleading. It exaggerates the differences between historical and present-day capitalism, and misses the ways in which “finance” and “industry” form complementary parts of a single process. JEL classification: B51, E44, N20

Italy

Nineteenth-century Italy witnessed the rise of nationalist politics, industrial capitalism, and colonialist adventurism. Intellectuals viewed political conquest and technological progress as barbaric and invasive, feeling alienated from a changing world dominated by bourgeois materialism and by the lower classes seeking economic advancement. This isolating tendency represented a desire to rise above mediocrity, to be greater than the common man. Progress was viewed with cynicism, and writers met with despair the failure of ideals in the post-Risorgimento world. Once the guiding hand of the populace, intellectuals now lost their way, as well as their ability to reconcile the profound contradictions in society and their cultural expectations. This article explores how Italian decadentismo as a spiritual reaction to progress occasioned an escape from reality. It also touches on the dichotomies present in the literature, illustrating the despondency of Italian writers at the fin de siècle.

The Chemical Theory of Phlogiston in the Cultural Economy of Fire: From the Enlightenment to Contemporary Times

The article focuses on how the chemical concept of phlogiston functions in the so-called economy of fire from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, in view of a shift in “pyropolitics” (politics of fire) in their relation to the economic paradigms (cameralism, industrial capitalism, postindustrial digital economy), and theories of chemical flame processes (phlogistics, oxygen theory,theory of detonation and deflagration). The phlogiston concept is explored as the key substantial notion of the phlogictic chemical theory of the Enlightenment (regarded also as a natural “cameralistic science” in terms of metallurgy), the epistemological metaphor of ignorance in nineteenth-century Marxist discourse. Phlogiston circulates in the economics of fire discourse as a signifier for surplus value (and some other Marxist terms). “Fire as equivalent to money” becomes, in petropolitical studies, a means for turning petropolitics into pyropolitics with the radical metaphor of “PyroGaia” (Nigel Clark) in the Anthropocene period.

Economic Policy of Industrial Development and Investment Approach to the Analysis of the National Economy

The article is devoted to a critical analysis and scientific search for alternative options for the country's economic development along the path of technological modernization and structural restructuring of the national economy. The purpose of this article is to consider the investment approach to the analysis of the economy in the context of modern political economy. As a result of the critical analysis, an investment approach to the analysis of the economy was used to theoretically substantiate the fundamental possibility of the development of industrial capitalism in economic macro-region, including Ukraine. Based on the investment approach to the analysis, M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky convincingly showed the fundamental possibility of the development of industrial capitalism, which is capable of creating a corresponding internal market for itself in the process of industrialization. First of all, this can happen due to the outstripping growth in investment demand for means of production. The most important reason for the unrealized industrial potential is the initially incorrect strategic formulation of the problem of economic transformations and the associated erroneous choice of the target of economic reforms. The historically specific goal of economic transformations should not be an abstract market economy, but the development of industrial capitalism, which determines the development of a solution to the problem of a radical change in the target of economic reforms, which should be directly related to the development of industrial capitalism and the corresponding renewal of the tools of the state's economic policy.

Constructing Ableism

This essay builds upon research in disability studies through the extension of Garland-Thomson’s figure of the normate. I argue that biopower, through the disciplinary normalization of individual bodies and the biopolitics of populations, in the nineteenth-century United States produced the normate citizen as a white, able-bodied man. The normate citizen developed with the new political technology of power that emerged with the transition from sovereign power to biopower. I focus on the disciplinary normalization of bodies and the role of industrial capitalism in the construction of able-bodied norms. I argue that the medical model of disability is produced through a dual process of incorporation: the production of corporeal individuals and the localization of illness in the body.

The evolving perspectives on the Chinese labour regime in Africa

This article explores the logics, persistence and evolution of perspectives on the Chinese labour regime in Africa. Studies find that Chinese firms’ labour practices engender abuse via casualisation of labour, low remuneration, and a general lack of adherence to occupational safety. Contrarian studies however demonstrate variations among Chinese firms’ labour practices as mediated by the labour dynamics of host countries, labour specificities and industrial capitalism dynamics. The article concludes by questioning the ‘talent gap’ dynamic in Africa in relation to Chinese firms’ managerial hiring practices and calls for an engaged scholarship on how Chinese investment in Africa’s human resource base is altering the ‘talent gap’ phenomenon.