Aspiring Minds: ‘A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making’

This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa’s youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial education enrols kids in anticipation of an entrepreneurial future, it falls short of both its enticing promise and its transformative intentions. As enterprise education fails to deliver on the New South African Dream, we argue, the aspirations it propagates withers, generating disaffection rather than a generation of entrepreneurial subjects faithful to the neoliberal creed of making it on your own.

The Machine Has a Soul

In the interwar years, the United States grappled with economic volatility, and Americans expressed anxieties about a decline in moral values, the erosion of families and communities, and the decay of democracy. These issues prompted a profound ambivalence toward modernity, leading some individuals to turn to Italian fascism as a possible solution for the problems facing the country. This book delves into why Americans of all stripes sympathized with Italian fascism, and shows that fascism's appeal rested in the image of Mussolini's regime as “the machine which will run and has a soul” — a seemingly efficient and technologically advanced system that upheld tradition, religion, and family. This book focuses on four prominent American sympathizers: Richard Washburn Child, a conservative diplomat and Republican operative; Anne O'Hare McCormick, a distinguished New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, an Italian-American publisher and Democratic political broker; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, a Columbia University professor of moral philosophy. In fascism's violent squads they saw youthful glamour and impeccable manners, in the megalomaniacal Mussolini they perceived someone both current and old-fashioned, and in the corporate state they witnessed a politics that could revive addled minds. They argued that with the right course of action, the United States could use fascism to take the best from modernity while withstanding its harmful effects. Investigating the motivations of American fascist sympathizers, the book offers provocative lessons about authoritarianism's appeal during times of intense cultural, social, and economic strain.

The Dream Machine

This chapter focuses on the fascist sympathizers' accounts of the destruction of democracy and the creation of the corporate state in Italy. In the late 1920s, Herbert Schneider, Richard Washburn Child, Anne O'Hare McCormick, and Generoso Pope presented a three-part argument about democracy and political reform in Italy and the United States. First, they harked back to the time of a multiparty system in Italy to imply a cautionary tale for the United States. Even if American democracy had not sunk to the same nadir as Italian democracy, a lack of congressional expertise, the rise of special interest groups, and popular disillusionment meant that it was experiencing similar symptoms of decay, they suggested. Second, they insisted that, through the corporate state, the fascist government had adapted political institutions to contemporary exigencies, enabling expert and efficient management of economic problems, and advancing policies in the direction of the general good. Last, these observers argued that the United States, too, needed to look beyond its preexisting institutions of government to create a state that was adept at dealing with the problems of modernity. They used fascist Italy to transport Americans to a different place, where policies were better managed, and the government was more popular, than in the United States.

CORPORATE-STATE MODEL OF VENTURE FINANCING: EXPERIENCE OF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

The article is devoted to the model of venture financing, which reflects the country-regional differentiation and its key distinctive features. It is noted that more than 40% of the largest European multinational companies annually allocate quite large-scale financing for the implementation of corporate venture programs. Among the factors that determine the high efficiency of the corporate-state model of venture financing, it should be noted first of all the high level of state regulation of innovation processes, the presence of large industrial companies with their own research centers and departments, and a developed and highly capitalized banking system. an active strategic partner of the business sector. National and regional innovation systems were formed as a result of complex interaction of scientific and technical, technological, socio-economic, political, legal and institutional-regulatory factors of innovative development of certain countries and regions. At the same time, the most decisive influence on their formation and further evolutionary development was exerted by scientific and technological determinants, which together form the global configuration of venture financing architecture and ensure effective consolidation of real business capital of some business structures and intellectual resources of others. Venture financing models provide large-scale development, implementation and use of the latest technical, technological and information tools in production and non-production areas and focus on the maximum concentration of material, technical and financial resources in the highest priority areas of research and development. This strategic goal is most implemented today in countries with a market model of venture financing, where it has long proven its high efficiency as a significant source of innovative development. At the same time, the deepening of techno-globalization processes gives a strong impetus to venture business, transforming it in line with global economic trends and stimulating scaling up and diversification of regional and sectoral-sectoral structure of venture capital.

Towards a Political Theory of Democratic Backsliding? Generalising the East Central European Experience

This chapter argues in favour of a general theory of democratic backsliding which should cover three dimensions: (1) the societal one (changing citizenry), (2) the institutional one (changing institutions of democratic government) and (3) the processual one (the nature of the democratic backsliding itself). Following these aspects, the chapter explores general developments of democratic backsliding, which also apply to East Central Europe. Regarding the societal dimension, it points to changes in the nature of citizenship towards spectatorship and plebiscitary understanding of democracy. Considering the institutional dimension, it focuses on two types of state capture: the party state capture and the corporate state capture. With regard to the processual dimension, the chapter argues that democratic backsliding does not imply fully fledged authoritarianism but rather represents a retrogression to semi-democracy—a potentially stable regime type, in which the dismantling of the rule of law goes hand in hand with cyclical elections preserving democratic standards.

Blueprinting BlockchainsIntroduction

The final chapter dives deeper into the territory of spin-off blockchains offered as technological modes of organisation for decentralising a host of socioeconomic practices. Recent discussions of platform capitalism are used to critique claims that blockchains are an incorruptible mode of democratic governance. Instead, blockchain capitalism is offered as a more accurate transaction model where profit necessitates certain points of centralisation through dominant distributed ledger technologies. A close examination of blockchain typologies reveals the co-option of these architectures by the very centralised banking firms and governments they were initially designed to bypass. As financial giants and central banks design their own distributed ledgers to increase the efficiency of business practices and monetary policy, innovation from the disruptive edges is once again absorbed into “the centre” by the corporate/state powers that be.