Envisaging global balance-sheet capitalism: The Bank for International Settlements as a collective organic intellectual

This article examines how the Bank for International Settlements, as a collective organic intellectual of finance capital, has sought to maintain the hegemony of financial globalization in the context of an increasingly fractured global order following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. I show how the Bank for International Settlements’ defence of financial globalization has pivoted around the construction of a new ‘economic imaginary’ of global capitalism in which the global financial cycle, which culminates in systemic financial crises, threatens economic and political stability. Asserting that this cycle can be ‘properly managed’, the Bank for International Settlements has advocated a set of formal shifts in macro-policy frameworks. Focusing on the temporality of economic governance as envisioned by the Bank for International Settlements, I highlight two important dimensions of the organization’s discourse: the reduction of policy to process and the fetishization of policy innovation. Here, the pursuit of principles of ‘good’ economic management is prioritized over the achievement of concrete economic or social outcomes. In traversing this economic imaginary, this article offers insights into how global capitalism and its management are envisioned by elites in the current period of hegemonic disorganization and political-economic turmoil.

Stuart Hall, a peerless mediator

The authors discuss Stuart Hall's lifelong critical engagement with Marxism - though his was a complex, subtle, agonistic, Marxism, where nothing is taken for granted. This engagement continued even as postcoloniality, ethnicity, race and identity steadily came to the centre of Hall's attention, constituting ways of thinking that in some ways represented a departure. Hall can be seen as a mediator, both within Marxism - for example structuralism versus culturalism - and between Marxism and other discourses, finding areas in common as well as difference, respecting aspects of a position without endorsing whole positions; and in so doing transforming the problem under consideration. He is also discussed as an organic intellectual, who - though with no assumption of a shared class or shared party - sought to create a collective self-consciousness, a coalition, that could offer an effective challenge to the state. The concept of conjuncture is an important part of these ideas. These aspects of Hall's work are discussed further in relation to racialisation and racism, where Hall is seen as committed to both analytic and practical observation, and to humanism as well as Marxism: the people at the centre of the analysis are agents not categories. Hall was not aiming to bring things to a rounded, validity-seeking coherence, but to always leave some strands open: his thinking is constitutively open. At the same time his underlying, very simple, message is that, in some way or another, the many issues we face are all connected, and we should never give up the integrative pluralism of political thinking. The great danger is fragmented pluralism, where the politics of difference, wherever the differences are, leads to political de-alignment rather than coalitional unity.

“Propaganda for peace”: a Gramscian reading of Irish and Spanish Civil War photography

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Ireland’s ruling party were faced with the challenge of maintaining political hegemony. Revealing the old fault lines of the Irish Civil War, the opposition cast the government’s Non-intervention policy as pro-Communist and anti-Catholic; a refusal to support Spanish insurgents in what was perceived by the majority as their defence of the Catholic faith. Following McNally, this paper utilises Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explore political equilibrium in the contexts of the Irish and Spanish conflicts. The notion of the “organic intellectual” enables a Gramscian reading of war photography, finding common visual language in the works of Robert Capa and W.D. Hogan as they contributed to national and transnational projects of hegemony. Through such a reading, the author finds cultural compatibility between the conflicts and casts the Irish revolutionary period in new international light.

From Progressive Radicalism to Democratic Degeneration: The Trajectory of John Locke's Political Theory

As an organic intellectual of the emerging propertied class in 17th century England, John Locke has made an enduring contribution to the prevailing ideas shaping the socio-political order in Western societies and beyond. Through invoking the law of nature and natural rights which were nothing more than what he had abstracted from the socio-economic conditions of the seventeenth century and had projected back into the state of nature, Locke assiduously embarked on justifying the separation of civil society from the state, naturalizing class inequalities identifying the preservation of property as the fundamental function of the state, and rationalizing the subordination of propertyless classes to the emerging liberal democratic political order geared to preserve the interests of economically hegemonic classes.

Rethinking the category of organic intellectual of/by Antonio Gramsci in today's world

The attempt to assess the essential functions and aspects of the intellectual establishment in the modern and contemporary world occupies a prominent place in the social sciences and in the political philosophy of the 20th century. Antonio Gramsci was undoubtedly one of the philosophers who made the most heuristic and hermeneutical contributions, from his revisionist Marxist perspective, to understand intellectuals as leading actors and active political subjects, situated in the dilemma of favoring the preservation of the established order, in the case of traditional intellectuals, or in promoting their radical transformation as a program of action of the so-called organic intellectuals, who dedicate themselves at all times to interpret the needs and aspirations of justice and equity of the time and social space of which they are part, to endow it with concrete political content. Consequently, the objective of this scientific article is to examine the role of the critical intellectual with social commitment in the current complex context, marked by the systemic crisis of the current world order. Methodologically speaking, the document presented here was developed through dialectical hermeneutics and the documentary research technique. The findings obtained allow us to conclude that critical thinking is key to revitalizing democracies.

Otman Baba as the Organic Intellectual of the Turkmen-Yoruks

The article examines a social structure of the Ottoman Empire based on the classification and comparative analysis of groups of intellectuals in accordance with the concept of an organic intellectual. On the basis of the analysis of the image of Otman Baba, the intellectual feature of the nomadic Turks is revealed. It necessary to note that three different intellectual groups are representing three different layers. The first of these are the intellectuals of the ruling bloc. These intellectuals go through historical transformations and continue as ulema (theologians). These intellectuals, the sheikhs, are the bearers of the Sunni Islamic ideology. The second type of intellectuals consists largely of the apostles (Ahis) that represent the craftsmen in the cities and the workers in these branches of crafts. The Ahis have an ideology that cannot be explained, with Islam only and Sunni Islam in particular. The third type of intellectuals is the abdals that are the intellectuals of the TurkmenYörük, who are the main oppressed class of the society. These three types of intellectuals can be explained with the concept of organic intellectuals. Otman Baba is the best example to describe the organic intellectual of Turkmen-Yoruks. Sheikh Bedreddin was unfortunately attributed to his place. Another phenomenon is the continued existence of the Ottoman sovereign to continue to block the period of the Republic of Turkey intellectuals. I define these intellectuals with the concept of “sedimentary intellectuals”.