Depression Risk Factors for Knowledge Workers in the Post-Capitalist Society of Taiwan

This study aimed to examine the depression risk factors for knowledge workers aged 20–64 in the post-capitalist society of Taiwan. Interview data from 2014 and 2019 were adopted for quantitative analysis of the depression risk by demographic and individual characteristics. The results showed that the depression risks of knowledge workers were not affected by demographic variables in a single period. From 2014 to 2019, the prevalence of high depression risk in knowledge workers aged 20–64 years increased over time. The more attention is paid to gender equality in society, the less the change in the gender depression index gap may be seen. Positive psychological state and family relationships are both depression risk factors and depression protective factors. Being male, married, religious, and aged 45–49 years old were found to be critical risk factors. Variables of individual characteristics could effectively predict depression risk.

Reimagining the Oikos

We are currently living through a time in which the line dividing capital and state has dissolved behind repair, where free-market economics and rules of governance have become nothing more than a totality of bio-political control for capitalist and subjective fixes, and, where the distinctions between corporate hegemony, policy making, free-speech and mainstream media have become seemingly non-existent. This text attempts to act as a remedy to this by examining and analyzing some of the key tenets of what must be done in order to create a post-capitalist society, and move towards a reimagined oikos and oikonomia. It focuses largely on the necessity of moving away from subjectivity-centered thought, and towards a new form of materialist universality.

Excerpt from Chapter One of Frank Engster’s Book: Das Geld als Maß, Mittel und Methode Das Rechnen mit der Identität der Zeit (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag UG, 2014)

The question of the book is how a radical critique of capitalism is possible when critique in the tradition of Kant and Hegel means that the criticized subject itself has to “give” the measure of its critique. The thesis is that, while in Kant this reflexivity is achieved by transcendental subjectivity and reason and in Hegel by self-consciousness, self-relation of the concept and the absolute reason of spirit, in Marx we find a materialist turn. The turn shows that capitalist society became reflexive by a kind of self-measurement, done by the functions of money, on the one hand, and the valorization of labour power and capital, on the other. Money, by its function as the measure of value and the means of its realization and mediation, measures in the commodities the productive relations of their production, thus determining from the past valorization of labour and capital the magnitudes necessary for their further productive valorization — and hence for a productive use of money itself. That is howl, in money’s capital form, the measured magnitudes become reflexive, while money itself becomes in its capitalist self-relation the form to measures the same valorization process which by this form becomes possible in the first place

Fleabag’s Pedagogy of the Gimmick

As a work of art, the show Fleabag prompts differing kinds of judgements by critics. But as a project that reflects life in capitalist society, its gimmickry models the existentially fraught dynamics of despair. Informed by Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick, this article explores three sets of gimmicks in relation to despair, where each holds differing pedagogical stakes for viewers: being alone; being a bad feminist; being smitten with a priest. Gimmickry, as a technique within the show, puts viewers on the hook for judging gimmicks as wonders or tricks. Gimmickry as an object of criticism, in turn, brings into view the political and existential significance of Fleabag for viewers.

Literature as Speculative Thought

This chapter spells out the conceptual stakes of the reformist literary mode by turning to British state theory’s ‘Hegelian moment’. Hegel’s state theory converges on an understanding of the state as an aspect of social life (Sittlichkeit), making it possible to think about the state’s institutional structures as a moment in the actualization of social life rather than as a Foucauldian assemblage of administrative means external to social life. Britain’s Hegelian moment makes visible a reformist idiom in which the state appears as an aspirational figure that makes it possible to imagine the transition from capitalist society (Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft) towards a more egalitarian socio-political order. This transformation is imagined through close engagement with existing social forms rather than through a complete revolutionary overhaul of existing social arrangements. The chapter ends by asking why Britain’s Hegelian moment ended around 1914 and what were its more immediate afterlives.

‘True Ownership’

The third chapter focuses on the work of Edward Carpenter, the socialist poet, cultural critic, and early queer activist. Seeking to keeping open a middle ground for people who could accept some role for the state while regarding full centralization askance, Carpenter’s thinking about the ends of state-action in the 1880s and 1890s crystallized around the question of land reform. Key to his reformist vision was the attempt to re-signify the language of capitalist society by advocating an ethos of proprietary care and concern (what Carpenter calls ‘true ownership’), a form of custodial attention that is supported by the state but that cannot be reduced to purely legal entitlements. The chapter explores Carpenter’s writing as well as his experience of rural living in Derbyshire. Carpenter, I argue, hoped to turn poetry itself into the ground where a collective desire for comprehensive, non-revolutionary social change might take root.

The long and winding road

Growing up in a capitalist society means induction into a set of taken for granted concepts that seemingly get realized through the way that world works. As a result, a grasp of the very different fundamentals of Marxism has to be a lifetime pursuit. For the author, it started in secondary school for reasons that were both personal and intellectual. In terms of the overall geohistorical trajectory of the author’s life, it bears emphasis that it is unlikely that that would have occurred in the US as it was at that time. Nevertheless, the American university system would then allow, often unintendedly, a deepening of that understanding. There have been diversions and distractions, most notably the distributional emphasis of much critical work in the 1970s and then critical realism in the 1980s, but overcoming them served to further enhance a critical grasp. A visit to South Africa in 1982 played a part in that. The trajectory has been simultaneously geohistorical and dialectical.