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Chapter 5 turns to the economic sphere, with special attention to the emergence of the modern economic corporation, as a competitor par excellence. I examine its origins in medieval antecedents, how post-revolutionary US was the ideal environment for its initial cultivation and elaboration, and its subsequent development in Europe and beyond. The economic firm is in many ways the ‘ideal type’ of the modern corporate actor, but I am concerned to show in the next two chapters that new corporate actors in the political and ideological/cultural spheres are also crucial to the general domestication of competition in liberal societies.
This article begins by surveying the commercial structure of nineteenth-century Yazd, centring on the economic activities of its Zoroastrian inhabitants. Next, we examine the house of Mehrabān, arguing that they were intermediate figures in Persia's transition from a pre-capitalist to an inchoate capitalist mode of production. Throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, the Mehrabāns were significant socio-economic players and precursors for later generations of prosperous, worldly Iranian Zoroastrians. Ardeshir in particular epitomised the gradual emergence of an Iranian bourgeoisie in the urban centres of Persia, specifically Yazd. Concurrently, the rise of prominent members of the Mehrabān family was intimately related to their education, ‘cultural capital’, socio-economic connections, and business ventures in Bombay as well as their constantly developing political clout in Persia and India.
To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.
This chapter reconstructs the content of the three principles that play a key role in the constitution and the disciplining of public power in the European Union: ’sound money’, economic freedoms(s) and ’free’ competition. Such a trio is the fundamental parameter of the validity of all national norms, at the same time that the division of labour between supranational decision-making processes favours their reflection in European legislation, while constituting a major obstacle to efforts at approving regulations and directives promoting alternative socio-economic visions. The fundamental norms of the European Union also include norms and practices that shift decision-making powers from the supranational legislature to (some) private actors, (some) technocrats and (some) national governments. The result is the affirmation of private property as the sovereign value of European law, which requires that supranational public power becomes a powerful external constraint that once and at the same time constitutes, disciplines and fragments (national) public power.
This chapter identifies the factors likely to influence employees, managers, and firms given that businesses operate within the context of capitalism. Several common presuppositions about capitalism are discussed – consumers know best, industry and innovation will be rewarded, growth should be encouraged, no centralized distribution, and individual self-interest always leads to mutual benefit. The term “market morality” is introduced as a background for factors such as spending on nonrecyclable goods or a focus on price rather than employee conditions where the goods are made, providing a means to identify consumer hypocrisy and corporate greenwashing. The implications of market failures such as oligopolies are noted, and questions about proper use of government regulation are raised. Moral concerns about the globalization of supply chains and varying normative standards around the world are also discussed, as well as the balance between World Trade Organization standards and national sovereignty. The fact that currencies and credit rely on the moral principle of trust is considered. The final case deals with the ethical concerns that are raised when international companies promote GMO crops to poorer countries.
Marxism has long been criticized for its failure to elaborate a theoretical analysis of war. Prioritising a commercial view of history, Marxism has treated war as either a tool of policy or an anachronistic aberration. However, a more foundational and determinate role for capitalism’s violence has begun to be elaborated by Marxist scholars concerned with the place of accumulation in the history of capitalism. Alliez and Lazzarato, for example, insist that the violence of primitive accumulation subtends all capital relations. Capitalism, they argue, has always depended upon the expropriation of nature and so operates as a form of colonial warfare. This chapter draws on their insights to examine Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Although the novel has been criticized by Marxist theorists for lacking a fully realised class analysis, its narrative of an unnamed Empire’s pitiless campaigns against barbarian forces offers an account of how commerce expropriates lives and land. This chapter argues that the personal ethics of corporeality, truth, and pain developed in the novel cannot be understood outside of this concern with the violent, collective experience of capital accumulation.
This article makes a case for weak class reductionism. In particular, we advance a theoretical account that largely “reduces” a social construct called race to another social construct called class. Once you acknowledge that race is not itself a prime mover, but rather something to be explained, class as an explanans turns out to be a strong candidate. Before making this case, we distinguish our account from three alternative forms of class reductionism, which we reject: the notions that (1) class is a more fundamental form of identity than race; (2) class is of greater normative importance than race; and (3) race is an epiphenomenon of class, without independent effects. We then argue for one form of class reduction that establishes race as causally dependent on class. In particular, we provide a general defense of functional explanations, argue that capitalist class relations can functionally explain the persistence of race, and finally, delineate the limits of that explanation. Because the nature of functional explanation requires the explanandum to have important effects in the world, this argument puts race at the center of any discussion of capitalist class relations in racialized societies and explains it on the basis of its effects rather than its causes. Nonetheless, as we show in our conclusion, none of these arguments imply that race or racism is inherent to capitalist class relations. Racism may be explained by capitalism, even if it is not necessary for it.
Based on the material obtained from focus group interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the article analyses the mechanisms used by employers towards employees, as well as the adaptation strategies applied by those in precarious employment in Poland. The authors’ considerations refer to anti-worker changes introduced under the pretext of the pandemic in the capitalist labour market: layoffs and cuts in wages, manifestations of discrimination against precarious workers and the potential attitudes of employee self-defence. The authors conclude that it is almost certain that under the conditions of post-pandemic capitalism, the number of the precariat will grow and the neoliberal system will want to retain as many of the anti-worker solutions introduced in the shadow of the pandemic as possible.
As historians have begun to conceptualize the U.S. Civil War as a global event, so too must they consider Reconstruction as a political process that transcended national boundaries. The United States and Colombia both abolished slavery during civil wars; ex-slaves in both societies struggled for full citizenship and landholding, partially succeeding for a time; in both societies, a harsh reaction ripped full citizenship from the freedpeople and denied their claims to the land. These events, usually studied only as part of a national story in either the United States or Colombia, can also be understood, and perhaps be better understood, as a history of hemispheric and transnational processes—of race, of republican politics, of contests over equality, of capitalism. This essay examines the words and actions of historical actors, especially U.S. African Americans and afrocolombianos, to note the impressive commonalities of discourse (which was almost exactly the same in many cases) and political repertoires. This article focuses first on the agency of African Americans in both societies to create post-emancipation social movements for citizenship and land and then on the, largely successful, reactions against these movements.
The need for a new economy is great and the obstacles are many: growing inequalities within and between nations and regions, new complicity between corporations and non-democratic political regimes and failure of workers worldwide to make common cause. There are alternative models, indicating that a more egalitarian approach does not necessarily reduce living standards. Environmental degradation cannot be addressed by a technological fix: the threat to our long-term survival is pre-figured in the impact of climate change and corporate rapacity on the land and sea resources of the indigenous minorities who live as humanity has lived for most of its existence. A 10-point plan for a follow-up to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals is suggested, but it will work only if solidarity networks can be built across divides of ascribed race, religion and nominal income levels, to express the will of the people in place of the government representatives who are prepared to gamble the future of humanity for corporate profit and power.
In place of a conclusion, I provide a Coda on John Ruskin, the last major British writer to devote so much attention to the Swiss myth. The myth’s belated iteration in many of his works is the culmination of a long cultural movement that idealized and ideologized the Alps. But Ruskin’s writings on Switzerland are also a reaction to modern transformations brought upon by organized tourism, industrialized capitalism, and liberalism, which made it Europe’s only modern democratic republic in 1848. Focusing on Ruskin’s earlier texts, I suggest that his reactionary vision of Switzerland marks the end of a century-and-half republican tradition in which the various, sometimes conflicting figurations of the Swiss myth contributed to a modern liberal discourse and helped imagine a republic for the moderns. Yet by showing how Europe’s elites romanticized the country as a simulacrum of happiness and freedom while at the same time ruining its proverbial virtue through tourism, Ruskin also brings to the fore the contradictions between liberalism and free-market capitalism, providing us with the most conservative, but perhaps also the most radical of all Romantic representations of Switzerland.
Chapter 2 focuses on who service magicians were. As with Chapter 1, there is an element of statistical analysis as we endeavour to ascertain who a ‘typical’ service magician might be. The broad conclusion reached is that service magicians were diverse in terms of gender, occupation, and, as far as we can tell, age, though if the demographics are broken down by type of magic practised, some patterns do emerge. The second section of this chapter looks at the economics of magic: in short, how it worked as a service, and what sort of income a magician might expect. In doing so, we learn something of the financial state of sorcerers. The chapter concludes with a case study of Westminster, through which it is possible to gain an idea of how magic sat alongside other trades in a microcosmic service economy.
Chapter 4 focuses on magicians’ clients. Adopting a similar format to Chapter 3, it begins with a summary of the way clients were portrayed in didactic texts, isolating some key characteristics that were persistently applied. Again, these are unflattering, and the rest of the chapter is dedicated to establishing the extent to which they were accurate. We see that popular portrayals of clients are often more sympathetic, and that, if the court records are anything to go by, the range of people who visited magicians was very diverse. We also find that clients were aware of the negative reputations they might garner, and as such tried either to hide or justify their activities. Finally, we see that clients, especially in the late medieval period, were very aware that they were indeed clients. As such, they carried certain expectations about what they would receive from a magician and were even prepared to seek redress when disappointed. This assertive stance may have become more aggressive as the period progressed and fear crept in over the potential link between witchcraft and other forms of magic. Simultaneously, new legislation outlawing various types of practical magic probably led to a drop in clients seeking formal redress.
Why, despite all we know about the causes and harms of global heating, has so little effective action been taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and what we can do to change that? This book explains the mechanisms and impacts of the climate crisis, traces the history and reasons behind the lack of serious effort to combat it, describes some people's ongoing scepticism and how to shift it, and motivates an urgent program of action. It argues that the pathway to stopping dangerous global heating will require a much larger mobilization of advocacy and activism to impel decision makers to abandon fossil fuels, and transition to renewable energy and electrification embedded in a political and social framework guided by justice principles. It is an excellent resource for students and researchers on the climate crisis, the need for a renewable energy transition, and the current blocks to progress.
This essay offers an overview of literature and culture in Manaus between 1870 and 1930. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Manaus grew from a remote outpost in the Brazilian Amazon to one of the capitals of the rubber boom – a bustling port where British bankers mingled with Turkish traders and opera companies from Italy sang at the opulent Teatro Amazonas. By World War I, however, the rubber trade had shifted to southeast Asia and the city entered what is typically portrayed as a long decline. Most accounts of the boom depict Manaus as a place where “culture” was just another import and object of conspicuous consumption. In contrast, this essay shows how the social and economic relations, international influences, and cultural infrastructure established during the heyday of rubber were essential to the postboom emergence of a regionalist movement and efforts to articulate an explicitly Amazonian identity.
This chapter focuses on sugar as a commodity underlining and overdetermining social, political, and aesthetic changes in the Caribbean from the 1870s to the 1930s. These global and regional changes included the consolidation of the gold-standard regime and its sudden dismissal, the apparition of corporate-based capitalism, the rearticulation of economics as a discipline through the marginalist “revolution,” the incorporation of former slaves and indentured service into a wage-labor force, and the beginning of the conversion of former plantations into hospitality sites. The resurgence of sugar as a dominant raw commodity gave a particular character to the region's absorption into global corporate capitalism. By focusing on both the material and the social dimension of sugar, the argument is made that this commodity helped negotiate the differences between literary and artistic innovations coming from European-influenced lettered elites and those coming from popular groups with strong Afro-Caribbean roots.
As the central villain of Infinite Jest, entertainment is a persistent preoccupation in Wallace’s writing. He presents it as a locus of neoliberal power in ways that anticipated the development of tailored entertainment services well ahead of time. This chapter examines Wallace’s representation of entertainment, couching it particularly in its antagonistic relationship with attention and engagement, which his work elevated as cardinal virtues. This chapter situates Wallace’s vision of entertainment in a critical paradigm of entertainment as a form of individual and social control, and as the ultimate Jamesonian manifestation of late capitalist flattening, arguing that the anhedonia of Wallace’s characters is a direct result of the dominant forms and agendas of entertainment on display in his writing. The chapter also argues that the forms of entertainment in Wallace’s work invite and reflect the idea of absorption, which is characterized positively and negatively depending on its genesis. That is to say, the absorption of entertainment is contrasted with the absorption of boredom, and again with the absorption of attention, with widely diverse effects on the postmodern subject. Entertainment constitutes a seductive and deadening force that both unites and isolates the subjects of Wallace’s writing, the great threat to the contemporary self.
In 1996, the year Infinite Jest was published, the Federal Drug Administration approved Oxycontin as a prescription drug, a move that would have dire repercussions for Americans’ relationship to opiates. Indeed, Wallace’s novel appeared at a pivotal moment in what is now considered the opiate crisis. Drug use, of course, appears throughout Wallace’s fiction, including the pot-smoking LaVache of The Broom of the System, the numerous addicts in Infinite Jest, and the amphetamine-popping Chris Fogle in The Pale King. Wallace’s work fits into a long tradition of drug use and recovery in fiction, a genre that reaches back to Homer, Thomas De Quincey, William Burroughs and many more. This chapter will argue that Wallace’s fiction marks a sociopolitical shift in this genre: the commercialization of addiction under late capitalism. This approach to Wallace’s work will, like the recent Cambridge Companion and Marshall Boswell’s latest monograph, further thicken our understanding of Wallace’s literary and sociocultural context.
This essay, given as a public address in St. Thomas in 1952, proposes that the West Indies represent “in microcosm the problem of our time.” Long exploited by the European powers as a “deliberate laboratory” of modern production techniques, the subjugation of labor, and the capitalist system, the West Indies now face the “world problem”: the urgent challenge of preserving capitalism’s increased power of production while using the wealth it generates to promote the health, well-being, and democratic voice of all people. Political and economic discipline can make the West Indies a haven not only for the wealthy but for all their residents: a paradise of the “higher and simpler life in which the human spirit blooms and unfolds.”
This Element examines the current crisis of capitalism's legitimacy and concludes that it derives principally from business pursuing an aberration of capitalism known as shareholder capitalism, in which firms sought to maximize shareholder value as reflected in the current share price, at the expense of all other stakeholders and society. Shareholder capitalism began in the 1970s and was renounced by the Business Roundtable in 2019, but continues behind a façade of stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is the most widely cited form of capitalism today, but it is incoherent as a practical guide to action for an entire firm. This Element concludes that a recent evolution of capitalism--customer capitalism--which gives primacy to co-creating value for customers and users, enables firms to master the challenges of the digital age, shower benefits on society, and meet the needs of all the stakeholders.