Taking the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) as its focus, this paper critically examines the Canadian government’s efforts to regulate the extractive industry. Using insight from ideology theory and critical discourse analysis, and drawing empirically from Canadian Parliamentary debates, official government and NGO reports, and various news items regarding the development of the CORE, we document how dominant voices prioritized the economy, downplayed the systemic violence of the industry, and redirected blame to “underdeveloped” countries, on route to a regulatory framework that is voluntary and which fails to address the underlying causes of corporate harm and violence. While the CORE represents a “logical” state response to corporate crime, we nevertheless emphasize the importance of ongoing debates about its role in combating corporate impunity. This not only reinforces the idea that (capitalist) dominance is never absolute but signals the ever-present nature of resistance and possibility for change.

This article takes issue with the common view that the early Turkish Republic (1920-1940) followed a “special” route to modernity characterized by “state capitalism.” It argues that such a view, rooted in the Sonderweg paradigm, obscures the historical-comparative specificity of Turkish state formation, leading to problematic conclusions about the character of Turkish modernization. Based on insights derived from Karl Polanyi’s notion of “economistic fallacy” and Political Marxism’s conception of capitalism, I offer a new interpretation of the early Republican project in Turkey, which, in turn, provides a deeper understanding of the social content, tempo and multi-linearity of world historical development.

This paper argues that the class-based analyses that seek to make sense of the recent transformation of Turkish modernity rest on a pre-given duality between the state and the bourgeoisie. This not only jettisons the relational and temporal context in which classes define and articulate their interests, thereby leading to determinist explanations of various sorts, but also obscures the historical distinctiveness and mutual re-transformation of two different modes of socio-spatial organization, modernity and capitalism, in Turkey. Based on a novel historical materialist method known as Political Marxism, I suggest that re-conceptualizing class as property-relations sheds new light on the historical-comparative specificity of Turkish modernity, which, in turn, leads to a radical re-interpretation of Turkey’s recent transformation.

The paper argues that contemporary capitalism must be studied as a society rather than an economy, and contemporary society as capitalist society. Capitalism is defined as a specific institutionalization of economic action in the form of a specifically dynamic system of social action, with a tendency to expand into, impose itself on and consume its non-economic and non-capitalist social and institutional context, unless contained by political resistance and regulation. The paper illustrates its perspective by four brief sketches, depicting contemporary capitalism as a historically dynamic social order, a culture, a polity, and a way of life. All four examples, it is claimed, demonstrate the superiority of a longitudinal-historical approach over static cross-sectional comparisons, and of focusing on the commonalities of national versions of capitalisms rather than their “varieties”.

Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virtual economy", the inability of agencies to obtain insight into economic and financial operations, the short term orientations of managers not coinciding with enterprise viability, and a "mystification of risk" by high science are some of the analogies to be discussed. It is argued that not only the origins but also the aftermath of the crisis may show significant analogies.