Capitalism Archives - Page 13 of 28

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Gray is Beautiful Revisited

On the Politics of Sex and the Crisis of Democracy at Home and Abroad

December 23, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This week I am returning to my appreciation of the color gray, a theme I promised to explore regularly here, which unfortunately I have only returned to occasionally, and not recently. I am returning to the theme on this the darkest of days -- I started writing this during the winter solstice ...

Feature

From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond

December 21, 2017 • by Nancy Fraser

At first sight, today’s crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here, in the United States: Donald Trump -- his election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UK’s Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European ...

Feature

How Utopia Became a Real Estate Leaflet?

Discursive formation of branded housing projects in Turkey

December 14, 2017 • by Bilge Serin

When it comes to gated communities, recurrences of similar everyday life images and spatial representations in mass media form a discourse of the future everyday life. It depicts an ideal living environment that aligns neoliberalization with an idealization of private urban services, commodified forms of housing production, enclave living and ...

Education

Debt Comes for Us All

Students protest against the new GOP tax bill

December 11, 2017 • by Amy Osika

A graduate student walks by with a sign that reads: “TAXED OUT OF COLLEGE!” Early on Saturday morning, December 2nd 2017, the Republican Senate passed the new GOP Tax Bill, only days after students from across New York City joined together to protest it. While President Trump states that “people are going to be very, ...

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Concrete Utopia

(Re)producing life in, against and beyond the open veins of capital

December 7, 2017 • by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

Concrete utopia is a contradictory process that develops within, against and beyond the social relation of capital and its institutions. Concrete utopia is subsumed into the open veins of capital and is crisscrossed by the main contradiction of capitalist work: we live in a society where we need to work in ...

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Life Sentences

Opening remarks from the Conference on Incarceration and the Humanities

November 30, 2017 • by N. D. B. Connolly

Now, you could imagine the horrors of a colonial prison in a black, economically depressed country like 1930s Jamaica, just as you can imagine the nightmare that the sound of wailing men might conjure in the mind of a nine-year old child like my grandfather. Even the most benign administrative ...

Education

Being a Woman is Work

How capitalist society (de) values ‘female’ labor

November 30, 2017 • by Judith Elster

This is essay is part of the OOPS course Law and Sexuality. The current division of labor has been perceived as equal for many, but remains impractical in the long term, especially in our contemporary capitalist America. The challenges that come with capitalism, such as inflation and recession, has forced each member ...

Feature

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

An excerpt from Steven Stoll’s latest book

November 30, 2017 • by Steven Stoll

— J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III (1782) This is an ordinary map of southern West Virginia, adorned with shapes representing private property. Some of the shapes adhere to watercourses. Others run ruler straight, throwing squares and trapezoids across innumerable hills and hollows. Distant investors ...

Feature

(un-)imaging

Or: why the blank page is a lure in imagining the new

November 27, 2017 • by Pierre Schwarzer

In a dark room, projected onto a wall, we see the hands of a man, dressed in black, on a wooden table. In crisp detail, we see him holding a page from a magazine, with some advertisement on it. Slowly, the page is being crumpled, we hear the whispers of ...

Feature

Kevin Spacey, Company Towns, and the Reformation

Past Present Episode 106

November 14, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Natalia, Neil, and Niki debate Kevin Spacey’s coming out amid charges of pedophilia, the 21st century company town, and the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

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Kevin Spacey, Company Towns, and the Reformation

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Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser

A book excerpt from Banu Bargu and Chiara Bottici

November 7, 2017 • by Banu Bargu and Chiara Bottici

What has followed is a veritable revival of research on different aspects of capitalism (see, for example, Piketty 2013; Stiglitz 2013). While the movement away from the predominantly culturalist perspectives toward the register of materiality has been welcomed by many, this turn to the material sphere has not exactly been ...

Feature

Reductio ad Absurdum

Zero-Hours Contracts, Bogus ‘Self-Employment’, and Welfare ‘Conditionality’ in the UK

November 6, 2017 • by Christian Garland

Bogus ‘self-employment’, takes two main forms: the first is known as the ‘gig economy,’ and involves companies such as Uber, Deliveroo, and Hermes making use of the labor of those who are classified as ‘independent contractors’, rather than employees. The fact that these independent contractors earn less than the minimum ...