Capitalism Archives - Page 7 of 28

Capitalism

The Return of “Capitalism”

And the limits of economics

September 20, 2019 • by William Milberg

As Democratic presidential hopefuls find themselves responding to the questions “are you a socialist?” and “are you a capitalist?,” it is useful to remember that for most of the post-War era, the word capitalism was taboo in economics, the discipline whose very role is to provide rigorous analysis of … ...

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A Political Machine for the 21st Century

The Trump Organization As Platform Capitalism

August 22, 2019 • by Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer

Today, the Trump Organization lies at the epicenter of political power in the American state. How should we make sense of the family business and its relationship to politics? Ethics watchdogs and journalists speak of "conflicts of interest” when the president governs from Mar-a-Lago or promotes his golf properties and ...

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How Disney has Turned the Film Industry Into a Small World, After All

Does the beloved children’s entertainer have an antitrust problem?

August 12, 2019 • by Jake Pitre

In July 2019, Buzzfeed News ran an article with the headline, “Disney Won. Now What?” It’s a worthwhile question in the aftermath of the company’s purchase of 20th Century Fox from Richard Murdoch. The purchase of Fox is the largest in a long line of high-profile acquisitions by Disney that ...

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Networking and Human Nature

A Lesson in Socializing Under the Rules of 21st Century Capitalism

June 22, 2019 • by Patrick Sheehan

A Lesson in Socializing Under the Rules of 21st Century Capitalism...

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On Capitalism

The worst there Is, except for all the others

May 30, 2019 • by Daniel Rose

Winston Churchill’s famous comment on democracy as a political system applies equally to free enterprise capitalism as an economic system. No other economic form provides the incentives to economic innovation and creativity, relates the desires of the consumer to the efforts of the producer, encourages the voluntary savings and investment ...

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Speculating on Chaos in Financialized Capitalism

Speculations, Spectacles, Spectres

May 30, 2019 • by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

Across the channel, during the upheaval caused by the gilets jaunes movement, media and government have condemned protestors’ actions for the continuing chaos they have brought upon France’s city centers. Back in autumn, some weeks before the eruption of the gilet jaunes protests, President Macron used his Armistice Speech to focus on the ...

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Debt: A Lever of Dispossession

Case Studies in Resistance

May 22, 2019 • by Iolanda Fresnillo

“Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa” Thomas Sankara “In modern times, debt has become a key means of capital accumulation. Ubiquitous, it has taken on a new function, as the most general category through which exploitation is organized” Silvia Federici The 2008 crisis burst and debt rang our doorbell. Spain, together with ...

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The Anxiety Industry

At the limits of anxious consumerism

May 17, 2019 • by A.T. Kingsmith

Anxiety -- that chronic, widespread uncertainty proliferating out of the insecurities that exemplify modern life -- has become the lodestone of 21st century consumer capitalism. From fidget spinners, gravity blankets, CBD oils, air fresheners and skincare products to white noise machines, salt lamps, calming diffusers and the countless meditation apps inundating our ...

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Left Melancholy, Neoliberalism, and the Investee Condition

An interview with Michel Feher, author of Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age

May 10, 2019 • by Michel Feher

Public Seminar (PS): What motivated you to write Rated Agency? Michel Feher (MF): Well, three motivations probably. The first one, which is the longer one, comes from reading many years ago Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism and then thinking through that from the Foucauldian perspective but also realizing soon that these lectures were delivered ...

Left Melancholy, Neoliberalism, and the Investee Condition

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The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

May 9, 2019 • by Alberto Toscano

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...

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A Complex Balance

The Boeing 737 MAX Crashes

May 3, 2019 • by Richard McGahey

The recent tragic crashes of Boeing 737 MAX airliners have raised concerns that commercial aircraft are too complicated to operate due to the increasingly complex technologies involved. Notably, Donald Trump tweeted “Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT.” Others disagree, saying technology ...

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Mass Psychology of Crisis

For a structural analysis of financialization and against the use of “fascism” as a scare tactic

April 23, 2019 • by Nancy Fraser

Mass psychology, new fascism, financialization. The conjunction of these three terms is startling. Its meaning is not immediately transparent. To grasp it requires an imaginative leap. What connects them, for me, is a fourth term, crisis. Not just financial crisis, nor indeed any crisis that is merely sectoral -- whether ecological, economic, social or ...