theme-capitalism Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn

If the financial complexities and implications of the Evergrande case could be boiled down to a tabloid headline, it would read: “XI TO BUILDER: DROP DEAD.”

September 28, 2021 • by Mark Frazier

As part of its recent campaign to regulate capital and to rein in capitalists, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set their sights on the China Evergrande Group. Last week, Asian and global markets sank quickly on the news that Evergrande was unable to ...

China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn

Feature

What Are the Costs of Libertarianism?

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, Revisited

August 10, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking Press, 2017.) Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean's account of James McGill Buchanan and public choice economics, has caused an unusual stir in the few months since its publication. You may have followed the lengthy ...

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The Dream of Women’s Emancipation

May 18, 2015 • by Anna Kalashyan

How do socialist feminists of the 21st century theorize struggles against multiple axes and institutions of domination that are inherent to capitalist social order? What do they envision the emancipatory social transformation to look like? Against the background of the global domination of neoliberal values of individualism, entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and self-determination ...

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(Which) Feminism against (Which) Capitalism?

March 4, 2015 • by Mayra Cotta

Why start a course on feminism reading the first volume of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto? Do Marx and Engels have anything to say about gender oppression? How deeply, if at all, is patriarchy intertwined with capitalism? In which terms can the feminist struggle be part of a systemic ...

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Feminism, Marxism and Social Transformation: Beyond Economic Monism

March 2, 2015 • by Derek Baron

Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) has been a central text for Marxist-feminist thinkers in the 20th century and up until the present. But its centrality is not marked by a universal acceptance or agreement with the central tenets of Engels’ elaboration of Lewis ...

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Rethinking Capitalism: Class 4

February 22, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

I think what Moishe Postone gave us Wednesday was a rather dazzling reading of Volume 1 of Capital, which can be best approached by contrasting it to other readings. Postone rejects the idea that in Capital Marx saw himself as unveiling the “real” secret of capitalism in the hidden abode ...

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Feminism, Capitalism, and Social Transformation: Week 2 — Marx

February 16, 2015 • by Johanna Oksala

A Feminist Perspective on Productive and Unproductive Labor The debate between ‘Marxologists’ on the distinction between productive and unproductive labor has always seemed frustratingly confusing to me and yielded blindingly counter-intuitive results -- truck drivers are productive while taxi drivers are unproductive laborers, for example. The situation is not helped by ...

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Rethinking Capitalism: Class 3

February 13, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

I think there are two great questions to take away from Nancy Fraser’s approach to understanding capitalism, one small and one large. The smaller one concerns the analogy between feudalism and capitalism. This was not discussed last night but it seems to me important. Both belong to the same set ...

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An Interview with Lance Taylor on Inequality

February 11, 2015 • by Lance Taylor

In a new paper for the Institute For New Economic Thinking’s Working Group on the Political Economy of Distribution, economist Lance Taylor and his colleagues examine income inequality using new tools and models that give us a more nuanced -- and frightening -- picture than ...

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Rethinking Capitalism: Class 2

February 11, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

The second class had what I regard as a pellucid account of capitalism from Duncan Foley. The main points that I took away from it are: 1) Capitalism has to be seen as a quasi-natural form of social organization, which is rooted in the division of labor. The key point of ...
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Feminism, Capitalism and Social Transformation

February 4, 2015 • by Nancy Fraser and Johanna Oksala

Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that ‘capitalist society’ must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of women’s subordination and feminist struggles to overcome it. This renewed interest in the connections between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions concerning capitalism, socialism as ...
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Rethinking Capitalism

February 4, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

Capitalism, by its nature, cannot be understood through the lens of any one discipline. Most importantly, it is not fully comprehensible by economics; there is no such thing as an economic theory of capitalism. Philosophy is important, for example to understand the moral standing of capitalism, but it is scarcely ...
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