查看更多>>摘要：This paper attempts to rethink and globalize the concept of the capitalist class, to suggest ways in which this class uses social movements, and to explore what might come after capitalist globalization and the hegemony of the transnational capitalist class (TCC). The first section of the paper provides evidence that there is now a flourishing community of scholars largely but not exclusively connected with the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism (NCSGC), who are building a substantial foundation for research on the transnational capitalist class all over the world. The next section poses questions around the hegemony of the TCC and highlights the importance of what is conceptualized as social movements for global capitalism. Relatively little attention is paid to this compared to the vast literature on social movements against global capitalism. The paper concludes with the question: Is there a non-capitalist alternative to globalization dominated by the TCC? The answer begins with the aphorism: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of capitalism." My view is that this expresses a profound truth, forcing us to begin again to think through what we once conceptualized as democratic socialism.
查看更多>>摘要：Under current circumstances, the lasting and exacerbated crisis of world capitalism, its far-reaching transformations, and intensified socio-political and geopolitical conflicts lead to highly uncertain conditions and an increasing world disorder. After some methodological remarks and a brief analysis of the recent developments of world capitalism, this article more specifically investigates the capital-state relations, and critically considers competing explanations (including imperialism, globalization, empire, transnational and totalitarian capitalism) of the currently evolving world (dis-)order, as well as the urgent search for new forms of global governance. Based on this analysis, an attempt is made to draw some conclusions concerning social movements and struggles for social change.
查看更多>>摘要：The flags of convenience (FOCs) shipping system promotes laissezfaire global capitalist development and has become dominant in providing the legal framework for ocean commerce in recent decades, as it has largely replaced the national flag shipping system. FOCs reduce the powers of nation-states in taxing, owning, and regulating property; controlling competition; setting wage rates and working conditions; and providing environmental protection. The growing use of FOCs arises from ship owners'' worldwide shopping for laws that they are willing to pay for-to ensure the strongest private property rights and neo-liberal capitalist conceptions of efficiency. FOCs are offered to foreigners by tax havens or offshore financial centres in small states such as Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands. Flags from these open registers have a crucial role in drastically reducing transportation costs, vastly increasing the scale of maritime trade, and providing viability to globally integrated systems of production, distribution and consumption, as well as shifting power away from traditional centres of influence. FOCs push for a low tax, low wage, libertarian system of global capitalism, yet they unintentionally contribute to chronic instability-bubbles, over-capacity, and severe downturns in shipping and the wider global political economy.
查看更多>>摘要：Global conflicts, be they economic, political, cultural, or military ones, are big challenges in the age of world interactions. The article concentrates on conflicts and dangers of the future possible global state which can be the result of the current development of global capitalism. It tries to capture to the greatest possible extent these integrating trends, not only in order to clarify their shape and potentials over last recent decades, but also to show the thematic areas of the developmental processes of global conflicts. There is a need to deal with potential global tendencies in the form of planetary homogenisation, supranational authoritarian tendencies, and a world war, and to formulate possible normative solutions to these by a multi-level arrangement (local, national, macro-regional, and global levels). The article stresses that the analysis of negative and positive aspects of the global state presupposes its complex critical concept. It articulates the basis for a critical theory of (mis)recognition of the global state. In the end, the article indicates how, in the conflict zones and peripheries, the global poor as a potential new subject of social change can contribute to the positive development and solutions to the conflicts and dangers.
查看更多>>摘要：Natural scientists have pointed to the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, with the precise dating not yet decided, but often traced to the Great Acceleration of the human impact on the environment since 1945. Thus understood, the Anthropocene largely coincides with the rise of the modern environmental movement and corresponds to the age of planetary crisis. This paper looks at the evolution of Marxian and left contributions to environmental thought during this period. Although Marx''s ecological materialism is now widely recognized, with the rediscovery of his theory of metabolic rift, the debate has recently shifted to ecological dialectics, including dualism, monism, totality, and mediation, generating a conflict between ecological Marxism and radical ecological monism. It is argued here that only an ecological Marxism, rooted in a materialist dialectic of nature and society, is able to engage effectively with the Great Climacteric that increasingly governs our times.
查看更多>>摘要：This essay offers a socialist feminist postcolonial interpretation of the Anthropocene concept as used in recent ecocriticism. In contesting the rigid positioning of Humanity over Nature, the paper draws on the Marxist psychoanalytic theory of non-identity in Theodor Adorno (1973) and Julia Kristeva (1973, 1977, 1978). Making an ecofeminist contribution to the new field of environmental humanities, it engages critically with the perspective of prominent US scholar Timothy Morton (2012). Its embodied materialist argument is that contemporary Eurocentric institutions, science, and philosophies are indeed shaped by affect as Morton believes, but not in the way that he envisages. In addition, it is suggested that the socialist feminist postcolonial politics of ecofeminism is already challenging the inevitable universality of the Anthropocene by building an Earth Democracy with epistemologies of care. It is concluded that understanding the Anthropocene notion, a phenomenon that is profoundly gendered, requires more than thinking in "deep geological time." Ultimately, all ecological awareness will demand a capacity for thinking in "deep libidinal time."
查看更多>>摘要：In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty uses global macroeconomic statistical data to show that, in the distribution of national wealth, the rate of return on capital is always greater than the rate of economic growth (r>g). He demonstrates a trend toward the concentration of wealth, which, to a certain extent, means a trend toward a hereditary system of the concentration of wealth, and away from wealth through hard work. In some respects, Piketty''s argument verifies the basic view of Marx that surplus value is concentrated at the end of capital. However, unlike Marx''s criticism of relations of production, the goal of Piketty''s research is to improve the capitalist system. He advocates progressive wealth taxation and its global implementation to curb limitless increases in profit.
查看更多>>摘要：This is a biographical essay about Stanley Levison, who is the subject of Ben Kamin''s Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers (2014). Levison was a communist and friend of Martin Luther King. The review focuses on the limitations and strengths of the book, of Levison and of the Civil Rights Movement. At a time when the Communist Party was facing difficult challenges, Levison was not totally a failure in helping to uphold the aspirations of the underprivileged.
查看更多>>摘要：Bernie Sanders, who claims to be a "socialist," surprisingly rises from the 2016 US Democratic presidential primaries, and has created a socialist vision for future America. The "socialism" he has selfclaimed for is virtually democratic socialism. Sander''s meteoric rise in the election polls indicates that capitalist crisis is increasingly exacerbated; meanwhile, socialist thought tends to revitalize in the United States and other capitalist countries. The "socialism" Sanders has claimed will not take place in the United States, yet the historical tendency that socialism will inevitably replace capitalism is not going to change.
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