After hegemony Keohane, Robert O
2001., 20050228, 2005, 1984, 2005-02-28
eBook
This book is a comprehensive study of cooperation among the advanced capitalist countries. Can cooperation persist without the dominance of a single power, such as the United States after World War ...II? To answer this pressing question, Robert Keohane analyzes the institutions, or "international regimes," through which cooperation has taken place in the world political economy and describes the evolution of these regimes as American hegemony has eroded. Refuting the idea that the decline of hegemony makes cooperation impossible, he views international regimes not as weak substitutes for world government but as devices for facilitating decentralized cooperation among egoistic actors. In the preface the author addresses the issue of cooperation after the end of the Soviet empire and with the renewed dominance of the United States, in security matters, as well as recent scholarship on cooperation.
Commodifying what nature? Castree, Noel
Progress in human geography,
06/2003, Volume:
27, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this essay contemporary Marxist writings on the commodification of nature in capitalist societies are reviewed systematically. Recent research on commodities in human geography, cultural studies ...and related fields have been largely post or non-Marxist in tenor and have paid relatively little attention to the ‘natural’ dimensions of commodities. By contrast, recent Marxist writings about capitalism-nature relations have tried to highlight both the specificity of capitalist commodification and its effects on ecologies and bodies. This fact notwithstanding, it is argued that the explanatory and normative dimensions of this Marxist work are, respectively, at risk of being misunderstood and remain largely implicit. On the explanatory side, confusion arises because the words ‘commodification’ and ‘nature’ are used by different Marxists to refer to different things that deserve to be disentangled. On the normative side, the Marxian criticisms of nature's commodification are rarely explicit and often assumed to be self-evident. The essay offers a typology of commodification processes relating to specific natures with specific effects to which a variety of criticisms can be applied. Though essentially exegetical rather than reconstructive, the essay tries to pave the way for a more precise sense of how the commodification of nature in capitalist societies works and why it might be deemed to be problematic.
This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the ...north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that provided modern, European-style apartments and facilities for more than eight thousand residents left homeless from the war. Drawing from interviews, images, poems, and archival materials that document urban reconstruction, the article foregrounds the complex historical, ideological, social, and gendered meanings and sentiments attached to a particular construction material: bricks. It argues that bricks have figured prominently in radical and recurring urban transformations in Vinh, both in the creation and the destruction of urban spaces and architectural forms. As utopie objects of desire, bricks gave shape to an engaged politics of hope and belief in future betterment, as construction technologies once reserved for the elite were made available to the masses. In Quang Trung public housing, bricks harnessed political passions and Utopian sentiments that over time, as Vinh's urban identity shifted from a model socialist city to a regional center of commercial trade and industry, came to signify unfulfilled promises of the socialist state and dystopic ruins that today stand in the way of capitalist redevelopment.
This article challenges the tendency to conceptualize contemporary debt bondage as an individualized relationship between employer and victim. It highlights the systemic relations of inequality that ...underpin debt bondage in advanced capitalist countries, focusing on temporary migrant workers in the United States. It advances two interlocking arguments. First, that debt bondage in the US market is rooted in processes of ‘neoliberalization’ that have left dispossessed populations few alternatives but to sell themselves into coercive labor markets. Second, that debt operates as a class-based form of power that disciplines all sectors of the labor market, albeit in variegated forms and degrees. Far from an archaic or non-capitalist social relation, debt bondage must be understood as a profitable strategy of labor discipline anchored in state regulatory frameworks that have bolstered the power of employers and facilitated predatory and privatized forms of credit and lending as solutions to poverty and unemployment.
In recent years, diverging demand and growth regimes received greater scholarly attention. Particularly, the intersection between variants of Comparative Political Economy and the post-Keynesian ...macroeconomic analysis provides a promising avenue for understanding the main dynamics of various growth regimes. Yet, the majority of these studies focused on the global North. We expand this analysis to the global South by examining eight large emerging capitalist economies (ECEs), Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey, during the periods 2000-2008 and 2009-2019. In so doing, we not only uncover the main demand and growth regimes of ECEs for the two periods but also link them to the main trends in the demand and growth regimes of developed capitalist economies (DCEs) for both periods. One main finding of our research is that ECEs did not follow the same path as DCEs after the Great Recession. While there was a clear shift in the demand and growth regimes of DCEs toward export orientation, the main pattern in the ECEs remained as the continuation of a trend that already emerged before the 2007-09 crisis, i.e., domestic demand-led regimes associated with considerable financial deficits of domestic private and/or public sectors. Finally, we provide some observations on the puzzle of resilient domestic demand-led regimes in ECEs.
•Collaborative approaches within old industrial regions require deliberate construction.•Local institutional constraints remain important and are likely to shape outcomes.•The capacity of regions to ...influence must be examined within different spatial structures.•The appropriate characteristics of local autonomy must be unravelled.
During recent decades capitalist forces have altered the geography of economic production and intensified the de-industrialisation of old industrial regions (OIRs). Various regional development prescriptions have followed including place-based concepts centred upon the stronger involvement of local and regional actors. Yet in promoting a shift beyond overly centralist responses, important questions remain about local institutional capacity, especially within OIRs given frequent attention to institutional paralysis and fragmentation. Although more fruitful evolutionary perspectives can be identified, ground level outcomes remain uncertain. This paper focuses on the Black Country OIRs within the English West Midlands where a transformational vision resulted from sub-regional joint working during the 2000s. Whilst acknowledging important external drivers, not least state support for new spaces of governance, a constructivist perspective is presented to more fully understand why a transformative collaborative approach emerged. Particular attention is given to the role of Black Country advocates in creating dilemmas, questioning traditions and challenging existing beliefs. Place-based development approaches therefore do emerge in a latent sense but must be actively constructed. Even then, substantial limitations exist stemming from continuing institutional influences.
We articulate and test an explanation for the remarkable change and continuity in contemporary tax policy in capitalist democracies. We argue that internationalization, domestic economic change, and ...budgetary pressures each prompt significant changes in tax policy; yet, together, they create a system of constraints on altering the level and distribution of tax burdens. We utilize 1981 to 1995 data from fourteen developed democracies to analyze the determinants of taxation. We find that capital mobility and trade are associated with cuts in statutory corporate tax rates but not with reductions in effective average tax rates on capital income. Moreover, we find that capital mobility is negatively associated with the tax components of labor costs. Domestically, structural unemployment leads to reductions in labor and capital taxes while public sector debt and societal needs raise taxes. We conclude with a summary of the new political economy of taxation in capitalist democracies.
State rescaling is the subject of a continuously growing literature that provides valuable insights into our current understandings of globalization, the spatiality of the capitalist state and urban ...and regional development. There have been, however, growing concerns about the wider applicability of this literature. Since the bulk of state rescaling studies have focused on North American and European examples, the existing literature is limited in its conceptualization of the diverse and concrete ways in which the spatial and scalar restructuring of capitalist states takes place in different historical, political and social contexts beyond North America and Western Europe. This symposium provides the literature with a valuable opportunity to transcend this limitation. The articles in this collection discuss the processes of state rescaling in non‐Western countries such as Japan, Korea, Brazil and Turkey. By providing detailed explanations of state rescaling and the associated politico‐economic processes in non‐Western countries and regions, they not only show that state‐rescaling literature is more widely applicable and meaningful beyond Western politico‐economic contexts, but also point out what is missing in the existing corpus.
The global capitalist system is at a particular historical juncture with a dilution of the capitalist core away from Western (and Japanese) centers of accumulation to China and India, among other ...countries. What is the nature of capitalism in these countries? Are China and India going along the same development trajectories that advanced capitalist countries followed earlier? Is their accumulation model the same as that of the OECD economies or is accumulation different under late capitalism? The author argues that capitalism in India and China is "compressed," meaning that the phases of capitalism do not follow one another in sequential order. Instead, some phases, such as primitive accumulation, may be delayed or be experienced at the same time as advanced accumulation under the corporate sector, thereby producing a mode of development that does not generate widespread employment. The author contends that capitalism in India and China is compressed and he demonstrates empirically that primitive accumulation, petty commodity producing sectors, and mature capitalism in late-industrializing countries reinforce each other, creating precarious forms of employment in the process.
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