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Monthly Review, 1998
During the past few years a strong challenge has been mounted in the pages of Monthly Review to the argumentp revalent on the left as well as the right-that globalization and technological change have combined to bring us into a r ew era. Ellen Meiksins Wood captured the gist of the emergi 19 MR position in an essay entitled "Modernity, Postmoderr ity, or Capitalism" in which she asserts that there has been I' 0 historic rupture, no epochal shift, to usher in globalization c.r postfordism or postmodernism. All these concepts have c. the effect of obscuring the historical specificity of capitalism" vhich "by definition means constant change and development.. .." What we are witnessing is the diversification and ,.xtension of the old logic of the mass production economy.' 'This is capitalism.T' We agree with much of the empirical basis for the MR .hallenge to the new catechisms about globalization and .echnological change. We agree, for example, with the arguments, made variously by Wood, Tabb, and Henwood in the pages of Monthly Review, and by Gordon, Zevin, Hirst, and Thompson, and others elsewhere, that the competitive pressures in domestic markets attributed to increased global trade and capital movement have been vastly overstated, especially Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward are co-authors of The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New Press, 1997). 11 MONTHLY REVIEW / JANUARY 199E MONTHLY REVIEW / JANUARY 199 l painfully constructed forms of popular understanding an I organization, which made possible the realization of somp ower from the bottom, weaken. The erosion of popular power capacities in turn smooths the way for new assertion s of power from the top. Capital breaks the social compact which working-class power made necessary. By doing so, however, !t may also unleash new possibilities for popular struggle. Capitalist societies organize production and exchange through networks of specialized and interdependent activities. These networks of cooperation are also networks 0' contention. They help to shape the interests and values whicl give rise to conflict. More important for our argument, net works of interdependency also generate dispersed power ca pacities. Agricultural workers depend on landowners, bui landowners also depend on agricultural workers, as industria. capitalist depend on workers, the prince depends in some measure on the urban crowd, and governing elites in the modern state depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics. Actual power relations are of course tangled and intricate, since urban, democratic, and capitalist societies generate multiple and cross-cutting forms ofinterdependence. We take for granted, however, that some relationships are much more important than others. The dominant interdependenciesand the power constellations they make possible-develop within economic relationships, and within the relations which anchor state elites to the societies they rule. Thus dominant interdependencies, and dominant forms of power, reflect the cooperative activities that generate the material bases for social life, and that sustain the force and authority of the state. If workers withhold their labor, production stops; if they withhold their votes, regimes fall. And, of course, the one set of relations is deeply intertwined with the other. States define and enforce property rights, regulate money and credit, and regulate the relations between employer and employees, for example." The relations between class-based interest groups and state authorities inevitably focus importantly on these economic policies. And the broadly parallel evolution of in-MONTHLY REVIEW /
Central European History, 2012
autonomy? To read Specter, one gets the impression that the key difference between Habermas and Horkheimer/Adorno is their readings and interpretations of Weber-but weren't their differing appraisals of Nietzsche also significant in shaping Habermas's early and late projects? To read Specter, one gets the impression that Adorno was strictly an "ivory tower" mandarin, which obscures the fact that he was the driving force behind the famous Gruppenexperiment, as well as a major public intellectual who shared many of Habermas's concerns about the future of German democracy and society. In a similar manner, Specter briefly mentions Habermas's debt to the American pragmatist tradition-which would seem to indicate that he fails to appreciate the importance and significance of that inspiration for his philosophy. Habermas is an undeniably German thinker with firm commitments to German intellectual traditions and contemporary history, but he is also a transatlantic scholar-a thinker who has supplemented his intellectual inheritance with foreign imports when necessary. In general, one worries whether Specter may have given the reader too much of a good thing. The political/legal context is illuminating and offers new and significant vantage points for reconsidering Habermas's social theoretical project, but these new offerings come at the expense of an underemphasis on the broader and more technical philosophical debates that have also shaped Habermas's writings.
POLS1007_2015 - Introduction to Political Studies
To what extent has the capitalism failed the society? Are the capitalism contradictions a common discourse to any type of an economic system? Putting politics one side, this paper seeks to digest Marxist writings, those which were written in 1848. We look at how this writing is still common tills the modern day society. This paper will take you through liberal democracy and elaborate on how it endorses capitalism. We will the look at the trade-offs of capitalism which in this case will be exploitation, alienation and flaws of the market. This paper entails critiques
Introduction: In the Wake of the Polity to Come
Synthesis (9.2016) Living through the Interregnum: Democracy, the Polis and the Subject in Crisis The current event of the global economic recession that threatens the political, cultural and social structures of democratic states in the first decade of the twenty-first century; the insurgencies in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria; the exponential rise of unemployment and poverty in the countries of the European South; and the threatened position of the humanities and the human are stark symptoms of the waning of the symbolic, cultural and political capital of modernity. Indeed, the destabilization, even precarious position of democracy in the age of transnational capitalism, the dissolution of social bonds and alliances, and the disappearance of labor rights and laws are only a few of the symptoms of living through the interregnum, a term that Étienne Balibar, invoking Antonio Gramsci, has recently used to describe this age of crisis. If this is an age of ends, it is also an age of beginnings, an age of “just befores,” just before the consolidation of the new formations, collectivities, and discourses that harbor the promise of the new. Democracy, the polis and the subject are in crisis; yet, this crisis constitutes a multitudinous event that affiliates the political, social and economic claims of different peoples from various territories and cultures that now share the anxiety over the exhausted capital of modernity on which they have unevenly drawn. Signifying both the promise of the new and the destruction of the old, the event of the crisis summons the histories of the concepts of democracy, the polis, and the subject as a citizen, worker, and ethical singularity and requires a critical revisionism of these histories in the present. Greece is an interesting case in point; once represented as the cradle of European civilization, now the example of an economically rogue state in Europe, it showcases the economic, political and cultural dimensions of the crisis. The symbolic habitat of democracy, the polis and the citizen, now the site of their disintegration and default, Greece today comprises the key terrain for several epistemological, political, cultural and economic conflicts. As the sign that affiliates the imaginary space of the birth of democracy with the real political space where democracy is in a precarious condition the Greek case can gesture to the rethinking of the epistemological and political gap between the classical ideal of democracy and its modern reinvention as part of the capitalist, imperialist and colonialist mapping of the world that has led to the systematic expropriation and marginalization of non Western cultures within and outside the West. This special issue of Synthesis invites essays that reconstellate the concepts of democracy, the polis and the subject in an age that witnesses the pressing call for democracy and justice manifested in the form of various collectivities, discourses and narratives that try to invent and articulate new visions of the political.
History and Nations in the Postmodern Era. disClosure interviews Geoff Eley
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 1999
Geoff Eley teaches history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and is a recognized expert on nationalism from the dawn of the Enlightenment era to the present. Eley is the author of Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (London and New Haven, 1980), From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), and Kontinuitiit in Deutschland (Munster, 1991), and is co-author with David Blackboum of The Particularities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Gennany (Oxford, 1984). He has also edited with Ronald Gregory Suny a book entitled Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford, 1996). Eley visited the University of Kentucky campus in January of 1998 to discuss nationalism, with particular emphasis on Germany. He took some time from his busy schedule to discuss various aspects of his work on nationalism with a