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Glolocal Value Chains: A Core-Periphery Framework Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-24 Aneesh Correa, Romar Correa
A distinction is drawn in a developing economy between ‘town’ and ‘country’, or between ‘agriculture’ and ‘industry’. The connections between the two are the supply of agro-inputs, notably food, fr...
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Authoritarian Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Face of the Jina Movement Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-24 Parviz Sadeghat
Since last Shahrivar [August—September], a movement has arisen across Iran which has come to be recognised globally by its pivotal slogan, ‘Zan Zendegi Azadi’. This movement can be viewed from one ...
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Pierre Bourdieu vis-à-vis Martin Heidegger: the first ‘conservative revolution’ Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-24 Bridget Fowler
As a philosophy student in 1950s Paris, Pierre Bourdieu experienced a ‘certain fascination’ with the German phenomenologists, Husserl and Heidegger. He later went on in 1975 to write a lengthy arti...
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The politics of Benjamin’s laughter at melancholy Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Javad Momeni Kolour
Following Agamben’s distinction between Adorno’s melancholy science and Benjamin’s Pauline Messianism, the present study aims to shed light on Benjamin’s project through scrutinizing his recourse t...
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Objective form, territory of critical struggle Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Luiz Renato Martins, translation by Nicholas Brown
This essay historicizes the origins of the concept of “objective form,” detailing its emergence in the light of Brazilian and world political history.
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A critique of political economy: misgovernance equifinality to green economy transformability Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Zhan Wang
An inquiry into misgovernance in globalization vs. anti-globalization aims to understand why the ‘world factory’ has a relative lower world pricing impact and animates in the history of ‘ecological...
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Isaac Deutscher and his left-wing critics Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Paul Flewers
This article investigates Isaac Deutscher’s left-wing critics, looking at a wide range of assessments of Deutscher’s biographies of Stalin and Trotsky and of his ideas, especially in respect of the...
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The dialectics of radical social change and global capitalist order: evidence from the ‘Arab Spring’ Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Govand Khalid Azeez
Today, the capitalist statist system has engulfed the planet as a whole. There are fundamental ecological, economical and socio-political contradictions and antagonisms. At each frontier, the appar...
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Wealth production and millionaire footballers: wage-labourers or rentiers? Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Xabier Arrizabalo-Montoro, Alberto Ruiz-Villaverde
During the financial crisis that started in 2007–2008, the incomes of the most outstanding professional footballers increased exponentially in Spain. By contrast, most wage-labourers witnessed a dr...
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Mapping Aijaz Ahmad’s intellectual legacy: a thorough expedition Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Waseem Ahmad Bhat, Shazia Majid, Bilal Ahmad Mir
This article examines the intellectual legacy of Aijaz Ahmad, primarily through the insightful dialogues conducted by Vijay Prashad. It comprehensively investigates and highlights Aijaz Ahmad’s sig...
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The future of education and work in the ‘New Old World’: pensée unique once again or is there any alternative at all? Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Roberto della Santa, Raquel Varela
In this essay we will try to explore (1) the economic, political and cultural origins of the ‘future of education and work’ neoliberal élan; (2) its main agents and structures in terms of instituti...
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Migration in knowledge aging societies. Differentiating labor force and discriminating people Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Francesco Maniglio
Although populism in the global North countries has advanced during the last two decades as an anti-immigrant ideology, demographers have shown concerns about the aging of populations in those coun...
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Everyday movements and massive socio-cultural shifts in Iran Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Abbas Varij Kazemi
This article investigates the grounds for forming the ‘women, life, freedom’ movement in Iran, which has spread throughout the country since September 2022. In this article, relying on statistical ...
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Timothy Snyder: contemporary liberalism’s Elmer Gantry Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Michael de Young
Critique of Timothy Snyder - historian and prominent public intellectual in US and Europe- in particular works Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin 2010 & The Road to Unfreedom 2018 & journa...
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Empirical evaluation of monopolization Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Nathan Johnson
Monopolization in the US economy is empirically evaluated, along with the concentration and centralization of capital. Factors which contribute to monopolization and counteracting factors are brief...
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Re-examining the rise of left in India Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Waseem Ahmad Bhat
This review paper offers a concise overview of the evolution of India's Leftist movement. It contends that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia spurred neighbouring countries to break free from the t...
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Capitalist accumulation and its historical foundation and logical premise: on primitive accumulation Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Werner Bonefeld
Primitive accumulation is the historical foundation and logical premise of the capitalist social relations. Accumulation by exploitation presupposes the existence and expanded reproduction of the d...
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The World Cup football: a case study in commodity fetishism Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 David Kennedy
This paper provides analysis of the football (soccer ball). Specifically, we focus on the manufacture of the World Cup ball through the lens of commodity fetishism and the journey that the football makes to become a commodity. Three aspects of this journey are outlined: symbolic fetish of the World Cup ball in the build-up to tournaments; scientific fetish in the corporate marketing of footballs; and
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Reflections on ‘capital’s cost-of-living crisis’ Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Peter Kennedy
Few people will be unaware of the global cost-of-living crisis. This paper situates the crisis in the much larger crisis of capital and, specifically, the present form of accumulation, premised at one end by parasitic capital and at the other by the impoverishment of labour. It does so by examining the immediate and underlying causes of capital’s cost-of-living crisis. It is argued that both immediate
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Türkiye: sub-imperialist power or semi-colony? Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Michael Pröbsting
The theory of sub-imperialism, which originated in the 1960s, has gained more attraction in the past one, two decades. Various supporters of this theory refer to Türkiye (‘Turkey’) as a model for such a sub-imperialist power. We think that both the theory in itself as well as such a characterisation of this Mediterranean country are mistaken. In our view, a more appropriate characterisation for Türkiye
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Understanding food rationing in colonial India: a prelude to the formation of public distribution system Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Soumik Sarkar, Sharanya Bhattacharya
The paper presents an alternative theoretical framework to deliver a historical account of the formation of public distribution system (PDS) in India as a wartime food rationing system under colonial rule. It is argued that the origins of food rationing in India can be traced to the historical coagulation of class and non-class effects/struggles arising from colonial-era agrarian class structure, including
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The perfect state, the strong state and the deadlock of political Islam: the case of Turkey Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Siyaves Azeri
Erdogan's ‘moderate’ political Islamist administration was initially introduced in Turkey as the bourgeois state that would facilitate the implementation of neo-liberal economic order and a new cycle of accumulation of capital. However, Erdogan's breed of Islamism has proven itself incapable of constituting the bourgeois ‘strong state’. The inability of political Islam to constitute the ‘strong state’
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Mészáros’ Structural Limits to Capital and the Limits to the War on China Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Samuel Spellmann
Critical Political Economy analysts have addressed the similarities between the US–China hegemonic confrontation as contemporary parallels to previous global rivalries which led to open conflict. Noticing the distinctive patterns through which the capitalist crisis presented itself, István Mészáros proposed a theoretical elaboration linking the overproduction characteristic of the crisis to the material
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Art and reification: Georg Lukacs’ critique on Brecht Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Spyros Potamias, Iro Mandilara
In this article, we intend to combine the few and short passages where Georg Lukacs exerts his criticism on Bertolt Brecht’s dialectical theatre with the Lukacsian aesthetic theory as a whole, in order to comprehend and designate those points, on which the above-mentioned criticism is based. Both thinkers’ main concern was to discover ways in which art could contribute to the overcoming of the reification
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Julius Margolin on freedom and ‘being human’ under conditions of Soviet totalitarianism Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Agnieszka Lenart
The article Julius Margolin on Freedom and ‘Being Human’ under Conditions of Soviet Totalitarianism is devoted to analyzing the work of Julius Margolin, philosopher, writer, and victim of the Soviet regime. In the novel Journey into the Land of Zeks, Margolin describes his experiences in the Gulag and witnesses the cruel process of dehumanization. This article aims to show the experiences of a Gulag
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Interview with Professor Bridget Fowler—women’s rights in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the 21st century Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Bridget Fowler, Yassamine Mather
Published in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory (Vol. 50, No. 2-3, 2022)
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Philosophy and Sociology: 1960 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Xiaoxiao Liu
Published in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory (Vol. 50, No. 2-3, 2022)
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The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-02 Michael Newman
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Neoliberalism and rationality: a tango for two? Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-02 Theofanis Papageorgiou,Sotiris Koskoletos,Antonis Papangelopoulos
Questions about the role that rationality plays in economics are of general importance. In that vein, we check for differences in the concept of rationality, in parallel with differences in the concept of neoliberalism, in the aftermath of the crisis, arguing that different conceptions of rationality go hand in hand with variations of neoliberalism. Furthermore, we argue that in periods of crisis there
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Empirical evaluation of the law of value Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-02 Nathan Johnson
The law of value is empirically evaluated as it relates to the distribution of capital across industries and their appropriation of surplus value, using US economic census manufacturing data from 1997 through 2017. Strong correlation is demonstrated between the annual surplus value appropriated and mass of capital stock, with the coefficient of determination values ranging 0.75–0.85. Correlation between
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The end of the social pact in Europe (1981–2008) Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-02 Raquel Varela
Between 1980—during the 'double dip' crisis—and 2008, the European social pact, born of the armed and revolutionary defeat (in part of the countries) of Nazi fascism, ended. In exchange for disarmament and the end of the revolutionary struggle, in 1945–47, a specific form of counter-revolution was designed in Europe, outlined in Yalta and Postdam, which erected the European Welfare State and full employment
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Thomas Piketty Capital and Ideology, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press ISBN 9780674980822 1093 pp. £25.22 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Bridget Fowler
Piketty's magisterial analysis of socioeconomic inequalities and changing ideologies is likely to transform the field. It is based on primary research, including Parisian inheritance archives, and on an exceptionally wide range of secondary historical sources. Whereas his Capital in the Twenty-First Century was limited to Western societies, this work has a broader scope. It enters into the important
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The natural domination of capitalism: Darwinist organicism and the perverse postcolonial fantasy in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Adel Saeid
Jhumpa Lahiri's status as a prominent author of ‘post colonial literature’ necessitates a probing of her fiction's ‘macro-politics’, a rigorous demystification of her ideological and political sympathies and antipathies. Situating Lahiri's post colonialism must clarify her stance on geo-political and economic developments of the last seventy years. It must inevitably engage with the debates on issues
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In Defence of History – Foreword to A People’s History of Europe Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Roberto della Santa
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Crisis of Accumulation and Accumulation of Crises in Iran Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Parviz Sedaghat
In this article, referring to the process of accumulation and circuits of social capital and the individual circuits of financial, productive and commodity capitals, I intend to provide an analytic picture of the causes and mechanisms of economic crises in Iran.
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Travelling concepts: the story of the commodification of higher education in Iran Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Abbas Varij Kazemi, Saeid Safari
This paper deals with the biography of commodification in higher education and tries to demonstrate the journey of this concept within it. The journey of this concept will then be traced from global northern to global southern countries and in particular Iran. Next the studies dealing with this concept will be addressed. Our purpose here is to discuss how the commodification of higher education finds
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The Origins of authoritarian neoliberalism: the role of the legislature in implementing fiscal retrenchment in British Columbia, 1983 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Tom McDowell
This article explores the circumstances surrounding the parliamentary implementation of the first major neoliberal restructuring reforms in Canada at the British Columbia Legislature in 1983. The British Columbia case provides a concrete illustration of the strategies and approaches utilized to overcome resistance to neoliberal reforms internal to the state’s political apparatus. The article contends
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Capital accumulation chain in post-revolutionary Iran Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Mohammad Maljoo
The post-revolutionary Iranian society has experienced two simultaneous, contradictory phenomena: the ever-strengthening capitalist class relations accompanied by ever-weakening capitalist production. These twin unaligned tendencies have continually threatened the viability of the post-revolutionary political economy. In order to explain such a situation, I suggest the capital accumulation chain as
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The Unknown Chomsky: When the Pentagon Used Chomsky’s Linguistics for Weapons Research Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Chris Knight
Noam Chomsky’s early linguistic research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was funded by the Pentagon. While acknowledging this funding, Chomsky has always denied that it had any effect on either his linguistics or his political activism. Here, I provide evidence that Chomsky’s linguistic theories were initially developed in a context of significant military interest and involvement. I go
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Re-examining the Winternitz Solution of the Transformation Problem: Simple and Expanded Reproduction Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 George Economakis, Maria Markaki
This paper re-examines the so-called transformation problem through Josef Winternitz’s 1948 seminal contribution. Instead of the three-department model of Winternitz’s solution, a two-department model for both simple and expanded reproduction is applied. Although Winternitz’s solution in both cases is verified, a new complementary treatment concerning the consumption of capitalists is needed. In both
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Modern times, ancient hours Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Pietro Basso
Since the crisis of the mid-1970 companies began to push for longer hours in every dimension (daily, weekly, monthly, annual and lifelong). At the same time unemployment and extreme forms of job insecurity grew as a result of ‘neoliberal policies’, ending with zero hours contracts and various kinds of work placement and internship. This article questions the causes of this global, dramatic, twofold
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Islam, political Islam, and the Islamic Republic: the political economy of Allah Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Siyaves Azeri
This article argues that the Islamic Republic was the only alternative available to the international bourgeoisie in the face of the revolutionary crisis of 1979 in Iran during the Cold War. The task of the Islamic Republic was suppressing the revolution, which gave it a ‘provisional’ character in the eyes of the international bourgeoisie. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union that necessitated
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A Critical Reflection on Neoliberalism Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-10-01 Mehrdad Vahabi, Nasser Mohajer
This is an English translation of an article published in Persian on the subject of neoliberalism in Iran’ Islamic Republic.
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Critique Notes 89 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Hillel Ticktin
Just when the far right succeeded in winning a general election in the UK, along came covid-19; and the imperial countries of the USA, UK, and the wealthier EU countries were forced to concede mass...
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A Crisis by and for Capital Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Mohammad Ferdosi
In the industrial world, the post-crisis years were marked by systematic attempts by governments to retrench the laws, programmes and institutions that provided the working class with some degree of protection from the inherent instabilities and excesses of capitalist development. These corporate inspired and state-led attacks on workplace and labour market rights were largely a continuation of earlier
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German Reparation Debts After the Second World War—A Research Summary Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Karl Heinz Roth
Over the past five years, I have been grappling with the fallout from the predatory wars of annihilation waged by the Germans during the Second World War. The history of the Nazi dictatorship and of German-controlled Europe has been one of my most important research topics for decades. But the true extent of the enormous material destruction and humanitarian devastation caused by these wars has only
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Unequal Exchange: Key Issues for the Labor Theory of Value Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Barry Finger
Arghiri Emmanuel pioneered the theory of Unequal Exchange—the imperialism of trade—as an explanation for the persistence of underdeveloped economies in the 1960s. But the theory also claims to provide a robust explanation for the abandonment of revolutionary politics by metropolitan working classes, who, in the most extreme versions of this theory, no longer constitute an exploited class. It has remained
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V. I. Lenin on the ‘Black Question’ Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Joe Pateman
In his revolutionary activities and writings from 1913 to the fourth Comintern Congress in 1922, V. I. Lenin didn’t merely analyze the function of black labor in the process of capitalist development. He also had something to say about the role that black people themselves would play in their own emancipation. His posthumously published article Russians and Negroes is particularly insightful. The guiding
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The construction of Erdogan autocracy: balancing hegemonic crisis with promises of accumulation regime Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 A. Ekber Doğan
In this article, the author will try to shed light on the historical dynamics and pillars of the construction of Erdoğan’s recent autocratic regime in Turkey. He will discuss that regime change mainly in the framework of a proposal for leaving the hegemonic crisis with a very despotic reconstruction of the relationships between executive organ–whole state apparatuses and state–civil society. In contrast
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Canadian Labour Rights in Crisis: The Harper Years Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Mohammad Ferdosi
In the postwar period, a set of transient historical conditions gave rise to many of the policies that came to define modern labour legislation, constituting the crowning achievement of working class economic and political power in Europe and North America. However, the conflicting claims of capital and labour to the social product came to a head by the 1970s as profit margins began to decline across
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Thoughts Interlinked: Corporate Imaginaries and Post-Capitalist Futures in Blade Runner 2049 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Ali Rıza Taşkale
It's impossible to discuss the recent Blade Runner 2049 without touching on its dystopian aesthetics. The film is a contradiction of fascinating aesthetics within a world of decay, the gloomy vision of cyberpunk. Yet, one must not limit the discussion of dystopian cinema to its visual images or its narrative aspects. What is most important is the way in which dystopian cinema relates to ideas. This
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Critique Notes 88 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Hillel Ticktin
When future generations look back at the present period they will wonder how it was that the party of privilege in the UK could win elections so easily. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that in terms of votes the Conservatives had a minority—43.6 per cent—not a majority. However, the overwhelming bias of the news media to the right, not to speak of a series of other features of the social system
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Is unconditional basic income feasible in capitalism? Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Annamaria Artner
This paper examines whether the concept of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) can be realised within the framework of capitalism. After describing the essence of UBI, I present its historical antecedents, rival concepts and the pros and cons. The paper then contrasts the effect of UBI on wage labour with aspects of capital accumulation and makes an assessment of the obstacles to the introduction of UBI
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Critique Notes 87 Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Hillel Ticktin
Since the crisis of 2006–2008, the bourgeoisie has been unable to re-stabilise the global and local economy. While claiming near to full employment, there is de facto large scale unemployment hidden under different titles such as ‘part-time employment’, ‘self-employed’, overqualified, zero-hours contracts, etc. The rate of growth is low and consistently below the figures before 1980. The latest US
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Activity, labour, and praxis: an outline for a critique of epistemology Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Siyaves Azeri
This article aims at analysing the relation between academic-scientific knowledge-production, scientific labour, and capital. Scientific knowledge-production is a specific form of activity, that is, the metabolic material exchange between human and the social environment, which is irreducible to forming a trans-historically universal Weltanschauung. Knowledge- production is always tool-mediated and
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Fascisms’ road to power (1929–1939) Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Raquel Varela
The idea of Nazism as an act of madness is closely linked to the revisionism of the 1950s, to the social pact, which sought to dissociate it from the crisis of capitalism, from the explicit support of the German bourgeoisie to the Nazi expansionist project – and the inability of both the West and the USSR to prevent the war. Nazism resulted from the militant support of the German industrial and financial
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The historical development of labour standards Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Mohammad Ferdosi
The history of labour standards is at one and the same time the history of the formation and struggles of the modern working class. However, at every stage of their development there have been contradictory tendencies towards regulation and deregulation, reflecting the conflict of interest between capital and labour over the distribution of the share of total value created. Labour standards and the
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Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Paul Flewers
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Modern Capitalism and the Marginalized in the Post-2008 Era: The ‘Consumer Society’, Mystification and Rebellion Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Julian Eagles
This article explores the issue of modern capitalism’s ability to mystify the majority of people through a system of mass consumerism in the post-2008 era of austerity. It argues that although the power of consumerist ideology—in a context of stagnating/declining living standards—has weakened since the 2008 global banking crash, the capitalist system, to an extent, retains its mystificatory power over
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The ‘Kurd’ between capitalist-statist nationalism and class conflict Critique (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Govand Khalid Azeez
The ‘Yes for independence’ campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan has been predominantly explained as an act undertaken by an omni-representative political governing structure (Kurdistan Regional Government) and a homogenous ethnic group univocally voicing a ‘Yes for independence’. However, the role of what Engels calls the ‘first great cleavage of society’: the historically conflicting exploiting and exploited