capitalism | Re-public: re-imagining democracy

Irmak Ertuna-Howison – Pirates, authors, and the fear of collective intelligence
February 6, 2011

As the chain of neo-liberal ideology tightens around our necks, it becomes harder to pull on the leash and attempt to break away from its influence in our thinking. Even cultural historians, critics, and authors- those who have traditionally taken the role of vanguard of progressive thinking – submit to conservative ideas. One such author is Jaron Lanier, whose book You’re Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, published in 2010, received enthusiastic reception from conservative critics such as the famous The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Her review “A Rebel in Cyberspace, Fighting Collectivism“, as the title suggests, cuts right to the chase of the issue and pinpoints Lanier’s caution against the “wisdom of crowds” and threat to intellectual property posed by free Internet content as the real virtue of his book. Collectivism of cyber content, in distribution and production, is seen as an insidious threat to originality and imagination by conservative authors.

Brett Neilson – Crisis as an allegory of production
October 8, 2009

The current credit crisis has brought calls for a return to the ‘real economy’ as opposed to the financial (fictive) economy. Brett Neilson shows us that this tendency is nothing new: through his analysis of the recent changes in the very practice of capitalist accumulation, he also dispels any fantasy of resolving the current crisis through a return to industry.

Stephen Gudeman – Creative destruction: Efficiency or collapse?
October 8, 2009

Stephen Gudeman invites us to re conceptualise our understanding of the economy not as flat plain consisting of markets and market like behaviour that lead to equilibrium situations, but as a overlapping and conflicting spheres of value and practices. Through his comparative and ethnographically informed perspective of the economy, Gudeman helps us challenge certain dominant narratives of the current crisis.

Ann Kingsolver – `As we forgive our debtors’: Mexico’s El Barzón movement, bankruptcy policy in the U.S., and ethnography of neoliberal logic and practice
October 8, 2009

Kingsolver considers the question of whether, in the face of rising indebtedness, there might be a social movement in the United States similar to El Barzón, a debtors’ movement in Mexico particularly visible during and after the neoliberal financial crisis of 1994. The importance of U.S. consumer debt to the global economy (with powerful potential for debtors to organize, if that significance is recognized) is mediated in the U.S. by increasing domestic surveillance and the links between neoliberal policy and neoconservative Christian logic in state administration. Since this article was first published, the U.S. has experienced – with many other nations — the debt crisis anticipated in this article.

William Davies – Housing after crisis
October 8, 2009

Through his reading of the new genre of media production dedicated to houses and the production of domestic space, that arose with the speculative bubble in housing that affected so many countries, William Davies argues, asset price inflation for housing perversely led to a collective suspension of orthodox economic reason. Rising exchange values of property had the peculiar effect of making the houses use value into a national obsession. With the current collapse in the housing bubble, the housing market is once again represented as a market once more. To own a house is to be a victim of malign mathematical probabilities, probabilities that had mysteriously sublimated during the period of expansion.

Michael Sayeau – The new austerity
October 8, 2009

Michael Sayeau challenges the recent discourses in the media of ordinary citizens discovering the benefits of personal austerity under the shadow of the economic crisis. Bringing to our attention that ‘austerity’ until late was a codeword for the supposed structural necessity of the starvation of the state sector under a time of booming profits and tax returns, Sayeau suggests that rather than endorse such fantasies of austere living, we would be better off with a more useful re-evaluation of cultural priorities. Given that capitalism is both a dynamic generator of goods for consumption, and of the vicious maldistribution of those products, one possible beginning is recognizing that immeseration and austerity is an effect of capitalism and not the solution to it.

Steven Shaviro – A modest proposal: Some thought on the crisis
October 8, 2009

Steven Shaviro argues that part of our difficulty in making coherent sense of the crisis, reflects the way we experience as individuals, the market economy as something alien to us, over which we have no power. The boom and bust cycles that are intrinsic to capitalism are instrumental in instilling this sense of fatalism in people. One possible challenge to this fatalism is repoliticising one of the most ubiquitous aspects of the economy: money. Nearly all capitalist theory assumes ‘the neutrality of money’, yet rather see it as a vanishing mediator we need to understand, as this credit crisis has shown, that money isn’t a faithful ‘representation’ of wealth that exists, rather it is something that has it own intrinsic density and weight.

Trebor Scholz and Paul Hartzog: Toward a critique of the social web
December 6, 2008

In the debate that launches the homonym special issue, Paul Hartzog and Trebor Scholz attempt to outline a critique of the social web organised along five axes: production, expoitation, individuality/collectivity, cultural difference, activism.

Peter Barnes – Towards a fair climate policy
September 22, 2008

Many economists (and others) from a wide range of political viewpoints are coming to support the idea of cap-and-dividend or tax-and-rebate as the most sensible way to address climate change. It’s important to note that the two approaches (cap or tax) are functionally equivalent. Both policies are intended (1) to raise the price of the carbon emissions that cause global warming, thereby discouraging those emissions and encouraging alternatives, and (2) to do so in a way that does not place the burden of adjustment disproportionately on the poor.

Michel Bauwens – The social web and its social contracts: Some notes on social antagonism in netarchical capitalism
May 21, 2008

The social web is based, argues Michel Bauwens, on an underlying, but unstable social contract. From the point of view of the users this social contract stipulates that their attention is to be monetized through advertising, as long as it does not interfere with their sharing. If the interference crosses a certain line of acceptability, users will either revolt, or go elsewhere.

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