Editors: Aylin Topal, Gökhan Demir, M. Gürsan Şenalp, Melih Yeşilbağ, Sümercan Bozkurt.
Global Capitalist Crisis and Twenty-First Century Fascism: Beyond the Trump Hype
William I. Robinson
Global capitalism faces an organic crisis involving a structural dimension, that of overaccumulation and a political dimension of legitimacy or hegemony that is approaching a general crisis of capitalist rule. Fascism, whether in 20th-century or 21stcentury forms, is a particular response to capitalist crisis. Trumpism in the US, BREXIT in the UK, the increasing infuence of neo-fascist and authoritarian parties and movements throughout Europe and around the world, represent far-right responses to the crisis of global capitalism. There are similarities but also important differences between fascist projects of the 20th and 21st centuries. The former involved the fusion of reactionary political power with national capital, whereas the latter involves the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary and repressive political power – an expression of the dictatorship of transnational capital. A fightback against the global police state and 21st-century fascism must involve broad anti-fascist alliances led by popular and working-class forces.
Keywords: Global capitalism, 21st century fascism, police state, Gramsci, transnational capitalist class.
The Crisis of Democracy or the Crisis of Capitalism? The Streeck-Habermas Debate
Sanem Yamak –
Köksal Çalışkan
The ongoing crisis of capitalism, which began in the 1970s and continued until the present day, had important consequences in the political sphere. The consequences of the neoliberal policies implemented for overcoming the crisis in terms of broader societal segments have been the gradual decline in the capacity to affect political decisions, as well as increase in the poverty rates, and decline in unemployment and living standards. In this context, the impact of the crisis of capitalism and the neoliberal policies implemented for the solution of this crisis in the political sphere is a crisis of liberal democracy, which is a limited form of democracy. The crisis of democracy has brought many analyzes and debates to explain this crisis. One of these debates is the discussion between Wolfgang Streeck, who discussed the crisis of democracy in Europe with a political economy perspective, explaining it through the crisis of capitalism and Jürgen Habermas, who sees the crisis as a crisis of legitimacy. In this study, two different perspectives on the crisis of democracy will be tried to be revealed.
Keywords: Habermas, Streeck, Crisis, European Union, Capitalism, Democracy.
Social Classes and “New” Social Movements Under the Crisis of Global Capitalism
Efe Can Gürcan
This article re-evaluates the underlying premises of the classical new social movement (NSM) paradigm in today’s context where neoliberal globalization is increasingly being challenged. As were originally formulated, the classical NSM paradigm follows the basic premise that that the axis of social conflicts has irreversibly shifted from class struggles to conflicts over lifestyles, cultural autonomy, and collective identity. Economic demands and anti-capitalism have therefore lost their centrality. NSM theories mostly attribute these changes to the long-term effects of “post-industrial” globalization and the rapid development of communication technologies, which fnd their sharpest expression in the weakening of nation-states and the rising relevance of cultural autonomy. The current global environment –characterized by the emergence of a new wave of global protests following the worldwide crisis of capitalism since 2007/2008– provides a propitious opportunity to contribute to social-movement theorizing by re-evaluating the fundamental premises of classical NSM theories. The present article thus uses process tracing to reveal the increasing relevance of social classes and class analysis against the backdrop of this “new” wave of global protests. Of particular interest to this article is the class dynamics of the US economic crisis and occupy movements, the Arab Spring, popular rebellions in European countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece, and the recent Yellow Vests movement in France.
Keywords: Arab Spring, Greece, new social movements, occupation movements, Spain, working
class, Yellow Vests.
Global Value Chains or Global Poverty Chains? A New Research Agenda
Benjamin Selwyn
Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis is part and parcel of mainstream development discourse and policy. Supplier frms are encouraged, with state support, to ‘link-up’ with trans-national lead frms. Such arrangements, it is argued, will reduce poverty and contribute to meaningful socio-economic development. This portrayal of global political economic relations represents a “problem-solving” interpretation of reality. This article proposes an alternative analytical approach rooted in “critical theory” which reformulates the GVC approach to better investigate and explain the reproduction of global poverty, inequality and divergent forms of national development. It suggests re-labelling GVC as Global Poverty Chain (GPC) analysis. GPCs are examined in the textiles, food, and high-tech sectors. The article details how workers in these chains are systematically paid less than their subsistence costs, how trans-national corporations use their global monopoly power to capture the lion’s share of value created within these chains, and how these relations generate processes of immiserating growth. The article concludes by considering how to extend GPC analysis.
Keywords: Global Value Chains, Global Poverty Chains, Immiserating Growth, Chain Governance, Labour, Development.
Debates on the Capitalist Agri-Food System and the Agrarian / Peasant Question in the 21st Century
Atakan Büke
This study aims to analyze, in theoretical terms, the agrarian/peasant question debate that has been reinvigorated since the early 2000s. The growing interest in agrifood relations, and agrarian/peasant question in particular, has been a product of, on the one hand, neoliberal globalization processes, and, on the other, the post- turn characterizing the trajectory of social theory. This article suggests that the proliferation and differentiation processes manifested in the field of agrifood knowledge within this context, can be seen as the emergence of critical agrifood studies. On this ground, the main of argument of this study is the following: the rise of critical agrifood studies signifies a theoretical rupture not only with respect to the mainstream liberal understandings, but also in relation to the political economic approaches that dominated the critical circles from the 1960s to the late-1980s. This rupture, which has been centered mainly on the radical critique of the concept of development, is particularly manifested in the post-developmentalist turn with respect to the agrarian/peasant question formulations, which has led to a growing divide between post-developmentalist and political economic understandings in the contemporary agrarian/peasant question debate. This article is an attempt to trace the theoretical and political implications of the agrarian/peasant question debate of the 21st century, through an analysis of this divide which is reflected in the following areas: historical and intellectual context, theoretical assumptions, methodological strategies, major problematics, and political propositions.
Keywords: Capitalist Agrifood System, Critical Agrifood Studies, Agrarian/Peasant Question, Post-Developmentalism, Agrarian Political Economy.
An Old Postulate a New Discourse: The Technologıcal Development and Capitalism within the Context of Industry 4.0
Güven Savul
Industry 4.0 has been considered as a concept defining the new techno-capitalist phase in the production processes for eight years. Under the circumstances providing a rapid transformation of the digital and robotic technologies, it can be claimed that the production processes would proceed in an integrated and simultaneous way through networks, and customised mass production would be replaced with a standardised one. The special interest of business environments in the concept Industry 4.0 draws attention. These environments over-exaggerate the concept. At the same , they also claim that the practices initiated within the context of Industry 4.0 would transform the production processes and the world of work radically. The same environments assert that the mentioned transformation is a kind of “revolution” of the production processes and the working life as well. For this reason, the concept is used with connotations such as “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” or “Industry 4.0 Revolution” within the related literature. Apart from the business environments, trade unions, and federations, confederations also try to pay attention to the concept and its prospective impacts on the world of work. Although we are at an early stage to predict what the outcomes of the Industry 4.0 practices would be, when we take the historical integrity of technological-capitalistic development into account, it seems that a new gale of precarisation and unemployment could be experienced by labourers in the future. Due to all these reasons, the concept Industry 4.0 deserves to be assessed. This manuscript aims to analyse the Industry 4.0 debate with a critical approach. While the political economy context of the concept Industry 4.0 is scrutinised within the frame of techno-capitalism, the prospective impacts of the initial Industry 4.0 practices on labour and, the measures which would be taken in favour of labourers are discussed (even the current intellectual sphere has a restrictive nature in terms of working class’s capacity to struggle). This article also analyses how Industry 4.0 can be functionalised for the sake of the working class. That is, this paper aims to carry the debate on Industry 4.0 outside the boundaries of hegemonic main stream discourse.
Keywords: Industry 4.0, Technology, Capitalism.
Marx and Eco-Marxism(s) in the Age of the Anthropocene: The Dialectics of the Society-Nature Relationship
Yelda Erçandırlı
Recent years have witnessed new approaches and conceptualizations regarding the relation between society and nature. The concept of Anthropocene gains a particular importance which signifies a new geological period marked by the change of the biosphere by “human activites.” Accordingly, there is a growing number of Marxist studies problematize the dialectical relationship between nature and society based on a critical perspective to deepen the related discussions. This article focuses on the development of a Marxian ecological discourse and it pays attention to the significance of Marxism to understand the Anthropocene both as a concept and a period. The main argument of the paper is the following: the concept of the Anthropocene is an analytically significant tool to analyse social sciences as long as is connected to the dialectical relationship between society and nature. Thus, the article focuses on the materialist and dialectical relationship between the society and nature. The concepts of metabolic rift, the humannature duality, totality and relationality are used in the article to deepen the argument.
Keywords: Eco-Marxism, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Historical Materialism and Social Nature.
