MARXIST SOCIOLOGY | RUPTURE(dot)CAPITAL

If the new finance capital does not suppress, but actually intensifies, capitalist competition, then this implies the need for a more thoroughgoing remaking of these institutional forms. The corporation is not an instrument or tool to be wielded, but rather a social relation disciplined by the logic of capital.

Socialists therefore must imagine and construct an alternative form of democratic economic planning to challenge, rather than reinforce, capitalist competition, which is oriented around meeting social needs, rather than serving private profits.

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The growing concentration of value and knowledge in a few big corporations that became intellectual monopolies induced different forms of academic capitalism. I present three types of academic capitalist university – teaching institutions, subordinate research universities, and academic intellectual monopolies – and explore the consequences for knowledge as commons and for academic workers, all of which have worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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In the United States, delinquent credit lines as a share of both total consumer, auto loan, and credit card debt steadily grew over the last two and half years. Over the same period, residential-mortgage delinquencies rapidly declined, essentially returning to their pre-2007 levels. These divergent trends point to the relative financial security of upper-income and the increasing fragility of lower-income households prior to the pandemic. How are working families in America getting by in the midst of a capitalist crisis unlike any other?

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The dynamics of US-China rivalry is an inter-imperial rivalry driven by inter-capitalist competition. Competition for the world market could soon turn into intensifying clashes of spheres of influence and even war. It is not new. It resembles a lot of the dynamics as described in Lenin’s Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In the book, published in 1917, Lenin talked about the competition between German and British banks to lend to Latin American countries to build railroads and to ensure the projects would rely on German or British supplies. This is just like talking about the competition between China and the U.S. to offer credits to Belt and Road countries to build infrastructure. In the early twentieth century, inter-capitalist competition led to inter-imperial rivalry culminated in two world wars.

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There is probably no better example of why “it is much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” than governments’ responses to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The problem is not so much that the structural and ideological hegemony of capital accumulation prevents us from imagining alternative forms of organizing […]

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Under Deng Xiaoping’s famous slogan, “liberating the productive forces” (jie fang sheng chan li), the official policy of liberal reform – strong state intervention in the labor market – has worked in support of commodification of labor, rather than constructing a system of social welfare that restricts the impact of market forces in China. When it comes to the price for labor power, there are two kinds of remuneration: the direct and the indirect salary (or fringe benefits). The first resembles what we know as hourly wage, whereas the second “is redistributed through a social agency.” For most welfare states, this social agency refers to the State, or a statutory agency that manages the social security fund, for example. As regards the Chinese context, it is the household solidarity characterized by auto-exploitation and auto-deprivation of rural households that has played this role.

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