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2021, Neoliberalism's Zeitgeist: The Untethered Disposition of Capitalism
Recent observers from the financial world have described the current status of the economy as "unhinged" and traversing "unchartered territory." These expressions reflect the unprecedented freeing of capitalism from established conventions, norms, practices, and regulations underway since the 1970s and the ascendence of neoliberalism; a process that is not captured by the allied concepts "unfettered" and financialization. Capitalism has been untethering itself from not just the regulations that curtailed action ("fettered" it) across the twentieth century, but also the established conventions, customs, and practices initially described by Marx in Capital I that guided action into the mid-twentieth century, such as acceptable debt levels and forms of financial manipulation. This essay suggests that we have entered a new phase of capitalism with crucial implications for the status of the state and its intervention in the economy and likelihood or not that the current capitalist hegemonic order can be maintained far into the future. -----The essay progresses by first considering freedom of action in (especially liberal) capitalism and the historical development of tethers, notably those observed by Marx. Special attention is given to the oldest form, customs, conventions, and norms since today they are typically overlooked or taken for granted. I subsequently try to show how far capitalism has come from a day when conventions constituted especially robust tethers, focusing on the other two dimensions, capitalist state (de)regulation and hyper- fabrication of new financial practices. I draw connections between the rise of the inter- ventionist Keynesian state and the development of economic (especially financial) hyper- fabrication more generally. I argue that the inventive intervention of the former opened the way for the latter, with the appropriation by capitalism of a new form of social power associated with the unprecedented registers of inventive economic intervention. Regarding that appropriation, I consider how capitalists themselves reflexively under- stand untethering as unprecedented, as an opportunity, and a necessity. Finally, I conclude with a consideration of what the untethering process might mean for capitalist crises and the possibilities for an anti-capitalism that must develop within this context.
Educational Philosophy and Theory
New histories of capitalism: from delineation to critique2013 •
2015 •
2024 •
Westra explores a nuanced literature on post-capitalism which claims that instead of constituting the end of history or ending in its supplanting by socialism, capitalism has transmuted into something else. Foci of this literature ranges from questions of financial system and technological change through evidence of shifting class contours metastasizing a more predatory constellation. In exposing the dire consequences for humanity of capitalist unravelling, Westra remedies the lacunae of current writings which leave fundamental questions of what precisely capitalism is or was and the historical delimitations of capitalism unanswered. He not only critically analyzes the arguments over capitalisms passing under key rubrics of financialization, globalization, intangible assets and social class, but grounds determinations over the existence of capitalism in a novel synthetic definition of it drawn from Marx. While capitalism has always been an exploitative, asymmetric wealth distributive, alienating, class divisive, crises ridden society, Westra explains how current economic transmutations undermine what coherence capitalism had historically maintained. This book, written in a clear and compelling fashion, is a clarion call for social change. It will be of interest to academics and students across fields of economics, political economy, economic history, political science and sociology as well as to progressive policymakers and social activists.
public talk, unpublished
The Crisis of the Crisis of CapitalismWhere is the coveted, prophesied, dreaded crisis of capitalism? Why has the economic and social turmoil that recently afflicted Western democracies triggered such faint attempts to replace the apparently moribund socio-economic model? The alleged crisis of capitalism, I claim, has been a catalyst in the metamorphosis of neoliberal capitalism – a transmutation that began well before the recent economic meltdown and in many ways triggered it. This has led to the emergence of a fourth historical modality of capitalism, which I call ‘aggregative capitalism’ (after the entrepreneurial nineteenth-century capitalism, the ‘organized’ capitalism of the post-WWII welfare state, and the neoliberal, ‘disorganized’ capitalism of the late twentieth century). In this essay, I trace the features of this new form of capitalism and the dynamics that activate it.
Capitalism on Edge (Columbia University Press)
“Capitalism Under Scrutiny: from Concept to Critique”2020 •
• This Chapter of Capitalism on Edge develops the first comprehensive methodology for critical social theory; • it articulates a three-dimensional model of domination and attendant notions of emancipatory practice and radical politics; • offers a theory of the internal transformation of capitalism, later applied in an account of the historical forms of capitalism from the 19th-century liberal form to our contemporary post-neoliberal, 'precarity capitalism'.
2018 •
Edited by Brian Milstein. In this important new book, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi take a fresh look at the big questions surrounding the peculiar social form known as “capitalism,” upending many of our commonly held assumptions about what capitalism is and how to subject it to critique. They show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically readjusting the boundaries between these domains in response to crises and upheavals. They consider how these “boundary struggles” offer a key to understanding capitalism’s contradictions and the multiple forms of conflict to which it gives rise. What emerges is a renewed crisis critique of capitalism which puts our present conjuncture into broader perspective, along with sharp diagnoses of the recent resurgence of right-wing populism and what would be required of a viable Left alternative. This major new book by two leading critical theorists will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the nature and future of capitalism and with the key questions of progressive politics today.
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research
Introducing Capitalism: Current Crisis and Cultural Critique2014 •
Revista eletrônica de direito processual
Adr and Civil Proceeding in Italy 2021, Potential Developments Commissione Luiso2021 •
The Churches and the War / Ed. by Oleh Turin and Yury Avvakumov. Lviv
Counterfeit Forms of Russian Orthodoxy as a Challenge to Religious Freedom2024 •
Anthropological Researches and Studies, vol. 14, 143-161.
Agenda-setting and framing during the first wave of coronavirus pandemic: A content analysis of news in Greek media2021 •
Physics Letters A
On the dynamics of moving single bubble sonoluminescence2010 •
Journal of Structured Finance
European Securitization: a Garch Model of CDO, MBS and Pfandbrief Spreads2003 •
Mathematics Education Research Journal
Responding to calls for greater accountability2007 •
2024 •
Enrique III de Castilla (1390 - 1406)
Enrique III de Castilla (1390 - 1406)