The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession

Abstract: Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts—cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state—to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed within the bounds of cannibalistic capitalism, a mode of accumulation primarily based on the expansion of fictitious capital and secondary forms of exploitation, the debtfare state enhances the social power of money by allowing major credit card issuers (banks) to generate high levels of income from uncapped interest rates and policies that ensure the extension of plastic money to those who fall within Marx's category of the surplus population. While the expansion of debt subjects surplus workers to the disciplinary requirements of the market, it is unable to suspend the main tensions of cannibalistic capitalism, prompting ongoing reconstructions of the debtfare state.     

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.     

新郑铁岭墓地M1404、M1405发掘简报

新郑铁岭墓地M1404、M1405为东西向大墓,南北相距2米,均出土成套青铜礼器与陶器。铜器墓紧临,这在铁岭墓地还是首次出现。周围大中型墓葬,也多出土有成套的陶器。其北、其西40米开外的墓葬极少随葬器物,说明这一带可能为一个家族墓地。     

Fiddling for outcomes: traditional music,social capital,and arts policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra‐artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so‐called ‘traditional arts’, have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centred on the concepts of ‘mutual understanding’ and, more recently, ‘social capital’. The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term ‘social capital’ in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘forms’ of capital and Eagleton’s ‘ideology of the aesthetic’, the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘the aesthetic’.     

Labour Migration and the Swedish Labour Market Model: a case study of recruitment of Yugoslav workers to Svenska Fläktfabriken in Växjö, 1969–1970

This essay deals with active labour recruitment from Yugoslavia to Sweden at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. It is a case study of recruitments of foreign-born workers to one particular manufacturing industry. It focuses primarily on trade-union actions and strategies in connection with the recruitments, analysed in the light of the power relations within the corporatist Swedish labour market model. This approach illuminates how the Swedish labour market model dealt with an issue involving both conflicting and coincident interests between labour and capital, with the state as an intermediary. But the recruitments are also analysed from the recruited workers' points of view. The essay reveals great union influence in the process of labour recruitment, and suggests that the national Swedish labour market authority only approved as many work permits for non-Nordic workers as the trade union concerned accepted. This power, in combination with the shortage of workers, could be used by the unions as a forceful instrument in their struggle to transform working life according to their members' interests. Accordingly, the labour recruitments to Sweden were framed by the power relations and the corporative practices within the Swedish labour market model.     

North and south in the current crisis

The Italian Minister for Territorial Cohesion, Carlo Trigilia, reviews the current condition of the Italian south (the Mezzogiorno) and sets out the policies that the present government is seeking to implement. Underlining the need for long-term strategies and for close cooperation with European Union funding agencies, the Minister emphasizes the need to remove the political and institutional obstacles to development and promote human capital through measures designed to improve training, education and welfare programmes. He concludes the lack of economic growth in the southern regions poses serious dangers to the growth prospects of the national economy.     

Marx and Modernity: Rethinking Labour,Capital, and Capitalism

This article argues that China’s modern historical development and, more generally, modern global developments can be illuminated by a renewed encounter with Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism. This renewed encounter entails a fundamental critique of traditional Marxism’s understanding of capitalism and of socialism. It seeks to explain the historically dynamic character of capitalist society as a system of ongoing constraints. This central feature of the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately by intellectual paradigms, such as theories of identity or of politics, which have been dominant in recent decades. The approach outlined here analyzes capitalist modernity as structured by a historically unique social function of labour, and is based on a fundamental reevaluation of the meaning of labour in Marx’s analysis as the object, rather than the standpoint of his critique. The focus on the historical specificity of Marx’s analytic categories also calls into question any conception of a transhistorically valid social science.     

晚清苏沪民间资本组合与股份公司经营形态

晚清时期是中国民间资本重新组合的重要历史时期。在这一时期 ,集中于城镇的各种手工业组织对资本的需求增大 ,而拥有资金的商人又缺乏投资渠道。因此 ,在经济相对富裕的苏沪地区 ,民间资本开始通过招股与认股的方式组合成为股份公司。各股份公司成立后 ,在股金管理、红利分配和组织机构等方面均形成了新的体制。同时 ,随着股份公司的建立 ,传统的生产和销售等经营方式也开始发生转变     

再论郑州商城的年代、性质及相关问题

郑州商城为商代前期王都 ,始建于二里岗下层一期晚段 ,距今约 35 0 0年 ,后为仲丁之都。偃师商城为商灭夏之后所建最早之都城 ,始建于二里头文化四期 ,距今约 36 0 0年 ,为汤都西亳 ,亦为夏商文化分界惟一的界标     

唐后期陇右失陷与京畿安全危机述略

在唐朝前期,黄河中下游的富庶农耕区和陇右东部可以养育马匹的半农半牧区,犹如国家强盛的左右臂膀。及至"安史之乱"后,吐蕃攻占陇右,唐之右臂断绝;河北与江淮间藩镇割据抗命,唐之左膀近乎瘫痪,帝国雄强气象,无由再振。从军事地理角度观察,陇右失陷对唐后期京畿安全的直接影响是关中暴露,京城危迫;党项部落东徙,扰攘关中十余年。间接影响是陇右的监牧丧失导致"马政"剧衰,若干羁縻府州及其部落兵损失,致使唐朝骑兵软弱,军力下降,综合国力严重削弱。而唐朝保卫京畿,缓解危机的重大措施,就是将关内道的军防重心从北面转到西面,即建立起京西、京北八镇军防新体系,阻遏戎寇,历经80余年顽强抗御,终使关中免沦左衽。