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The USA is widely seen as the country at the centre of the recent economic crash. But will this be the case the next time the system goes into shock? This book analyses how the political and economic imbalances in China will exacerbate system collapse, and how this could happen much sooner than we imagine, possibly within a decade. By looking at the big questions of class struggle, global economic imbalances, peak oil, climate change and political power play, Minqi Li argues that by the time of the next crisis, China will be at the epicentre of these contradictions. China is the last large region, and source of cheap labour, into which capital could expand: the system is at its limits. By combining this argument with issues surrounding the planet’s ecological limits and the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, Li commands a narrative of China at a pivotal, and possibly apocalyptic stage.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. Its ability to develop a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neo-liberalism and international capitalism captured the imagination of the growing anti-capitalist movement and has been claimed as a turning point for the left. As much as it has seduced and delighted some, however, it has enraged and frustrated others. In this collection, a series of some of the most acute international theorists and commentators of our times subject the book to trenchant and probing analysis from political, economic and philosophical perspectives, and Hardt and Negri respond to their questions and criticisms.
Making Waves unearths the successive, worldwide waves of revolts, rebellions, and revolutions that have shaken and remade the world from the eighteenth century to the present. It challenges us to rethink not only our limited conceptions of social movements but the very character and possibilities of social movements. The authors show how successive outbursts of global social protest have undermined world capitalist orders and, through both their successes and their failures, provided the basis for long periods of stable capitalist rule across all the zones of the world-economy. The surprises start in the Age of Revolution, when the antisystemic wave of slave revolts that led to the Haitian Revolution is related to the systemic effects of their combination with the U.S. and French Revolutions. The analysis comes up to the present, when a wave of post-1989 movements points to quite divergent futures based, as in the past, on the search for alternatives to communities organized by capital accumulation, nation-states, and the accelerating commodification and fragmentation of human needs, identities, and desires.
The exhaustion of neoliberal globalization is marked by three great tendencies or inflections: the first is the scornful failure of the South-American attempt to construct a neo-developmentalist exit; the second is the increasingly unavoidable Chinese-effect macro and micro dynamics within globalization; the third is the combination of austerity policies and monetary emissions (Quantitative Easing) that characterize, for instance, the financial conduct of the Central European Bank. The dramatic failure to renew traditional state interventionism in the sphere of Pink Tide in Latin American politics—in particular with the violent recession of the biggest economy on the Latin American contine...
Traces China's transformations with a focus on China's incorporation process in the nineteenth century, which help to grasp the historical origins of China's capitalism. As Europe's colonial powers reached China in the nineteenth century, they became so strong that China could no longer ignore them. Given that the unprecedented geographical expansion of the European system undermined a China-centered world order and brought unprecedented changes to Chinese society, an intriguing question—why and how the Chinese empire entered into the capitalist world economy—has attracted increasing attention among historians, historical sociologists, and world-systems researchers. Yet, there has been n...
At War with Women reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integrat...
Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award (1995) for Distinguished Scholarship The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Giovanni Arrighi masterfully synthesizes social theory, comparative history and historical narrative in this account of the structures and agencies which have shaped the course of world history over the millennium. Borrowing from Braudel, Arrighi argues that the history of capitalism has unfolded as a succession of "long centuries"—ages during which a hegemonic power deploying a novel combination of economic and political networks secured control over an expanding world-economic space. The modest beginnings, rise and violent unravel-ing of the links forged between capital, state power, and geopolitics by hegemonic classes and states are explored with dramatic intensity. From this perspective, Arrighi explains the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English, and finally American capitalism. The book concludes with an examination of the forces which have shaped and are now poised to undermine America's world power.
Adopting an historical approach, explores four controversies facing global analyses today: the geography of world power, the power of states versus the power of capital, the social power of subordinate groups, and the changing balance of civilizational power.
Schwartzman's study of the first Portuguese republic demonstrates the significant ways in which a nation's social and political structures are shaped by its position in the global economy.