Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below

Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below PDF Author: T. Byres
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349251178
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
The distinction between 'capitalism from above' and 'capitalism from below' is important in the analysis of the agrarian question in poor countries. The 'Prussian path' and the 'American path' are here examined, against existing historical scholarship. Their unfolding, from their earliest roots to the point of final 'agrarian transition' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is considered. The dialectic between social relations and productive forces, mediated as it was by the state, is treated and the implications for capitalist industrialisation scrutinised.

Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below

Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below PDF Author: T. Byres
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349251178
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 509

Get Book

Book Description
The distinction between 'capitalism from above' and 'capitalism from below' is important in the analysis of the agrarian question in poor countries. The 'Prussian path' and the 'American path' are here examined, against existing historical scholarship. Their unfolding, from their earliest roots to the point of final 'agrarian transition' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is considered. The dialectic between social relations and productive forces, mediated as it was by the state, is treated and the implications for capitalist industrialisation scrutinised.

Capitalism from Below

Capitalism from Below PDF Author: Victor Nee
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065395
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Over 630 million Chinese escaped poverty since the 1980s, the largest decrease in poverty in history. Studying 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, the authors argue that the engine of China’s economic miracle—private enterprise—did not originate at the top but bubbled up from below, overcoming initial obstacles set up by the government.

Capitalism: The Basics

Capitalism: The Basics PDF Author: David Coates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135786240
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
The global economy is dominated by a powerful set of established and emerging capitalisms, from the long-standing capitalist economies of the West to the rising economies of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. An understanding of capitalism is therefore fundamental to understanding the modern world. Capitalism: The Basics is an accessible introduction to a variety of capitalisms and explores key topics such as: the history of major capitalist economies; the central role played by both states and markets in the global economy; the impact of capitalism on wages, workers and welfare; approaches to the analysis of capitalism, and choices for capitalism’s future. Examining capitalism from both above and below, featuring a range of case studies from around the globe, and including a comprehensive glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for students studying capitalism.

Land's End

Land's End PDF Author: Tania Murray Li
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822356943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Tania Murray Li offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while others lost their land and struggled to sustain their families. Yet the winners and losers in this transition were not strangers—they were kin and neighbors. Li's richly peopled account takes the reader into the highlanders' world, exploring the dilemmas they faced as sharp inequalities emerged among them. The book challenges complacent, modernization narratives promoted by development agencies that assume inefficient farmers who lose out in the shift to high-value export crops can find jobs elsewhere. Decades of uneven and often jobless growth in Indonesia meant that for newly landless highlanders, land's end was a dead end. The book also has implications for social movement activists, who seldom attend to instances where enclosure is initiated by farmers rather than coerced by the state or agribusiness corporations. Li's attention to the historical, cultural, and ecological dimensions of this conjuncture demonstrates the power of the ethnographic method and its relevance to theory and practice today.

Capitalism, Dependency and Ultra-Imperialism

Capitalism, Dependency and Ultra-Imperialism PDF Author: Hartmut Elsenhans
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003847137
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book assembles main contributions to an alternative explanation of globalisation and the political economic structures of the international system. As the result of capitalism, globalisation does not transfer basic capitalist structures from the Centre to the Periphery. Capitalism is based on rising mass incomes that create investment opportunities and, thus, the possibility of profit. A structurally homogeneous and ultraimperialist Centre dominates a deeply fissured Periphery of structurally heterogeneous societies and economies. Capitalism penetrates underdeveloped regions and deforms them through rent, which obstructs expanding internal mass markets while labour goes unempowered. Rent constitutes the basis for state operations and the role of emerging state classes. While globalisation disempowers labour in both the West and in the South, it has given new comparative advantage to the South. The shift from rent appropriation in the South via raw material exports to export-led manufacturing is based on devaluation below purchasing power parity and, hence, on a rent from agriculture that is based on the Green Revolution. Its impact is, however, not always sufficient to compensate for the loss of influence experienced by social reformist forces. A novel multipolar system based on the balance power has emerged. Mutliethnic empires are held together with large varieties of however always identitarian ideologies. This global system is composed of powers that are internally and externally opposed to peaceful change. Across the globe, there is an impending danger of globalisation of rent. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

The Future of Capitalism

The Future of Capitalism PDF Author: Paul Collier
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062748661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

Science for Sale

Science for Sale PDF Author: Daniel S. Greenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226306267
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In recent years the news media have been awash in stories about increasingly close ties between college campuses and multimillion-dollar corporations. Our nation’s universities, the story goes, reap enormous windfalls patenting products of scientific research that have been primarily funded by taxpayers. Meanwhile, hoping for new streams of revenue from their innovations, the same universities are allowing their research—and their very principles—to become compromised by quests for profit. But is that really the case? Is money really hopelessly corrupting science? With Science for Sale, acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. While universities seek out corporate funding, news stories rarely note that those industry dollars are dwarfed by government support and other funds. Also, while many universities have set up technology transfer offices to pursue profits through patents, many of those offices have been financial busts. Meanwhile, science is showing signs of providing its own solutions, as highly publicized misdeeds in pursuit of profits have provoked promising countermeasures within the field. But just because the threat is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn’t mean that there’s no danger. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, the temptations of money will always be a threat, and they can only be countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale will be indispensable to anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.

The Spirit of Capitalism

The Spirit of Capitalism PDF Author: Liah Greenfeld
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674037922
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or spirit, behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the rational economic actor, but rather nationalism. Nationalism committed masses of people to an endless race for national prestige and thus brought into being the phenomenon of economic competitiveness. Nowhere has economic activity been further removed from the rational calculation of costs than in the United States, where the economy has come to be perceived as the end-all of political life and the determinant of all social progress. American economic civilization spurs the nation on to ever-greater economic achievement. But it turns Americans into workaholics, unsure of the purpose of their pursuits, and leads American statesmen to exaggerate the weight of economic concerns in foreign policy, often to the detriment of American political influence and the confusion of the rest of the world.

Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change

Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change PDF Author: Henry Bernstein
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 1565493567
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Henry Bernstein argues that class dynamics should be the starting point of any analysis of agrarian change. Providing an accessible introduction to agrarian political economy, he shows clearly how the argument for "bringing class back in" provides an alternative to inherited conceptions of the agrarian question. He also ably illustrates what is at stake in different ways of thinking about class dynamics and the effects of agrarian change in today's globalized world. CONTENTS: Introduction: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change. Production and Productivity. Origins of Early Development of Capitalism. Colonialism and Capitalism. Farming and Agriculture, Local and Global. Neoliberal Globalization and World Agriculture. Capitalist Agriculture and Non-Capitalist Farmers? Class Formation in the Countryside. Complexities of Class.

Divided World, Divided Class

Divided World, Divided Class PDF Author: Zak Cope
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781894946681
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Divided World Divided Class charts the history of the 'labour aristocracy' in the capitalist world system, from its roots in colonialism to its birth and eventual maturation into a full-fledged middle class in the age of imperialism. It argues that pervasive national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist countries is not primarily attributable to 'false class consciousness', ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core capitalist nations' shared economic interest in the exploitation and repression of dependent nations. The book demonstrates not only how redistribution of income derived from super-exploitation has allowed for the amelioration of class conflict in the wealthy capitalist countries, it also shows that the exorbitant 'super-wage' paid to workers there has meant the disappearance of a domestic vehicle for socialism, an exploited working class. Rather, in its place is a deeply conservative metropolitan workforce committed to maintaining, and even extending, its privileged position through imperialism. This second edition includes new material such as data on growing inequality between the richest and poorest countries; data illustrating rising real wages in Imperial Britain; explication of the concepts of value, monopoly capital and unequal exchange and their ramifications for the global class structure; discussion of social imperialism on the left; responses to critiques surrounding the thesis of mass embourgeoisement through imperialism; as well as further information on a range of subjects.