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The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton's concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

The Chinese Communist Party and China's Capitalist Revolution examines issues of political change and development in China. In the last 30 years China has experienced a profound political transformation and a degree of political progress but these are largely mired in the assumption that the free market is inherently incompatible with communism, and the perceived lack of political reforms in China. Indeed, there has not been much in the sense of democratization, multi-party competition, freedom of speech and association, but as this book demonstrates, political development is not limited to these factors. Based on extensive empirical investigations of the impact of the market on the communist party, with a particular focus on its grassroots organisations, this book finds that the Chinese communist party is undergoing profound changes in a host of important areas. By analyzing the impact of China's socioeconomic transformation on the CCP and the adaptations of the Party to the new environment the book takes stock of the nature and dynamics of political change underway in China. The author concludes that the Chinese communist party we knew no longer exists--it is evolving into something quite different, which must have political implications for both China and the rest of the world.

Papers prepared for a conference organized by the Institute for Marxist Studies and Research, held in Frankfurt, Germany, June 5-6, 1982.

Chinese state capitalism may be transitioning towards a technology-assisted variant that we call "surveillance state capitalism." The mechanism driving this development is China's corporate social credit system (CSCS) – a data-driven project to evaluate the "trustworthiness" of all business entities in the country. In this paper, we provide the first empirical analysis of CSCS scores in Zhejiang province, as the Zhejiang provincial government is to date the only local government to publish the scores of locally registered firms. We find that while the CSCS is ostensibly a means of measuring legal compliance, politically connected firms receive higher scores. This result is driven by a "social responsibility" category in the scoring system that valorizes awards from the government and contributions to causes sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. Our analysis underscores the potential of the CSCS to nudge corporate fealty to partystate policy and provides an early window into the far-reaching potential implications of the CSCS.(China Q / GIGA)

"Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders develops a novel political economy approach by establishing a dialogue between the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) theory and Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxism theory. Using this synthesis, it provides an in-depth analysis of Spain's recent socio-economic evolution since the early-1990s. The book develops a theoretical framework capable of appraising capitalist dynamics together with their relationship to the institutional environment surrounding and structuring them, in order to explore the interrelation between the historical development of the capitalist mode of production, on the one hand, and the various co-existing social processes, social consensuses and political identities, on the other. Contemporary Spain provides an interesting case study: until the onset of the Great Recession, Spain had an impressive macroeconomic record supported by several contradictory social processes, such as a massive real estate bubble, an upsurge in private indebtedness and a deteriorating manufacturing sector. However, the accumulation of internal imbalances during those years led inevitably to the sudden disintegration of this institutional and social environment in the years after 2008, thus resulting into a breakdown of capitalist activity accompanied by widespread social contestation. The book also explores the ensuing political scenario, including the emergence of the 'indignados' movement and the anti-austerity party Podemos. This work is of significant interest to critical political economy and discourse-theory scholars, critical theorists in general, and social scientists concerned with the recent Spanish experience. Pedro M. Rey-Araújo is a Researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain."

In Egypt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were replaced with new, alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. The activism of Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) and the populist message of the Watani Party began the process of defining and popularizing urban Egyptian nationalism. After Kamil's premature death in 1908, there was more of an "urgent need," as described by Zachary Lockman, for "tapping into and mobilizing new domestic constituencies in order to build a more broadly based independence movement." This article argues that the eventual mobilization of the Egyptian urban masses, and their "incorporation into the Egyptian nation," was due in large part to the materialization of a variety of mass media catering to a growing national audience. To be more specific, I will examine early Egyptian nationalism through the lens of previously neglected audiovisual colloquial Egyptian sources. This, I argue, is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of "ordinary" Egyptians. Finally, the article documents the role of early colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, "hidden transcripts" of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place.

For a long time, people outside China often forgot that China is a communist state. In many ways it was more capitalistic than some paragons of capitalism—for example, the United States and Great Britain. However, since 2012, the Communist Party of China (CPC) under General Secretary Xi Jinping's stewardship has abruptly—seemingly—reverted to the grand tradition of communism. Ideology and politics once again take command in China. Unlike the half-hearted efforts of his predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping has given top priority to Party rectification, integrating it within his grand plan for "socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era". This ideological and policy turn has strained China's relationship with liberal democracies and brought China to the brink of a new Cold War with the United States and some US allies. Arguably, it has also contributed to the drastic slowdown of the Chinese economy. Why did the CPC make such a move that appears detrimental to China's rise?(China/GIGA)

This seminal article analyses the current structural crisis and instability in an ever more polarised world in relation to earlier systemic crises that were resolved through fascism or through Fordist-Keynesian 'class compromise' (the 1930s) and the emergence of capitalist globalisation (the 1970s). The authors identify three basic responses to the crisis: popular insurgency from below; reformist stabilisation from above; and, a twenty-first century neo-fascism. Looking specifically at the US, they analyse political and economic developments that demonstrate fascistic characteristics. While no simple replication of the past, the emergence of a Christian Right since the mid-1980s, the growth of certain currents within the Tea Party movement, the sharp increase in violent hate groups, the spread of a vicious anti-immigrant movement, the psychopathology of white decline, sharp militarisation and pervasive policing give some indications of the rise of fascist tendencies. But what is crucial today is the sophistication of such a project, made possible by the ideological domination of media together with new surveillance and social control technologies that allow it to rely more on selective than generalised repression. In calling for a co-ordinated fightback, both in the US and beyond, the authors see the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism as a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity, along the lines of a twenty-first century democratic socialism. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright, the Institute of Race Relations.]

Explores how a wide range of countries attempt to cope with the challenges of globalization. This book examines how certain social structures, political cultures, party patterns, interest group politics, classes, policies, liberal democratic and authoritarian institutions, and the discourses that frame them, are being reset by political actors

Responding to recent debates, this article challenges the presentation of Corbynism and Blue Labour as competing philosophical tendencies in the contemporary British Labour Party. It does so with reference to their shared mobilisation around post-liberal and national-populist notions of the relationship between nations, states, society, citizens and the outside world, and critiques of capitalism and liberal democracy that they hold in common. Uncovering a largely subterranean 'critical Marxist' counterpoint that seeks to 'hold the centre' rather than rhetorically or theoretically endorse its destabilisation, the article outlines the other paths available from within the intellectual traditions of the Labour Party and wider left, concluding that there is a real philosophical alternative to both Corbynism and Blue Labour.

This paper addresses the current discussion on links between party politics and production regimes. Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU although, in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms, one would expect the situation to be reversed? I divide my analysis into three stages. First, I use the European Parliament's crucial vote on the European takeover directive in July 2001 as a test case to show that the left-right dimension does indeed matter in corporate governance reform, beside cross-class and cross-party nation-based interests. In a second step, by analyzing the party positions in the main German corporate governance reforms in the 1990s, I show that the SPD and the CDU behave "paradoxically" in the sense that the SPD favored more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU, which protected the institutions of "Rhenish," "organized" capitalism. This constellation occurred in the discussions on company disclosure, management accountability, the power of banks, network dissolution, and takeover regulation. Third, I offer two explanations for the paradoxical party behavior. The first explanation concerns the historical conversion of ideas. I show that trade unions and Social Democrats favored a high degree of capital organization in the Weimar Republic, but this ideological position was driven in new directions at two watersheds: one in the late 1940s, the other in the late 1950s. My second explanation lies in the importance of conflicts over managerial control, in which both employees and minority shareholders oppose managers, and in which increased shareholder power strengthens the position of works councils.