Suchergebnisse

This article reflects on how the journal Global Political Economy arrived at this point. It does not consider the more recent years, of engagement and subsequent contracting with Bristol University Press, focusing instead on my own experiences of working as part of the collective effort to launch such a journal from 2009 to 2016. The article utilises my recollections and documentary sources to offer an intellectual-institutional history of this endeavour. In particular, I argue that particular folklores about Critical Political Economy scholarship served to caricature such research and, consequently, to prevent publishers from contracting the journal – even when presented with arguments and evidence that countered such notions. As such, this article shows how the building of alternative scholarly folklores, as embodied in journals such as Global Political Economy, often entails the painstaking, regularly disrupted and long-term mobilisation of our energies.

Via a reflection on the evolution of a module on comparing capitalisms that I have been teaching for more than a decade, this article discusses the collective influence of new generations of students on how knowledge is (re)made. I deploy a conjunctural understanding of the term 'generations' in order to make sense of how students' interpretations of the topics covered by the module have, across the 2010s, led me to increasingly question the field that was, in an earlier conjuncture, essential for my intellectual foundation and development. Their lived experiences of capitalism are more likely to be dominated by themes such as political, economic and social crises and conflicts, inequality, personal indebtedness and precarity, and in some cases activism. This has had profound and long-lasting effects on my teaching and research, discomfiting me in an ultimately beneficial way; most notably, through the recognition that future critical work on comparing capitalisms ought to move away from previous attempts to engage immanently with dominant, mainstream approaches and towards the articulation of a more confident, autonomous position. Hence, a key aspect of the development and evolution of critical research agendas occurs in and through educational exchanges in the seminar room.

How progressives can transform our economic model

This article returns to Marxist commentaries during a previous period characterized by profound contradictions and conflict-especially the writings of Nicos Poulantzas and Stuart Hall on authoritarian statism/populism from the late 1970s to the 1980s-in order to make sense of the present era. The article argues that we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, which is rooted in the reconfiguring of the state into a less democratic entity through constitutional and legal changes that seek to insulate it from social and political conflict. The apparent strengthening of the state simultaneously entails its growing fragility, for it is becoming an increasingly direct target of a range of popular struggles, demands, and discontent by way of the pressures emanating from this strengthening. A primary reference point for the article is a notable casualty of the post-2007 crisis, European social democracy, but the implications for radical politics more broadly are also considered. Adapted from the source document.