'Reform or Revolt?' Polanyian v Marxian perspectives on the regulation of 'the economic'

Rosa Luxembourg’s 1900 pamphlet “Reform or revolution,” which critiqued reformist political strategy, has relevance to, and finds echoes in today’s debates on the possibility and desirability of using law to protect society from the market’s negative effects. It also summed up the nineteenth-century “Polanyian” reformist and Marxist “revolutionary” perspectives. Polanyi argued that “the economic” must be “embedded” in the social by means of legal regulation, an argument he illustrates with the help of the “Speenhamland” example. Marx, while acknowledging the role of the legal struggle as part of class struggle, concludes that ultimately “right can never be higher than the economic structure of society”. Marxist legal theorist Pashukanis developed this position in his “commodity form theory of law” which points to the structural impossibility of law’s regulation of capitalism. While contemporary “Polanyist” Ruggie again asserts that legal and soft law “global governance” regimes can control capitalism’s main instrument, the corporation, Shamir contra Ruggie argues that the “moralisation of markets” through corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to the “marketisation of morality” or a change in what we perceive law to be (and who has legitimate authority to regulate) rather than a “taming” of markets. Following Shamir, I add that this corporate-led global governance hastens the collapse of capitalism, and confirms the inevitability of revolution and the subsequent creation of a law-free society

From the Dutch East India Company to the corporate bill of rights: corporations and international law

The corporation - and especially its more complex, globally networked version, the multinational enterprise - is increasingly a target of intense debate. Critics report on ‘corporate complicity’ in conflict situations, environmental disasters and degradation in the oil, gas and mining sectors, the privatisation of war through the use of mercenary-like contractors, the monopolisation of intellectual property rights over essential medicines, the buying up of vast swathes of agricultural land in povertystricken areas of the Third World, the commodification and for-profit provision of various previously essential public services such as education and healthcare, and finally the seemingly reckless speculation on financial markets, leading to taxpayerfunded bailouts. It is felt that corporate power is able to grow unchecked, giving rise to ‘corporate excess’,that international trade rules are skewed in corporations’ favour, that bilateral investment treaties and instruments such as the putative transatlantic trade and investment treaty (TTIP) will provide a ‘Corporate Bill of Rights’, that ‘corporate accountability’ is falling short, and that we experience ‘governance by corporations’. Indeed, it has come to the point, perhaps the point of neoliberalism’s resolution between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’, that we increasingly look to corporations for leadership in both the realm of ideas and management. Although oftentimes corporations’ influence over, abuse of, or impunity from, international law are identified as key causes of our discomfort with corporate power, a deeper understanding of the precise relationship between (multinational) corporations and (international) law remains absent in such critiques. In this chapter I show how a historical reading of the concurrent development of corporations, law and capitalism can lead us to an alternative assessment of ‘the question of the corporation’ and why we might formulate different responses to this question in today’s global political economy. In particular, an understanding of the relationship between corporations, law and capitalism should enable us to reassess to what extent law is an adequate response to this question

Capitalism's victor's Justice? The hidden story of the prosecution of industrialists post-WWll

This chapter analyses the trials of industrialists at the US Military Tribunals at Nuremberg for their roles in the Nazis' aggressive wars and the Holocaust. The chapter is organized as follows. Section II examines the Allied consensus on the nature of World War II as imperialist; on the role of the industrialists in Hitler's aggressive war; the formulation of the ‘economic case’; and the indictment, trial, and judgment at the International Military Tribunal. Section III traces the post-World War II turnaround in US foreign and economic policy and its impact on US political and economic involvement in Europe. Section IV shows how this turnaround manifested itself in the conduct and outcomes of the trials of the industrialists at Nuremberg. Section V compares the US trials to the largely forgotten post-World War II international trials of industrialists by the French, British, and Soviet military tribunals, and with the decision of the Military Tribunal for the Far East not to indict Japanese zaibatsu leaders. Finally, Section VI connects the aftermath of the trials, the ‘McCloy clemency’, and subsequent reinstatement of most of the industrialists to their former positions, with contemporary debates around international criminal law, the economic causes of conflict, and ‘corporate impunity’

‘It’s not me, it’s the corporation’: the value of corporate accountability in the global political economy

‘Corporate accountability’ legitimises and thus reinforces the current system of surplus value extraction. Accountability struggles effectively to reduce corporate capitalism’s violence to the good corporate citizen’s occasional ‘wrongdoing’, which becomes a calculable risk capable of being exchanged—signifying ‘planned impunity’. Corporate accountability, though a seemingly emancipatory process, thus exemplifies law’s constitutive role in capitalism and the need to move beyond law for emancipation

Near-Field Radio Holography of Large Reflector Antennas

We summarise the mathematical foundation of the holographic method of measuring the reflector profile of an antenna or radio telescope. In particular, we treat the case, where the signal source is located at a finite distance from the antenna under test, necessitating the inclusion of the so-called Fresnel field terms in the radiation integrals. We assume a ``full phase'' system with reference receiver to provide the reference phase. We describe in some detail the hardware and software implementation of the system used for the holographic measurement of the 12m ALMA prototype submillimeter antennas. We include a description of the practicalities of a measurement and surface setting. The results for both the VertexRSI and AEC (Alcatel-EIE-Consortium) prototype ALMA antennas are presented.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, to appear in IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 49, No. 5, October 2007. Version 2 includes nice mug-shots of the author

Detection of Optical Synchrotron Emission from the Radio Jet of 3C279

We report the detection of optical and ultraviolet emission from the kiloparsec scale jet of the well-known quasar 3C~279. A bright knot, discovered in archival V and U band {\it Hubble Space Telescope} Faint Object Camera images, is coincident with a peak in the radio jet \sim0.6\arcsec from the nucleus. The detection was also confirmed in Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 images. Archival Very Large Array and MERLIN radio data are also analyzed which help to show that the high-energy optical/UV continuum, and spectrum, are consistent with a synchrotron origin from the same population of relativistic electrons responsible for the radio emission.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figs. accepted for publication in ApJL with minor revision