Putting the "Amsterdam School" in its rightful place:a reply to Juan Ignacio Staricco's critique of cultural political economy

This article responds to Staricco’s critique of cultural political economy (CPE) for being inherently constructivist because of its emphasis on the ontologically foundational role of semiosis (sense- and meaning-making) in social life. Staricco recommends the Amsterdam School of transnational historical materialism as a more immediately productive and insightful approach to developing a regulationist critique of political economy. Both lines of criticism of CPE are addressed. First, Staricco misinterprets the implications of treating semiosis and structuration as ontologically equal bases of social life. Second, Staricco mistakes our criticisms of the ‘Italian School’ in international political economy for criticisms of the Amsterdam School – an approach we have always warmly endorsed. He therefore misses our more nuanced claim that, while the Amsterdam School emphasizes the importance of semiosis, it has fewer concepts to explain how semiosis matters and why only some imagined class identities and concepts of control are selected, retained, and institutionalized. CPE addresses this lacuna by integrating critical semiotic analysis into political economy. Third, we provide the first detailed comparison of the Amsterdam School and CPE to provide a better understanding of the merits of each approach and to indicate where they might complement each other without claiming one to be superior to the other

The heartlands of neoliberalism and the rise of the austerity state

adopts a regulation- and state-theoretical variegated capitalism approach to the genealogy and subsequent development of neoliberalism. It distinguishes four kinds of neoliberal project: post-socialist system transformation, principled neoliberal regime shifts, pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustment, and neoliberal structural adjustment regimes. The heartlands of neoliberalism are characterized by principled neoliberal regime shifts, typified by the USA and UK but with variations in Canada, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland. I consider the periodization of neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK and comment on similarities and differences with other cases. I then consider the extent to which pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustments can cumulate, over time, through ratchet-like effects, to produce de facto rather than principled neoliberal regime shifts. Here I also consider two cases – the Federal Republic of Germany, in which neoliberal policy adjustments serve a neo-mercantilist economic strategy but have consolidated into a more neoliberal regime shift, and Sweden, where a glass half-full, glass half-empty ambivalence exists as a result of the steady cumulation of neoliberal policy adjustments but much of the Swedish social democratic model has been retained. Finally, I consider the implications of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands in terms of (1) core-periphery relations within the heartlands themselves, associated with intensified uneven development and (2) the repercussions of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands for the overall dynamic of a world market organized in the shadow of neoliberalism

Bonapartismus ohne Bonaparte:von Thatcher über Blair zum Brexit

This is a contribution to a volume celebrating Marx's analysis of the dictatorship of Emperor Louis Bonaparte and seeking parallels with later developments in the interwar period and the 21st century. I compare the rise of Thatcherism, New Labour, and the Brexit referendum and negotiations in the light of the arguments of Marx and Gramsci. Brexit can be seen as a Bonapartist moment without a Bonaparte to lead it

The world market, North-South relations, neoliberalism

Marx’s analysis of the world market as the historical presupposition and posit of capital and its role in generalizing and intensifying the contradictions of capital on a world scale remains valid. Neo-liberalism and financialization reinforce world market completion, transform North-South relations, and modify relations within the South. Moreover, for Marx, the more integrated the world market becomes, the less scope there is to resolve crises by extending capitalist relations into previously marginal economic zones. When this crisis displacement strategy reaches its limit, increasingly severe general world crises would erupt, thereby indicating the need for a new historical form of production

Territory, politics, governance and multispatial metagovernance

This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-relational approach in social theory, explores their interconnections. This conceptual re-articulation is then contextualized in regard to the European Union (EU) as a political regime that serves as a real-time laboratory for experiments in government and governance with implications for redesigning polities, politics, and policies, especially in response to symptoms of political and policy failures and other crises. Mobilizing the territory-place-scale-network schema, and drawing on critical governance studies, this article offers an alternative account of these developments based on (1) their sociospatial and temporal complexities, (2) recognition that socio-spatial relations are objects and means of government and governance and not just sites where such practices occur, and (3) extension of this approach to multispatial meta-governance, that is, attempts to govern the government and governance of socio-spatial relations. The article ends with suggestions for future research on the state and state power, governance of the EU, and the role of Territory, Politics, Governance as a major forum for future discussion on multispatial metagovernance

Language and critique:Some anticipations of critical discourse studies in Marx

We examine Marx’s critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx’s work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy

Penilaian Kinerja Keuangan Koperasi di Kabupaten Pelalawan

This paper describe development and financial performance of cooperative in District Pelalawan among 2007 - 2008. Studies on primary and secondary cooperative in 12 sub-districts. Method in this stady use performance measuring of productivity, efficiency, growth, liquidity, and solvability of cooperative. Productivity of cooperative in Pelalawan was highly but efficiency still low. Profit and income were highly, even liquidity of cooperative very high, and solvability was good

Juxtaposing BTE and ATE – on the role of the European insurance industry in funding civil litigation

One of the ways in which legal services are financed, and indeed shaped, is through private insurance arrangement. Two contrasting types of legal expenses insurance contracts (LEI) seem to dominate in Europe: before the event (BTE) and after the event (ATE) legal expenses insurance. Notwithstanding institutional differences between different legal systems, BTE and ATE insurance arrangements may be instrumental if government policy is geared towards strengthening a market-oriented system of financing access to justice for individuals and business. At the same time, emphasizing the role of a private industry as a keeper of the gates to justice raises issues of accountability and transparency, not readily reconcilable with demands of competition. Moreover, multiple actors (clients, lawyers, courts, insurers) are involved, causing behavioural dynamics which are not easily predicted or influenced. Against this background, this paper looks into BTE and ATE arrangements by analysing the particularities of BTE and ATE arrangements currently available in some European jurisdictions and by painting a picture of their respective markets and legal contexts. This allows for some reflection on the performance of BTE and ATE providers as both financiers and keepers. Two issues emerge from the analysis that are worthy of some further reflection. Firstly, there is the problematic long-term sustainability of some ATE products. Secondly, the challenges faced by policymakers that would like to nudge consumers into voluntarily taking out BTE LEI

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio