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In recent years activists around the globe have challenged the commodification of water, education, health care, and other essential goods, while academics have warned from unintended effects when everything can be bought and sold. But what is commodification? And what is the problem with commodification? In The Critique of Commodification, Christoph Hermann argues that commodification entails production for profit rather than social needs, and that production for profit has a number of harmful effects, including the exclusion of those who cannot pay, the marginalization of those whose collective purchasing power is not large enough, and the focus on highly profitable forms of production ove...
John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a...
This book provides the basic knowledge of Japanese contributions in political economy and the ongoing research agenda, such as the pursuit of theoretical consistency in Marxian economics by Uno School; the concept of ‘civil society’ as a criterion of existing socio-economic structure; a mathematical reconstruction of Marxian theory; and an analysis of environmental pollution. The new generation of Japanese political economists in collaboration with their overseas counterparts has produced new insights into political economy and into the newly emerging structure of the world economy. The book provides useful insights into international capitalism and how past patterns of uneven development are now changing; the role of international finance in affecting both national and international growth and employment patterns; an analysis of recent growth patterns in Asia; and the specific issue emerging within the Asian region and the implications for economics, social change and geopolitics.
Scrutinizes possibilities for an equalised global order, in light of recent conflicts between the world’s major powers The “post-Cold War era is definitively over,” asserted US President Joe Biden as he launched the new National Security Strategy, warning in late 2022 that “a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” American leadership, the document declared, would be more necessary than ever to define "the future of the international order,” insisting that the US must marshal its unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic resources to confront its geopolitical rivals. Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry? takes stock of momentous...
This timely book offers a fresh perspective on how to effectively address the issue of unequal access to healthcare. It analyses the human right to health from the underexplored legal principle of solidarity, proposing a non-commercial understanding of the positive obligations inherent in the right to health.
A unique study of the WW2 culture of Germany.
For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy? While this volume seeks a reappraisal of existing liberal democracy today, its main goal is to help lay the foundation for new visions and practices in developing a real socialist democracy. Amid the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism today, the responsibility to sort out the relationship between socialism and democracy has never been greater. No revival of socialist politics in the twenty-first century can occur without founding new democratic institutions and practices.
This book examines countries that have tried, with varying degrees of success, to use legislative strategies to encourage and support collective bargaining, including Australia’s Fair Work Act. It is the first major study of the operation and impact of the new collective bargaining framework introduced under the Fair Work Act, combining theoretical and practical perspectives. In addition, a number of comparative pieces provide rich insights into the Australian legislation’s adaptation of concepts from overseas collective bargaining systems – including good faith bargaining, and majority employee support as the basis for establishing bargaining rights. Contributors to this volume are all leading labor law, industrial relations, and human resource management scholars from Australia, and from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
Program generation holds the promise of helping to bridge the gap between application-level problem solutions and efficient implementations at the level of today's source programs as written in C or Java. Thus, program generation can substantially contribute to reducing production cost and time-to-market in future software production, while improving the quality and stability of the product. This book is about domain-specific program generation; it is the outcome of a Dagstuhl seminar on the topic held in March 2003. After an introductory preface by the volume editors, the 18 carefully reviewed revised full papers presented are organized into topical sections on - surveys of domain-specific programming technologies - domain-specific programming languages - tool support for program generation - domain-specific techniques for program optimization
Using a comprehensive analysis of the wave of organizing that swept the country starting in 2007, Labor in Israel investigates the changing political status of organized labor in the context of changes to Israel’s political economy, including liberalization, the rise of non-union labor organizations, the influx of migrant labor, and Israel’s complex relations with the Palestinians. Through his discussion of organized labor’s relationship to the political community and its nationalist political role, Preminger demonstrates that organized labor has lost the powerful status it enjoyed for much of Israel’s history. Despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, however, he show...