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This article analyses the American Express travel board game Money Card (1972) as it highlights the intertwinement between the rise of a distinctive form of tourism as a modern mass industry and the expansion of the capitalist market, the primacy of the dollar, and U.S. hegemony. In a period marked by a shift from paper money to credit cards and global credit markets, American Express was the most powerful and easily identifiable symbol of the new post-war international economic order dominated by U.S. economic and political power. Placing the American Express Money Card board game within the shift from the post-war economy of reconstruction to credit expansion and neoliberalism, brings to the forefront the ways in which the game presented tourism as a ritual in celebration of capitalism. As a form of armchair travel, the board game sold tourism as a re-enchantment of the world. The article explores how the board game framed the American Express Card as fetish object, portrayed Europe as up for sale, and created a desire for the services of American Express and consumerism more generally. It shows how players were trained to use credit cards, be good consumers, and participate in the economy of the tourist industry. By advancing a capitalist tourist dreamworld, Money Card shaped perceptions of travel to Europe and created a religious illusion, offering a re-enchantment of the world through tourism and credit cards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) was a philosopher, historian and sociologist. This paper asks: What elements of the Political Economy of Communication are there in Ibn Khaldûn's work and how do they matter in digital capitalism? It presents relevant passages from Khaldûn's main work Muqaddimah and points out parallels between the Muqaddimah and works in Political Economy, especially Karl Marx's approach of the Critique of Political Economy. The comparison of Khaldûn to Marx is not an arbitrary choice. Several scholars have pointed out parallels between the two's works with respect to general Political Economy. It, therefore, makes sense to, also, compare Khaldûn and Marx in the context of the Political Economy of Communication. The paper analyses the relevance of Khaldûn's ideas in digital capitalism. Khaldûn's works are situated in the context of media and communication theory, digital automation, Facebook, Google, labour in informational and digital capitalism, Amazon, the tabloid press, fake news and post-truth culture. The analysis shows that Khaldûn's Muqaddimah is an early work in Political Economy that can and should inform our contemporary critical analysis of communication in society, communication in capitalism and class society, ideology and digital capitalism. What connects Marx and Khaldûn is that they were critical scholars who although living at different times in different parts of the world saw the importance of the analysis of class and communication. Their works can and should inform the Political Economy of Communication and the analysis of digital capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies. Scholars have approached this rise of digital capitalism from various angles. However, relatively little attention has been paid to digital capitalism's cultural underpinnings and the beliefs of those who develop most digital technologies. In this paper, we argue that a solutionist order of worth – in which value derives from solving social problems through technology – has become central to an emerging spirit of digital capitalism. We use supervised learning to trace the relative importance of different orders of worth in three novel text corpora. We find that solutionism is indeed central to the normative beliefs of digital elites and the broader digital milieu, but not to capitalist discourse at large. We illustrate the importance of these findings by discussing how the spirit of digital capitalism motivates, legitimates, and orients the actions of digital capitalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of Western scholars are currently arguing that socialist transition theory may provide solutions to industrial relations and management problems that capitalism struggles to resolve. I add to this effort by introducing the debate on whether scientific management could assist the transition from capitalism to socialism that was undertaken in the United States through the first two decades of the 20th century. By so doing, I make two contributions. First, I show that socialist theory has a substantial lineage within management studies from which current progressives might draw lessons. Second, I add to the literature that has problematised the authoritarian depiction of Taylorism that is orthodoxy in the management and industrial relations literature. I do so by showing that a significant body of theorists and practitioners believed scientific management could assist populations to move beyond capitalism. Some welcomed this possibility, while others viewed it as a dire threat, requiring that Taylorism be demonised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Jordan Peterson’s enthusiastic reception, including on the neofascist Right, reflects how his discourse functions as a form of indirect capitalist apologetics, which no longer obviates how the sociopolitical system produces massive inequalities, but sanctifies inequalities as natural and eternal. Part 1 frames the contention of the paper, addressing methodological issues. Part 2 establishes the understanding of indirect apologetics, drawn from Gyorgy Lukács’ account of fascist ideology as involving the following three irrationalist functions: first, ontologizing and relativizing peoples’ material, socioeconomic concerns; second, positioning the in-group as privileged by nature; and third, displacing socioeconomically mediated anxieties onto designated enemies to be combatted by a revivified, masculine culture. Part 3 shows how Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life proposes a social Darwinism (indirect apologetics, function 1), whose darker underside is authoritarian permission to ‘kick down’ on the weak, or those who would seek to ameliorate sociopolitical conditions (indirect apologetics, functions 2, 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dynamics of capitalism and the penitentiary system through an analysis of the decline of debt imprisonment in 19th-century United States. It argues that class transformations in the early to mid-1800s created a context for social experiments with new forms of punishment. The penitentiary systems that formed developed logics that contingently fit with the rising mode of production. The decline of debt imprisonment, in this context, was much in part the result of transformations in class power and class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of racial capitalism, presenting ten theses that explore its theoretical framework and its relevance in contemporary sociological debates. It examines how racialization and capitalism are intertwined, with racial capitalism acting as both a material and ideological process that structures inequality and dispossession. It also emphasizes the historical roots of racial capitalism, including the colonial and slavery systems.

In this article, we analyse the role that entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship have played in the construction and consolidation of capitalism in Poland. We question the line conventionally drawn between entrepreneurs and the working class, arguing that the vast majority of so-called entrepreneurs in Poland are disguised workers who were rejected from the labour market during the transition to capitalism or forced into self-employment as Poland's precariat labour market crystallised. We outline a critical historical analysis of the origin of these disguised workers to provide space for a discussion of the specific 'labour problem' that Poland has faced during its transition to capitalism. A central argument of our study is that the top-down creation of entrepreneurship is a partial and often contradictory response to this 'labour problem'. We then illustrate these contradictions, showing how those commonly defined as entrepreneurs have performed relatively poorly in their designated roles of creating employment and innovation, while their living standards and wellbeing have deteriorated. We historically frame how this group of disguised workers in Poland embody the tension between the normative and actual aspects of capitalist development in Poland since 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations and societies have changed. Bureaucracy, as modernity's form of organization, has transformed into a reflexive organization, coordinating the conditions of system reproduction in time–space with increased reflexivity. Simultaneously, modernity with capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization as its institutional dimensions radicalized; reflexive organizations as one of its driving forces and the reflexive organization as the new organization model. Today, reflexive organizations are the most ubiquitous and powerful agents in our societies, separating and integrating activities, practices, and occurrences in new time–space arrangements and sets of social systems together with others, fueling modernity's dynamism and global scope and letting our societies resemble an engine without a driver, erratically running in directions we cannot foresee. To identify and understand these changes and their impact on our current world, we develop a research framework informed by Anthony Giddens' structuration theory that upgrades social systems to the core of structuration theory and adds the reflexive mode of organization and a strategic perspective to Giddens' theory of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on digital labor platforms requires a focus beyond techno-utopianism, foregrounding the role of living labor that materially sustains the fantasies of convenience ingrained in platform capitalism. The gig workers embodying living labor exhausted by location-dependent platform work are mainly migrants. Yet, greater understanding of the complexity of difference production and the gigification of work is needed. The article is prompted by the desire to understand the relationship between entrepreneurialized workers and heterogeneously produced differences within the labor power composition of gig workers active on location-based labor platforms. Drawing on ethnographic data produced together with migrant workers engaged in food delivery and cleaning gigs via labor platforms in Helsinki, the article first analyzes the organizing logic of gig work mediated via platforms through the notion of transversal entrepreneurial tendency, and second, the entwined forms of social, legal, and algorithmic difference produced among gig workers. The article argues that differentiation in labor power composition is dynamically related to the interactions required and facilitated by the platforms. The article contributes to discussions on entrepreneurialization in the contemporary world of work and the specific ways in which the social, legal, and algorithmic production of difference shape the constitutive hierarchies of platform labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ownership has been a core research theme in parts of media and communication science since its establishment as a distinct research field. In particular, scholars in the field of political economy of the media, media sociology and media industry studies typically pay close attention to the role ownership has on various media and communication processes. In this article, we argue, however, that media ownership has been treated largely as a black box ignoring the inner workings and dynamics of it. Filling this void, we reach out to research on ownership from the field of political economy, sociology as well as social and legal philosophy to discuss two options to conceptually grasp the 'inner workings of property'. To showcase the importance of this conceptual redefinition, the article discusses the implications of unpacking property in the realm of digital capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without structures of employer coordination, it is difficult to develop and deliver effective and legitimate labour market policy. This article theorises the conditions under which employer coordination occurs in a context usually described as a Liberal Market Economy. An explanatory framework of employer coordination is developed arguing that there are structural, institutional and ideational factors that facilitate and hinder coordination. The framework is applied to an empirical analysis of the Scottish context where devolution means that the Scottish Government has taken a different approach to issues of regulating work, emphasising the policy importance of 'fair work'. Empirical material was collected through interviews with employers' organisations (EOs) and other key stakeholders. The article extends existing theorisation by demonstrating that the pressures that facilitate and hinder employer coordination are dynamic and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between different forms of oppressive structures has been an object of dispute throughout the history of feminism. One of the most influential debates devoted to this issue is the one between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser during the 1990s. Although the debate attracted a great deal of attention, and both thinkers have subsequently developed their theories by introducing novel concepts to describe oppression as well as the conditions of contemporary emancipatory movements, they have not continued to engage in each other's work. This article offers a critical reading of the positions that Fraser and Butler took in the 1990s debate, as well as an identification of shifts in their thinking ensuing from the debate. A particular interest of the article is their conceptualisations of the grounds for political alliances among groups with distinct experiences of oppression. The article not only offers a critique of both Butler's and Fraser's positions in the 1990s debate but also argues that the way in which Fraser's trajectory has come to directly address the issue of the capitalist social order, and which can also be read as an implicit self-critique, is more satisfactory than Butler's later work on precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of media and communications was never explicitly defined – nor was there ever an explicit debate about the sub-field. Not having a clear anchor makes it hard to define what its critical component should be. Nonetheless, a rich yet disconnected tradition of sociology and critical political economy allows flexibility to reconsider communication and social relations in the broader societal dynamics of capitalism. Specifying a critical sociological approach to communication can help better define the role of communication at the micro, mezzo and macro levels of society. The multi-paradigmatic heritage of sociological theory can provide new ways of criticising communication power in contemporary society. Diverse contemporary developments in the critique of political economy give a breadth of understanding of the capitalist mode of production and its internal dynamics. Sociology can add depth to understanding social relations within and beyond the production, distribution and consumption process. This introduction sets out the framework for the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes into exam the current literature about Big Data and data capitalism, from the perspective of the critical Internet theory. Particular attention will be placed to the ideas of data exploitation and raw data, which will prove to betray a form of digital fetishism: in short, the focus on the final results of the production process, rather than on the social relations by which the very same process is fueled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveillance of human subjects is how data-intensive companies obtain much of their data, yet surveillance increasingly meets with social and regulatory resistance. Data-intensive companies are thus seeking other ways to meet their data needs. This article explores one of these: the creation of synthetic data, or data produced artificially as an alternative to real-world data. I show that capital is already heavily invested in synthetic data. I argue that its appeal goes beyond circumventing surveillance to accord with a structural tendency within capitalism toward the autonomization of the circuit of capital. By severing data from human subjectivity, synthetic data contributes to the automation of the production of automation technologies like machine learning. A shift from surveillance to synthesis, I argue, has epistemological, ontological, and political economic consequences for a society increasingly structured around data-intensive capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The era since the Great Recession of 2008/9 has witnessed the rise and increased sway of numerous authoritarian-right movements, regimes and leaders across the globe. Such political developments remain inadequately understood; yet several commonplaces have emerged. First, a tendency to eschew critical enquiry of the range of forces on the radical right, in favour of collapsing such political developments into generalisations such as 'populism'. Second, such over-generalisations have commonly elided analysis of neofascist forces, strategies and processes. Third, despite some engagement with 'economic' factors, examination of these political developments has largely eschewed the underlying organic crisis of neoliberal capital accumulation. This article critiques such commonplaces. The first section problematises the category of 'populism' as largely inadequate in understanding the complexity of forces and dynamics on the radical right. The subsequent section argues that an emergent or immanent neofascism exists within such political developments, outlining eight theses on the spectre of neofascism and the conditions that underpin the rise of elements of fascistic politics. The final section concludes with key aspects for an antifascism, arguing that opposing neofascism entails the transcendence of neoliberal capitalism itself. And a meaningful alternative to neoliberal state and capital requires us to look again to socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the stagnation of macro-level development theory in development studies, attributed to a mainstream denial of systemic transformation beyond capitalism. It reports the micro-level issues like healthcare and water provision, neglecting fundamental systemic change. It highlights the lack of challenge to capitalism in mainstream discourse leads to a lack of consideration for socialism as a viable alternative.

The concept of trusts, absent from the classical writings of Marx and Weber on capitalism, was introduced by Frederic Maitland and John Locke as an explanatory framework for the central institutions of capitalism. While these two theorists offered compelling arguments, they relied on intuition and utilized the concept primarily to justify the existing social structure. This paper aims to bring analytical rigor to this intuitive theory and proposes that critical theory embraces the idea of trusts as a critical conceptual tool to unravel the nature of capitalist institutions. Examining limited liability corporations, the modern state, and public debt, the incorporation of trusts into critical theory provides key advantages. First, it facilitates analyzing capitalist institutions in terms of rights and responsibilities, unveiling moral dynamics. Second, it highlights the role of personhood in distributing rights and responsibilities. Third, it can help understand why modern society is ensnared by the shackles of debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent post-capitalist theorizing, particularly Winant, revives the question of service sector growth. At stake is whether an economic system built on the extraction of surplus value can continue to function when ever-larger shares of workers do not produce this; also, whether their growing predominance prefigures post-capitalist relations of production. Most contributions offer imprecise concepts of service work and capitalist productivity, however. This article sharpens these with Marxian theoretical tools and assesses them using 2016–2020 US Census data, finding that less than one-fifth of service employees produce surplus value, while nearly half of non-service employees do. The majority of service and all formal US employees create important use values outside of direct capitalist exploitation. They thus pose a potentially post-capitalist constituency that is heavily—and non-randomly—female and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). The implications of this for the transition away from capitalism, as well as for the transition debate itself, are then considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the relationship between race and the expanded reproduction of capitalism has exploded across the social sciences and humanities over the past several years. Despite this widespread appreciation and interest, profound disagreement, debate, and analytical impression persists, not least regarding the relationship between race and the necessary 'laws of motion' of capitalist society. This article begins by tracing the core approaches to the race and capitalism conversation, paying particular attention to their understanding of the necessity/contingency distinction. It then proceeds to make the case for race as a contingent – which, emphatically, does not mean local or insignificant – relatively autonomous, and historically path-dependent terrain of struggle in capitalist society, which has largely functioned to maintain capital's necessary disequilibrium between the value form and its value relations, but need not do so. It closes by exploring the implications of this claim in relation to recent historical-geographical research on post-1898 US imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]