A Cross-National Comparison of Nationalism in Austria, the Czech and Slovac Republics, Hungary, and Poland

The transition to democracy in Eastern Europe after the breakdown of communist regimes was challenged by ethnic and national tensions. Nationalist sentiments and traditional patterns of ethnic intolerance were almost immediately revitalized. The analysis presented here concerns nationalist orientation in several of these countries in the context of ideology and social origin, which form links among nationalist identification, ethnic intolerance, democratic and economic orientation, and social class position. In 1996, representative national surveys were carried out in Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, and Poland. The study was then extended to Austria, where, like in other Western democracies, nationalistic, xenophobic, and rightist-radical attitudes have emerged. Analyses of the attitude structures (structural equation models) showed that different types of nationalism have developed. In post-communist countries—with the exception of the Czech Republic—anticapitalist feelings are strongly correlated with nationalism and ethnic intolerance. Such attitudes are held by the lower classes, yet this form of antiliberalism is not directed against democracy. In Austria, a classical "underclass authoritarianism" exists but remains independent of economic ideology. This is typical of the "new right" in Europe: a "modernized" brand of fascism in which neoliberal ideology, instead of anticapitalist resentments, is combined with traditional value patterns.     

Exploitation via labour power in Marx

Marx's account of capitalist exploitation is undermined by inter-related confusions surrounding the notion of labour power. These confusions relate to [i] what labour power is, [ii] what happens to labour power in the labour market, and [iii] what the epistemic status of labour power is (the issue of appearance and reality). The central theses of the paper are [a] that property ownership is the wrong model for understanding the exploitation of labour, and [b] that the concept of exploitation is linked more fruitfully to a conception of distributive injustice than to Marx's theory of surplus value.     

Globalization and counterdevelopment: The importance of new narratives

The article is a personal recount of living under the called neoliberal regime installed in the post-Cold War in the region. Written from the perspective of a Latin American woman in the betweenness of the North and the South. Focusing on capitalism history shows how counterdevelopment has been the other face of globalization. The social protests in the whole continent request the respect of human dignity recovering an inclusive collective narrative and social justice caring of our common home, to build a more profound democracy and a more just world.     

Late capitalism and postmodernism: Educational problems and possibilities

This work analyzes certain aspects of postmodernist thought in terms of the challenges it presents to the secular, radical democratic project to which the author subscribes. It is argued that much of postmodernist thought has been effective in attacking foundationalism, as well as supporting marginalized persons and ideas, but holds little promise with regard to building an integrative democratic community. Postmodernist radicalism has not usually been directed against capitalist power; therefore, it is not clear how this form of radicalism can be useful to a project that is predicated upon the incompatibilities between capitalism and bona fide democracy.     

Contemporary Sociological Theory and Techno-Nihilist Capitalism

The problem advanced societies have tried to answer since the last part of the twentieth century can be ascribed to a fundamental question: how to go beyond the constitutive (and unsustainable) limit of nation-state capitalism, constrained by an excessively circumscribed and univocal idea of social organization, without losing the ability to govern? Or, expressed in other terms, how can you dismantle the center (the state) without losing the power to control? The answer to this (difficult) question has been sought for along two main axes. The first has concerned the seizing of new opportunities distributed over a space larger than the national space. As historians have shown (Arrighi 1996 Arrighi, G. 1996. Il lungo XX secolo, Milan: Il Saggiatore.  [Google Scholar]), if global projection is a constant of capitalism only the disastrous politico-military vicissitudes of the first half of the twentieth century created the conditions according to which the nation-state capitalism model could be born, in the form that dominated the fifty years following the Second World War. But first the exhaustion of colonialism, then the urgency of the energy question, the signs of a possible demise of Anglo-Saxon hegemony and, subsequently, the collapse of the Soviet empire, have changed the rules of the game. Within a rapidly transforming international framework, the recovery of a global outlook promised the exploitation of important opportunities with the opening of new markets, the valorization of investment possibilities, the displacement and utilization of low-wage labor, financial speculation, the acquisition and control of energy resources and raw materials. It is a promise that Anglo-Saxon elites have contemplated since the early 1980s, the moment in which—to counter the increasingly worrying signs of decline of their hegemony—they abandoned the Keynesian doctrine to embrace the neoliberal doctrine. The second axis along which a new growth cycle has been developed has to do with the increased manipulation of meanings available individually and collectively. Such a process is formed from the combination of two rationales, the subjectivist imperative, which inscribes into social life some of the philosophical developments of the twentieth century, and the formation of De-territorialized Aesthetic Space, which makes technically possible, a degree of cultural mobility hitherto unthinkable. Both these factors facilitate the insertion of the immaterial dimension into the cycle of capitalist valorization, making it more readily available for exploitation by economic forces on a global scale.     

Threats and Challenges to Feminist Therapy

No abstract available for this article.     

Just Wars,Holy Wars,and Jihads,edited by Sohail Hashmi,Oxford University Press: New York, 2012, xvi + 434 pp. ISBN 978 019 975503 5, US$35.00 (paperback)

In recent years, academic interest in the nexus between Pentecostalism, economics, and capitalism has grown significantly. Notably, the vast majority of publications that have addressed this interface are to some degree conceptually framed by Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this article I consider what The Protestant Ethic might contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Pentecostalism and capitalism. First, I assess a particularly noteworthy attempt to draw Pentecostalism into Weber's genealogical account which draws a series of parallels between Pentecostalism and ascetic Protestantism. Second, I discuss the merits of an approach that is not primarily genealogical but remains indebted to the concepts that Weber introduces, elaborating a new affinity between Pentecostalism and capitalism in its present iteration. With this article, I seek to comprehensively extend the scope and sharpen the conceptual underpinnings of future analysis and empirical work in this area.     

Elaborating Faith

Emerging from participant observation fieldwork in varied interfaith organizations, this essay argues that intentional interfaith engagement in the United States is a decidedly classed phenomenon that too rarely includes the presence and concerns of persons who are working poor. This dynamic is particularly problematic given religious entanglements with free‐market capitalism and the specific political economic vulnerability and religious diversity of recent immigrants and refugees. Interfaith organizing models, especially with their inclusion of labor unions, offer an important balance in the ecology of interfaith engagement and resistance to the civil religion of neoliberalism. Through these place‐based, consociational collaborations, labor organizations help faith communities historicize, conceptualize, and navigate complex economic dynamics while expanding labor's value‐frameworks, forms of organizing, and apprehension of worker's faith‐filled identities.     

Slavoj Žižek and the Real Subject of Politics

Slavoj ?i?ek's refusal to sketch an alternative to the global liberal-capitalist order, combined with his claim that there is an urgent need for a repolitization of, most of all, the economy, raises the question of the possibility of radical political thought and action. Considering fundamentalisms and politically correct multiculturalism not as oppositional, but as correlative to the “depolitization” of post-modern societies, ?i?ek invokes the emancipatory legacy of Europe in an attempt to reinvent Marxism in a way similar to what Lenin, thrown into an open situation, had to do in 1917 between the revolutions. A single question confronts political philosophy today: is liberal-capitalist democracy the ultimate horizon of our political practice, or is it possible to open up the space for another political articulation? The key to a repolitization is to identify with the “symptom” of the existing global order's false claim to Universality, with the excluded “part of no part” who politicizes it's predicament by claiming to stand for the real universal. In order not to discard political struggle as “unrealistic”, today's cynical “realist” consensus must be broken. Taking things as they “really are” has become the dominant ideological mode that keeps people from thinking about alternatives. The remedy is to show that things never are “really” as they are.

     

Communicating a Protesting Protestant Heritage

This article opens by wondering, as many critics did during and after World War II, why a tradition named for its protesting impetus is today often marked by complacency and quietism. In conversation with political theorist William Connolly and Rev. Dr. William Barber's activism, this article suggests that Luther's unique articulation of the communicatio idiomatum might offer a compelling and coherent model for Lutheran ethical‐political agency that can provide an alternative to—rather than reinforcing—the modern isolated subject cum homo economicus often associated with idealized images of Luther's protest before the Diet of Worms.