Capitalism's Captures

Market ‘solutions’ neutralizes and captures any social effort to counter the bad outcomes of capitalism. In a comprehensive and well argued essay Peter Smith (‘Rewilding’) takes us on a tour of the last century of such ‘captures’, the most prominent being Labour Unions transformed from Class Struggle formations into Lobbying outfits and the Environmental Movement turned into consultancies for financialization of natural resources.1 The conclusion is that the real problems are not attacked but fragmented and commodified for intensified extraction by new and old classes of rentiers....

The sovereign is dead! Long live the sovereign!

Corporations rule the world - for how long? In Norway the king died recently. The Parliament declared: “The King is dead. Long live the King!” and put a new one onto the throne. Ambrus Béla, however, declares sovereignty dead - for good. Also Kristian Thyregod is concerned about sovereignty, although thinking that it - like security - gradually may become indivisible, so that the sovereignty of one state cannot be considered independently of other states....