This project is borne of the recognition that any adequate theorization of the contemporary requires an empirically attuned and theoretically sophisticated understanding of the dynamics, forms, and trajectories that global capitalism takes today. There have been a range of approaches adopted from across disciplinary perspectives, ranging from economics to philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, and literature, to do so. Many of the most pertinent critiques have emerged out of lineages of scholarship indebted to the works of Karl Marx.
In the twentieth century, these theorizations have increasingly come to be located within the framework of global relations of power and production, including those shaped by colonialism, then in the aftermath of decolonization, and more recently in the neoliberal turn and its attendant globalization. Yet capitalism is not singular, its forms and manifestations have changed across place and time, and the political challenges that come in its wake constantly demand its retheorization. This must take the form of revisiting philosophical understandings of the dynamics of capital, as well as elaborating new empirical manifestations in terms of regional impact, sectoral specificity, mutations in form, and sociological implications.
With its Global Capitalisms initiative, 3CT aims to revisit and reinvigorate this theoretical project at a world-historical conjuncture that is marked by:
- The multiple crises of capitalism, witnessed in rising inequality, corporate hegemony and the consolidation of monopolies, rising authoritarianisms, impending climate catastrophe, the political effects of neoliberal austerity and deindustrialization, and the bubbles and bursts of speculative enterprises, which demand a longue durée attentiveness to the ways in which forces and relations of production have globalized with differential effects in different parts of the world.
- The growth of emergent markets in the global South, which creates new axes of power and hierarchies of difference that reconfigure older colonial, metropolitan-periphery, lines of cleavage.
- The challenges presented for politics in view of large-scale structural transformations in the operations of capital, which demands new forms of internationalist solidarity that respond to problems from the local to the planetary scale.
Themes to be explored throughout the project include (but need not be limited to) the dynamics of finance capital and its relationship to democracy, authoritarian retrenchment, human rights narratives, varying understandings of temporality, and questions of ontology; cultural Marxism’s approach to ideology and affective fantasy investments; extractive capitalism’s uneven effects across the globe; old and new forms of international solidarity-making such as the rise and fall of leftist political movements; capitalism’s historical and ongoing relationship to US and other great powers’ militarism; the emergence and evolution of the corporation; the corporatization of the university; and critical theory’s engagement with postcolonial and decolonial theory.
