On New Travels in Space-Time: Theoretical Rediscoveries after the Crisis in (Comparative) Capitalism(s)

Abstract

This review essay on the books New Directions in Comparative Capitalisms Research and The Future of Capitalism After the Financial Crisis uses the prism of ‘travelling theory’ to appraise whether both edited volumes meet their proclaimed aim to challenge the alleged reductionisms inherent in the Comparative Capitalisms (CC) research and reinvigorate the CC agenda's radical potential to analyse contemporary capitalism in critical and global perspectives. The verdict is affirmative as both volumes (i) introduce new as well as forgotten approaches to combined inter-spatial and inter-temporal comparisons into the CC literature, which then (ii) allows for the rediscovery of a multitude of roads to (knowledge about) really existing capitalisms. However, the essay urges some of the authors to avoid tracing capitalism only at its worst, which leads to an exaggerated intellectual pessimism and fatalism. Finally, putting both volumes into the context of post-socialist Central and Eastern European (CEE) capitalism, the review documents the continuing relevance of empirical discoveries in CEE for developing an expanded critical-global CC scholarship.

Moving to new generational beats: Lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas

“…Perhaps, but I think that my own ways of seeing and understanding are only part of the story. The changes that occurred in my worldview from the early 2010s onwards, towards a more openly critical (Šitera 2015;Bruff & Ebenau 2017) and distanced perspective, can be traced to my own observations of the relative failure of the field to respond effectively to a period in history dominated by discussions of multiple crises, but this was also because my students, informed by their own generational experiences of capitalism, increasingly forced me to confront the possibility that the problems in the literatures were more endemic and insurmountable than I thought. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that I explicitly and fully articulated this possibility for the first time when co-authoring a paper with a former student.…”

“…Fortunately, by the end of 2013 a book proposal had been accepted for an edited volume on ‘new directions’ in CC research, and its final form/content (in the shape of Ebenau et al 2015b) had this new generation in mind. This text – along with the related publications mentioned in the introduction (such as the 2014 special issue of Capital & Class ) – has also shaped disciplinary discussions in ‘research’ terms, generating multiple citations for the collection as a whole and for many of the chapters, and being the basis for a debate on the notion of ‘new directions’ (Bruff & Ebenau 2017; Šitera 2015). In other words, and as I discuss later in greater depth, students contributed to the (re)makings of not just the module but also of knowledge in the field.…”

Un-cancelling the future

“…Many of their proponents are still really more interested in explaining the failure to bring about the inevitable (full communism) in the past and present than in imagining new futures that go beyond the narrow world view and limiting subjectivity of too many Marxist approaches (see, e.g. Scribner, 2003; Šitera, 2015). This has done little to address the crisis of hope or to countervail prevalent contemporary pessimism.…”