Critical Sociology

As global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions seem an ever more distant prospect, attention has turned to adaptation to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. On the key frontier of sea level rise, this amounts to the injunction ‘build sea walls’. But what are the implications of a scramble for coastal protection technologies? This article explores sea wall politics in one of the countries most vulnerable to sea level rise: Egypt. It is shown that protection of the Nile Delta coastline is skewed towards sunk capital and expected investments rather than poor people. This is a consequence of the neoliberal policies of the Mubarak regime and, on a more fundamental level, of uneven and combined development in Egypt. The latter process is thus undergoing an inversion and reappearing as ‘uneven and combined apocalypse’, on the threatened coastlines of Egypt and elsewhere.

This article examines the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed, and discussed in Southern California to battle wildfire. In particular, this will be a critique of the technical literature and application of fire safety in housing, as well as the anthropocentric hubris that humans can outsmart wildfire. Rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I am situating the SIP within the context of architecture, the history of fire safety, and the push of neoliberalism. The purpose of this approach is to make SIP and fire safe home design less about technology and know-how, and more about broader social issues such as privatization and social inequality.

Finance has traditionally been conceptualized on the basis of what could be labelled a credit model. This model theorizes finance as a functional actor in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural model has entertained a specific understanding of the contradictions of finance which emphasizes the imbalances in its relation to production. While the rich literature based on this template has generated important insights for understanding capitalist finance, it is debatable whether the credit model is sufficient to account for financial speculation. This article argues that the perception that speculation is essentially based on irrational optimism fails to capture what is important about recent developments of finance. New conceptual foundations are required, in order to develop a political economy of speculation which examines the way in which speculation is socially constructed, how it evolves through history and whether or not it is transforming the nature of capital accumulation.

In 2009, US financier Bernard (Bernie) L. Madoff was jailed for 150 years after pleading guilty to running a massive ponzi scheme. While superficial condemnation was widespread, his US$65 billion fraud cannot be understood apart from the institutions, practices and fictions of contemporary finance capitalism. Madoff’s scam was rooted in the wider political prioritization of accumulation through debt expansion and the deregulated, desupervised and criminogenic environment facilitating it. More generally, global finance capital reproduces many of the core elements of the Madoff scam (i.e. mass deception, secrecy and obfuscation), particularly in neoliberalized Anglophone societies. We call this ‘Madoffization’. We suggest that societies are ‘Madoffized’, not only in the sense of their being subject to the ill-effects of speculative ponzi finance, but also in the sense that their prioritization of accumulation through debt expansion makes fraudulent practices, economic collapse and scapegoating inevitable.

Many scholars associated the recent transformation of Turkish democracy with the rise of a new bourgeois class and the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. Using a social property relations approach, I provide a critique of the readings of Turkish modernity based on the fall and the rise of bourgeois agency. Revealing the non-capitalist origins and the protracted capitalist transformation of Ottoman and Turkish modernization, I conclude that the reformulation of the main pillars of Turkish modernity today is an expression of the recent consolidation of capitalist property relations.