Corporate violence is a form of organised violence motivated or caused by material interest, profit-seeking or economic expansion. It is inflicted on human beings or ecosystems. Complementing a Marxist theoretical frame with literature on ecosocialism and degrowth, we examine how corporate violence is inherent to and has been consistently encouraged by the capitalist mode of production. By drawing on the concepts of primitive accumulation and social metabolism, we visibilise how such violence is manifested within the productive forces of capitalism – natural resources, labour, technology and money. Corporate violence, we argue, may only be countered in a post-capitalist society where the productive forces are radically transformed. We build on degrowth principles to articulate how corporate violence may be countered and how post-growth organising of productive forces may look.
The city of Moscow has been going through a transformation of its surface transport network during the past decade as part of a broader policy of urban beautification. Despite a renewed interest in public transport, this policy has led to the dismantling of the trolleybus system. This was met with resistance from various groups. Bringing together scholarly discussions on urban growth coalitions and on degrowth, we repoliticise urban mobility policies and put the entangled issues of ecological sustainability and social justice at the centre of the analysis. To do this, we outline a degrowth vision of urban mobility and introduce the concept of ecosocial justice, through which the case is analysed. Our results show that the trolleybus dismantlement increases biophysical throughput, compromises Moscow's ecology of culture, and is rooted in injustices, not least because Moscow authorities have ignored the many objections and alternative proposals put forward by residents. However, opposition groups paid limited attention to procedural injustices and to the configuration of Moscow's political economy. This was a limitation of the campaign, but suggests possibilities for repoliticising urban mobility policies at other sites of resistance.
This article focuses on representations of the nexus of work, meaning and consumption as experienced by university students. We develop an empirically based argument that the meaning of work is being constructed as an object of consumption on a British university campus. We suggest that this indicates two key changes in representations of the meaning of work. First, there is a significant shift in the social construction of orientations to work towards what we term ‘consumption of work’. Second, we argue that this new social construction is made up of three dimensions: (1) consumption of an idealised image of work, (2) consumption through specific work processes and (3) consumption of self-development opportunities at work. We conclude by suggesting ways in which this argument could be researched further.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.