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        <rdf:li rdf:resource="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268414" />
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    <dc:date>2026-04-29T08:37:51Z</dc:date>
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  <item rdf:about="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/280859">
    <title>Capital as Death Denial</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/280859</link>
    <description>Title: Capital as Death Denial
Authors: Hager, Sandy Brian
Abstract: Terror Management Theory (TMT) argues that subconscious fears about death shape our behaviour in often disturbing and destructive ways. Building on the work of Ernest Becker, the core theoretical claim of TMT is that human activity, including all forms of culture, is ‘…designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.’ *** Capitalism is unlike anything that preceded it, and this novelty stems from a specific behaviour amongst capitalists that leads to sustained growth: the routine reinvestment of profits in the anticipation of future profitability. What might this novel feature of capitalism have to do with death denial? What kind of phenomenological specificity is bound up with this historical specificity? My aim in this chapter is to tackle these questions, primarily through a comparison between the role of death in capitalism and the archaic gift economy. *** My argument can be summarised as follows. First, I place the archaic gift economy, organised around the redistribution and destruction of surplus, on the low end of the death denial continuum. Archaic economic activity is collective and sacred, actively involving the dead and death in order to make payable the existential debts that haunt us from the moment of biological birth. Cyclical time and periodic redemptive ritual are purposefully designed to prevent accumulation of anything, whether it be wealth, power, time, anxiety, or guilt. Second, I place the capitalist economy, organised around the routine reinvestment of surplus for profit, on the high end of the death denial continuum. With capitalism, economic activity is individualised and de-sacralised and the dead and death are banished, resulting in unpayable debts. Capital accumulation is the primary psychological defence mechanism, a power intended to stave off mortal dread. But because accumulation rests on linear time and is shorn of redemptive and sacrificial ritual, guilt and anxiety also start to accumulate. The system is driven by an endless and increasing neurotic charge. Third, I claim that since the 1970s, capitalist death denial has intensified. Structural transformations in the so-called ‘advanced’ economies over the past few decades have dissolved the remaining vestiges of collectivism in economic life and shattered any shared vision of social progress. The result is a disintegration of the remaining collective outlets needed to share, expiate, and to some extent relieve, the cumulative guilt and anxiety of capitalist life. Intensified death denial in the contemporary era finds its most spectacular manifestation in Silicon Valley’s quest for literal immortality. This privatised immortality project is a morbid escapism intended to hive the ruling class off from the irredeemable masses.</description>
    <dc:date>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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  <item rdf:about="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268414">
    <title>Capitalism, Money and Inequality in the World</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268414</link>
    <description>Title: Capitalism, Money and Inequality in the World
Authors: Di Muzio, Tim
Abstract: There is little doubt that, in the last hundred years or so, progress has been made in lifting more people out of extreme poverty. Yet, considerable economic inequalities both within and between nations persists and, as recent work has shown, if the rate of return on capital surpasses the rate of growth, inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth. Together, these inequalities contribute to radically different life chances for people around the world. For some it means multiple mansions, private jets, hundred-foot yachts and access to life-saving technologies, while for a substantial portion of humanity it means a daily struggle just to survive or maintain a livelihood. However, why this radical inequality exists is not altogether clear and is much debated in the academic literature and popular press. Moreover, some view economic inequality as natural and beneﬁcial since it is reasoned that the less well-off will want to emulate the wealthy and thus work harder to achieve their goals. However, is gross inequality rooted in human nature or is it the result of certain ways of organizing society and certain policy choices regarding the human economy? While it cannot possibly canvass the enormous literature on capitalism, money and inequality, this chapter will suggest that it is the latter by considering the important relationship between capitalism and money to explain the persistence of economic inequality in our world. The chapter also asks what can be done to lessen global economic inequalities once we gain a deeper appreciation of the relationship between capitalism, money and inequality. I will argue that it is too often forgotten that, while economic growth over the last three centuries has lifted many people out of extreme poverty, that capitalism is primarily an economic, monetary and accounting system whose very aim is to generate income and wealth inequality, not level the economic playing ﬁeld. To explore this argument and examine potential solutions to lessening ﬁnancial inequality, this chapter is divided into three main sections. In the ﬁrst section, the chapter provides an explanation for the historical rise of capitalism, what constitutes capitalism as a speciﬁc politico–economic system and how economically unequal our world is today. In the second part of this chapter, a theoretical analysis of how we might consider the relationship between capitalism, money and inequality is developed. In the ﬁnal section, the chapter explores what is to be done about economic inequality from both mainstream and radical perspectives and argues that there are indeed some plausible public policy initiatives that would work towards achieving objective 10 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).</description>
    <dc:date>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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  <item rdf:about="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/278817">
    <title>From Operation Warp Speed to TRIPS. Vaccines as Assets</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/278817</link>
    <description>Title: From Operation Warp Speed to TRIPS. Vaccines as Assets
Authors: Andersen, Tatiana
Abstract: This chapter examines the political economy of biopharmaceutical innovation, focusing primarily on vaccines in the Covid-19 pandemic. This analysis aims to make visible the deep entanglements that entrench an extractive and dysfunctional innovation ecosystem, calcifying inequities in global access to essential medicines. The chapter argues that the current inequities in vaccine access are not new or anomalous and that they are the result of a complex yet strategic enmeshment among the logics of war and biomedicine, asset accumulation, and intellectual property. Uneven access to Covid-19 therapeutics can be traced to these three elements, which have built inequity into the political economy of biomedicine long before the current pandemic. The first section in the chapter teases out the first entanglement by unpacking Operation Warp Speed (OWS) as the culmination of a historical war-biomedical nexus driven by the United States, which has important implications for the global political economy of biomedical innovation and North-South asymmetries. The second section places OWS in the broader context of an extractive innovation ecosystem guided by a logic of differential accumulation characterised by the assetisation of publicly funded research. The final section explores how asset accumulation logics and unequal access to therapeutics are embedded in the international architecture of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) regime.</description>
    <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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  <item rdf:about="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/279957">
    <title>The Billionaire Boom: Capital as Power and the Distribution of Wealth</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/279957</link>
    <description>Title: The Billionaire Boom: Capital as Power and the Distribution of Wealth
Authors: Popcevski, Natasha
Abstract: During the pandemic, the world’s billionaires increased their net worth to unprecedented historical heights. This was an impressive feat for the world’s richest, who took to celebrations by launching themselves into outer space, hosted factory mega-raves, and perhaps more prudently sailed away from the virus on their mega-yachts during the mass suffering caused by the global health crisis. Whether billionaires have profited during the pandemic, or whether billionaires have profited from the pandemic may be difficult to detect with any certainty. However, we know that the accumulation of billionaire wealth has transcended previous orders of magnitude set before the crisis. In this chapter, I use the capital as power framework to argue that ownership and exclusion (institutional power) rather than individual productivity or the exploitation of workers can help us account for the rise of the billionaire class and its increase in wealth throughout the pandemic. However, although ownership and exclusion are key factors in the rapid accumulation of wealth, so too have the unprecedented fiscal stimulus and loose monetary policy of governments and central banks during the pandemic. At least in the United States, there is some survey evidence to suggest that a considerable amount of stimulus checks given by the Biden administration ended up in financial markets, boosting share prices, and thus the wealth of billionaire shareholders like Elon Musk of Tesla. This chapter considers two additional main factors: The turn to neoliberalism and rapid technological change. To demonstrate my argument, I have divided this chapter in the following manner. First, I consider the rise of the billionaire class before and during the pandemic. Second, I consider the neoclassical and Marxist understandings of the distribution of wealth and contrast this with the capital as a power perspective before discussing some of the reasons for the rise in billionaire wealth. In the third section, I briefly consider whether billionaires should exist and canvass some recent proposals to address the divide between billionaires and the vast majority of citizens. The chapter then ends with a short conclusion.</description>
    <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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