A more conservative supreme court will likely have the chance to overrule Roe v. Wade. Many states have passed heartbeat laws that will probably be taken all the way to the supreme court, these cases will ask the supreme court to affirm fetal personhood, giving fetuses a constitutionally recognized right to due process and making abortion illegal. In this thesis, I will defend an expansion of protections for pregnant peoples through a socialized right to abortion.

A dissertação procura compreender o fenômeno da financeirização no âmbito do capitalismo contemporâneo. Uma série de transformações iniciadas nos anos 1970 assinalou o declínio do regime de acumulação fordista e a provável emergência de uma nova fase do capitalismo. Sua característica fundamental consiste em um movimento de financeirização, decorrente em parte de mudanças desenvolvidas na esfera financeira. Seus traços mais destacados são o aumento exponencial das transações, tanto em termos absolutos como em relação às atividades produtivas; a liberalização e desregulamentação de mercados e das atividades financeiras em todo o mundo; o surgimento de novos agentes e instituições ligados às finanças. Processo este que desembocou no aumento da importância do capital financeiro nos circuitos de valorização. O caráter recente deste fenômeno ainda não permitiu que fossem estabelecidos consensos teóricos sobre a questão. Por conta disso, a dissertação debruça-se sobre as obras de dois pensadores marxistas, François Chesnais e David Harvey, buscando estabelecer semelhanças, diferenças e, sobretudo, as complementaridades de suas contribuições. A escolha de Chesnais se impõe pelo papel destacado que o assunto ocupa em sua obra. Harvey, por sua vez, concede primazia à discussão das relações das finanças com os demais aspectos que caracterizam o capitalismo na atualidade. / The dissertation seeks to understand the phenomenon of \"financialization\" under contemporary capitalism. A series of transformations started in the 1970s which began out the decline of the \"Fordist\" regime of accumulation and the possible emergence of a new phase of capitalism. Its key feature is a movement of \"financialization\", which results in part from changes in the financial sphere. Its distinctive aspects are the exponential increase in transactions, both in absolute terms and in comparison to productive activities; liberalization and deregulation of financial markets and activities around the world; the emergence of new actors and institutions related to finance. This process led to an increased importance of financial capital in the circuits of valorization. This new moment has not yet allowed to establish a theoretical consensus on the issue. For this reason, the dissertation focuses on the works of two Marxist thinkers, François Chesnais and David Harvey, seeking to establish similarities, differences and, above all, complementarities of their contributions. Choosing Chesnais is imposed due to the prominent role the subject occupies in his work. Harvey, in turn, prioritizes the discussion of relations between finance and other aspects of capitalism today.

This thesis begins by revisiting and building on themes of labour market segmentation, with particular reference given to Marx's seminal account of segmentation in Capital, Vol.1 (Chapter 25). Marx distinguishes between an active army - the stable full-time employed - and the relative surplus population - the precariously employed reserve army and the residual surplus - and suggests further fragmentation of these main groups into sub-strata. Marx's perspective of segmentation is grounded in fragments of a general theory of employment that, as a long-term tendency, identifies continual advances in constant capital that abolish work and proliferate the reserve army. This thesis builds on these themes by formulating a concept, the 'transference dynamic', which underpins a general theory of employment segmentation. A short history of segmentation under capitalism traces recent phases of development in both developed and lesser-developed nations. Stress is placed on the role of political configurations that regulate capitalism in ways that can either counter the general tendency, such is the case under the Fordist model of capitalism, or strengthen its logic. The theory of employment segmentation and the lessons drawn from the historical account are spliced together with an analysis of the contemporary phase of capitalism, labelled here as the neoliberal model of development. It is demonstrated that the coercive international regulatory dynamic of the neoliberal model reasserts and extends the competitive principle of the capitalist mode of production. Through this extension, nations are transformed into competition-states vying for scarce and globally mobile capital to operate on their shores - the primary source of national prosperity and employment - by implementing capital-friendly neoliberalized policy. This analysis of neoliberal global capitalism reveals an expanding surplus population within a context of deepening international segmentation. This employment crisis is expressed as a hierarchy of nations that is determined in part by their uneven development. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, comprising a majority portion of the world's population, contain a massive reserve army and residual surplus population unincorporated into wage-based capitalism, without any obvious support of means of life and with little hope for the future. Finally, mainstream solutions are criticized for failing to address either long-run or contemporary drivers of the employment crisis. In response, this thesis pitches a project of multi-faceted radical reform that counter-regulates capitalism by adopting a combination of local, national, regional and global forms of democratic socialist governance.

<p>A juxtaposition of Jane Austen's <em>Pride & Prejudice</em> and <em>Persuasion</em>. The two novels are analyzed from a Marxist theoretical perspective.</p>

<p>This thesis coheres around the issue of collective political mobilisation within one part of the contemporary feminist movement, or more specifically, within the Swedish feminist zine community. A feminist zine, also commonly referred to as Grrrlzine or femizine, is a small non-commercial and non-professional publication, which is distributed by channels other than that of the mainstream media.</p><p>The aim of the thesis is to examine what role the 'name' ' sisterhood' has in the constitution of a feminist zine community. Further, it is to explore the ways in which this 'name' is expressed and the precise function this name has within the community itself. That 'sisterhood' is necessary for a feminist politics is, according to the vast majority of the zines studied, obvious. Nevertheless the issue of what sisterhood 'is' or what it ’ought to be’ is constantly under negotiation. In this thesis I study how the name sisterhood works to create a collective feminist identity – even if this very 'name' comes to be articulated in, sometimes radically, different forms.</p><p>In order to conduct my analysis, I have taken several theoretical decisions. First, I have chosen to frame the zine community in accordance with the term communitas, defined as a collective identity constituted in terms of its opposites, by that which it is not. In this specific case, this Other consists of the commercial media, that is also, conceived as an effect of a wider patriarchal threat.</p><p>Second, to understand the differences which exist within this community, I have chosen to develop three feminist logics, to capture some quite contradictory articulatory strategies. They are referred to as ’liberal feminist’, ’radical feminist’ and ’post feminist’. The concept of logics allows me to interpret how it is that three different (and sometimes competing) feminist traditions can be found in the zine community, and commonly how in a single zine, or a single text, the three logics can coalsce.</p><p>As mentioned above, it is the 'name' sisterhood that provides the glue that holds the feminist zine community together. To understand this I have analyzed sisterhood by way of the concept 'empty signifier', that is, a 'name' which is partially emptied of meaning and which serves as a surface of inscription for a variety of feminist demands, demands that in themselves may have very little, or even nothing in common.</p><p>Finally, the ideas outlined in the thesis call for reflexivity, that is, for an explicit meta-analysis of the conduct of one’s own research process. In this thesis I discuss the problematic arising when the feminist researcher studies a feminist movement, and the inevitable blurring of political partisanship and theoretical analysis that takes place. Here I pay particular attention to the frontiers that a political community is always-already in a process of re-negotiating, and how the researcher is herself part of this very re-negotiation.</p>

This dissertation provides a particular Marxian class analytical political economy critique of post-Marxism. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which different positions within post-Marxism continue to essentialize the conceptualizations of class and capitalist economy. What distinguishes this dissertation from other dominant critiques of post-Marxism is the anti-essentialist epistemological and ontological position it adopts. By adopting an anti-essentialist epistemological position the dissertation is able to demonstrate the discontinuities and continuities between post-Marxism and the Marxian tradition. The dissertation does this by reading the heterogeneous and disparate post-Marxian approaches as so many different ways to "resolve" the central tension of the Althusserian mode of production debate of the 1960s and 1970s: The tension between the desire to think the overdetermination of social reproduction and transformation and the effort to explain the stability of class domination . The dissertation argues one of the effects of this tension to be the lapse of the Althusserian mode of production problematic into reproductionism .Drawing extensively on the scholarship of Ernesto Laclau and Étienne Balibar, the dissertation substantiates the ways in which the post-Althusserian post-Marxism has developed a critique of the reproductionist tendency of this problematic and constructed a theory of the social that allows for conceiving social reproduction to be both provisionally stable and overdetermined. The dissertation argues, however, that such "resolutions" have failed in different ways to dislodge the constitution of class and capitalist reproduction from essentialist narratives, with the effect of restaging the ontological duality of the mode of production problematic (i.e., overdetermination vs. determinism qua reproductionism ) in a new form: The contingency of politics and the necessity of class and capitalist reproduction. After showing the limitations of some of the prominent positions within post-Althusserian post-Marxism, the dissertation concludes with an alternative post-Althusserian Marxian perspective, initially developed by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, that provides an overdetermined understanding of social and economic reproduction from the entry point of class qua surplus.

This essay is concerned with two explanations of why oppressive social orders persist. According to the first, the so-called gunman theory of oppression (GT), these social orders persist because the oppressed are afraid being punished if they participated in a revolt. According to the second, the so-called ideology theory of oppression (IT), oppression persists because the oppressed are subject to ideology. Traditionally, the former has been associated with rational choice theory, and the latter with Marxism and critical theory. Analytical philosophers have been suspicious of IT since it involves functional claims. This essay shows that it is possible to make sense of both IT and its associated functional claim within the framework of rational choice theory. Chapter one provides an overview of the discussion and a presentation of the general argument against IT. Chapter two specifies the explanandum for the two theories in more detail. The chapter concludes with a description of three real-life persistent oppressive social orders. In chapter three, the basics of rational choice theory are introduced and GT spelled out. Some problems for the theory are identified and then dealt with. It is concluded that GT does a good job at explaining the persistence of tyrannies. Chapter four argues that ideology is necessary to provide satisfactory explanations of the other two cases of oppression described in chapter two. The chapter concludes with a specification of IT where the functional claim is made explicit. Chapter five defends Gerald Cohen's account of functional explanations against a dilemma formulated by Ann Cudd. In chapter six, three mechanisms are provided that indicate how the functional claim of IT can be demystified. Chapter seven concludes by indicating a statistical method for testing IT and describing some policy implications. / EXPLANATIONS OF REPRESSION BY A MINORITY OF THE MAJORITY — A RESEARCH PROGRAM

This thesis coheres around the issue of collective political mobilisation within one part of the contemporary feminist movement, or more specifically, within the Swedish feminist zine community. A feminist zine, also commonly referred to as Grrrlzine or femizine, is a small non-commercial and non-professional publication, which is distributed by channels other than that of the mainstream media. The aim of the thesis is to examine what role the 'name' ' sisterhood' has in the constitution of a feminist zine community. Further, it is to explore the ways in which this 'name' is expressed and the precise function this name has within the community itself. That 'sisterhood' is necessary for a feminist politics is, according to the vast majority of the zines studied, obvious. Nevertheless the issue of what sisterhood 'is' or what it ’ought to be’ is constantly under negotiation. In this thesis I study how the name sisterhood works to create a collective feminist identity – even if this very 'name' comes to be articulated in, sometimes radically, different forms. In order to conduct my analysis, I have taken several theoretical decisions. First, I have chosen to frame the zine community in accordance with the term communitas, defined as a collective identity constituted in terms of its opposites, by that which it is not. In this specific case, this Other consists of the commercial media, that is also, conceived as an effect of a wider patriarchal threat. Second, to understand the differences which exist within this community, I have chosen to develop three feminist logics, to capture some quite contradictory articulatory strategies. They are referred to as ’liberal feminist’, ’radical feminist’ and ’post feminist’. The concept of logics allows me to interpret how it is that three different (and sometimes competing) feminist traditions can be found in the zine community, and commonly how in a single zine, or a single text, the three logics can coalsce. As mentioned above, it is the 'name' sisterhood that provides the glue that holds the feminist zine community together. To understand this I have analyzed sisterhood by way of the concept 'empty signifier', that is, a 'name' which is partially emptied of meaning and which serves as a surface of inscription for a variety of feminist demands, demands that in themselves may have very little, or even nothing in common. Finally, the ideas outlined in the thesis call for reflexivity, that is, for an explicit meta-analysis of the conduct of one’s own research process. In this thesis I discuss the problematic arising when the feminist researcher studies a feminist movement, and the inevitable blurring of political partisanship and theoretical analysis that takes place. Here I pay particular attention to the frontiers that a political community is always-already in a process of re-negotiating, and how the researcher is herself part of this very re-negotiation.

The foundation of the Chinese Communist Party was originated from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the May Forth movement in 1919. Of the two events, the former inherited the ideological characteristics of ¡§globalization¡¨ on Marxism, while the latter embodied the ideological features of ¡§localization¡¨ on nationalism. Up to now, the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party has still been involving the dialectics of ¡§globalization¡¨ and ¡§localization¡¨. This doctoral dissertation first elaborates on the research motivation, purpose, method, documents, framework and so forth. It then continues to expound on the definitions of ideology, dialectics, globalization and localization. The third chapter discusses Marxism and Leninism which are the origins of the Chinese Communist Party¡¦s ideology. Chapter four analyzes how Mao Zedong conducted the dialectics of ideology and helped the Chinese Communist Party to seize power. Chapter five explores why Mao Zedong led the dialectics of the Chinese Communist Party¡¦s ideology to advance the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The sixth chapter studies how Deng Xiaoping guided the dialectics of ideology and promoted the Chinese Communist Party to transform a political movement into an economic reform. Chapter seven investigates why and how Jiang Zemin, and later, Hu Jintao carry on the dialectics of the Chinese Communist Party¡¦s ideology and construct the important thought of Three Represents, harmonious society of socialism, etc. Chapter eight concludes the achievements and discoveries of this research. Be it Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, or, as a matter of fact, regardless of whoever was or is in charge, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party invariably conducts the dialectics of ideology on the ¡§globalization¡¨ of Marxism-Leninism and the ¡§localization¡¨ of the Chinese Communist Party in power. Based on the successful experience of ¡§localization¡¨ of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Chinese Communist Party expects to achieve the goal of ¡§globalization¡¨ of the Marxism-Leninism.

This thesis examines strategies and practices, in Soviet ethnographic research, concerning terminologies for and classifications of what in research texts are conventionally called “supernatural beings” in the world views of the Samoyedic peoples. The question is put whether there are any general rules for the terminology used by scholars for these kinds of beings. The thesis also explores claims that a conventional ethnographic terminology, consisting of technical terms such as gods, goddesses, spirits, owners etc., leads to misinterpretations of the indigenous conceptions under study. By presenting, analysing and discussing Soviet scholars’ strategies and practices in this regard, the thesis is a contribution to the ongoing debate among historians of religions on the use of scientific terminology for beings in different world views. It is also, to a limited extent, a source critical investigation of Soviet research on the religions of the Samoyedic peoples. In chapter 2 the international scholarly debate on terminology for so called supernatural beings is summarized and discussed. The principles for constructing concepts in general are also delineated, using prototype theory and a model for polythetic definition. In chapter 3 a survey over the purposes, main fields of interest, and theoretical and methodological development of Soviet ethnography is presented as an essential background to the investigation of individual ethnographic texts. Chapter 4 and 5 constitute the empirical part of the thesis, with a presentation and analysis of Soviet ethnographic descriptions of beings in the world views of the Samoyedic speaking Nenets, Enets, Sel’kup and Nganasan. Since findings on Nganasan world view in Soviet ethnography was seen as particularly viable for reconstructions of proposed primitive communist thought, matriarchal society, the origin of religion, and mankind’s development of beliefs in “spirits” and “gods”, chapter 5 is solely dedicated to the research on the Nganasan. In chapter 6 the result of the empirical part of the study is confronted with the questions put in chapter 1, as well as the theoretical and methodological conclusions of chapter 2. It is concluded that there is no typical Marxist-Leninist terminology for “supernatural beings”, but that certain developments regarding terminology and classifications in Soviet ethnography on the Samoyeds can be detected. These developments consists of (1) a growing awareness among ethnographers of the distinction between indigenous, emic and etic terminology – an awareness which makes their descriptions become more detailed and closer to the Samoyedic sources. (2) From the 1960s one can trace an ever deepening reliance on Marxist-Leninist theory in Soviet Samoyedology. In accordance with Marxist ideas about primeval society as matriarchal and non-religious, ethnographers focused more and more on (and discovered more) female beings in Samoyedic world views. They also interpreted the “beings” under study as remnants of a primeval materialistic world view and proposed explanations of their development from “natural” to “supernatural beings”. It is also concluded that there are no general rules for scientific terminology. Technical terms are chosen in accordance with the varying aims and theoretical standpoints of different scholars. Whether the terms are appropriate or not, depends on their transparency.