A group of scholars known as "the global capitalism school" has emerged over the last two decades claiming that globalization is engendering the rise of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) supported by a transnational state apparatus (TNS). The TNS is made up of nation-states, supranational institutions, and other political and economic for a, such as international organizations. Critics claim that the school uses social theory to jump over historical contingencies, make numerous category errors, and that the concept of the TNS is immune to empirical falsification. The debate has now moved toward attempts to provide empirical evidence to support the thesis through various case studies of class and state transformation.

This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships to address technological deficits in the nonprofit sector by engaging with the partners of a concluded project. The partnership case study that forms the backbone of this article was a three-year nationally funded nonprofit-industry-academic partnership. The ob- jective of the partnership was to increase the data collection capacity of a national nonprofit organization and its affiliate centres through the development of a web-based app. This article highlights the challenges and differing experiences of nonprofit-industry-academic partnerships more generally, and technology-development partnerships more specifically.

Contemporary iterations of the youth question present social work with a generative challenge to imagine the education needs of youth as social work students, and at the same time, to imagine the intervention needs of youth as service users. This paper engages this challenge through an empirical case that confronted us with our own preconceived understandings of young people and social work: a funded project to support the program evaluation capacity of a national network of youth centers in Canada. Working through three tensions that emerged in this work-(1) assumptions about youth and workers, (2) participation as a best-practice, and (3) how local data collection practices are networked to ambiguous, ongoing social processes-we reflect project learning and youth studies literature together to explore the possibilities of 'critical inquiry skills' in social work education. As we develop the concept here, critical inquiry skills are a means to encourage young people to see themselves as simultaneously within and outside of the categories and approaches they are taught and subjected to, and by extension, to invite and support newcomers to make the discipline and profession their own.

This article explores what globalization means for the relationship between Medicare and Canadian identity. Typical accounts of this relationship explain it as either the result of deep-seated Canadian values, or as the result of government action in the postwar era. Starting from where the second group leaves off, this article explores how the Medicare identity was the result of very specific capitalist property relations that are now fading. The article begins with an analysis of the origins of modern national identities, linking them to the transformation of property relations that characterized the transition to capitalism. It then focuses on the rise of social rights and how these were used to craft social solidarity among disparate individuals and groups in Canada. The next section focuses on globalization and the shift to neoliberalism. The article concludes with a reflection on what the demise of Medicare might mean for Canadian identity.

The last few years have seen the emergence of a growing academic literature on the blockchain. On one side are the supporters, who see its potential to create a true, peer-to-peer (p2p) sharing economy. On the other side are the critics, who argue that the blockchain is more likely to reproduce capitalism than to disrupt it. Using the insights generated by the critical literature on the blockchain, this paper seeks to ask new questions and provide new insights about the development of this technology and how it is likely to transform the global political economy through its capacity to enforce global property rights.

In the context of a revived debate over Canada’s location in the global political economy, this paper highlights two recent changes to the property relations of capitalism that problematize the conceptual framework of theories of imperialism and dependency: first, new rights for financial institutions that challenge attempts to surmise meaning from the nationality of capital, and, second, new rights for corporations that restrict nation-states from limiting their accumulation activities.

Following recent criticism of the concept of a transnational state, this paper attempts to defend the concept by focusing on the role that property plays in organizing societies. Through an analysis of how the rise of private property reoriented the role of feudal absolutist states, the paper argues that contemporary free trade agreements are transforming nation-states into transnational states by restricting their ability to legislate against corporate interests.

Although it is still in early stages, many commentators have been quick to note the revolutionary potential of next-generation or Bitcoin 2.0 technology. While some have expressed fear that the widespread application of these technologies may engender the rise of a Terminator-style Skynet, others believe that it represents the coming of a decentralized autonomous society (DAS) in which humans are freed from centralized forms of power through the proliferation of distributed autonomous organizations or DAOs. Influenced by neoliberal theory that stresses privatization, open markets, and deregulation, Bitcoin 2.0 technologies are implicitly working on the assumption that 'freedom' means freedom from the state. This neglects, however, that within capitalist societies, the state can also provide freedom from the vagaries of the market by protecting certain things from commodification. Through an analysis of (1) class and the role of the state; (2) the concentration and centralization of capital; and (3) the role of automation, I argue that the vision of freedom that underpins Bitcoin 2.0 tech is one that neglects the power that capital holds over us in both organizing the structure of our lives, and informing our idea of what it means to be human. In neglecting these other forms of power, I claim that the DAS might be a far more dystopian development than its supporters comprehend, making possible societies that are commodities all the way down.

The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire marks Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's most recent attempt at furthering their thesis that globalization should be understood as an informal American empire. Their analysis, however, is hampered by three overarching issues that result from their inattention to many of the precepts of historical materialism. First, they treat capital as being predominantly national, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary; second, they treat the nation-state as an actor; and third, they neglect the question of political space, and the extent to which the social relations upon which globalization rests must necessarily also transform the structure and form of existing political institutions. As such, Panitch and Gindin incorrectly label globalization as a form of American imperialism, without being critically reflexive as to the concepts they are using, and the particular nation-state-centric framework through which such concepts operate.

Using atrial fibrillation (AF) as a case, this article examines the contemporary relationship between the 'science' of race, and the development of new pharmacological products. Following from the controversy of the 'race-based' congestive heart failure drug BiDil in 2005, this article provides an analysis of the way in which contemporary studies of AF are concerned with developing race-based medicines for populations in which the construction of race is both unscientific, socially contingent, and extremely problematic. Through, one, a historical analysis of the development of the concept of race and scientific racism, two, the introduction of BiDil, and, three, the use of race within current studies of AF, this article argues that race-based medical practices are misguided, treating the body as if it holds the answer to what are primarily social problems. It thus recommends the destruction of race as a category of scientific medical practice and research.