Capital Dynamics Research Articles

Régis Debray: as tecnologias da crença

Interview with Regis Debray, sociologist at the Sorbonne. In this interview, the ex-guerrilla, converted to midiology, revised the myth Che Guevara, silenced Fidel Castro, relativized the value of utopias and needed his political choices. In his view, capitalist dynamics need a state capable of redistributing the wealth produced. The new technologies of communication, which fascinate him, will not, however, serve to establish a virtual and universal democracy.

Entre martelos e lâminas: dinâmicas globais e políticas de produção na indústria do caju em Moçambique

This article discusses how the main trends and impacts of capitalist dynamics are felt in Mozambique, based on a case study of the cashew industry, especially its industrial processing component. Having emerged in the colonial period, the cashew industry provides a practical example of Mozambique's integration in the world economy through the exploitation of natural resources and the local labor force to manufacture products for the main central markets. In order to better understand this industry's evolution and current situation, the author conducted his fieldwork in various places, especially in two cashew nut processing plants in the district of Manjacaze (Gaza Province). He thus adopted a methodological strategy based on a multilocal ethnography rather than a classical approach centered on the study of a single location or a supposedly isolated and autonomous community.

How Greece and Ireland Have Been Positioned in the World Developments Since 1945: A French Regulation Approach

This research analyses how Greece and Ireland have been positioned in the world development since 1945 by using the French Regulation Approach. In particular, this analysis describes three broad periods, notably the Fordist, post-Fordist and the New Economy ones. In each period, apart from the general approach that concerns the world economy transformation, the specific transformations of the economies of Greece and Ireland are also described. It is argued that the different understanding of capitalist dynamism and development by Greece and Ireland, due to their different national characteristics and experiences, had as a result the two countries to implement different policies in order to respond to these changes and consequently differently to take advantage of the new opportunities that have emerged. In this respect, Ireland has advanced a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of capitalist development, in relation to Greece and therefore has been able to identify and give preferential assistance to growing sectors (e.g. IT sector).

A Belle Époque caipira: problematizações e oportunidades interpretativas da modernidade e urbanização no Mundo do Café (1852-1930) - a proposta do Cemumc

Este artigo visa apontar a importância historiográfica de interpretar e compreender de maneira ampla e exaustiva as imagens, os discursos e demais vestígios que nos permitam ter acesso às sociabilidades, representações, projetos e práticas vivenciadas pelos habitantes das cidades do Brasil caipira, que apresentaram transformações geradas pela modernidade, no limiar do XX, em decorrência da nova dinâmica capitalista gerada pelos efeitos da expansão da economia cafeeira nessa região.

Urban competitiveness in the knowledge economy: Universities as new planning animateurs

Contemporary economic activity is increasingly dominated by ‘knowledge-based’ activities. Increasingly internationalisation of competition has increased pressures on firms in all advanced economies to compete primarily in terms of product differentiation (Porter, 1990). This has changed the nature of the production process, placing an increasing premium on intangible inputs; macro-economic analyses (for a review see Temple, 1998) have determined that investment in physical assets and labour alone does not account for much more than half of the productivity growth in the developed world since 1945 (Romer, 1994; Solow, 1994). There is an increasing consensus that knowledge capital, the expertise embedded in individuals, networks and organisations, providing capacity for continual innovation, which accounts for the remaining growth. Knowledge capital facilitates innovation, in particularly those innovations, which allow the territorial exploitation of a deeper division of labour, creating competitive advantages for places and driving their economic growth (Wood, 2005). The neologism ‘knowledge economy’ refers to the range of changes, pressures and trends which have increased the importance of innovation, knowledge and learning to economic life (Milward (2003) B. Milward, Globalisation? Internationalisation and Monopoly Capitalism: Historical Processes and Capitalist Dynamism, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (2003). Milward, 2003).

Um modelo macrodinâmico pós-keynesiano de simulação

A post-keynesian macro-dynamic model of simulation. The objective of this article is to present the structure and the simulation results of a one-sector macro-dynamic model that embeds some elements of the post-keynesian theory. The computational simulation of the model replicates some important features of capitalist dynamics as the phenomenon of cyclical growth, the long-run stability of the profit rate and functional distribution of income, the maintenance of idle-capacity in the long-run and the occurrence of a single episode of deep fall in real economic activity, which is in accordance with the rarity character of great crashes in the history of capitalism. Moreover, the simulation results show that a great reduction in inflation rate will be followed by an increase of financial fragility, increasing the like-hood of a great depression. As a policy advice derived from the simulation results, we can state that the Central Bank should never promote big reductions in inflation rate.

No Logo, No Change?

No Logo, No Change?

The South Korean Economy and U.S. Policy

The South Korean economy is undergoing an economic restructuring based on neoliberal, free-market principles. Mainstream economists claim that that this process was a necessary and successful response to South Korea’s devastating 1997–1998 crisis. This article challenges this claim. It critically exams the economic and social consequences of South Korea’s current neoliberal restructuring; highlights the ways international capitalist dynamics and U.S. policy initially promoted and then undermined South Korea’s growth; describes the role played by U.S. and International Monetary Fund policymakers in shaping South Korea’s post-crisis restructuring; and considers the challenges facing South Korean workers in their struggle to advance a new economic strategy.

Local Trends and Perceptions of Processes of Commoditisation in Central Sudan: The Responses of the Ahâmda Pastoral System to State Pressures and Capitalist Dynamics

The Ahamda are a Muslim and Arabic-speaking people of Central Sudan (2). They are part of the larger category of 'arab peoples, a term that in broad Sudanese terminological classification--largely analogous to that in most Middle-Eastern countries--defines nomadic pastoralists and distinguishes them from rural and urban settled communities (Casciarri 1999; Grandin 1980). They conceive of themselves as a group of agnatic kin (known as gabila in Sudanese Arabic, I gloss this as 'tribe') descended from ah eponymous ancestor, Hammed, and claim further origins from 'Abbas (the Prophet Mohammad's father's brother), as do many of the Arabic-speaking peoples of Northern and Central Sudan (MacMichael 1922; Trimingham 1949). Their socio-political organisation is similar to that of the Bedouin (Bonte et al. 1991). They live in a semi-desert environment on the central-western fringes of the Butana plains, east of the Main Nile, north of Khartoum, and obtain most of their subsistence from extensive herding (mostly of sheep and goats, with a few camels) complemented by the rain-fed cultivation of sorghum. Practising a bipolar cycle, they approach the Nile during the dry season and go deep into the Butana pastures during the wet season. In the last two decades this community has experienced a general crisis, with processes familiar among other nomadic populations of arid zones (Galaty et al. 1983, 1994; Rigby 1985)--namely increasing sedentarisation, a shift from nomadism to transhumance, the forced switching to new sources of income, a general proletarisation and continuous marginalisation. This paper focuses on the dynamics of socioeconomic change that have accelerated since the 1970s. Generalised sedentarisation and major transformations of the Ahamda pastoral system have become more significant only during the last fifteen to twenty years, but the extreme rapidity of this recent change has had a strong disruptive impact on the entire society and threatens to reshape not only the economic processes, but the entire community's social relationships, thus putting at risk its production and social reproduction. These processes of transformation will be seen within the wider context of national and international trends of economic and political strategies. My analysis focuses specifically on those aspects of commoditisation that typify the shift from use-value to exchange-value and are of broader interest for anthropological theory. The Crisis of the Ahamda Pastoral System and Society: the Wider Context of the State's Policies and the World Economy The current commoditisation process among the Ahamda seems to coincide with the larger crisis in the pastoral system and the wider society. But what do we mean by the term 'crisis', so widely employed in describing pastoral societies, particularly those of the Third World and of arid lands? Environmental aspects are often stressed, to the extent that both scholars and national and international development and aid organisations speak of 'ecological crises' as the dramatic events that affect the life of pastoral groups. The historical memory of social actors also marks the boundaries of what people perceive as substantial--sometimes irreversible--change, with cycles of severe drought in the Sahel, mostly in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then again in 1984-85. Even if in such periods of climatic stress the decimation of livestock and the degradation of natural resources have been drastic and the survival of domestic units threatened, sometimes such a 'naturalisation', on the part of both observers and the observed, disguises other factors of global political and economic import. It is now generally accepted that even for pastoral societies, whose lifestyles have for a long time been closely linked to and conditioned by ecological contraints, their harsh environments allow a marge de manoeuvre (Digard 1979) for subsistence strategies, such that the relation between humans and their material conditions is more dialectical than unidirectional (Bonte 1979; Godelier 1984). …

The Making of the Middle-Class City: Transportation Policy in São Paulo

The adaptation of urban spaces to cope with increased automobile traffic has been called the ‘building of automobile cities’. This is a vague and otherwise politically naive interpretation of these important changes in capitalist societies. Cars do not run on their own and one has to ask who is behind the wheels, and for what purposes. I argue that these spatial transformations are definite economic and political undertakings related to capitalist modernization processes, in which the middle classes, as preferential partners of ruling classes, play the most important role. In these contexts, the automobile turns out to be an essential means for the reproduction of the middle classes in their pursuit of social mobility. Therefore I argue that these large transformations should instead be seen as the ‘building of middle-class cities’.This paper is about how São Paulo was transformed into a middle-class city. In it I emphasize the period from 1960 to 1980, when the city population increased from 3.6 million to 8.5 million, and 1.6 million new automobiles were put into circulation. In this period Brazil experienced a highly dynamic capitalist modernization process, with high rates of GNP growth, under authoritarian (and often repressive) political rule. New middle-class sectors were generated, supported by the concentration of income and by their ideological commitment to the new regime. The city space was physically transformed to allow for a new pattern of circulation which was directly related to the new economic activities and the new lifestyle of these middle-class sectors, for whom the automobile became a vital means of social reproduction. The middle classes were represented, inside the state, by transportation planners who promoted the ideology of modernization. The space was then reshaped in a way which favored the circulation needs of the middle class population, in its prime role of driver, rather than the needs of the majority of the population, in their primary roles of pedestrian and captive public transportation user. Moreover, the mobility and fluidity needs of these selected middle-class sectors were pursued regardless of the safety and environmental consequences of the new circulation pattern.Similar processes can be identified in the developing world where other middle-class cities have been created. In spite of social and political differences, these processes share the objective of readapting space to ease the circulation of the social sectors which are relevant to economic accumulation and political legitimation.

Capitalism and its future: remarks on regulation, government and governance

The article relates capitalism's distinctive dynamic to the nature of the wage relation and self-valorization of capital. Capitalism has no final telos: its future remains open in the face of structural changes and social struggles. This source of capitalist dynamism also opens it to external influence. Some key changes in the 'government and governance' of economics and politics are also discussed. These include: the denationalization of statehood, a partial de-statization of politics, and the internationalization of policy regimes. Among counter-trends are the survival of the national state as an instance of meta-governance.

Post-Cold War capitalism: Modernization and modes of resistance after the fall

The so-called collapse of communism has reinforced powerful North American- and Western-European-centred visions which continue to see 'Western' models of development as the key to modernization world-wide. The end of the Cold War has also drawn renewed attention to the rise of an increasingly dynamic capitalist East Asia, which has brought with it triumphant East Asian-centred discourses which celebrate East Asianstyle development models distinct from and superior to 'Western' models of development. At the same time, challenges to the dominant discourses and the emergent post-Cold War capitalist order continue to emerge from numerous angles and at multiple sites. Two recent books represent important efforts at critically examining global inequality and articulating alternative perspectives to the dominant international narratives on development and social change. In After the Revolution , Arif Dirlik attempts to recast and recuperate Marxism so that it can play a role in progressive politics at the end of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Arturo Escobar's new work seeks to engage critically with the dominant Western discourse on 'development' and sketch out alternative post-development trajectories from a position that synthesises post-structural analysis with the insights and concerns of grassroots activists-writers and the new social movements. Beginning with Escobar's book, I will examine some of the key themes and draw out what I see as some of the main analytical strengths and weaknesses of these two contributions to the post-Cold War development debate.

Beyond Inevitability: The Opening of Philippine Provincial Ports in 1855

The opening of Philippine provincial ports to the world market in 1855 served to solidify the direct incorporation of regions outside Manila into the international capitalist system. This article reconstructs the events surrounding this important episode by situating it in the context of global capitalist dynamics and Spanish imperial decay, and the conjuncture in which local interest groups manoeuvred to intervene in the colonial state processes of the Spanish Philippines. In line with Philip Abrams' vision of history as the nexus of structure and action, the 1855 ports policy is reinterpreted as issuing from the articulation of macro and micro spheres, a perspective which allows for contingency in so far as the possibilities of human actors confronting structured totalities are multiple yet theoretically bounded. By eschewing the overdetermined view of socioeconomic change and by accounting for human agency in history, this article serves as a case study to overcome the notion of inexorability that, as David Booth rightly points out, has been frequently imputed to the epoch of global capitalist change.

A Model of Institutional Hysteresis

In recent years, renewed interest has been shown in both the importance of institutions for the functioning of capitalism and the impact of capitalism's dynamics on the nature of institutions.1 However, the common interests of this literature conceal profound methodological differences, which in turn give rise to substantially different conclusions with regard to the origins, nature, and role of institutions in a capitalist economy. The purpose of this paper is to show how a critique of the methodologies underlying the two most popular approaches to institutional analysis gives rise to a new, more satisfactory methodology based on hysteresis. A model of institutional hysteresis is developed, which resembles the work of Cornwall [1990] and Cornwall and Cornwall [1987]. The insights of these earlier analyses are extended by focusing on the effects of hysteresis on the nature of institutions (in particular, their eff'iciency properties), rather than on economic outcomes. The conclusion reached is that institutions are best treated as evolving, non-optimal, path-dependent phenomena, rather than in terms of either simple historicism or the standard equilibrium metaphor of mainstream economic theory.

Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism, vol. 2: America and the Wider World by William N. Parker

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 805 Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic EUstory of Western Capitalism, vol. 2: America and the Wider World. By William N. Parker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvii + 372; tables, notes, appendixes, index. $59.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). William N. Parker is the Phillip Golden Bartlett Professor Emeritus of Economics and Economic History at Yale University. This is the second and final volume of his collected essays; the first bore the subtitle Europe and the World Economy. Parker is unusual among eco­ nomic historians in that he has done research in primary sources in both Europe and the United States. His early work, accomplished mainly in the 1950s, dealt with the mining and metallurgical industries of Western Europe (see, e.g., Coal and Steel in Western Europe [1957], coauthored with N. J. G. Pounds) and is well represented in the first volume of these essays. Parker is even more famous, however, for his research in American history, especially agricultural history, and most of the essays in this volume come from that phase of his career. As a student of A. P. Usher, whose publications are well known to readers of this journal, Parker emphasizes the interrelations of technology, resources, and institutions. Parker is also a literary econ­ omist, in the best sense of that term. Not that he shuns quantitative data—quite the contrary—but he writes clearly and well, and at times humorously, sprinkling his text with literary allusions and occasional quotations. He also employs diagrams—not the usual supply-anddemand or production-function graphs of economists (well, some­ times those, too), but spatial diagrams intended to indicate the relation of everything to everything else, including body, brain, mind, memory, values, and attitudes (see, e.g., p. 349). He indicates that he began every graduate course with such a diagram. I do not know how his students reacted to them, but I must confess that I have yet to understand a single one of them. The book is organized in five parts, plus two “annexes” (appen­ dixes?). Part 1 consists of a single chapter, “American Civilization: The Impulse from Europe.” It was presented as a paper to a Japanese seminar on American studies and was presumably intended to explain to the Japanese auditors/readers the influence of Europe on Ameri­ can institutions and behavior. Part 2, “The South in Slavery and Freedom,” contains five chapters devoted primarily to southern agriculture. The heart of the book lies in parts 3 and 4, entitled respectively “Capitalist Dynamics of the Rural North” (four chapters) and “The North: Dynamics of an Industrial Culture” (nominally two chapters, but actually seven). These two parts also contain the only chapters concerned explicitly with technology, although the subject is, of course, dealt with elsewhere in its relations with other factors. Chapter 9, “Technological Knowledge: Reproduction, Diffusion, Im­ 806 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE provement,” is strongly reminiscent of Usher’s treatment of the same subject. Chapter 12, “The Industrial Civilization of the Midwest,” is in six parts, the first of which is devoted to resources and technology. Part 5, “American Values in a Capitalist World,” has three chapters and for the first time casts a glance at the “wider world” promised in the subtitle. Actually, however, they are also mainly concerned with the United States. Chapter 13, “Political Controls on a National Economy,” was originally entitled “American Attitudes toward Busi­ ness.” Parker suggests in his preface that the two final chapters, “Nationhood in a Common Market” and “European Industrialization in an American Mirror,” somehow pertain to recent events in Europe, but of course they were written before the dramatic events of 1989 and later. The former does not even mention the European Commu­ nity, and the latter, prepared for a conference assessing the impact of the work of Alexander Gerschenkron, is an obvious reference to his Europe in a Russian Mirror (1970). The two “annexes”—“A Look Backward. Quantification and the Counterfactual in American Agricultural History, 1850—1910: A Re-examination” and “A Look Forward. Understanding Productivity: The Ways of Economics and History”—are able examples of the economic historian’s craft, but have little...

Perfidious Albion: The Abandonment of Hong Kong 1997

When Britain agreed to restore Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1984, British spokesmen explained that the Communist Chinese were reforming and would allow Hong Kong to continue its dynamic capitalist ways. But the brutal suppression of the Chinese student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 made it clear that totalitarian Beijing does not tolerate even potentially rival centers of power. William McGurn examines the background of the 1984 agreement and the current plight of Hong Kong's 5.8 million citizens. Although they hold British passports, the British government has refused to allow most of them in. McGurn urges the United States and other nations to open their doors to those who want to leave Hong Kong, not only as a humanitarian act but to infuse their own societies with talent and dynamism.

Property as a Constitutional Right in the Nineteenth Century: Or What Have We Learned Since Corwin?

The evolution of from an innocuous paraphrase of old English concept the law of land into a strong bastion ofproperty rights until its curtailment in constitutional decisions in 1937 has been beautifully delineated in writings of Edward Corwin. Later writers have concentrated largely on extrapolating that history to cover metamorphosis of propertied liberty into personal rights, which has even required a modest revival ofpropertyprotection. Still, Corwin has been amended on several key points. (1) We now understand that nineteenth-century battle over was not between and persons, but between an older concept of property as possession and a dynamic capitalist view of property as creation of social value. (2) The transformation of due process in popular controversy, which Corwin was acute enough to advance as afactor, seems to have been most decisive factor, particularly altering debate on Fourteenth Amendment. (3) Corwin 's search for a transforming case representing a decisive conceptual change seems misplaced. The complex economic-regulation due-process cases allowed a move from procedure to substance without any visible transformation of legal rules.

BUSINESS HISTORY: THEORY-DRIVEN AND THEORY-STARVED

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1990. xviii + 860 pp. Stuart Bruchy. Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. xiv + 645 pp. The two books under consideration here represent the culmination of the careers of two distinguished scholars. Both also deal with the history of American business. Beyond that, however, the two could not be more dissimilar. Whereas Chandler's Scale and Scope represents the apogee of a lifetime devoted to the exegesis of a new theory of business enterprise and growth, Bruchy's Enterprise is a largely conventional narrative of business developments, no doubt aided by a lifetime of lecturing and research, which pursues no particularly coherent thesis beyond the nebulous and rather sophomoric idea that a "free people" have been able to convert their individual achievement and vertical social mobility into a dynamic capitalist system.

The Brazilian Model of Accumulation: Its Origins, Structure, and Crisis

When in 1964 the political crisis of Brazilian democracy was solved in capitalist fashion by a brutal military coup, this military dictatorship seemed to the international left a last, desperate resort of the international bourgeoisie in its struggle against the general upsurge of the anticapitalist popular movement. The military dictatorship seemed to have little chance of political and success in view of the deep and universal crisis of Latin American society. Peasant movements, guerrillas, workers' strikes all aroused hopes on the left the world over and fears on the part of the bourgeoisie that the Latin American continent would become a powder keg igniting a chain of social revolutions. The only alternative to these revolutions seemed to be fascist military dictatorships lacking any capacity for development. The Cuban Revolution seemed to be an expression of the general direction of development of the continent, and the Brazilian military dictatorship only a desperate reaction of the rulers of a stagnating, dependent capitalism, a bourgeoisie placed on the defensive. Political developments since that time are well known: after hopeful beginnings of socialist or reform-capitalist developments in Peru, Chile, and Argentina, repressive military regimes have become the rule in the most of Latin America. The Brazilian military dictatorship became the model case of dynamic capitalist accumulation accomplished concurrently with increasing integration into the world market. While the representatives of international capital have celebrated the Brazilian economic miracle as a model for the successful capitalist conquest of underdevelopment, the left has responded to events in Brazil with moral outrage over terror, torture, and mass impoverishment. It has been incapable, however, of comprehending the dynamics of dependent capitalist accumulation except in terms of imperialist conspiracy and social collapse. Brazilian development has been viewed as a special case in which a subimperialist bridgehead of U.S. multinational corporations succeeded in temporarily * Thomas Hurtienne is a sociologist at the Freie Universitat Berlin. This article is an abridged translation of his Zur Entstehungsgeschichte, Struktur und Krise des Brasilianischen Akkumulationsmodells, which appeared in Lateinamerika: Analysen und Berichte, (Berlin) 11 (1978), 70-96. Jon Sperber is a historian at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. 108

The Socialist Transformation of Cuban Agriculture: Domestic and International Constraints

The world system perspective suggests that socialist governments cannot construct truly socialist societies because they remain part of a larger capitalist world economy and must emphasize trade-oriented production for profit. Using this thesis to examine developments in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, I discuss (1) changes in the role of trade and the impact of the world economy on the structure of Cuba's domestic production; and (2) forces shaping the organization of Cuban agriculture since the revolution. Cuba is affected by global capitalist dynamics, internal class forces, and its distinctive trade relations with the Soviet bloc. I conclude that the world economy perspective enhances our understanding of developments in societies purporting to be socialist, but that the thesis itself is insufficient for a complete analysis. A world system perspective challenges widely held assumptions about development possibilities in countries that claim to be socialist. According to Wallerstein (1974, 1979), societies that nationalize ownership of resources within their territory, declare themselves socialist, and propagate socialist ideologies cannot in fact construct a socialist mode of production because they remain part of the larger capitalist world system.' He also argues that because such countries are integrated into a capitalist world economy, they are pressured to organize production to profit from market trade. Socialist and, especially, communist ideologies obfuscate the fact that regimes committed to socialist transformations remain part of a capitalist world economy. A state which collectively owns the means of production is a collective capitalist firm as long as it participates, as all states are compelled to, in the market of the capitalist world economy. This paper examines how Wallerstein's thesis helps explain certain developments in Cuban agriculture since the 1959 revolution. Efforts to expand and diversify agriculture are constrained by global economic forces and not merely, as Dumont (1970), Mesa-Lago (1978), and Ritter (1974), among others, have tended to stress, by domestic organizational inefficiencies and utopian shortsightedness. I summarize Wallerstein's argument and discuss the conditions that should prevail in Cuba were his thesis correct. Then I examine how and why the agrarian sector has been reorganized since 1959 and what effects the changes have had on the island's relations with the world economy.