Capitalist Political Economy Research Articles

Labour process theory: in and beyond the core: continuities, challenges, and choices

Since the publication of Braverman’s seminal Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), labour process theory (LPT) has become a successful theory-building project driven by empirical expansion and conceptual innovation, operating as the equivalent of a normal science, with a distinctive scope and specific empirical focus on workplace regimes in the context of capitalist political economy. It’s toolkit or conceptual architecture combines underpinning and ordering principles with contingent and flexible operational categories concerning labour power and control. Though LPT has built stronger conceptual connections between workplace and accumulation regimes, changes in the global order have brought new theoretical and empirical challenges that are requiring it to adjust some of its core concepts and boundaries to consider development such as new sources of labour power, migration, and mobility.

Climate Science, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Political Economy of Knowledge-Making: Beyond the Capitalist Ontology of Nature?

Climate science is one of the main political drivers of today's world, informing critical scholars and social movements alike. Yet, many scholars associate it with projects of domination (the Cold War, capitalism, imperialism) while relying on it to elaborate a critique of capital. This article proposes a new historical account of climate science. Drawing from archival findings, interpreted with historical sociology combined with the critique of political economy, the article shows that a conflict developed at the National Academy of Sciences during the Vietnam War, between scientists who wanted atmospheric research to be under the auspices of NATO, as proposed by the "father of the H-bomb" Edward Teller, and others who favored global cooperation, led by meteorologist Jule Charney. The resolution of this conflict had consequences for both the institutional framework and the content of what is today understood as climate science. It is argued that this conflict was part of the social movements of the time, and had momentous consequences for knowledge-making by rejecting the association of atmospheric science with the military-industrial complex, an essential component of capitalist accumulation. Most notably, it resulted in the conceptualization of the atmosphere as a commons, which undermines its treatment as a sink, private property, or commodity, and qualifies it as a potential informer of the allocation of resources in an emancipated society. Therefore, the article sheds light on the resonance between climate science and current social movements and critical scholars: the constitution of climate science was in mediation with a worldview that was critical of aspects of the capitalist political economy and its ontology of nature.

Scientific nationalism and museums of the future in Germany and the UAE

Nationalist visions of the future are articulated through the language and logic of science. This article extends political geography research on the future by examining “scientific nationalism” expressed at two museums of the future in Germany and the UAE: Berlin's Futurium and Dubai's Museum of the Future. The techno-science ideals narrated in the museums are projected as planetary stories about building common futures through science, technological innovation, and concern for the environment, but fundamentally reinforce nationalist ideals and aspirations about their nations' success and prosperity in the future. In Germany and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), nationalist discourses celebrate science and technology – and technoscientific prowess is framed in the two museums of the future as holding the key to solving planetary challenges like the climate crisis. But in “technowashing” social, political, and environmental challenges, they reflect a conservative approach to centering technology-centered questions about the future, while working to persevere the energy-intensive, capitalist political economy that defines their present. By projecting these extractive and nationalist presents into the future, the two future-themed museums illustrate how the future animates nationalist visions not just through stories of survivance, but also through stories of science.

Conservation and conviviality in the American West

The emerging field of convivial conservation (CC) draws on the tradition of political ecology (PE) to present a “radical” alternative to contemporary environmentalisms, speaking to the challenges of conservation in the Anthropocene as well as the global ascent of reactionary populism. Building on previous work arguing for the ongoing value of dialogue between PE and the American West, I here develop a conversation between CC and another radical intervention, the collaborative conservation of the West’s so-called “radical center” (RC). Using the nexus of wolf–livestock conflict and public lands grazing, I first trace a genealogical history of western environmental politics before turning to CC as critical corrective to the shortcomings of the RC. Scholarship on the commons and commoning provides an analytical bridge and political toolkit for linking the empirics of place with the aspirational aims of conviviality, and naming and navigating on-the-ground obstacles to collaborative conservation efforts in the region. This dialogue in turn highlights deeply rooted tensions of capitalist political economy and questions of non/belonging rooted in settler colonialism—necessary regional engagements for building from polarized antagonism toward an alternative environmental politics of coexistence and conviviality.

Capitalism qua development in an era of planetary crisis

ABSTRACT Ecological crisis, massive inequality and war: our world is at a dangerous tipping point. Yet the present global crisis defies simple description and is difficult to explain. To clarify, it is argued that the character of the world crisis today is triple: ecological, economic and political. Underlying all three dimensions is the capitalist form of world society. The consolidation of this capitalist form was accompanied by the emergence of the concept of development within liberal philosophy. During the 20th century, development came to define geographical regions and legitimate capitalist political economy on a world scale. Capitalism came to be taken as development: I call this ‘capitalism qua development’. Because of the triple crisis, capitalism qua development is beginning to undergo a profound change. In an era of rapid global heating and ecological crisis, the tie between capital and development is straining and likely to give way. Capital is becoming more closely attached to the concept of adaptation. I argue that, in the most likely scenario (‘Climate Leviathan’), capitalism qua development will be recast as adaptation. Some signs of this shift are already apparent. Since this is only a likely prospect, three other possibilities – fates of the concept and practice of development – are proposed.

Capitalist political economy and the political economy of capitalisms: 2022 Rik Davidson/Studies in Political Economy Book Prize

In 2022, Heather Whiteside of the University of Waterloo was recognized with the Rik Davidson/Studies in Political Economy Book Prize for her book Capitalist Political Economy: Thinkers and Theories (Routledge, 2020). This article is an edited version of the book prize talk that she delivered at the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2023 Annual Meeting, held at York University in Toronto. Professor Whiteside summarizes the book briefly and presents some recent works on the political economy of capitalisms, specifically regarding proprietary settler colonialism and Coast Salish capitalism.

Getting Ours? "Girlbossing" and the Ethics of Nurse Reimbursement Models.

This article politicizes a reimbursement model proposed by some professional nursing associations that aim to better align the price of nursing labor (nurses' pay) to the value of nursing and make nurses' contributions more visible. Using the concept of "missing care," the critique reveals how professionalization directs attention to individual-level interactions between care seekers and practitioners while obscuring from view the harm inflicted by social institutions and structures constitutive of a capitalist political economy and the related carceral state. Direct reimbursement models render practitioners complicit in the harms perpetrated and perpetuated by the health care industrial complex while professionalization processes are deployed to reduce cognitive dissonance (and moral injury) produced by combining harm with nursing's normative principles. We describe and trace the complementary capitalist imperatives of extraction-based profit maximization and efficiency through the health care industrial complex to demonstrate how formative those imperatives are of the health care system, care-seekers' outcomes, nurses' experiences, nonconsensual modes of data collection, and surveillance. The naturalization of racial capitalism and the precarity and violence it entails foreclose the creation of ethical alternatives that prioritize well-being instead of the pursuit of profit that could bring the provision of and payment for care closer to the normative principles held by practitioners.

The discursive emergence of ‘the market’ in capitalist political economy: crisis system and the Longue Durée

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a longue durée account of the discursive emergence of ‘the market'. It seeks to develop understanding of the ‘crisis system' by showing that the crises of the present have their origins earlier than some critical realist scholars have suggested and can be better understood by the theorization of the generative mechanisms that emerged from the economic and political chaos of the early 1600s. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to show that in the context of the emergence of capitalism in England, these generative mechanisms resulted in the meaning of the word ‘market’ slipping loose of the geo-spatial semiotic bounds by which it had commonly been delineated – i.e. as a physical space in a town or city where goods were bartered or sold – and being re-semioticised to refer to abstract space where all acts of capitalist economic exchange, including those impacting upon the natural world, take place.

Household Matters: Engendering the Social History of Capitalism

AbstractThis essay takes up the project of engendering capitalism by turning to the household. It situates a gendered analysis of capitalism within recent histories of capitalism, feminist analyses of social reproduction, histories of family and industrialism, histories of sexuality, and histories of women's labor. It argues that to analyze capitalism from a household perspective clarifies three core elements of capitalist political economy. First, capitalism depended on reproductive and productive labor inside the household, from early industrialization through its most recent incarnations. Second, reproductive labor, historically anchored in the household, has served as a crucial site for development of capitalist labor relations. Third, that intensified commodification of reproductive labor has driven capitalist accumulation as well as capitalist social relations, whether that labor occurs within the household or is located beyond it.

The Values of the Care Economy Comment on "Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy".

Labonté proposes that health equity and environmental sustainability may be best obtained through a care economy. Because a care economy plays a key role in Labonté's formulation, its position in the capitalist political economy, the work it entails, and the workers who do it all merit further reflection. I aim to complement Labonté's editorial by elaborating on care economies and the work of social reproduction. The existing care economy is a structural part of capitalism that largely generates and sustains inequities, reinforcing Labonté's argument that transformation is needed. Transformation could, and should, change the perceived value, status, and material rewards of work in the care economy. I then touch on the policy tools Labonté describes, highlighting how they connect to my broader point: that the care economy is currently an integral, but devalued part of capitalism. For a transformation to take place, raising perceived value, status, and material rewards of caring work and the people who do it must be an explicit policy goal.

Climate Justice, Capitalism, and the Political Role of the Psychological Professions

The term Anthropocene (Age of Human) implies that the reduction of carbon emissions is a matter of changing human behaviour. This risks depoliticising the climate emergency. Everyone is not equally responsible for climate change, and the consequences of climate change are not distributed equally. Climate change is overwhelmingly the result of extractive and exploitative capitalist production. It is thus more useful to understand the climate crisis in terms of the Capitalocene (Age of Capital), with climate justice being a terrain of anti-capitalist struggle. Mainstream responses to climate change have largely neglected the Capitalocene, focusing instead on consumer behaviour. This individualistic approach has been taken up by several ecologically oriented psychological professions, where the emphasis has been on ‘responsible consumer behaviour’ and/or the psychological effects of climate uncertainty. There is, however, a growing critical tradition within the psychological professions that seeks to advance climate justice by taking seriously the capitalist political economy. Indeed, psychological practitioners are equipped with skills that may be useful for activists involved in psychopolitical efforts to consolidate climate justice movements and build political power. We posit three key areas for psychological practitioners working for climate justice movements: solidarity-making, affective mediation, and resource mobilisation.

Mapping complexity in deglobalisation: A typology of economic localisms from ‘hyper-localism’ to ‘strategic autonomy’

In recent years, scholarly attention has turned to the fracturing of global supply chains and the costs and benefits of reorienting economies to the local scale. While its real extent is debated, the term ‘deglobalisation’ has been broadly used to refer to this break from the expansionist neoliberal common-sense of previous decades. This paper conducts narrative reviews of six approaches which have emerged in this context: Hyper-localism, Open Localism, Cosmo-localism, Foundational Economy, Developmental Nationalism and Strategic Autonomy. It examines these emerging proposals for more local production, consumption and trade, and hints at relevant research directions for the uncertain era ahead. Its conceptual contribution shows that we are now faced with complex and differing processes of (de)globalisation – sometimes overlapping and sometimes competing. Grounded in a post-growth perspective, the paper concludes with an invitation for dialogue and future research around local production where capitalist political economy and organisation are not taken for granted.

Rethinking the Pan-African Agenda: Africa, the African Diaspora and the Agenda for Liberation

The original Pan-African ideal had, as its programmatic agenda, the struggle to free Africans in the diaspora from slave bondage and to liberate the African continent from the despicable occupation by European imperial powers. This article revisits this agenda for liberation, placing it in the current crisis of globalisation and examining the continued marginal place of Africa in the global capitalist political economy. The article sketches out the genealogy and contours of the liberation agenda that looped the African diaspora to developments on the African continent, dating back to the antislavery struggles at the end of the eighteenth century through to the era of independent Africa. I argue that the highest point of the liberation agenda, the final defeat of apartheid in South Africa, ironically coincided with the deepening of Africa’s place on the lowest rungs of the global capitalist system. Today, globalisation has fastened rather than loosened Africa’s position on the ladder of the global political economy. To push back against Africa’s continued marginal position perforce requires returning to the original motivation of the Pan-African agenda and ideal: the unity of purpose and collective action of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora for radical liberation.

Economic Rights, The Very Idea

This article seeks to provide the philosophical foundations for the very idea of economic rights, comparable to the foundations that have long been available for the rights around the notion of liberty. The author then situates economic rights, so understood, within the realities of contemporary capitalist political economy, as it has been analysed over the years by Prabhat Patnaik. JEL Codes: B0, K1, N1, P1, P2

Indigenous food sovereignty is constrained by “time imperialism”

Food sovereignty, which goes beyond food security to include culture, knowledge systems, labor practices, and ecosystem dynamics, is critical to Indigenous self-determination. Yet the reconstruction of time according to colonial values and the capitalist political economy constrains the ability of Indigenous peoples to exercise food sovereignty. In three case studies of coastal Indigenous harvesters from Alaska, USA; Palau; and Indonesia, we document how the social, cultural and political aspects of time restrict food sovereignty. Using interviews, participant observation and surveys, we found that: 1) food harvesting and the intergenerational sharing of Indigenous ecological knowledge was constrained by the time demands of the capitalist wage economy and formal schooling; 2) harvesting of wild foods was often already limited to narrow windows by natural constraints such as tides and weather systems; and 3) human-induced environmental changes further increased the time required for harvesting. We also found that Indigenous harvesters are meeting these challenges by reprioritizing and reimagining the harvest of Indigenous foods. These cases show that the dominant construction of time is intertwined with capitalism and tangibly limits the exercise of Indigenous food sovereignty. We propose a new framework to describe this phenomenon, which we call “time imperialism.” We contend that this unrecognized form of imperialism imposes unique constraints to Indigenous self-determination and call for policies that explicitly address the impact of time on food sovereignty.

"Notes on Exterminism" for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements

In 1980, the great English historian and Marxist theorist E. P. Thompson wrote the pathbreaking essay "Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization." Although the world has undergone a number of significant changes since, Thompson's essay remains a useful starting point in approaching the central contradictions of our times, characterized by the planetary ecological crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, New Cold War, and current "empire of chaos"—all arising from features deeply embedded in the contemporary capitalist political economy.

Regulating viral capitalism: four stages in a pathology of accumulation

This paper analyses the ecology of SARS-CoV-19 as a phenomenon of capitalist political economy. It argues that the biological conditions that allowed the virus to emerge must be understood within a broader set of concrete political and economic conditions. At every stage in the emergence and spread of the virus, we can observe its mediation through the processes of capital accumulation. The paper therefore argues that the emergence and the spread of SARS-CoV-19 can be understood as a ‘pathology of accumulation’. Regimes of capital accumulation always depend upon complex regimes of regulation. Wherever capital seeks to accumulate, it must be nurtured and supported by states. The rate and scale of capital accumulation depends on how access to common resources, labour, public wealth and public infrastructures is guaranteed, regulated and policed by states. The paper therefore seeks to analyse the regimes of accumulation that produce zoonotic pathogens like SARS-CoV-19, across four ‘moments’ or stages: release (in predatory practices of capitalist development); amplification (in the upscaling of industrial farming); spread (in sites of social concentration); and medical intervention (in the commodification of testing and vaccination regimes).

Amy Kaplan and the McDonaldization of Mark Twain

Amy Kaplan and the McDonaldization of Mark Twain

Making the Waste Count: A Contribution to the Political Economy of Youth

Abstract This article contributes to the debate on the political economy of youth by exploring elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxian theory in the context of youth participation. It will be argued that the mechanisms deployed to support youth participation are part of a university discourse that functions as to guarantee that youth is not wasted but is instead assimilated into the functioning of capitalist political economy. Elements from a large European project will be used to illustrate the modus operandi of this discourse, together with an exploration of Lacan’s notion of jouissance as an important construct to understand the motivations behind young people’s participation in formal settings. The article finishes with a set of remarks about our own role as researchers in the way we enjoy the same economic system that we so often criticise.

4 - Post-Independence Development Planning in Ghana and Tanzania: Agriculture, Women and Nation-building


 
 
 This article analyses development planning in post-independence Ghana and Tanzania, particularly related to agriculture, in contrast with the contemporary neoliberal subsumption of African economies to market forces. The article derives lessons from both their successes and shortcomings. Ghana and Tanzania’s experiences suggest the importance of agricultural transformation for national self-sufficiency; development planning as a mechanism to link all sectors of the economy; and the key strategic potential of the state in production, distribution and employment creation. Key shortcomings included the inability to fully de-link national economies from the global capitalist political economy, break dependence on earnings from cash crop exports, and the political and economic marginalisation of women in post-independence development planning. The article suggests that progressive development planning that centres the pursuit of gender justice is a critical starting point for imagining and pursuing alternatives to neoliberalism.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Akua O. Britwum, Associate Professor, Department of Labour and Human Resource Studies, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana / Post-Colonialisms Today researcher. Email: aobritwum@ucc.edu.gh