Capitalist Political Economy Research Articles

The epistemic evolution of market authority: Big data, blockchain and China’s neostatist challenge to neoliberalism

Neoliberalism initially invoked the authority of competitive markets as the ideal epistemic mechanism for socio-economic coordination. Yet, the rise of neoliberal ‘market society’ in Western advanced economies since the 1970s has been underpinned by a normative political theory that advocates the reconfiguration of society and politics around the authority of economic theory and knowledge in both production, but especially finance. Conversely, the reform-era development of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ has been underpinned by an insistence on retaining centralized political power over the allocation of financial capital. This article argues that the rise of digital algorithmic technologies constitutes one means by which these contrasting politico-economic visions are being more closely reconciled. It investigates the ways in which China’s ongoing construction of an explicitly authoritarian capitalism is being facilitated by the deployment of complementary financial technologies that enable the Chinese Communist Party to embrace the micro-level epistemic coordinative function of markets without relinquishing macro-level political power and juridical sovereignty over these markets. Following a comparative historiography of the praxis of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neostatist’ political theory in contemporary capitalism, two case studies of blockchain-enabled currency and big-data driven credit scoring in China illustrate the emergent Fintech foundations of Chinese authoritarian capitalism. The findings contribute to our understanding of how markets are being reshaped by new algorithmic technologies, as well as illuminate some of ideological contradictions in existing conceptions of markets as (neo)liberal institutions at the centre of capitalist political economy.

The Construction of Gratitude in the workplace: Temporary foreign workers employed in health care

AbstractIn capitalist societies, workers feel, or feel obliged to feel grateful for having a job. In a world marked by global inequality, migrants from the global South to the North are expected to feel gratitude for their opportunity to move to and live in a first world country. In the case of temporary foreign workers, both these sorts of gratitude come together. The political economy regime governing the conditions of work and cross‐border movement for temporary foreign workers employed in health care in Canada engenders feelings of gratefulness from workers towards their employers. Contextualized within a cross‐disciplinary study of gratitude as a social construct, this article uses the case of this particular sort of work and migration gratitude to develop knowledge on the nuanced and complex ways in which structures of feeling lead from and loop back into capitalist political economies.

The political economy of the nation form

ABSTRACT This is an edited transcript of a lecture to the Vega Symposium on Resurgent Nationalisms and Populist Politics in the Neoliberal Age, held at the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, in April 2018. It is part of a Special Issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B which also includes an Introduction by Gillian Hart, and articles by Kanishka Goonewardena, Gillian Hart and Tova Höjdestrand based on their contributions to the Symposium. My engagement with the political economy of the nation form falls into two sections. The first addresses questions of comparison in debates over nations and nationalism, pointing to how the concept of relational comparison helped break the impasse that became evident in the 1990s and 2000s between problematic universalizing models and strong claims about incommensurability and incomparability. With reference to India, the second section develops the argument that there is no way of reckoning with the extraordinary transposability of the nation form without focusing on transformations within the political economy of capitalism. The transformation from empire to the nation form emerged from the extraordinary systemic crisis of capitalism in the conjuncture of the 1930s; and the crisis of 1970s was another key moment for understanding the political economy of the nation form in India. Reflecting on the current conjunctural crisis, I warn against efforts to set up a straight chain of equivalence between Modi, Trump, Putin, Orbán and others, as well as the political arithmetic of left populism.

Beyond the Mutual Constitution of States and Markets: On the Governance of Alienation

ABSTRACT International Political Economy (IPE) textbooks tend to present the concept of a clear state-market dichotomy as the disciplinary mainstream. Yet we argue that a critical consensus has emerged around the mutual constitution of states and markets. Underpinning this is the Polanyian thesis that economic activities are always politically embedded. However, we claim that this notion of state-market mutual constitution is inadequate to grasp the peculiarities of the capitalist political economy. While capitalist market relations are underpinned by states, they take on an autonomous, dominating logic that limits states’ agency. Concretely, by reproducing international monetary relations, states accidentally contribute to the establishment of world labour productivity averages that force them to boost national competitiveness in order to keep pace with world market standards. In place of the notion of mutual constitution, then, we offer Marx’s concept of alienation as a theory of a form of social relations that have escaped the control of the institutions that produce them. The challenge of state governance – reflected in the canon of liberal thought – is to reconcile the impersonal imperatives of world market relations with the creation of a legitimate national political project, which we term the politics of governing alienation.

Qom After Islamic Neoliberalism: A Narrative of the City in Limbo

Despite its classically appreciated rank in the constellation of the Shia world and its key but contentious role in the politics of modern Iran, Qom has been one of the least-researched cities of the country. Especially taking into account the archstructures of capitalist political economy and the undercurrents of middle-class consumerism, this study aims at building up a critical, materialist take on the neo-liberal politics of Qom, particularly with regard to the developments of the last decade. It argues that recent trends in the urban formation and municipal policy of Qom betray the historical image they pretend to sustain and the ideological ideals they seem to pursue.

Biggish data: Friedrich Engels, material ecology, and Victorian data

ABSTRACTThrough Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), this article examines two prominent themes in environmental humanities – vital ecological materialism and ‘big data’. Engels’ vivid descriptions of factories, houses, and environment shared the central tenets of ‘material ecology’ – ‘thing power’ (Jane Bennett); ‘intra-actions’ of social and material agency (Karen Barad); ‘trans-corporeality’ (Stacy Alaimo) – and met Bennett’s call to align vital and historical materialism. The main body of the paper connects his analysis both to current debates about integrating ‘big data’ into social science and the humanities and to comparable nineteenth-century developments in statistics and data visualisation. Engels articulated the working-class condition by blending four distinct modes of investigation: big data; qualitative survey research; literary thick description; and theory (the nascent critique of capitalist political economy). Such a mix remains rich with possibilities for sociology and humanities not only in communicating but in generating knowledge about complex ecologies.

Money and moneyness: thoughts on the nature and distributional power of the ‘backbone’ of capitalist political economy

ABSTRACTThis paper contends that political economy may profit from an understanding of money that is both able to account for its systemic importance as well as money’s specific role for the contemporary distribution of wealth. ‘Money-ness’ is a strategic factor in profit-making and capital accumulation. If we accord moneyness to all those instruments that make the repackaging of credit and other financial assets and liabilities and their capitalization possible, we arrive at an understanding of money that underscores the Marxian analysis of the structural importance of the money relation for capital accumulation that is up to speed with current financial innovations. As a social structure and process, moneymaking through capital permeates society. As a public-private deal between the state, rentiers, banks, and taxpayers that has existed since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, it binds these actors together in shifting relations of dependence. Under financial capitalism today, what counts as money and how far moneyness stretches into the realms of financial innovation has been a core object of struggle in the public-private deal of money creation.

The <em>New</em> New Poor Law

This essay is an attempt to outline recent trends in the criminalization of working-class lives. It casts the net broadly, both historically and geographically, situating capitalist austerity’s recent turn to mass incarceration in the United States and Canada in early 19th-century poor law sensibilities. What is happening now differs from the workhouse regime of industrial capitalism’s new poor law, of course, but it has undoubted connections to this older regime of regulation. The new new poor law of our times is part of a long history of how dispossession has been pivotal to capitalism’s project of uninhibited accumulation and suppression of those driven to defiance and dissent. It reveals how, as profit declines in the productive sphere, incarceration itself can be made to pay. The new new poor law is fundamental to contemporary capitalist political economy as the politics of austerity, the dismantling of the welfare state, and an assault on working-class entitlements and trade unionism are complemented by the rise of a prison-industrial complex. Driven by class antagonisms and racialized scapegoating, the new new poor law inevitably draws into its sphere of influence public-sector workers employed in the criminal justice system. It also unleashes intensified grievances of the incarcerated, stimulating the birth of movements of protest in which prisoners and proletarians search out ways of making common cause.
 
 Cet essai tente de décrire les tendances récentes en matière de criminalisation de la vie de la classe ouvrière. Il jette les bases largement, historiquement et géographiquement, en situant le virage récent de l’austérité capitaliste vers une incarcération de masse aux États-Unis et au Canada, au début du 19e siècle à l’égard de la loi sur les pauvres. Ce qui se passe actuellement diffère du régime de travail de la nouvelle loi sur les pauvres du capitalisme industriel, bien sûr, mais il a des liens incontestables avec cet ancien régime de réglementation. La nouvelle loi sur les nouveaux pauvres de notre époque fait partie d’une longue histoire montrant à quel point la dépossession a été au centre du projet du capitalisme d’accumulation sans entrave et de suppression de ceux qui sont poussés au défi et à la dissidence. Elle montre comment, lorsque le profit diminue dans la sphère productive, l’incarcération elle-même peut être payée. La nouvelle loi sur les nouveaux pauvres est fondamentale dans l’économie politique capitaliste contemporaine, car la politique d’austérité, le démantèlement de l’État social, l’assaut contre les droits de la classe ouvrière et le syndicalisme sont complétés par la montée d’un complexe pénitentiaire. Poussé par des antagonismes de classe et des boucs émissaires racialisés, la nouvelle loi s’inscrit inévitablement dans sa sphère d’influence sur les travailleurs du secteur public employés dans le système de justice pénale. Elle libère également les griefs intensifiés des incarcérés, stimulant ainsi la naissance de mouvements de protestation dans lesquels les prisonniers et les prolétaires recherchent des moyens de faire valoir leur cause commune.

ТЕОРЕТИЧНІ ЗАСАДИ АГРОЕКОНОМІКИ: РЕТРОСПЕКТИВА І СУЧАСНІСТЬ

Досліджується формування в теорії та на практиці двох діаметрально протилежних шкіл аграрної економіки. Перша вважає, що сільське господарство підпорядковується загальним економічним законам капіталістичної системи господарювання (А. Сміт, Д. Рікардо, К. Маркс), а друга – що галузі притаманні особливості, які обмежують це підпорядкування, внаслідок чого дана сфера лише «віддзеркалює» загальну капіталістичну політекономію. Розкрито основи шкіл другого напряму, сформовані класиками агроекономіки А. Теєром, Й. Тюненом, Т. Бринкманом і розвинуті Е. Давідом, С. Булгаковим, Т. Гольцем, О. Чаяновим, М. Макаровим та іншими вченими.Огляд практики господарювання у світовому аграрному просторі довів, що сільське господарство успішно розвивається там, де визнається специфіка соціально-економічних відносин в аграрному секторі, зумовлена переплетінням у галузі природних і економічних умов відтворення, особливостями використання трудових і земельних ресурсів, впливом рентного чинника, низькою еластичністю попиту на основні види сільськогосподарської продукції та продовольчих товарів, значущістю соціальних і екологічних функцій сільського господарства для розвитку суспільства.Країни ж, де аграрна політика базується на принципах загальноекономічних законів капіталізму, які аргументують переваги великих капіталістичних господарств, концентрації та глибокої спеціалізації сільського господарства, підпорядкованість виробництва максимізації прибутку тощо, стикаються з негативними соціальними і економічними наслідками, втрати від яких у сукупності переважають економічні вигоди орієнтованої лише на капітал системи господарювання.Аналізується розвиток агроекономічної науки в умовах сучасного науково-технічного прогресу і глобалізаційних процесів, яка, розширивши під впливом їх позитивних результатів і негативних наслідків змістове наповнення соціальних і екологічних функцій сільського господарства, довела рівнозначність цих функцій економічній функції галузі. Розкривається сутність концепції багатофункціональності сільського господарства, яка визнана міжнародним співтовариством інструментом розробки аграрних політик сталого розвитку сільського господарства. У даному контексті аналізуються проблеми вітчизняних наукових агроекономічних течій і наслідки їх реалізації у процесі реформування аграрного сектору України.

Theorizing Sino-capitalism: implications for the study of comparative capitalisms

ABSTRACTAlthough not central in the literature on Comparative Capitalisms (CC), the case of China is highly salient. This is not just because of the country’s sheer size and international economic influence, but also because the Chinese political economy can provide fertile ground to theorize on aspects of CC that are widely recognized to pose challenges. I employ the analytical framework of Sino-capitalism to demonstrate the importance of an open and evolutionary approach. Specifically, Sino-capitalism centres on state-centric modes of governance interacting dialectically with bottom-up networked modes of entrepreneurship exposed to market forces and global capital. The dialectic evolutionary quality of Sino-capitalism contrasts with the more static comparative approaches in most of the CC literature. China’s emergent capitalism forces the observer to open up the black box of capitalist evolution and ‘bring back in’ classical approaches to studying political economy. Capitalist political economies are thus conceived of as encompassing different politico-economic spheres, each with its own logic. Leveraging the analytical framework of Sino-capitalism for the continued theoretical development of CC elucidates in this manner the architectonic role of the state, the chronic re-composition and rebalancing of the institutional spheres of state and capital, and the existence of contradictory cum symbiotic politico-economic logics that reproduce capitalism.

Theorising vertical urbanisation

Taller, denser and more diverse city skylines are a hallmark of 21st century urban change. Although vertical urbanisation is increasingly ubiquitous, this development has not followed a single universal pattern. It is not uniform in its scale, its target neighourhood types, nor in its design, which spans ‘starchitect’-designed skyscrapers and generic tower blocks. Urban scholars have traditionally considered vertical development via less specific concepts such as intensification, and only recently has the expression ‘vertical urbanisation’ risen in prominence. There remains however a lack of integration and theorisation of vertical expansion across social science debate. This siloing of diverse perspectives encourages isolated accounts and hinders shared understandings around the processes it entails. Yet interest lies not only in examining the specifics of each new local crop of towers, but also in explaining the process of vertical expansion itself as performative and constitutive of shifting social relations. Equally, integrating distinct local, historical, and institutional trajectories within robust theoretical schema can enhance understandings of vertical expansion in particular times and places. This paper steps towards these ambitions by conceptualising residential vertical urbanisation as a special kind of spatial fix. Using intertextual theorisation and drawing upon Aalbers and Christophers’ recent theorisation of housing’s functions under capitalist political economy, this article positions residential high-rise development within the circuitry of capitalist accumulation. In particular, and independently of national or local specifics, it develops an exploratory conceptual schema for high-rise housing development based on its three interrelated functions as: labour and capital intensive commodities; as investments on real estate markets tied to financial markets; and as cultural artefacts of distinction both in inter city competition and geopolitics, and in class relations. The proposed theorisation does not explain vertical expansion in every case, indeed it emphasises the importance of interrogating the role of intermediaries, states, and local opportunity structures in understanding the local contours of vertical expansion. Nonetheless, by providing a theoretically informed heuristic that is sensitive to temporal and geographic contingencies, and into which specific occurrences of vertical expansion can be embedded, this framework offers to promote communication between these occurrences as related yet locally contingent phenomena of financialised capitalism.

Spanish Imperial Vassalage and the Social Reproduction of Slavery in Colonial Cuba

Abstract With the social reproduction of slavery in colonial Cuba as its center point, this essay draws on the recent historiographical acknowledgment of the way vassalage mediated the often starkly drawn social distinctions between whites and enslaved people within colonial Spanish America. Inside the region’s emergent, capitalist political economy, feudal vassalage continued to define each social sector’s rights and responsibilities vis-á-vis the Spanish Crown. The rights of enslaved vassals derived from their potential contributions to the Spanish monarchy’s imperial survival, in their capacity to populate the extensive empire with loyal Catholic subjects and potential military defenders. These concerns also justified the Spanish monarchial state’s ability to intervene between its slaveholding vassals and its enslaved vassals, by limiting private property rights over enslaved people and operating in ways that did not fully conform to capitalist profit motives. Awareness of such sovereign-vassal interdependencies challenges historians to broaden their understanding of the relationship between capitalism and slavery to include the remnants of feudal social-political forms, even into the nineteenth century.

Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain, no gain

ABSTRACTAs a region of the world capitalist political economy, Africa has been the epitome of neoliberalism as a universal project to remake societies in its image. In Africa, the neoliberal project encountered a region already ensconced in state-forms that were authoritarian, albeit very often weaker than their analogues in Latin America or Southern Europe. In these circumstances, neoliberalism both reconstructed and relied upon authoritarian state practices: reassertions of law and order, rising technocracy, re-built bureaucracies, and ‘choiceless democracy’. Liberal advocates of neoliberalism indulged authoritarian governance in the belief that economic liberalization would generate economic growth and transformation. Reviewing these authoritarian neoliberal constructions, one is struck by how poorly they performed as vehicles for market-based capitalist transformation. In a phrase, the pain of neoliberal adjustment was accompanied by no palliative of sustained economic ‘gain’. Liberalization, executed by top-down and undemocratic governance, has generated fragile growth, instability, some enrichment and no economic transformation. This conjuncture is pivotal to an understanding of moves by some governing elites to explore and at times implement non-neoliberal development strategies. The article concludes by suggesting that neoliberalism is currently a somewhat besieged orthodoxy. However, the exploration of unorthodox development strategies has taken place within an authoritarian political shell.

Marxism, Crypto-Marxism and the Political Economy of Capitalism

ABSTRACTThis article conducts groundwork for a discussion of Marx’s influence through examining the boundaries of the specifically Marxian school of economics. This Marxian school extends well beyond the bounds of the self-identified Marxian school. Marx’s influence, Marxian themes and effectively Marxian theory can be found in several important heterodox traditions of economics, though this is often unacknowledged. A consideration of the proper boundaries of the Marxian school of economics is essential for a full understanding of Marx’s legacy and could contribute to the emergence of a more unified heterodoxy in economics.

Criminal, Medicinal and Industrial? Unpacking Cannabis Narratives By Providing An Agrarian Alternative

Cannabis is an agrarian commodity that was made illegal throughout the twentieth century in most parts of the world. The cannabis plant is the victim of complex sets of political and economic (agrarian) decisions that culminated in the prohibition of every use of the regardless of the plants agricultural benefits. This has created over time a legalistic narrative about the plant which are mostly attentive to the historical criminalization of cannabis but fail to acknowledge the agrarian nature of the plant nor the agrarian factors that led to its removal from agricultural production. Moreover, an analysis of the agrarian political economy of cannabis produces a more useful narrative of the contemporary place the plant occupies in society, particularly in the context of the global south. The reason that cannabis narratives are important to agrarian transformation in the global south, South Africa and elsewhere is because it reveals significant aspects of the ways in which global political economy was designed to benefit capitalist development through the control of agrarian goods including agricultural produce, land, and labour. Using largely a review of secondary sources this paper will highlight the narratives about cannabis and argue for the inclusion of an agrarian understanding of the plant. The paper will show that the most common narrative situates all usages of cannabis within the domain of ‘hard drugs' and disregards the fact that the plant is a recreational, medicinal and industrial non-food crop that was marginalized for various political economic factors. The second most common narrative is the medicinal categorization of cannabis, currently being popularized, that is useful in repositioning the plant but remains insufficient in removing the plant from its control by global capitalist political economy. Finally, it will be argued, that the most useful narrative of cannabis is produced when the plant is viewed from the vantage point of an agrarian good. An agrarian narrative of cannabis consolidates the industrial, medicinal and recreational usages of this non-food crop and reveals fresh insights about the political economy of agrarian development in the global south and South Africa.

Reflections on three populisms

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper considers the populist surges of our times in three countries: Trump’s America, Brexit Britain, and Modi’s India, distinguishing the special features of each, and philosophically and politically analyzing the relations that populism bears to both liberalism and the capitalist political economies of liberal-democratic societies.

The Role of Business in Transforming the Political Organization of the World

Having moved to the global level, capitalist political economy today is turning into a dominant way of governance in world politics, undermining the state-centrist model that has been developing since the time of the Westphalian peace treaties. As a result, we are witnessing a Schumpeterian phenomenon of “creative destruction” i.e., destruction of old accompanied by creation of new. The current world politics is dominated by the logic of destruction, and this destruction is not limited to changing interstate relations, as it is represented in most studies, but involves at the same time at least three levels of political organization of the world, forming a synergy effect: the level of the Westphalian world order; the level of interstate relations; the level of the national state. The Westphalian ststem is being blurred largely by transnational business activity. Entrepreneursinnovators form capitalism of co-participation. This capitalism rests not on interest, but on values and social ties that unite people in networks. Examples of such capitalism are various forms of sharing, peer-topeer networks, wiki-platforms, block-chain technology. Capitalism of sharing unites in- formational networks and human potential, the main resource of such capitalism is precisely human capital, human trust and social relations. The sharing is being transmitted to the international political sphere, supplementing the principle of the Westphalian sovereignty with the potential of eventually replacing it. At the same time, practices are being introduced into the political organization of the world from other projects of the political organization of the world, in particular Islamic (Islamic banks, hawala money transfer system, etc.).

Marx, Engels and the critique of academic labor

Articles in Workplace have repeatedly called for increased collective organisation in opposition to a disturbing trajectory: individual autonomy is decreasing, contractual conditions are worsening, individual mental health issues are rising, and academic work is being intensified. Despite our theoretical advances and concerted practical efforts to resist these conditions, the gains of the 20th century labor movement are diminishing and the history of the university appears to be on a determinate course. To date, this course is often spoken of in the language of “crisis.” While crisis may indeed point us toward the contemporary social experience of work and study within the university, we suggest that there is one response to the transformation of the university that has yet to be adequately explored: A thoroughgoing and reflexive critique of academic labor. By this, we mean a negative critique of academic labor and its role in the political economy of capitalism; one which focuses on understanding the basic character of ‘labor’ in capitalism as a historically specific social form. Beyond the framework of crisis, what productive, definite social relations are actively resituating the university and its labor within the demands, proliferations, and contradictions of capital? With the production of this special issue of Workplace, we hope to contribute to a negative critique of academic labor that not only helps make these social relations more transparent, but situates academic labor as an object of critique within the discourse of recent developments in Marxist praxis.

Language and critique: some anticipations of critical discourse studies in Marx

ABSTRACTWe examine Marx's critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx's work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.

Wage‐labour and a double separation in Papua New Guinea and beyond

AbstractIn this essay, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour is used to perform a double separation within and between persons. The first aspect of this separation is a separation of activities that are characterized as ‘labour’ from the person performing the activity thus characterized. This separation is the precondition for the second separation: namely a partial and often contested separation between the two parties to the contested wage‐labour transaction. Ethnographically, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour has been used to perform this double separation in Papua New Guinea in recent years. The analysis of these separations has a long pedigree in Western critical thought, the first being at the heart of Marx's conception of the worker as person in a capitalist political economy, for example. The second separation creates the possibility of momentary perspectives from which persons can present themselves increasingly as discrete individuals separate from the claims of others. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates how the category of ‘labour’ and related idioms create possibilities for the historically shifting emergence and dissolution of different idioms of the person in contemporary PNG, which is taken as a specific instance of an important global phenomenon.