Capitalist World Economy Research Articles

On Problems of International Liquidity in Capitalist World Economy

In capitalist countries, there has been a very lively debate in recent years about the legitimacy or illegitimacy, adequacy or inadequacy of the current form of the international monetary system. One of the main indirect motives for this general attention now being given to international monetary problems is the unfavorable development and weakened position of the reserve currencies, i.e. the US dollar and the pound sterling. The dollar and the pound form, to a greater or lesser extent, part of the monetary reserves of all capitalist countries, and concern over their prospects necessarily leads to considerations of the possibilities and reliability of the entire current international monetary system.

Discursive and institutional standards of justice in the modern world-system

In the article the essence of standards of justice in the modern world-system is outlined in a general way. It is shown that these standards emerged in the European capitalist world-economy in consequence of the French Revolution. Standards of justice are interpreted as ideological semantic constructions that have been institutionalized simultaneously with establishment, first, of the ideology of liberalism as the geoculture of the modern world-system and, second, — of model of liberal state. Standards of justice are considered within theoretical theses and methodological guiding lines of I. Wallerstein's theory of the modern world-system. However, some theoretical theses of J. Alexander's civil society theory are also used to supplement and concretize considered in the article problems with some new arguments. For instance, Alexander's conceptual toolkit helped to distinguish discursive and institutional standards of justice. Reasons and peculiarities of establishment of standards of justice are considered and role these standards played in the providing of development of the modern world-system is shown. In particular, it is elucidated that owing to these standards elites of the core countries of the modern world-system managed to redirect the rebellion energy of the lower strata from antisystemic revolutions to struggle for inclusion to liberal state. This helped to calm the lower strata down and to guard structures of the modern world-system against essential damages. Standards of justice contributed to legitimation of social order of the modern world-system. Full integration of the lower strata to newly created national societies reinforced social solidarity, and this strengthened the core states even more. It is shown that for today in particular countries of periphery and semi-periphery trends of revision of current standards of justice and their replacement by alternative semantic constructions become visible.

The Sudan's Incorporation into the Capitalist World-Economy through Modern Cultivation and Trade of Cotton

Before the 19th century, the Sudan had a distinctive social system in which decentralized kingdoms held the political power. The article assumes that this intersocietal system entered a process of incorporation into the capitalist world-economy in the 19th century. Early modernization policies pursued in the Sudan during the Turco-Egyptian administration between 1821-1885 period, known as the Turkiyya. This rule shifted to the Anglo-Egyptian administration in 1899, after British forces defeating the short-lived Mahdist rule. Upon establishment of the new condominium government, the Sudan became a peripheral supplier of the expanding world economy. Throughout the peripheralization, the British gained control of raw materials such as gum arabic and cotton from the Nile valley, which were then transported to factories located in the mainland England. This article investigates economic incorporation process of the Sudan, specifically focusing on the Gezira Scheme, established with a colonial mentality, and mainly based on cotton production. The effect of this process was evident during the 1930s, when the country had been seriously impacted by the global economic crisis of 1929.

Ibn Khaldun’s Labor Theory of Value and the Question of Race

In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx’s premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun’s (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun’s labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the “nondebates of the 1970s” and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx’s argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.

Uneven decommodification geographies: Exploring variation across the centre and periphery

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed significant variation in the scale and form of decommodification across the capitalist world economy. To explore these uneven decommodification geographies this article develops a new conceptual framework that combines a critical Polanyian reading of decommodification with Latin American insights into centre-periphery structures and relations. The decommodification of land and labour in Britain (centre) and Ecuador (periphery) are then analysed from this conceptual perspective. The comparative analysis reveals significant variation in the scale and form of decommodification between the two countries during the pandemic. However, some important similarities are also observed, especially in relation to the (de) commodification of land. Here, the article draws on the corporate food regime literature to better understand similarities and differences between Britain and Ecuador. By revealing the uneven and shifting terrain of decommodification, this article makes a novel contribution to wider debates about the capitalist conjuncture and the intensifying crises of neoliberal capitalism.

Debt Economy and Class Transformation in Tunisia: A Critical Comparative Analysis (1860s–1970s)

The progressive integration of Tunisia into the international capital market implies deep institutional and social transformations as well as the positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. From the mid-19th and during the twentieth century, the growing Tunisia’s debt paved the way to a compulsory financial administration of the North African country by 1870. Likewise, this process favoured the development of a capitalist class, whose origins were both exogenous and endogenous, drawing its power from doing business with the global financial élites. Thus, we assist to the birth of a capitalist class with local and international interests, also called afterward compradors. Adopting an original comparative approach, this article shows that the integration of a country into the global economy, mainly when occurring through a growing foreign debt, paves the way not only to the birth of a local capitalist class drawing its power from the circulation of capital but also to the permanent positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. The access to the international capital markets, according to the rules of the controlling powers and elites, makes the indebted country less independent in its economic policy choices, thus modifying its class structure in favour of the new capitalist elites, and their interests.

National Sovereignty and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman

Abstract Recent scholarship on the bildungsroman highlights the ideological implications of bildung in relation to empire and human rights discourse. This essay adds to that scholarship by reading the postcolonial bildungsroman as an expression of the erosion of national sovereignty after decolonization. Bildung in post-SAP (Structural Adjustment Program) novels is contested because the development of a fully modern personality—rational, cosmopolitan, economically agentive, entrepreneurial, nonadversarial—privileged by modernization theory and global institutions symbolically undermines the political sovereignty promised by decolonization. Through an analysis of Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics, this essay argues that such contestation of bildung in post-SAP postcolonial bildungsromans generates narratives of negation in which the imagining of bildung is always deferred to imaginative and political futures. In The Romantics, bildung turns into an enduring historical trauma; Mishra juxtaposes various trajectories of individual and national growth both before and after India's adoption of SAP policies in 1991 to show how the symbolic realization of full and free personality development would paradoxically negate the claims to sovereignty that elevate such personality development as an expression of successful modernization. In The Romantics, as in Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the negation of successful bildung—and the deferral of fully formed visions of “development”—become the only registers in which to register liberatory growth in the peripheries of the capitalist world-economy.

Spanish Fake Sovereignty: From Privatising the Nation-State to Becoming a Digital Colony

Giving policies pompous names, such as ‘Digital Spain 2025’, ‘National Artificial Intelligence Strategy’ (ENIA) or ‘Spain 2050’, the Spanish government wants to roll out a new sovereign power deployed outwards and integrated into the global digital, financial and military sphere. The article argues that this process, which requires handing over legal, social, financial, and economic powers to private corporations, has transformed the country into an incipient ‘digital colony,’ a territory for data mining and the surveillance of society situated on the periphery of the capitalist world economy. On the way to becoming a digital colony, the privatisation of nation-building and popular sovereignty has involved discriminating against minority nations and executing repressive law enforcement policies.

The spiral of state capitalism: labour transformations or the ‘whip of external necessity’?

This article opens a conversation between uneven and combined development (U&CD) and state capitalism studies. It reflects on the potential of U&CD to answer the following questions: why has there been an aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world capitalist economy since the turn of the millennium, and why has this taken an uneven and combined form? I argue that U&CD as an evolving research programme holds great potential in creatively expanding the study of state capitalism and its multi-scalar geographies. It is particularly well positioned to help us elucidate the multilinear and interactive character of present-day state capitalism. U&CD’s heuristics of ‘societal multiplicity’, ‘combination’ and ‘hybridisation’ can help us trace the combinatorial dynamics which result in the cumulative expansion of state prerogatives and their cascading impacts across policy realms and geographic space. Yet the causal mechanisms identified by U&CD (the ‘whip of external necessity’, ‘the privilege of historic backwardness’ and ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’) are unable to grasp contemporary state capitalist transformations in their historical and geographical fullness, notably due to a tendency to misread spatial unevenness as temporal dislocation. Theorising state capitalism requires that we examine the role of multiple and interacting capitalist states in politically mediating historically determinate transformations in the capitalist labour process, and their ramifications in terms of the temporal and geographical dynamics of value production and circulation. Thus, looking at U&CD from the perspective of the new state capitalism reveals both its analytical strengths and limitations for GPE.

The Making of a Slave-Trading Entrepôt: Rio de Janeiro in the Economic Spaces of Mining, 1565-1763

This work explores the making of Rio de Janeiro as a key supplier of enslaved Africans to the silver and gold mining areas of Latin America over the early modern period. The city became a critical component of the South Atlantic system during the long seventeenth century, supplying captives to Spanish America in exchange for Peruvian silver. In the following century, it became an essential part of the Brazilian gold boom that radically transformed Portuguese America. The article discusses the role of coerced Amerindian and African labor in the creation of the basic city structures that allowed for the reproduction of those connections to mining zones and reflects on the broader meanings of this story, framing the specific history of Rio de Janeiro within the broader context of a capitalist world economy.

Cities and migration

ABSTRACT As a prelude to the following essays on nine cities selected as strategic research sites, this introduction traces, in summary fashion, the linkages between migration and the development of the capitalist world economy, including, the rise of cities and their development. The history of migration during these five centuries encompasses the movement of European settlers to the new colonies, followed by three centuries of trans-Atlantic slave trade leading in turn, to deliberate labour recruitment in three continents and, eventually, to the contemporary self-driven flows of both labourers and refugees. A final diagram summarizes this evolution and seeks to situate the origin and development of the nine selected cities within it.

The regulation of international migration in the Cold War: a synthesis and review of the literature

ABSTRACT For a long time, research on international migration during the Cold War maintained that a rigid distinction existed between political emigration, generated by the ideological conflict between liberalism and communism, and labour migration, which was determined by transformations in the capitalist world economy. This article challenges that assumption on several grounds. It starts from the premise that the Cold War was primarily a competition between the capitalist and communist projects of development. It ascribes to this rivalry the establishment of the international system regulating migration as a terrain of ideological confrontation in the early postwar period, and its evolution into one of convergence over development strategies since the 1970s. It reviews both the literature on labour migration to/in Western Europe and the recent studies exploring how socialist Europe also relied on foreign labour recruitment to achieve development. It brings these findings in conversation with research that examines the expansion of economic cooperation between Eastern and Western Europe during the long 1970s. It shows that, in this context, the distinction between economic migrant and political refugee continued to justify the erection of wired walls, this time between an enlarging European Union and the Global South.

America’s Marshall Plan and China’s One Belt and One Road Initiative

Abstract Existing research on the US Marshall Plan and China’s OBOR Initiative has tended to focus on national interests and relations with the countries involved in the projects, assuming the state or interstate relations as the unit of analysis and focusing on the background (or causes), process, and outcomes of the Marshall Plan and Belt and Road Initiative. In contrast to these approaches, this study aims to show the transnational elements (i.e., logics of the capitalist world-economy) of the Marshall Plan and OBOR that both projects have in common. This study also presents how both projects at least partially helped to revitalize and boost global capitalism beyond their own national interests. The theoretical contribution of this study is to show that the logic of global capitalism is part of what keeps the Marshall Plan and OBORs going.

Выбор приоритетного пути повышения уровня конкурентоспособности экономики России в условиях неопределенности мировой конъюнктуры

This article is debatable and is devoted to the consideration of the problem of choosing ways to reform the Russian economy in the conditions of the crisis of the world economic system. The relevance of the proposed discussion is determined by the need to find effective instruments of economic regulation that allow the national economy of Russia to take a worthy competitive place in the changing geo-economic space. The article analyzes the main cause of crises in the world capitalist economy on the basis of the theory of K. Marx, which consists in the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private capitalist form of appropriation of the results of labor. The statistics of the world cyclical crises for the period from 1825 to the present are given. Cyclical crises, generated mainly by economic factors, are repeated periodically through 7–9–11 years with minor deviations. The author considers the cause of the US mortgage crisis and its impact on the economy of other countries, including Russia. Three possible ways of development of the Russian economy are shown: 1) pro-Western; 2) the development of the economy in the interests of the national bourgeoisie; 3) the NEP period of Soviet power, which is successfully used by China. The third way is objectively justified. This is evidenced by the statistics provided in this article. The necessity of changing in the near future the disastrous liberal course of managing the country’s economy, of carrying out a left-centrist financial and economic course towards justified socialism, is justified. The conditions for the transition to a managerial revolution that provides a leap in the development of the country are outlined. The directions for reducing the dependence of the Russian economy on the conditions of the capitalist market are proposed.

A Language Spoken with Words: Decolonization, Knowledge Production and Environmental Injustice in the Work of Abdulrazak Gurnah

The paper analyses the relationship between decolonization, climate change, and environmental injustice as represented in the writings of Abdulrazak Gurnah. Gurnah’s work is considered an example of decolonial literature. Decolonial literature has focused on issues beyond the nature of the colonial subject, highlighting the relationship between the capitalist world economy and the formation of modern decolonial subjectivities, namely the exposure of those subjectivities to environmental injustice. The paper intends to answer the following research question: how does Abdulrazak Gurnah address the articulation between decolonization, climate change, and environmental injustice? The paper argues that Gurnah addresses such an articulation by discussing knowledge production about the colonial subject and the postcolonial self and instituting an association between environmental/climate precarity and biopolitical precarity. Building from two of Gurnah’s novels—By the Sea and Afterlives – the paper debates how Gurnah’s characters are afflicted by the racialization of social and economic relations and biopolitical and climate precarity. Questioning knowledge production about the colonial subject and the postcolonial self is significant because it underscores the importance of transforming how knowledge about climate change is produced. Instituting an association between environmental/climate precarity and biopolitical precarity permits debating how colonial and capitalist power structures are responsible for disseminating environmental injustice, foregrounding the epistemic importance of indigenous climate change studies. The work of Gurnah is critically analyzed, bearing in mind the need to discuss the relevance of addressing climate change and environmental injustice from the perspective of global south literature.

Reflections on Walden Bello

The online censorship and subsequent arrest of scholar-activist Walden Bello is the latest instance of a disconcerting trend during a period of hegemonic crisis. To understand how a respected scholar ended up in jail and in grave legal trouble on very feeble accounts, we have to unpack the full implications of this case, and place it in relation to ongoing structural changes within the world-system—namely, the decline of the United States as global hegemon, the ascendancy of far-right authoritarianism as a popular political framework, and the use of institutions and technologies developed under liberal-democratic rule by authoritarian regimes for purposes of social control during a period of flux. The crisis offers an opportunity to reconfigure systemic arrangements through coordinated solidarity networks characterized by forms of organization and ways of relating that embody prerogatives and values different from those that predominate in the modern world-system and from those that reproduce the capitalist world-economy; which, more likely than not, will have authoritarian tendencies in the decades to come. As a conclusion, we offer some of the possibilities the global left has for these upcoming decades in regards of large coalitions aimed at changing the structure of the world-system at large.

Experience and Prospects of Interaction between Russia and the Modern World System

The article considers the problem of Russia’s positioning in the Western-centric world-system. The views of domestic and foreign researchers have been analyzed. It is shown that the constants for Russia are the position of the semi-periphery within the framework of the capitalist world-economy, the features of a land and transcontinental power, as well as an empire, which is characterized by integration imperatives that determine territorial expansion, taking into account the alternation of periods of integration and disintegration, which interact in various proportions with the processes of modernization. The external and internal political results of the cycles of Russian modernization in the context of correlation with the influence of the capitalist world-economy have been characterized. It is substantiated that modernization in Russia led to the most positive consequences when the state was least dependent on the Western-centric capitalist world-economy and strove for autarky and transformations based on the mobilization of internal resources (a conservative model of modernization), which contributed to the achievement of true sovereignty, raising the level of economic development, domestic political centralization and successful integration policy. Relevant recommendations and scenarios for the development of the situation in terms of the correlation of the waves of the Kondratiev cycles with the periods of reforms/counter-reforms in Russia, as well as the cycles of evolution of the world political and economic system with the peculiarities of the Russian political system and foreign policy have been presented. In this regard, two main scenarios for the prospects for interaction between Russia and the capitalist world-economy have been identified. The first scenario is based on the analysis of the correlation of Kondratiev cycles with periods of reforms/counter-reforms in Russia, and the second one is guided by the logic of complete cycles of evolution of the world political and economic system, which seems to be more reasonable.

Dale W. Tomich, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Carlos Venegas Fornias, and Rafael de Bivar Marquese. Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Slavery was under attack in the Americas during the nineteenth century just as it reached the plantation as a form of agricultural production. In this stunning book, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, researchers from Brazil, the United States, and Cuba on “second slavery” have turned a well-funded international project into a short but brilliantly illustrated survey of how plantations worked to produce, through enslaved labor, coffee, sugar, and cotton for an expanding global market. The aim of Tomich, Monzote, Fornias, and Marquese, brilliantly realized, is to show how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy in the nineteenth century led to new zones of commodity production. They argue, convincingly, that second slavery was different from slavery before the advent of industrialization insofar as new environments of mechanized plantation labor and modern management methods radically transformed how enslaved labor worked in growing tropical crops that were increasingly part of global mass markets. They are especially good at showing what happened when enslaved people interacted with new forms of technologies and calculated systems of production in which enslaved people were units of production more than they were people. Their conclusion seems right. The new commodity frontiers of the second slavery, dominated by large plantations that transformed and dominated the landscapes they occupied, were no less capitalist factories than the mills of Manchester.

Hegemonic world orders, distributional (in)justice and global social change

Abstract Focusing on the relationship between distributional justice and hegemonic world orders, this article turns attention to a fundamental contradiction in historical capitalism between profitability and legitimacy that manifests itself in successive creative destructions of hegemonic orders. Through a comparative–historical analysis of world hegemonies, I show that increasing distributional injustices during periods of ‘legitimacy crisis’ compel new hegemonic powers to pragmatically address some of these injustices as a part of their hegemony-building strategies. Despite growing efforts by world hegemonic powers to address such distributional injustices, social and global inequalities in the capitalist world-economy tend to increase over time. As social and global inequalities increase, new hegemonic powers are compelled to make greater promises and to undertake much greater efforts to address distributional injustices in order to gain intellectual and moral leadership in an emergent new world order. Yet, none of these efforts become successful in the long run because even the partial successes of redistribution policies pave the way for ‘profitability crises’ and undermined world hegemonies. This dynamic poses several challenges to achieving global distributional justice in an emergent new capitalist world order.

Trajetórias divergentes: a América Latina e o Leste Asiático na economia-mundo capitalista

Objectives/Context: The main objective of this paper is to present an explanation for the divergent development trajectories of two regions of the capitalist world-economy, Latin America and East Asia. Methodology: starting from the concepts of world-economy, world region, regional focus and long durée, it is intended to verify how the forms of integration of the two regions to the capitalist worldeconomy affected them in three essential dimensions for economic development: State, capital accumulation and technological capability, from the 16th century to the present. Conclusions: having autonomously developed the three dimensions analyzed to the point of equating to the West at least until the end of the 17th century, when it was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy in the first half of the 19th century, East Asia was able to take advantage of this integration and advance in global hierarchies of wealth and power. On the other hand, Latin America, which as a geopolitical entity was born together with the capitalist world-economy in the 16th century, was at that moment at a relatively low level of development in these dimensions, which, together with colonialism, continued to restrict its development and maintaining the region in its historical position as a periphery of the capitalist world-economy. Originality: the originality of this research is to establish a historically grounded principle of variation to explain the divergence in recent development trajectories of Latin America and East Asia.