Capitalist World Economy Research Articles

Chilean Insights for Progressive Constitutionalism

This article outlines the global importance of the failed proposal for a new Chilean constitution. It shows the potential of constitutional processes to deescalate heightened social confrontation as well as the need of consensus building. In particular, this article focuses on how the Chilean proposal deals with rights. Its mainstreaming of progressive demands is as important as its implicit rejection of the critique of rights voiced in the Global North. The article concludes with a note on substantive equality in a capitalist world economy.

Finding a Germ of Transition to Capitalism within China

Recent research shows the need to reinterpret nineteenth-century China’s economic condition, which can be defined as the beginning point of a transition to capitalism. I expand on the theoretical implications of the historical capitalism over the longue duree to theorize the great transformation of China’s economy from pre-capitalist to capitalist. I present a theoretical framework of China’s incorporation process that highlights how the nineteenth-century Chinese economy was gradually turned into a capitalist economy within the dynamics of the capitalist world economy, which led to China’s capitalist transition. To compartmentalize the nineteenth-century China’s incorporation process, I present two ideal types, the capitalist world economy’s positive and negative impacts and China’s active and passive responses. Then, I analyze how each incorporation process makes way for the Chinese economy’s capitalist transition. I also present historical evidences that Qing governmental apparatus, directly or indirectly, serves to foster China’s capitalist transition. It informs us of a hitherto unnoticed phenomenon, non-European areas’ capitalist transition; engagement with Western impact, which triggered both positive and negative impacts on China; and China’s active and passive responses. This serves to find a legacy of the nineteenth century China, as a tumultuous and complex initial stage of China’s capitalist transition process.

ARE SANCTIONS FOR LOSERS? A NETWORK STUDY OF TRADE SANCTIONS

<p>Studies built on dependency and world-system theory using network approaches have showed that international trade is structured into clusters of ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ countries performing distinct functions. However, few have used these methods to investigate how sanctions affect the position of the countries involved in the capitalist world-economy. Yet, this topic has acquired pressing relevance due to the emergence of economic warfare as a key geopolitical weapon since the 1950s. And even more so in light of the preeminent role that sanctions have played in the US and their allies’ response to the Russian-Ukrainian war. Applying several clustering techniques designed for complex and temporal networks, this paper shows that a shift in the pattern of commerce away from sanctioning countries and towards neutral/friendly ones. Additionally, there are suggestions that these shifts may lead to the creation of an alternative ‘core’ that interacts with the world-economy’s periphery bypassing traditional ‘core’ countries such as EU member States and the US.</p>

Walter Rodney and the method of political economy: retrieving a critical-historical IPE

Walter Rodney is a household name in IPE. Traditionally, scholars place Rodney in the tradition of dependency theory. More recently, scholars of ‘racial capitalism’ have identified Rodney as a foundational analyst of the empirical and conceptual relationship of racism and capitalism. However, while Rodney’s work is often invoked in contemporary literature, it is rarely discussed. This paper offers a detailed engagement with Rodney’s major works and situates them in their broader intellectual context in the history of IPE. In doing so, the paper highlights three major contributions. First, Rodney locates processes of working-class formation within the historical emergence and structural constraints of the capitalist world economy, breaking down conventional divides between domestic and international political economy. Second, Rodney demonstrates the centrality of unfree labor to the extension and reproduction of capitalism on a world scale. Third, Rodney highlights the integral role of race and racism in working-class formation, but stops short of positing these relations as functionally necessary to capitalist reproduction – a nuance which distinguishes him from current fashions. The paper argues that retrieving these three contributions can help renew a critical-historical IPE centered on the development of – and challenges to – working-class power in the global economy.

The Controversy with Immanuel Wallerstein: the Industrial Revolution and Globalization as the Great Turning Points of Modern Times

Wallerstein states that the only social revolution, or the «great turning point» of Modern Times, is the formation of the European capitalist world–economy during the «long» XVI century. Contrary to this, the author argues that two more great fractures can be distinguished in the history of Modern Times. The first of them was the industrial revolution of the XIX century, when three processes coincided, pro­voked by the invention of the steam engine – the mechanization of factory production, the energy rev­olution and the change of logistics. The emergence of globalization required a combination of several circumstances that developed into a single complex at the end of the twentieth century: the absorption of the remaining large external zones by the capitalist world system, the information and communication revolution, the establishment of geopolitical unipolarism, the dominance of the ideology of neoliberal globalism on a global scale.

Southern Senegambia in the World System Dynamics: from Medieval to the Atlantic Era

This paper seeks to identify the shift in the focus of academic scholarship in the use of theoretical and conceptual tools of inquiry in the examination of restructuring world economy within the framework of world system analysis. It further focuses on the rapid social, political, and economic transformation and change as consequence of the Malian political hegemony that led to the reinforcement of Mandinka-speaking cultural and political domination through the establishment of Kabu and other Manding principalities along the banks of The Gambia River prior to the expansion of European capitalist economic advancement in the fifteenth century. It also demonstrates the manifest transformation after the withdrawal of the Malian imperial control and the subsequent rise of the Atlantic trading system, which facilitated the establishment of capitalist world economy that also gave rise to European competition over the control of strategic viable commercial sphere of influence in Southern Senegambia.

Social Structures of Accumulation in a Semiperiphery Country

This article claims that the world-system approach can serve as a mediating force in understanding the social structure(s) of accumulation (SSA) dynamics in Turkey. The argument for using the world-system approach has two complementary supports. First, the Turkish SSAs are driven by the capitalist world economy. As such, the author focuses on Turkey’s Westernization efforts and dependency on core countries and international organizations under their control. Second, domestic struggles and political decisions related to the Turkish SSAs are not limited to the main variables of the SSA theory, such as labor-capital conflict, profit rate, and economic crises. Thus, the author shows that phenomena such as the religion-secularity conflict, the struggle between anti-imperialism and anticommunism, and military interventions are crucial in SSA formations. In support of this argumentation, the author discusses the regulationist and neoliberal SSAs in Turkey. JEL Classification: J50, J08, B51, P16

Revisiting antisystemic movements in the Global South: struggles against exclusion and struggles against exploitation

Antisystemic movements have been used as a key concept in world-­systems analysis to explain emancipatory struggles against the dominant structure of the capitalist world-economy. This study attempts to develop a more inclusive concept of antisystemic movements by focusing on the primary themes of emancipatory struggles – exploitation and exclusion – in the Global South. Struggles against exploitation are movements that mobilise people to demand an end to their absolute or relative poverty, austerities, economic grievances and dispossession. Struggles against exclusion are movements that contest processes of exclusion from local, domestic and international communities and polities. Nationalist mobilisations and ethnic conflicts have been the primary issues in these struggles. Struggles against exclusion could extend to mobilisations for democracy and the expansion of citizenship rights. Furthermore, an empirical analysis of popular protests conducted by compiling protest events in the Global South reported in The New York Times from 1870 to 2016 demonstrates that the most widely shared theme was the struggle against exclusion. Over time, the struggles against exclusion as emancipatory movements have remained a central issue in antisystemic activities in the Global South.

COVID-19 and Imperial Value: Commodity Chains, Global Monopolies, and Catastrophe Capitalism

ABSTRACT Why has the COVID-19 pandemic manifested itself differently in different parts of the capitalist world-economy? The analysis here examines the way in which the system of “imperial value,” as articulated by Samir Amin and others, has governed the relations of individual nation states to the onset of SARS-CoV-2. The result is enormous disparities between the Global North and the Global South, as well as between countries that are relatively more capitalist and those that are relatively more socialist, along the socioeconomic spectrum. The impact of COVID-19 is thus mediated by a country’s position within the global value chain dominated by monopolistic multinational corporations. In this way, the structure of the contemporary world system has only served to worsen the global effects of the pandemic, in line with the general character of today’s catastrophe capitalism.

ИНТЕЛЕКТУАЛНО ЈЕ ПОЛИТИЧКО: ЖИВОТ И ДЕЛО ИМАНУЕЛА ВОЛЕРСТИНА (1930–2019)

This text is an attempt to lucidly present the intellectual biography and theoretical work of Immanuel Wallerstein, the main architect and exponent of world-systems analysis. Given that the entire Wallerstein’s work has been devoted to understanding the reality of the modern world-system as the fundament of every prudent action, this paper should simultaneously be read as a homage to one of the greatest names of the 20th century sociology, and as a reflexion on chaotic present and uncertain future of the world we live in. Having in mind his wide range of scholarly interests and a gargantuan oeuvre left as a legacy, we have selected four main topics discussed in Wallerstein’s work. After a concise review of Wallerstein’s intellectual biography in the introduction, the first part focuses on the methodological and epistemological postulates of world-systems theory. The second part discusses the issue known as the “long sixteenth century”, that is, the genesis of the capitalist worldeconomy, which is also the topic of the first volume of Wallerstein’s most important work The Modern World-System. The third part reviews the historical trajectory of antisystemic movements, from the Old Left in the 19th and the first part of the 20th century, to world revolution of 1968 as a turning point in their development, to modern varieties of these movements. The fourth part discusses the issue of rise and fall of the United States of America as a hegemonic power of the world-system.

The Rise of Pacific Powers in the 19<SUP>th</SUP> Century Capitalist World-System and China’s Incorporation Process

This paper seeks to find the roles of Pacific powers in China’s incorporation process. So far, China’s incorporation process into the modern world-system has been interpretation as being controlled by European powers. However, this is only one aspect of the relationship in the modern world-system in the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century. To delve into the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century China’s unprecedented juncture led by the expansion of the capitalist world economy, I highlight the roles of Pacific powers like Russia, the United States, and Japan. To that end, I show how the Pacific powers newly emerged in the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century and investigate how each Pacific power influenced China’s incorporation process during the long 19<SUP>th</SUP> century.

The global south, degrowth and The Simpler Way movement: the need for structural solutions at the global level

ABSTRACT In a recent edition of Globalizations, Hickel and Trainer discuss the degrowth and The Simpler Way movement in regard to the global South. This author contributes a different point of view to the discussion using the world-systems analysis and highlights that to have any successful movement able to address global challenges, the differences between the South and North in terms of economic and political systems must be considered. Many South countries have rentier oligarchic systems, which require Western researchers to be more cautious about what they propose in terms of transitions. Furthermore, an effective solution for global challenges must go beyond behavioural or national strategies and be structural at the global level. This author claims that complete economic and political independence of the South from the capitalist world-economy is the only solution that can address global environmental and inequality challenges and should be considered as a long-term vision by degrowth and the TSW movement.

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF NIGERIA’S FOREIGN POLICY DURING THE SECOND REPUBLIC: LESSONS AND ALTERNATIVES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

This study examines the socio-economic and political foundations of Nigeria’s foreign policy during the Second Republic and their lessons in charting a new path in the 21st Century. It explores how neo-colonialism, within the context of an international capitalist economy, intensified class antagonism, socio-economic and political contradictions, which impinged negatively on the foreign policy initiatives and postures of Nigeria between 1979 and 1983. Drawing insights from the Marxist political economy approach, this fresh study departs from the common orientation of economic determinism by focusing on the complex interplay between the political, economic and social subsystems through the historical materialist approach to which little attention has hitherto been paid. The study made use of primary data through the conduct of interviews and also relied on secondary sources. The study found that the distorted and peripheral role of dependent neo-colonial Nigeria in the world capitalist economy, its sole reliance on oil and the neglect of agriculture generated socio-political and economic crises that constrained it from pursuing viable foreign policy goals during the period under study. The paper concluded that the pursuit of bold and impactful foreign policy goals by Nigeria depends on its ability to reactivate the non-oil sector of its economy, particularly the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

The position of the state in global capitalism: a Polanyian perspective

The aim of the article is to analyze the changing position of the state in the capitalist world economy form the perspective of Karl Polanyi’s political theory. The main thesis of the article is that the position of the state largely depends on the character of rules constituting global political economy. Three world regimes were singled out (gold standard, Bretton Woods system, and hyperglobalization), and the position of the state within each system was analyzed. If we agree with Robert Cox that each world order is a product of ideas, institutions and power relations, then we may expect the institutional structure of the world economy to evolve following the changes in the underlying constellation of ideas and social forces.

The Egyptian revolution of January 25, 2011 as an anti-systemic movement

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the Egyptian revolution as an anti-systemic movement. It illustrates how Egypt’s position in the world-economy has affected its political economy orientation and led to the marginalization of critical masses, who launched the revolution. Design/methodology/approach The paper follows Wallerstein’s world-system analysis focusing on the anti-systemic movement concept. The paper analyzes the Egyptian case based on Annales school’s longue durée concept, which is a perspective to study developments of social relations historically. Findings The Egyptian revolution was not only against the autocratic regime but also against the power structure resulting from the neoliberal economic policies, introduced as a response to the capitalism crisis. It represented the voice of the forgotten. The revolution was one of the anti-systemic movements resisting the manifestations of the capitalist world-economy. Originality/value This paper aims at proving that the Egyptian revolution was an anti-systemic movement; which will continue to spread as a rejection to the world-system and to aspire a more democratic and egalitarian world. The current COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating the crisis of the world-system.

Defining financial reforms in the 19th-century capitalist world-economy: The Ottoman case (1838–1914)

Capitalist-style reforms were an important factor in the economic and social evolution of the Late Ottoman Empire. This research investigates how foreign governments and financiers, and especially Britain, influenced these various financial reforms implemented in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. The chief purpose of such reforms was to integrate the Empire into the capitalist world-economy by imposing, both directly and indirectly, the adoption of rules, institutions, attitudes and procedures amenable to exploitation on the part of foreign and also local capitalists. Drawing on primary sources, mainly from the United Kingdom’s National Archives, the article argues that foreign pressure for financial reforms was instrumental in the Empire’s economic subjection to the rules and norms that regulated the capitalist world-economy, most notably in the field of public finance, banking and the monetary sector. It takes a long-term view and largely adheres to the scholarly evolution of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and world-systems theory and methodology developed by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, adopting a multidisciplinary and macro-scale perspective. Special attention is paid to the correlation between secondary and primary sources in support of empirical evidence. More broadly, this research contributes to the literature on the capitalist world-economy and brings a set of theoretical frameworks to bear on defining the role of financial reforms induced mainly by Britain in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.

Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside: a research agenda

AbstractOver the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.

Notes from the Editors, June 2021

buy this issue&#x0D; Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis constitutes a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control. This received view, however, is incorrect on all counts.

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

A posição da Índia na economia-mundo capitalista e o desenvolvimento da indústria de software nacional: a gaiola de ouro

Este artigo tem como objetivo investigar como a posição estrutural da Índia na economia-mundo capitalista condicionou o desenvolvimento da indústria de software nacional. Por meio da revisão bibliográfica e da análise de indicadores econômicos é mostrada a relação entre os condicionantes sistêmicos e o desenvolvimento da indústria de software indiana. Identificou-se que inicialmente a Índia empreendeu esforços para equiparar o seu desenvolvimento em hardware e software com o de Estados centrais. Contudo, as pressões para a liberalização econômica e a necessidade de sanar o persistente déficit na balança de pagamentos levaram