Political Economy Tradition Research Articles

Political centers in context: Depositional histories at Formative Period Kala Uyuni, Bolivia

In this paper, we examine the development of a Middle Formative (800–200BC) village and a Late Formative (200 BC–AD 475) political center at the site of Kala Uyuni on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia. Traditional political economy models rely on the spatial distribution of archaeological sites documented through site survey to define and explain the appearance of political centers. Recent scholarship on ‘depositional histories’ offers a framework for interpreting the dynamic and contingent political histories of such places using rich, stratigraphically excavated data. Our approach sheds new light on the diversity of practices and internally complex political processes that contributed to the transformation of Kala Uyuni from village to political center. We argue that serious attention to such ‘depositional histories’ has the potential to transform larger archaeological narratives in the region, and contribute to a more subtle understanding of the development of political landscapes.

Public Choice and the Virginia Tradition of Political Economy

This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia tradition in political economy. While the Virginia tradition originated during the neoclassical period and its widespread use of demonstrable reasoning, the home of the tradition resides in the classical tradition and its grounding in plausible reasoning. While the classical-neoclassical divide is commonly based on the explanation of prices and allocations, this is a sensible classificatory scheme only from within the neoclassical tradition. By contrast, scholarship within the spirit of Virginia political economy is more at home with the classical placement of the institutions of human governance and interaction into the analytical foreground, with prices and allocations being relegated to the background. This chapter is followed by an Appendix that contains a preliminary draft of the book’s Preface to provide context for the individual chapters.

Average and Marginal Labour Values Are: On Log (N)-A Reply to Hagendorf

1. introductionThis article addresses a debate in Political Economy that has its origins in the 1870s with, on the one hand, the publication of Stanley Jevons' Theory of Political Economy in 1871 and, on the other, Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875. It is well known that in his article Marx advocated a communist system of economy in which workers were to be paid in labour tokens and could use these to acquire goods containing the same quantity of labour. Jevons became famous for his role in founding the marginalist school of economics, which, in the West, became the main alternative to the tradition of Classical Political Economy represented by Marx.What has not, until recently, been noticed was that there are actually linkages between the ideas in these two publications, linkages that surfaced in debates in the USSR in the 1960s.The issues addressed here are the feasibility of Marx's idea of an economic calculus based on labour time and on whether such a calculus can best be done using Marx's own definition of labour value, or whether that developed by Jevons should be used instead. We will review Klaus Hagendorf's (2014) advocacy of Jevons style of interpretation of labour value published in this issue, and then go on to present an empirical investigation into the feasibility of calculating labour values. This empirical investigation publishes for the first time an important property: the network structure of an industrial economy. This property means that proposals like those of the Soviet economist Novozhilov to use labour values directly as a tool of economic calculation may be more feasible than has hitherto been thought.Klaus Hagendorf has done political economy a service by pointing out the degree to which Jevons, the founder of marginalism, can still be described as a follower of the labour theory of value. Klaus Hagendorf points out that for Jevons the prices of commodities should be proportional to their relative marginal labour contents and argues that this marginalist interpretation of the labour theory of value is the most scientific one to adopt.1.1. Is Klaus Hagendorf's Claim Justified?Readers will be aware that the conventional interpretation of the labour theory of value emphasises Marx's definition of the value of a commodity being the average amount of labour that society has to devote to its production.The average amount of labour required to make something is not necessarily the same as the marginal amount of labour. The average labour required can in principle be above or below the marginal labour, so the issue of whether to use marginal or average labour content as the definition of value is not theoretically vacuous.Klaus Hagendorf goes on to argue that the Soviet economist Novozhilov was right to redefine the labour theory of value in terms of marginal labour content because this is the appropriate definition for socialist planning. Marginalist economics, Klaus Hagendorf argues, while it is not an appropriate theory for capitalist economy, it is the right theory to use for resource allocation in a socialist economy. In a capitalist economy, he says, monopolistic restrictions mean that marginalist theory is not appropriate, but it does potentially allow a way of computing the optimal allocation of resources in a socialist economy.This thesis of Hagendorf obviously has quite a long and respectable pedigree. Lange (1938), one of the most forceful Western theoretical advocates of socialism in the 1930s, argued from basically the same position as did Dickinson (1933). As economists trained in the marginalist tradition, they used this paradigm to structure their arguments for socialism. But they did not mix this with the labour theory of value. By the time Novozhilov was expressing his ideas in the 1950s, Lange was working for the socialist government in Poland and went on to hold high government office there. If it seems to us now to have been a genuine innovation for Novozhilov to combine marginal arguments with the labour theory of value in a planning context, it is perhaps worth recalling that this is not so far from what Lange was working on in the 1950s and 1960s (Lange 1969) so these sorts of approaches seem to have been part of the spirit of the age among Com-econ economists of the period. …

Critical political economy of communications: A mid-term review

Abstract If we take the late 1960s as a starting point, an explicitly defined ‘critical political economy of communications’ is nearly 50 years old. How salient today are the core concerns that shaped this tradition? What are the emergent themes in contemporary critical media studies? While critical political economy’s attention to the way media industries are organized and financed has become a more central consideration across the field of media and communication studies, this mainstreaming has been accompanied by disconnection from the critical political economy tradition. Reviewing that paradox, the article identifies emergent research themes and argues for the relevance of critical political economy approaches for contemporary investigations into the problems of the media.

Footloose and duty-free? Reflections on European Union – Anti-Dumping Measures on Certain Footwear from China

AbstractEuropean Union (EU) anti-dumping duties imposed on Chinese leather footwear imports led to a challenge before the WTO Dispute Settlement body. The Panel ruled that the EU's presumption that Chinese exporters are subject to economy-wide non-market-economy anti-dumping duties was inconsistent with WTO obligations. The EU declined to appeal this outcome and subsequently changed its anti-dumping regulation in response. This dispute also illustrates the rapidly changing structure of global manufacturing and how these changes can scramble the traditional political economy of import restrictions. In addition, the case highlights how EU members' positions on trade remedy actions can depend importantly on national production patterns and firms' responses to economic pressures from globalization and the further development of global supply chains.

The territorial fix

The article heeds recent calls for closer attention to the geographies of markets. Speaking primarily to a rich tradition of geographical political economy, it argues that such geographies are highly material to value and profit creation and realization. In developing this argument, the article invokes the concept of a ‘territorial fix’, whereby territory is conceptualized as a technology of market-making geared to putting in place and optimizing the conditions for capital accumulation. The article draws selectively and critically on studies of territorialized market formation and pricing in two globalized industries – pharmaceuticals and television – to formulate this argument.

Forecasts of the 2012 US Presidential Election based on Candidates’ Perceived Competence in Handling the Most Important Issue

The Big-Issue Model predicts election outcomes based on voters’ perceptions of candidates’ ability to handle the most important issue. It provided accurate forecasts of the 2012 US presidential election. The results demonstrate the model's usefulness if one issue clearly dominates the campaign, such as the state of the economy in the 2012 election. It is also particularly valuable if economic fundamentals disagree, a situation in which forecasts from traditional political economy models suggest high uncertainty. The model provides immediate feedback to political candidates and parties on the success of their campaign and can advise them on which issues to assign the highest priority.

Game Theory and the Architecture of Social Theory: Reflections on Luigino Bruni's Ethos of the Market

This essay is written for a symposium on Luigino Bruni’s The Genesis and Ethos of the Market. That book identifies a tradition of Neapolitan civil economy that arose in the 18th century, and which the author opposes to the more familiar tradition of Smithian political economy. The difference in traditions is located in contrasting theories of society in which markets are situated. Where Bruni reduces the Smithian tradition to a prisoners’ or Hobbesian dilemma, he reduces the Neapolitan tradition to a stag hunt. While this essay accepts the general superiority of the stag hunt as a framework for organizing social theory, it also explains the misleading character of Bruni’s reduction of society to a universal stag hunt. In place of that reduction, this essay treats societies as ecologies of stag hunts which in turn leads to recognition that societies are continually turbulent and conflictual and not placid and peaceful.

Following Washington’s lead

By examining the Dutch press’s reporting on the run-up to the war in Iraq this paper provides evidence that Dutch foreign news is structurally biased in favor of the interests of political and economic elites. Despite a priori plausibility and already existing supporting evidence, this observation is rarely made in the scholarship, in part because the Dutch field of communication scholarship lacks a coherent political-economic perspective. This paper then presents empirical evidence for the relevance of the Anglo-American tradition of political economy to the study of the media in a continental European country.

Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE: A critical historiography of the discipline from the classical to the modern era

ABSTRACTIn this article and in Part 2 I advance a ‘critical historiography’ of IPE which excavates to the deepest foundations of the discipline. For while I very much welcome Benjamin Cohen's seminal historiographical intervention, nevertheless it obscures two foundational properties of IPE. First, identifying 1970 as the birth-year of IPE produces a distorted image of the discipline's purpose and historiography that can begin to be remedied by rehabilitating the originary era of classical political economy. Second, focussing on issues revolving around methodology and epistemology obscures the deeper Eurocentric metanarratival foundations upon which the vast majority of IPE scholarship between 1760–2012 stands. Specifically, I reveal the various Eurocentric metanarratives that underpin the orthodox traditions of classical political economy (Smith and List) and modern IPE (Gilpin and Keohane). My conclusion is that rather than producing positivist/objective (or even critical) explanations of the world economy, most of IPE has, often unwittingly, defended, promoted or celebrated Western civilization as the highest or ideal referent in the world. I follow this up in Part 2 by deconstructing open economy politics to bring my historiography upto the present while advancing an alternative non-Eurocentric empirical and theoretical research agenda for what I call inter-civilizational political economy.

The Land Rush and Classic Agrarian Questions of Capital and Labour: a systematic scoping review of the socioeconomic impact of land grabs in Africa

This paper has two main objectives. First, to address the problematic of the socioeconomic impact of land deals in sub-Saharan Africa by looking at what we know from the available literature so far, namely what has been claimed and how much research has been done, as well as why we do not know very much despite the quantity of material published. This is done via a systematic scoping review, which aims to avoid some of the biases inherent in conventional literature reviews and to provide evidence for some basic features of the emerging research on land grabs in Africa, with specific reference to their contribution to the understanding of livelihood impacts. Second, the article links empirical questions about the impact and implications of land grabs with a discussion of alternative (neglected) research questions, notably the implications of the current land rush phenomenon for the classic agrarian questions of capital and labour, as understood in agrarian political economy. Thus the paper proposes a re-engagement with debates on the classic agrarian questions in a Marxist political economy tradition in order to move the land grab research agenda towards more conceptually and empirically challenging research questions.

Workers, State and Development in Brazil. Powers of Labour, Chains of Value, by BenSelwyn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi+208. £65 (hb). ISBN: 9780719085314

__Abstract__ This book is written in the best of political economy tradition. Selwyn places class and labour at the centre of his analysis of Brazil’s agrarian change and capitalist development. The text starts with an impressive, enlightening and critical discussion of global commodity chain analysis within mainly Marxist and world systems theories of capitalist development. The author engages with a large number of authors such as Banaji, Bernstein, Brenner, Byres, Gereffi, Kaplinsky, Silver, E.P. Thompson, Wallerstein,Wood, E.O.Wright and, interestingly, Schumpeter. In a most original way, he weaves these different contributions into a theoretical framework appropriate for his research on the struggles of rural labour and how they shape processes of capitalist development. Selwyn’s aim is to write labour history from the bottom up within the context of globalization.

The Responsibilities of Communication Scholars

Communication scholars hold special knowledge and occupy positions of power. This article examines the question of whether communication scholars have particular responsibilities to assist in the propagation of truth, enhance the debate on ideas, provide insight into the universe of media technology, and engage in public citizenship. Drawing on philosophical and political economy texts, the author brings the political economy tradition into Denzin’s “critical pedagogy” project. Political economy’s challenge is to expand its contribution to educational reform and deepen its commitment beyond class to race, gender, and ethnicity.

The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital: An Introduction

The past half-century has been dominated by the rise of media to a commanding position in the social life of most people and nations, to the point where it is banal to regard this as the “information age.” The once-dazzling ascension of television in the 1950s and ‘60s now looks like the horse-and-buggy era when one assesses the Internet, smartphones, and the digital revolution. For social theorists of all stripes communication has moved to center stage. And for those on the left, addressing the role of communication in achieving social change and then maintaining popular rule in the face of reactionary backlash is now a primary concern.… political economists of communication, including one of us, identified themselves as in the tradition of radical political economy, but with a sophisticated appreciation of media that had escaped.… [the stellar critique of journalism produced… by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky]. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy were occasionally held up by political economists of communication as representing the sort of traditional Marxists who underappreciated the importance of media, communication, and culture.… We were never especially impressed by this criticism. To us, Monopoly Capital, and the broader political economy of Baran and Sweezy, far from ignoring communication, provided key elements for a serious study of the subject. [Note: this article was released in three parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3]This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Future of the Commons - Beyond Market Failure and Government Regulation

Traditional economic models of how to manage environmental problems relating to renewable natural resources, such as fisheries, have tended to recommend either government regulation or privatisation and the explicit definition of property rights.These traditional models ignore the practical reality of natural resource management. Many communities are able to spontaneously develop their own approaches to managing such common-pool resources. In the words of Mark Pennington: ‘[Professor Ostrom’s] book Governing the Commons is a superb testament to the understanding that can be gained when economists observe in close-up detail how people craft arrangements to solve problems in ways often beyond the imagination of textbook theorists.’In particular, communities are often able to find stable and effective ways to define the boundaries of a common-pool resource, define the rules for its use and effectively enforce those rules.The effective management of a natural resource often requires ‘polycentric’ systems of governance where various entities have some role in the process. Government may play a role in some circumstances, perhaps by providing information to resource users or by assisting enforcement processes through court systems.Elinor Ostrom’s work in this field, for which she won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, was grounded in the detailed empirical study of how communities managed common-pool resources in practice.It is essential that we avoid the ‘panacea problem.’ There is no correct way to manage common-pool resources that will always be effective. Different ways of managing resources will be appropriate in different contexts – for example within different cultures or where there are different physical characteristics of a natural resource.Nevertheless, there are principles that we can draw from the detailed study of the salient features of different cases to help us understand how different common-pool resources might be best managed; which rules systems and systems of organisation have the best chance of success or failure; and so on.Elinor Ostrom’s approach has been praised by the left, who often see it as being opposed to free-market privatisation initiatives. In fact, her approach sits firmly within the classical liberal tradition of political economy. She observes communities freely choosing their own mechanisms to manage natural resource problems without government coercion or planning.In developing a viable approach to the management of the commons, it is important, among other things, that a resource can be clearly defined and that the rules governing the use of the resource are adapted to local conditions. This suggests that rules imposed from outside, such as by government agencies, are unlikely to be successful.There are important areas of natural resource management where Elinor Ostrom’s ideas should be adopted to avoid environmental catastrophe. Perhaps the most obvious example relevant to the UK is in European Union fisheries policy. Here, there is one centralised model for the management of the resource that is applied right across the European Union, ignoring all the evidence about the failure of that approach.

The New Macro Political Economy of Alberto Alesina

The paper examines the scientific work of Alberto Alesina as leader of a new school of macroeconomic political economy which has renovated and broadened the content of this branch of the economic science. His political economy is not dominated by the axiomatic normative economics, where benevolent planners maximize the aggregate welfare dressed in simplistic neo-Keynesian clothing. After an examination of its roots in the Italian tradition of political economy and public finance the paper makes a comparison with the public choice approach, with decision-making by the electors and politicians is done. However, Alesina new macro-economic perspective incorporates the hypothesis of rational agents while the public choice approach is inherently micro economic and is generally based on limited rationally.

Anthropology and the commodity form: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum

Anthropologists working in the political economy tradition have generated a sizeable amount of work that focuses on commodities. This article discusses approaches that focus on the form and structure of the commodity, in particular the work of Lukács, Sohn-Rethel and Benjamin, and uses them to examine the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, an institution where encyclopedic statistics and anthropology were especially conditioned by commodity relations. These authors help the anthropology of commodities to grasp both the relation between political economy and culture, and the influence of commodity on the discipline itself.

Hilferding on derivatives

Rudolf Hilferding has always been regarded as a leading Marxist scholar. His theoretical intervention is still considered to be benchmark in Political Economy. Nevertheless, Hilferding's approach to derivatives has been left untouched. The aim of this paper is precisely to fill this gap in the literature. Hilferding realised that the development of the stock exchange was indeed parallel to another important event: the emergence of standardised derivative exchanges; he underlined their economic significance for the organisation of capitalism. In spite of how one appraises the final outcome of his analysis, the intention to incorporate futures markets in his general approach and to analyse them using Marxian theoretical categories is quite exceptional in the long tradition of political economy.

Methodological and normative individualism in The Calculus

I came to The Calculus of Consent not as an economist interested in extending economic analysis into the political realm but as a student of sociology who—influenced by Karl Popper’s critical rationalism—was dissatisfied with what counted as “theory” in his chosen field and had turned to Smithean classical political economy and the so-called “new” political economy of the 1960s in search of a theoretical approach to social phenomena that promised a more solid foundation. As a beginning student, I had come across the writings of Hans Albert, the principal advocate of Popperian methodology in Germany, and was instantly fascinated, and convinced, by what he had to say about a methodologically sound empirical social science in general and about the tradition of classical political economy as “a general sociological research program” (Albert 1967, 1979) in particular.1 In my dissertation (The two sociologies—individualism and collectivism in social theory, Vanberg 1975) in which I defended the individualist-economic tradition in social science against the collectivist Comte-Durkheim tradition in sociology I referred, though only once, to The Calculus. Drawing largely on Hayek’s writings in the history of social thought, my main interest was in the theoretical tradition that revolves around “the twin concepts of the formation of spontaneous orders and of selective evolution” (Hayek 1988: 146), a tradition that had little to say about the problems of collective action that The Calculus focuses on. Such neglect of one of the “two kinds of order” that Hayek (1973: 36ff.) had contrasted— namely “spontaneous order,” exemplified paradigmatically by the market order, and “organization,” i.e., order created by deliberate coordination—I found increasingly dissatisfying, and I began to look for contributions that might fill the missing second half of a truly general and consistently individualistic social theory. This led me to return to The Calculus. In my habilitation thesis (Market and organization—individualistic social theory and the

Marx, Heine, and German Cosmopolitanism: The 1844 Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher

In the tradition of classical political economy, Marx is usually read as an oppositional figure, rejecting the optimistic dogma of free trade and replacing it with a catastrophic vision of capitalism's self-destruction. Yet Marx was also a cosmopolitan figure who, like the classical economists, rejected a narrow nationalism for the vision of an internationally just economic sphere. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is addressed to “Workers of All Nations” and not just German workers. Marx saw his intervention as a combination of idealist German philosophy, radical French politics, and English economics.1 Marx's own travels from the Rhineland of his birth…