The conditions of production: A note∗

Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb: For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Bill Weinberg: War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America. Zed Press, 1991.

Daniel Faber: Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America. Monthly Review Press, 1993.

Malcom V. Brock: Biotechnology in Japan. Routledge, London/New York, 1989.     

Scope conditions of economic voting: The Danish exception?

In country after country, economic voting analysts have found that voters react sociotropically rather than egotropically. However, in a series of papers Nannestad and Paldam have found the exact opposite result for Danish voters – a result which challenges the scope conditions of economic voting. Changing only a few minor aspects of Nannestad and Paldam’s design, including the introduction of a standard sociotropic item in their models, though, reproduces the standard result: strong sociotropic and weak egotropic effects. The challenging results thus seem to be methodological artefacts; a finding that strengthens confidence in the generalizability of the basic mechanism of economic voting. Voters are not necessarily altruists, however. Sociotropic voting may be driven by both egoistic and altruistic considerations.     

Marx's concept of the Asiatic mode of production: a genetic analysis ∗

Marx's concept ‘Asiatic mode of production’ doesn't conceptualize production in Asia, which Marx knew very little about and never attempted to theorize, but the hypothetical remote ancestry of modern bourgeois production, which he knew a lot about and spent a lifetime theorizing. In Marx's writings from 1857/8 onwards, the AMP figures as the aboriginal, primitively communal mode of production much as in his writings before that date the family, tribe, or clan figure as the aboriginal, primitively communal social formation. Its putative charactenistics derive, less from Marx's examination of its actual structure, than from his retro-spective rational reconstruction, out of the ‘categories’ of the capitalist mode of production and the logic of dialectical development, of a schema which would embrace ‘all’ modes of production in a single progressive (though not straightforwardly successive) system of the economic formation of society.     

The ideological conditions for Khomeini's doctrine of government ∗

The Islamic movements and ideologies labelled ‘Fundamentalist’ share an oppositional stance to their respective governments rather than common doctrinal positions. The Islamisation of society and the state is planned on the model of the ‘original’ Islamic community of Muhammad and his immediate successors, but the interpretation of their principles in relation to modern socio-political contexts gives rise to political ideologies which represent marked departures from traditional Islamic doctrines and incorporate implicity or explicity modern political concepts. Khomeini's doctrine of government is an interesting example in that it is entirely based on traditional Shi'ite, premises and modes of reasoning and yet it reaches novel conclusions. It is argued that these conclusions presuppose the modern ideological notions of ‘the nation’ and the ‘nation-state’.     

The discourses of production (part I) ∗ : law,industrial relations and the theory of ideology

This part develops the author's previous effort to produce a Marxist theorisation of the role of legal discourse in democratic capitalist societies that properly acknowledges its ‘relative autonomy’. The paper proceeds by way of a critique of earlier efforts to theorise the non-economic dimensions of productions. It ends with an attempt to theorise the discursive dimension of production so that the effects of the law in the production process may be investigated in a way that overcomes the ‘incommensurability problem’ that otherwise seems to vitiate efforts to provide analyses that work at both the macro and micro levels.     

Drivers of political parties’ voting behaviour in European economic governance: the ultimate decline of the economic cleavage?

The article examines the factors that determined the attitude of parliamentary parties towards eurozone anti-crisis measures. Using a statistical logit model, it demonstrates that, while all governing parties supported such measures, opposition parties were divided. The support of the former is explicable in terms of international obligations. The positions of opposition parties reflected their attitude towards European integration: Eurosceptic parties tended to oppose anti-crisis measures. Furthermore, whereas negative votes were less likely in countries marked by higher levels of popular trust in government and satisfaction with the problem-solving capacity of the EU, the likelihood of no votes increased as a function of the level of trust in national parliaments. The policy preferences of opposition parties, measured on the economic left–right scale, did not provide significant explanatory potential; nor did an additional test measuring the impact of extreme left?right positions.     

Political freedom, economic freedom, and income convergence: Do stages of economic development matter?

In the literature, theory and empirical evidence on the nexus of political freedom, economic freedom, and economic growth are mixed. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the effect of political freedom on promoting economic growth is realized and detectable at later stages of social and economic development. Using panel data for a sample of 104 countries between 1970 and 2003, we find strong support for our hypothesis. While economic freedom has greater effects on income convergence in the OECD countries, political freedom clearly promotes the convergence among those OECD countries.     

Domestic terrorism: Notes on the state system of oppression∗

Abstract

Twenty‐five years after the Watergate affair culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon, the country continues to be animated by the spirit of scandal—even if the alleged offenses against William Jefferson Clinton involved sexual misconduct rather than illegal bombings, break‐ins, and other non‐"crimes and misdemeanors.” In this article, Noam Chomsky discusses a more basic threat to the Constitution than Watergate found in the pattern of FBI break‐ins and illegal actions first revealed to the public in 1973. (Illegal actions by the national police are known to have continued in the 1980s as a tactic used against activists in the Central America solidarity movement.) Not only does Chomsky locate a pattern in the FBI's actions since the founding of the Bureau, he discusses historical antecedents in the Alien and Sedition Acts, the judicial murder of the Haymarket anarchists, and the Palmer raids. For Chomsky, the real meaning of these actions is that the system routinely works to stifle dissent using means far more problematic than those employed by the Watergate burglars. In Chomsky's view, the purpose of these criminal actions is to frustrate preliminary stages of organization before more advanced forms of “revolutionary radicalism” can develop.     

“That’s not how it works”: economic indicators and the construction of partisan economic narratives

This study examines the processes through which partisans update their (biased) economic judgments during periods of mixed and asymmetric economic performance. I show evidence that citizens express relatively unbiased perceptions of the movement of the stock market, suggesting that partisans do not engage in processes of motivated reasoning when reporting judgments of widely available economic data. Instead, partisans respond to fluctuations in stock market performance by revising their assumptions about the way the economy works: in response to positive or negative developments, the stock market is perceived to be more or less important for the health of the broader US economy depending upon Americans’ partisan worldviews. This form of biased narrative construction has substantial importance in light of a “two-speed” post-Great Recession economy.     

Korean‐type economic construction: An analysis of the engineering approach

The ‘Engineering Approach’ to the fostering of industry adopted in Korea gave priority to those export industries which had a multiplier effect on the economy. The fostering of each industry passed through several steps, from direct protection through to the attainment of internationally competitive status. Development proceeded in timed and sequential stages, like a pyramid. Thus export industy was established first, followed by industries based upon processed materials, primary materials, and finally heavy industry. The direction of development was therefore the reverse of socialism, which aimed at autarky and the production of quantity irrespective of efficiency. This approach required the fostering of skilled human resources, and could only have succeeded with the cooperation of the industrialists. The longer term goal has been market responsiveness. The role of government was to help only until the large Korean corporations became able to compete internationally.     

Public choice and the economic analysis of anarchy: a survey

Public choice economists began studying anarchy in the 1970s. Since then, the amount of research on anarchy has burgeoned. This article surveys the important public choice contributions to the economics of anarchy. Following early public choice economists, many economists are researching how individuals interact without government. From non-public-interested explanations of the creation of government to historical studies of internalizing externalities under anarchy, public choice scholars are arriving at a more realistic perspective of human interaction with and without government. Although the economics of politics receives more attention, the economics of anarchy is an important area of research in public choice.