新教伦理与资本主义市场经济

任何一种社会经济体制的存在必须以其特有的文化土壤为根基.市场经济的兴起是一个社会物质和精神文化诸因素交互作用的过程,它所引起的社会生活广泛而深刻的变革,总体上推动了社会的进步.但是,这种进步并非单一经济因素所使然.马克思·韦伯关于新教伦理的论述,被视为西方精神文化与经济关系的经典,当中国选择了发展社会主义市场经济的革故鼎新的道路时,它给我们的启示就是要充分重视精神文化的巨大作用,重视这种作用的具体历史性意义.     

Global Macroeconomic Imbalances after the Crisis: From the Great Moderation to Secular Stagnation

After the global financial crisis, economists have been downbeat about the growth prospects of the capitalist world economy, leading many to argue that we have re-entered a period of “secular stagnation”. The phenomenon of secular stagnation is intrinsically connected to the evolution of global macroeconomic imbalances. During the pre-crisis era of the “Great Moderation”, the widening of global and European trade imbalances temporarily alleviated the problem of secular stagnation by forging a symbiotic yet unsustainable relationship between debt-financed consumption-led growth models in deficit countries and export-led growth models in surplus countries. The re-surfacing of secular stagnation and the asymmetric adjustment of these imbalances after the crisis can both be traced back to the domestic political constraints experienced by many advanced market economies in trying to revive their pre-crisis growth models.     

All in it Together? The Unlikely Rebirth of Covid Corporatism

The battle to soften the labour market impact of the pandemic has thrown up some unlikely bedfellows, with trade union leaders competing with business chiefs over who can most fulsomely praise the government’s economic response. But does this entente really presage a new era of ‘Covid-corporatism’? Crises like Covid-19 can provide opportunities for temporary social pacts, even in countries lacking the labour market institutions needed to sustain these in normal times, and the ‘social partners’ have shown an unusual willingness to be bold and constructive. But cracks are already appearing over how and when the state should begin its withdrawal from the economy. Unions face structural weaknesses and recruitment problems that will hamper their ability to take full advantage of what will likely prove to be only a temporary lull in hostilities.     

Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis

This paper provides a selective survey of food regimes and food regime analysis since the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in 1989, and further traced through their subsequent (individual) work. It identifies eight key elements or dimensions of food regime analysis, namely the international state system; international divisions of labour and patterns of trade; the ‘rules’ and discursive (ideological) legitimations of different food regimes; relations between agriculture and industry, including technical and environmental change in farming; dominant forms of capital and their modalities of accumulation; social forces (other than capitals and states); the tensions and contradictions of specific food regimes; and transitions between food regimes. These are used to summarise three food regimes in the history of world capitalism to date: a first regime from 1870 to 1914, a second regime from 1945 to 1973, and a third corporate food regime from the 1980s proposed by McMichael within the period of neoliberal globalisation. Questions of theory, method and evidence are noted in the course of the exposition and pulled together in a final section which criticises the ‘peasant turn’ of the ‘corporate food regime’ and the analytical and empirical weaknesses associated with it.     

The marketing of corporate agrichemicals in Western India: theorizing graded informality

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary.     

The role of rural indebtedness in the evolution of capitalism

Few studies have attempted to systematize the broader consequences of ordinary indebtedness – the inevitable other side of credit. My purpose here is to suggest four preliminary theses on the role of indebtedness in the evolution of capitalism, with special reference to the rural sphere. I argue that across time and space, credit/debt relations have not only been a key factor behind social differentiation through the control of land, labour and capital (Thesis I). They have also fostered market discipline by forcing the borrower – whether a poor peasant or a company manager – to calculate, pay, trade, work, intensify (Thesis II). Interest-bearing and guarantee-based loans have thus generated pressures for economic growth, short-termism and innovations, but have also undermined traditional community bonds and environmental conditions (Thesis III). Through its remarkable reward-or-punish nature, the credit/debt couple represents a powerful mechanism of social selection that has, in the long run, crucially shaped the evolution of capitalism (Thesis IV).     

Fordism: a review essay

ABSTRACT

Fordism is a central concept in American labour history. This essay, the first survey of the range of historiographical and sociological approaches deployed to understand Fordism, suggests that Fordism and Americanism are inseparably intertwined. Previous scholarship has emphasised that the technological and managerial efficiency of Fordist practice were a hallmark of twentieth-century Americanism. Historians of labour have demonstrated that these aspects manifested as a relentless system of control in the workplace that paradoxically helped to unify worker resistance. Historians of capitalism have tended to used Fordism to refer to an ethos underpinning mid-twentieth-century capitalist development marked by a balance between mass production and mass consumption. They identify increased social provisions and class compromise between labour and management as features that made Fordism attractive to states rebuilding their economies following the Second World War. New transnational histories of Fordism have begun to bridge the gap between these two main interpretations to show how Fordist practice and ethos were exported together internationally as part of an ideological project to modernise nations in America’s image. This essay concludes by assessing the usefulness of Fordism to historians and suggesting avenues for future research.     

社会主义是劳动者个人主义的否定与实现

在资本主义社会里存在着资本所有的个人主义与雇佣劳动的三个主义,二都是对早期的,抽象的个人主义的否定,资本主义是资本所有个人主义的实现,社会主义则是雇佣劳动个人主义的实现,社会主义为人的自由发展提供了现实条件。     

哈耶克思想在台湾的传播

哈耶克思想在台湾的传播始于20世纪50年代初,一开始是作为一位“反极权”的冷战英雄被接受。随着对哈耶克理解的深入,台湾学术界针对哈耶克“自生自发秩序”的理解出现了明显的分歧。周德伟的解读代表了哈耶克思想保守主义的一面,而殷海光则试图将对哈耶克的解读导向一种“后五四精神”,林毓生在综合二者的基础上,提出中国文化的“创造性转化”的概念。     

China’s Harmonious World: Beyond Cultural Interpretations

A culture “specter” is haunting the ongoing discourse regarding China’s declared policy of “peaceful rise” for a “harmonious world.” While some Western scholars “cherry-pick” “evidence” of China’s aggressiveness from Confucius legacies, the same cultural heritage is heavily tapped by many Chinese scholars to interpret the current policy of striving for internal and external harmony. Both seem to ignore, though to different degrees, the historically specific political environment, within which the cultural elements function and interact with other socio-political variables. China’s current pursuit of harmony is possible and desirable only at a time when China is able to achieve sustained sociopolitical stability (30 years) in the past 160 years and after its protracted encounter and experiment with Western liberalism, Marxism and capitalism. Although it has not explicitly rejected any of these Western ideologies, China has tested the limits of all of them—hence China’s search for its own identity and policy alternatives at the onset of the new millennium. It is toward a more historical and holistic explanation that this paper constructs the political space and historical trajectory of China’s search for modernity and for itself in the past two centuries and into the future. Yu Bin is Professor of Political Science and Director of East Asian Studies at Wittenberg University, Ohio, USA; Senior Fellow at Shanghai Institute of American Studies; analyst on Russian-China relations for Pacific Forum (CSIS) in Honolulu, Hawaii; and former president of Association of Chinese Political Studies (1992-94). Yu is the author and co-author of several books including the most recent ones: The Government of China (Stockton, NJ.: OTTN Publishing, 2006); Power of the moment: America and the world after 9-11 [Shunjian de Liliang: 9-11 Hou de Meiguo Yu Shijie] (Beijing: Xinhua Chubanshe, 2002); and Mao’s Generals Remember Korean (The University Press of Kansas, 2001). He has published more than 60 articles in journals including World Politics, Strategic Review, Asian Survey, International Politics Quarterly (Beijing), The China and Eurasian Forum Quarterly, International Journal of Korean Studies, Harvard International Review, Comparative Connections, etc.