Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime

There have now been two successive policy regimes since the Second World War that have temporarily succeeded in reconciling the uncertainties and instabilities of a capitalist economy with democracy's need for stability for people's lives and capitalism's own need for confident mass consumers. The first of these was the system of public demand management generally known as Keynesianism. The second was not, as has often been thought, a neo-liberal turn to pure markets, but a system of markets alongside extensive housing and other debt among low- and medium-income people linked to unregulated derivatives markets. It was a form of privatised Keynesianism. This combination reconciled capitalism's problem, but in a way that eventually proved unsustainable. After its collapse there is debate over what will succeed it. Most likely is an attempt to re-create it on a basis of corporate social responsibility.     

The political economy of global firms from India and China

This article attempts to build a bridge between contemporary studies of global firms from emerging economies and existing theories in comparative political economy. It argues that given the primacy of the state as an economic actor in developing countries, the variety of capitalism literature could provide a theoretical foundation for firm-level analyses of emerging market multinationals. For example, the authors suggest that China and India may be moving towards a ‘hybrid market economy’. They also offer a typology of Indian and Chinese corporates to demonstrate an empirical approach to analysing domestic business–government relationships and the ways in which these firms are shaped by the peculiarities of their respective institutional setting. Finally, they identify some of the likely pitfalls of doing cross-national comparisons of emerging market multinationals, particularly with respect to the reliability of corporate data.     

The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy

This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.     

Wage labour and capitalism: a comparative and historical analysis of Eritrea and Kenya

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with the advent, for a fraction of the working population, of labour relations based on wages. The precarisation of life of free wage workers is also partially analysed in this article.     

The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism,dispossession and agroecology

This contribution reviews recent critiques of the food sovereignty framework. In particular it engages with the debate between Henry Bernstein and Philip McMichael and analyzes their different conceptualizations of agrarian capitalism. It critically identifies tendencies in food sovereignty approaches to assume a food regime crisis, to one-sidedly emphasize accumulation by dispossession and enclosure and thereby to overlook the importance of expanded reproduction, and to espouse a romantic optimism about farmer-driven agroecological knowledge which is devoid of modern science. Alternatives to current modernization trajectories cannot simply return to the peasant past and to the local. Instead, they need to recognize the desires of farmers to be incorporated into larger commodity networks, the importance of industrialization and complex chains for feeding the world population, and the support of state and science, as well as social movements, for realizing a food sovereign alternative.     

Keeping ‘our’ land: property,agriculture and tensions between Indigenous and settler visions of food sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper situates literature on food sovereignty and land reforms in relation to academic and popular writings about land issues in Canada. We argue that settler Canadian food sovereignty scholarship and activism has yet to sufficiently grapple with the implications of private property ownership in relation to ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We also argue that efforts to advance ecologically sustainable farming practices in Canada need to confront private property ownership in terms of its contribution to both capitalist and colonial violence.     

Chinese state capitalism and neomercantilism in the contemporary food regime: contradictions,continuity and change

ABSTRACT

A significant proportion of critical agri-food literature has, to date, focused on the uneven relations of power between the Global North and the Global South, and the neoliberal characteristics of the corporate food regime. This literature has often overlooked the nuances in varieties of capitalism, particularly in East Asia. China is re-emerging as a powerful state actor in an increasingly multipolar global food system. It is also an important hub of capital, facilitating agribusiness mergers and acquisitions, as well as new East–South and South–South flows of agri-food trade, technology and capital. This paper aims to contribute to understanding state-led capitalism in China and neomercantilist strategies in the agri-food sector. The paper provides a critical analysis of a case study of China's state owned agri-food and chemical companies ‘going global’. It contends that the current food regime is in a period of transition or interregnum – a period of fluidity separating the continuity of successive regimes. Arguably, the analytical contours of a contemporary food regime in transition cannot be adequately comprehended without recognising the incipient importance of state-led capitalism and neomercantilism, and how contemporary socio-political and economic dynamics are reshaping relations of power in the global political economy of food.     

The political economy of ‘flex trees’: a preliminary analysis

With the rise of ‘bioeconomy’, trees are receiving increasing attention. This contribution conducts a preliminary analysis of the trajectories and the main drivers of change in the rise of new, flexible and multiple uses of trees. It assesses the political dimensions involved in this transformation, which is simultaneously ongoing, anticipated and imagined. Notes are offered on the issues to be considered when the flex-crop framework is operationalized to include the study of trees, and additional conceptualizations that help in analyzing the political economy of tree uses are provided. Areas needing further empirical study are identified and a preliminary research agenda is suggested. The flexible and multiple use of trees and tree-derived commodities is having a large impact on power relations in the global political economy of forestry and the forest industry, the asymmetry of which is based on who is best able to flex or de-multiply, thereby controlling commodity webs and processing technology. It is argued that while flexing seems to increase diversity, in practice it typically increases this only for the processing industry; the converse occurs in terms of the unification of the productive base into monocultures. However, these two processes go hand in hand, and illustrate how flexing is a deeply capitalist process.     

‘Democratic Socialism’ and the Concept of (Post)Capitalism

This article explores the ‘democratic socialism’ being proposed by new left movements on either side of the Atlantic, and evaluates its claim to be a form of anti- or postcapitalism. It argues that in the democratic socialist worldview, the line between capitalism and socialism rests on the balance of power between workers and capitalists in the economic sphere. While traditional social democracy seeks to redistribute wealth but leaves relations between workers and capitalists within firms untouched, democratic socialism seeks to abolish private property in the economic sphere. Production is controlled democratically by the workers themselves, in league with a workers’ state. The article critically appraises the claim that such a scenario constitutes a form of postcapitalism. Drawing on the work of critical Marxists such as Moishe Postone, it argues that capitalism is not primarily defined by private property relations in the economic sphere, but rather the peculiar social form of capitalist labour. Unlike in pre-capitalist societies, for labour in capitalism to secure a continued basis on which to reproduce the means of subsistence, it must be socially validated as ‘value-producing’. The criteria for value validation is not set in the workplace, or within a single nation state, but rather on the world market. The article concludes that, for all its merits, the democratisation of workplaces does not overcome the need for this social validation, but rather constitutes an alternative form of managing the process of production in this context. As such, democratic socialism, like social democracy, remains susceptible to the same imperatives and crises as other forms of capitalist production, and so cannot be said to constitute a form of ‘postcapitalism’.     

找寻与契合——毛泽东加快过渡理论的关节点

本文考察了1952年毛泽东为推进中国过渡到社会主义找寻具体途径。1953年李维汉在调查研究基础上论证了原未了解其功能的国家资本主义,正是改变资本家私有制的＂主要环子＂,该调查报告恰逢其时,为加快过渡的理论提供了合法性解释及实证的支撑。这种找寻与契合,成为毛泽东主持中央政治局会议正式提出党在过渡时期总路线的重要关节点,起了＂催生＂的关键作用。