Lecture1-1.pptxSocial Foundations of Modern Capitalism?
Unit Coordinator: Professor Adam D. Morton
Unit Tutors: Joel Griggs
Blog: Progress in Political Economy (PPE) http://ppesydney.net/
Twitter: @AdamDavidMorton
#ECOP2012
Lecture 1: The Socially Embedded Economy
Introduction
Dualist framings of political economy
The philosophy of internal relations
Conclusion
1. Introduction
Attuning your political economy antennae: putting you on guard about the abstractions political economists produce
State and market: the state intervenes in the market
Politics and economics: held as separate spheres
State and civil society: “more markets, less government”
Neoliberalism “denotes a preference over government, economic incentives over cultural norms, and private entrepreneurship over collective action” — Dani Rodrik, The Fatal Flaw of Neoliberalism, The Guardian (14 November 2017).
1. Introduction
‘rather than restraining Leviathan, the neoliberal era enabled its continued expansion’
Damien Cahill, The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism (Edward Elgar, 2014), p. 22.
neoliberalism is always embedded in society and space: 1) embedded through class, race, gender, ecological relations; 2) embedded through the state; and 3) embedded ideologically.
1. Introduction
The philosophy of internal relations (Bertell Ollman)
“focuses on internally related causes and conditions, rather than positing logically independent factors existing side-by-side one another”
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 9.
2. Dualist framings of political economy
“The historical relationship of state and market is a matter of intense scholarly controversy. Whether each developed autonomously, the market gave rise to the state, or the state to the market, are important historical issues whose resolution is not really relevant to the argument of this book. State and market, whatever their respective origins, have independent existences, have logics on their own, and interact with each other” (Gilpin, 1987: 10).
2. Dualist framings of political economy
Susan Strange, States and Markets (1988)
Departs from state-centrism to establish four separate distinguishable structures of power (security, production, finance, knowledge) that are externally related to each other as interacting sources in the world economy
The result is a fetishising of concepts by abstracting them from the social relations of capitalism.
3. The philosophy of internal relations
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (1982: p. 3):
“the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like “nation”, “society”, and “culture” name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding”.
3. The philosophy of internal relations
The problem of ontology
What in political economy terms is the world made up of?
States? Markets? Class? Gender? Race? Ecology?
Do we view these spheres as ontologically exterior, meaning as separate and then combined?
Or do we strive to understand the world of political economy as relational?
3. The philosophy of internal relations
The philosophy of internal relations implies that the character of capital is considered as a social relation in such a way that the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society, conditions of class, race, gender struggle can be realised.
Political economy is socially produced rather than by things external to us: space and nature.
The hallmark of historical materialism: makes explicit a conception of capital through which connections are maintained and contained as aspects of a self-forming whole.
3. The philosophy of internal relations
Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 48.
“With the philosophy of internal relations, the problem is never how to relate separate entities but how to disentangle a relation or group of relations from the total and necessary configuration in which they exist”.
3. The philosophy of internal relations
Karl Marx, Capital: the spiral form of capitalist development
The dialectical unity of opposites contained in the commodity form of production
The mystical character of the commodity as the product of labour: the dual character of labour embodied in the commodity
The commodity: use-value and exchange-value
Capital, Volume 1: “the inner connection between value and the form of value, or exchange-value” (p. 177).
3. The philosophy of internal relations
Market Dependence and Social Property Relations (Ellen Meiksins Wood)
Fictitious Commodities (Karl Polanyi)
Commodity Fetishism (Karl Marx)
Social Embeddedness and the Integral State (Antonio Gramsci)
Social Embeddedness and Ecology (James O’Connor) — Guest Lecture Dr Gareth Bryant
Social Embeddedness and Gender (Ariel Salleh)
Social Embeddedness and Space (David Harvey)
Social Embeddedness and Space (Henri Lefebvre)
4. Conclusion
Social foundations of modern capitalism
Seeking to avoid abstractions as separate things
state and market
politics and economics
Avoid violent abstractions: severely simply
4. Conclusion
Karl Marx, Grundrisse ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions’ (p. 164).
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, p. 185:
capital ‘does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labour as wage-labour’ but is also a process rather than a static thing, an ‘abstraction in action’.
