A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy

Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies

V. Spike Peterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134380206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Moving beyond a narrow definition of economics, this pioneering book advances our knowledge of global political economy and how we might critically respond to it.V. Spike Peterson clearly shows how two key features of the global economy increasingly determine everyday lives worldwide. The first is explosive growth in financial markets that shape business decision-making and public policy-making, and the second is dramatic growth in informal and flexible work arrangements that shape income-generation and family wellbeing. These developments, though widely recognized, are rarely analyzed as inextricable and interacting dimensions of globalization. Using a new theoretical model, Peterson demonstrates the interdependence of reproductive, productive and virtual economies and analyzes inequalities of race, gender, class and nation as structural features of neoliberal globalization. Presenting a methodologically plural, cross-disciplinary and well-documented account of globalization, the author integrates marginalized and disparate features of globalization to provide an accessible narrative from a postcolonial feminist vantage point.

1 Context and objectives

The complicity between cultural and economic value systems is acted out in almost every decision we make.

(Spivak 1987, 166)

The objective of this book is to politicize globalization through a critical rewriting of global political economy (GPE). Moving beyond a narrow definition of economics, I develop an alternative analytical framing of reproductive, productive, and virtual economies that shifts how we see the terrain of globalization and hence how we might interpret, understand, and respond to it. My three “economies” are understood as mutually constituted (therefore coexisting and interactive) systemic sites through and across which power operates. These sites involve familiar exchanges but also include socio-cultural processes of subject formation and cultural socialization that underpin identities and their political effects.¹ The conceptual and cultural dimensions of these sites are understood as inextricable from (mutually constituted by) material effects, social practices, and institutional structures. Thus, my alternative framing of reproductive, productive, and virtual (RPV) economies enables us to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and to map identities and culture in relation to conventional economic phenomena.

On the one hand, I argue that a expansive “RPV framing” is necessary to address and integrate two structural trends of globalization that affect everyday lives worldwide. The first is explosive growth in financial markets that shapes business decision-making and public policy-making. The second is dramatic growth in informal and flexible work arrangements that shapes income generation and family well-being. While these developments are widely recognized, they are rarely analyzed in relation – as interdependent phenomena. In contrast, the RPV framing provides a way to see informal activities, flexibilization, global production, migration flows, capital movements, and virtual activities as inextricable and interacting dimensions of neoliberal globalization.

On the other hand, I argue that prevailing accounts of global political economy are analytically inadequate and politically problematic. By “prevailing” I refer to the dominant accounts of GPE, which are generated primarily by mainstream scholars in the disciplines of economics and international relations. I join other critics in arguing that the orthodox (mainstream) orientations of both disciplines are compromised by particular conceptual and methodological commitments. In brief, their economistic, modernist, and masculinist starting points preclude adequate analyses of two additional features of global restructuring.

First, today’s globalization is distinguished by its dependence on information and communication technologies specific to the late twentieth century. These technologies not only enable the “global” in globalization – and GPE – but also transform the world as we “know” it. The point here is that globalization involves not only empirically observable changes in scale and scope, but also analytical challenges posed by information technologies and their unprecedented fusion of culture and economy – of virtual and material dimensions.

Second, even as these technologies enhance integration and homogenization, globalization and its effects are extremely uneven. These uneven effects are most visibly manifest in structural hierarchies of ethnicity/race, class, gender, and nation.
Advocates of globalization avoid theorizing the nature and role of oppression in relation to neoliberal policies. Critics of globalization tend to focus on one or another of these hierarchies, or at best “add” one to another. The point here is that theoretical attention to hierarchies as a structural feature of globalization, and especially their interconnections, remains underdeveloped.

With these points in mind, I argue that mainstream and even critical theories of political economy and structural inequality are partial and problematic. They remain tied to disciplinary, analytical, and ideological commitments that preclude adequate understandings of – and critical responses to – globalization. We therefore need new “ways of seeing” and theorizing that not only accommodate new developments but also cultivate the identification of relationships among diverse features of globalization – including links among identity, culture, economy, and power.

Politicizing globalization by rewriting global political economy

This book is an exploratory attempt to address the need for adequate theory and inclusive study of economic globalization. To better theorize global political economy I develop two conceptual innovations – the RPV framing and what I refer to as “triad analytics.” While the former is specific to rewriting GPE, the latter is applicable to social relations generally. It rejects oppositional, dichotomized framing in favor of viewing identities, meaning systems, and social practices/institutions as inextricable and interacting. The additional framing – “order” – this analytics provides facilitates systematic examination and interpretation of inherently complex and multidimensional social relations. These innovations and an assessment of theoretical approaches to global political economy – mainstream, critical, feminist, postcolonial – are elaborated in the next chapter.
The analytical orientation that emerges – derived from existing theories and amended by my analytical innovations – thus enables a inclusive, relational, and critical study of global political economy. In the remaining chapters I apply that orientation to the study of power relations and social hierarchies as these shape and are shaped by today’s global dynamics. Globalization here refers to large-scale transnational processes occurring today at an accelerated pace (due to information and communication technologies) and with extremely uneven effects (due to continuing and new inequalities). The uneven effects of globalization assume diverse forms that are variously addressed in the burgeoning literature on globalization.
This book focuses on the unevenness manifested in intersecting and politically consequential “structural hierarchies.” The latter is a reference to deeply institutionalized and pervasively internalized inequalities²based on ethnicity/race, class, gender, and nation, including differentiations regarding economic development (within and among states) and geopolitical power (in the international system of states). These inequalities involve identities, conceptualizations, and practices that are rarely foregrounded in mainstream accounts. They figure prominently in my study as focal points for politicizing globalization and advancing critical analyses of its uneven effects.

In this chapter I provide context and background. The first section situates globalization historically, initially through a discussion of continuity and change in relation to modernity and postmodernity, and then by reference to neoliberal economic restructuring dating from the 1970s. The second section situates globalization in relation to the systemic effects of information and communication technologies. These not only reconfigure “work” and market relations but also complicate the relationship between culture and economy. I then begin to politicize globalization by reviewing its uneven effects through a schematic survey of continuity and change in global hierarchies. This survey suggests how structural inequalities of gender, ethnicity/race, nation, and class intersect in sometimes unexpected and always complex ways. In the remainder of the chapter I consider the several objectives of the book, suggest its strengths and limitations, offer some comments on terminology, and conclude with brief chapter summaries.

Globalization in context: neoliberalism and information technologies

I understand contemporary globalization as both an outcome and transformation of “modernity” – pervasive social changes associated with the development and normalization of science, industrialism, and capitalism.³It is an outcome insofar as globalization is a further development of these changes. Hence, there is continuity.
But that development itself generated a “revolution” in information and communication technologies. In an obvious sense, these technologies are what enabled the reorganization and globalization of production processes that feature in most accounts of the global economy. Less obvious is how the particular – informational – nature of these technologies engenders a transformation of modernity. On the one hand, information is an aspect of all production and all earlier technologies; in this sense, the role of information is not “new.” But increasingly today, information is the technology, not just an aspect of the technology.

In contrast to material qualities, information (which has material consequences) is inherently conceptual and cultural; it is inextricable from the symbolic codes that constitute meaning and determine what has value in our lives. Economic processes based on information technologies therefore entail a fusion of mind and matter – of culture and economy – that is historically unprecedented (Castells 2000). This has important implications for how we construct meaning and value as cultural codes and it challenges us to rethink economic activities in relation to cultural phenomena.
Doing so requires new theoretical approaches. This also has implications for analyzing ideological representations of neoliberal capitalism as “the only alternative.” When capitalism and presently neoliberal capitalism become a cultural code that is internalized as “common sense,” anti- or non-capitalist imagination and practice are foreclosed (e.g. Gibson-Graham 1996). Hence, resistance necessarily involves attention to how we participate in dominant representations as well as to how we map capitalism as inextricably cultural and material processes.

These are recurring themes and treated at greater length throughout the book. The point here is that both continuity and change are key to understanding today’s global political economy, even as that economy marks a historical transformation that warrants its own study (e.g. Gill and Mittelman 1997). In brief, globalization processes are both a continuation of “capitalist racialized patriarchy” (Eisenstein 1998) as a characterization of modernity, and a new conjuncture of capitalist racialized patriarchy that is associated with conditions of postmodernity.⁴ These conditions are variously characterized as New Times (Hall and Jacques 1989), the new global cultural economy (Appadurai 1990), post-Fordism (Amin 1994b), flexible specialization (Piore and Sabel 1984), flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989), disorganized capitalism (Offe 1985), the end of organized capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987, 1994), new constitutionalism (Gill 1992), the rise of the network society (Castells 2000), complex connectivity (Tomlinson 1999), the world economy (Siebert 1999), the end of the nation state (Ohmae 1995), the new international economics (Krugman 1986), and neoliberalism or market fundamentalism (Soros 1998; Stiglitz 2002).⁵

The transition from modernity to postmodernity – like the transition to modernity – is less a definitive “break” than a perceptible transformation involving large-scale or structural changes. over, the unevenness of effects means that the transition itself varies, and occurs at different paces in different places, or in some places hardly at all. I identify globalization with postmodernity not to reify yet another dichotomy, or make a definitional claim about historical discontinuities, but to opt for what I consider a productive analytical strategy. Without denying the continuities and complexities of situated experiences of globalization, I wish to emphasize distinctive features of contemporary life and to situate my text in relation to a broader literature attentive to postmodernism and its analytical interpretations.

Globalization as neoliberalism: meaning and effects

This book focuses on conditions of postmodernity that are conventionally cast as “economic.” First and importantly, economic changes warrant our attention because they are constitutive of the global political economy, they are deeply implicated in relations of power, and their uneven effects are mystified by neoliberal discourse. Analyses of globalization that neglect these dynamics are empirically partial and especially incapable of illuminating patterns of power and hierarchy. Second and less obviously, I focus on economic changes not because I understand them as “determinative” or significant than cultural phenomena, but from a conviction that economics and culture are not separable and better mapping of the former promises better knowledge of the latter. I argue below that prevailing accounts neglect new – and continuing – aspects of the global political economy that critics argue must be incorporated for adequate analyses. This is especially the case in regard to disciplinary blinders and a neglect of subjective and cultural phenomena.
In contrast, I understand “economic” activities as inseparable from culture and politics and my rewriting of GPE attempts to illuminate these relationships.

To focus on global economic phenomena today is to focus on neoliberalism. A description and analysis of its history, ideology, identities, practices, and institutions weave throughout the book. Here I merely note key features of neoliberal restructuring to provide context for issues addressed in this chapter. In brief, the market reforms promoted by neoliberalism are also characterized as supply-side economics, “the Washington consensus,” or market fundamentalism. Liberalization is the code word, which Scholte (1997, 432) defines as the degree to which “articles, financial instruments, fixed assets, messages, and ideas can circulate throughout the world economy free from state-imposed restrictions.” Policy reforms are variously aimed at eliminating such restrictions: deregulation (to remove existing regulatory constraints); privatization (to replace the “inefficiencies” of public ownership and control); and free trade (opening borders to the flow of goods and capital). Complementing these supply-side reforms are fiscal and monetary “stabilization policies” (to reduce government spending, deficits, and aggregate demand). Finally, specialization in economic activities is promoted, based on the assumption of comparative advantage, and export-oriented policies are favored in pursuit of economic development and growth (Berik 1999a, 402–409; Bakker 1994, 7–17).
The consequences of these policies are matters of intense debate. The issues are obviously complex, and compounded by methodological and intellectual controversies regarding the accuracy, collection, selection, and interpretation of data. To provide background for subsequent discussions, I simply identify three broad vantage points that reflect familiar distinctions and surface frequently in the literature.⁶

First, proponents of neoliberal restructuring typically subscribe to neoclassical economic theory and the ideology of what Soros (1998) and Stiglitz (2002) call market fundamentalism. The presumption is that unfettered markets (free from government regulations or other interventions) facilitate “perfect competition” and tend toward equilibrium and the most efficient allocation of resources (Soros 1998, 126). Advocates assume that globalization “is inevitable and beneficial to all countries willing to pursue the prescribed policies. Production and trade based on comparative advantage is expected to bring about greater growth and a rise in standards of living everywhere through a better division of labor, bigger economies of scale, the flow of investment toward activities with the highest returns, and lower prices. . . . [Proponents view] adverse effects as temporary and small, and attribute the growing wage inequality or persistent unemployment to technological change, rather than import competition” (Berik 1999, 404).

If we liken neoliberal restructuring to a global “game” of capitalism, these enthusiasts fundamentally believe in the game at play. That is, they subscribe to the model of human nature attributed to the players (atomistic, competitive, and rational individuals or states), to the expectations of interaction that flow from this model when no additional constraints are imposed (“each-to-his-own,” winner-takes- all strategies), and to the projected long-term, system-wide benefits from playing what they understand anyway as the “only game in town.”

Second, a small but increasing number of economists within the neoclassical school criticize globalization as currently practiced. They “fault neoclassical analyses for overlooking the substantial restructuring of national economies (and job losses) that are needed to bring about the much-hailed benefits of freer trade and the adverse employment effects of international outsourcing by TNCs [transnational corporations]. . . . [They] argue for new government spending in order to ease social tensions and hardships . . . [and call] for ‘positive adjustment policies,’ . . . changes in multilateral rules . . . and extension of wage subsidies.”⁷ Given recurring financial crises and more recent corporate accounting scandals, critics especially debate the possibility and desirability of capital controls and greater transparency in financial marke...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Context and objectives
• 2 Theory matters
• 3 The productive economy
• 4 The reproductive economy
• 5 The virtual economy
• 6 The power of value
• Notes
• Bibliography