Global Political Economy

A Marxist Critique

Bill Dunn

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781783716647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

This is an ambitious survey of the history and state of the world economy, covering the major upheavals of the capitalist system over the last 100 years. Bill Dunn provides an original and enlightening explanation of the state of the world economy. He covers all the main aspects of global political economy explaining the theories behind production, trade, finance and relations between rich and poor countries. He also tackles the question of the origin of capitalism, a debate that always proves popular among students and academics. Dunn also includes a critique of alternative perspectives, showing that Marxism still provides the best analytical tools for understanding the global economy. This comprehensive text is a must for students of politics and economics who are keen to understand how the economy reached its current stage and what the future is likely to bring.

Part I

Theories of the Global Political Economy

1

LIBERALISM

This chapter argues that liberal premises of free markets and individualism cannot adequately explain a world in which free markets are not the norm and in which competitive individualism is only a one-sided and ever contested aspect of social life.

At its worst, liberal political economy can be a crass justification of existing order; crass in terms of how its very narrow focus on what constitutes wealth and growth excludes broader social questions. It can be crass too in adopting models which bear scant resemblance to the real world (corporations, for example, do not behave like rational, competitive individuals) and in its explicit unconcern with this discrepancy. Friedman (1953) notably expressed interest only in the accuracy of predictions, not with the falsity or otherwise of theoretical assumptions. If anything, the implication is often that the world should change to conform to theory rather than the reverse. In recent decades liberalism has been used to justify waves of attacks on labour and the welfare state. It justified processes Harvey (2003, 2005) calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ including the seizure of numerous previously uncommodified areas of social life.

However, liberalism need not be the simplistic pro-capitalist theory this suggests. Historically, it emerged as part of the great Enlightenment tradition, contesting very different collectivities than those fought by contemporary ‘neoliberals’. Moreover, while the focus here is on economic liberalism rather than the broader tradition, the association between an economy motivated by private profit and individual freedom can still resonate against authoritarian regimes, like the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. Planning too can be disastrous. And if the marginalist or neoclassical revolution is culpable in dropping the social content of classical political economy and insisting on a more thoroughgoing, but less plausible mathematical modelling, the competition it depicts is often real enough and the models may reveal important if partial truths. Moreover, since Keynes, the same liberal starting points of competitive individualism have produced less individualistic conclusions. Finally, many who regard themselves as liberals do so in a qualified way. Such accommodations can undermine elements of what others insist on as the necessary methodological rigour. However, these things do make liberalism a subtle and diverse tradition, if a somewhat slippery fish with which to deal.

The next section offers only a brief historical contextualisation. Good, critical, introductions to core liberal ideas and key thinkers are available elsewhere (see, for example, Green and Nore 1977; Heilbroner 2000; Fusfeld 2002; Stilwell 2006). The following three sections discuss different interpretations of liberalism’s individualist methodology and its normative commitments to self-regulating or free-market capitalism and to only a minimal state. Finally, the chapter introduces some of the ways in which liberalism deals with the specifically international aspects of the political economy and how this further stretches its plausibility.

What Liberalism?

Some contemporary liberals insist on continuity. For example, Wolf (2005) vehemently rejects the prefix ‘neo’, seeing himself as simply following a long, proud and singular tradition. However, liberalism encompasses a broad range of theorists many of whom have little in common. It is far from clear that Smith would see many contemporary liberals as kindred spirits. Friedman took liberalism in new directions rather than simply developing what went before. A liberal institutionalism (Keohane and Nye 1977) probably has more similarities with the realist and institutional approaches discussed in the next chapter. To understand the diversity a comment on the social and intellectual context seems necessary.

Classical political economy emerged in a rapidly changing Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It seems little coincidence that it should develop primarily in Britain or that its most prominent figures were interpreters and advocates, albeit sometimes critical ones, of British capitalism. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 on the eve of the industrial and political revolutions that would transform the world (Smith 1853). The British political revolutions of the seventeenth century had already established parliamentary power, which helped produce the conditions by which Britain became the richest country. Industrial capitalism then produced even more profound social and economic upheavals, challenges to the old order and to old ways of thinking. Classical political economy was part of a great intellectual tradition that rose to meet the challenges.

Classical PE also reproduced many of the ambiguities of the Enlightenment tradition of which it was a part. For example, Hobbes (1991) had taken atomistic premises to mean that life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ without a Leviathan state. Locke (1993), by contrast, articulated what would become central beliefs on private property and a limited state (Friedman 1962). However, his concern with appropriate government also tempered his attitudes to laissez-faire and individual freedom (Wootton 1993). Smith exemplified both the general optimism in the triumph of reason and order and the belief in social development. His specific characterisations saw stages of society; from hunting to pasturage to agriculture to commerce. Other political economists, like great Enlightenment figures before them (Rousseau 1968) would be more pessimistic, admitting only limited prospects for growth (Malthus 1970; Ricardo 1951; Mill 1994). The commitment to science meant many political economists revealed uncomfortable truths about the emerging society. Smith’s world of mutual benefits sat in tension with a society composed of great classes. Where he emphasised harmony between them, it was a relatively small step for Ricardo and of course Marx to reach conclusions of class conflict.

As capitalism passed beyond its youthful exuberance it became impolite to dwell on its many ailments. The industrial revolution transformed Britain’s economy and society and the way it was understood. Volatility, polarisation and social struggles, notably those of the Luddites and Chartists, all increased. These provided the context for radical interpretations of PE, most importantly by Marx. In the middle of the nineteenth century the freeing of markets and competitive individualism made decisive advances. The Poor Law Amendment Act freed the labour market, the Bank Act established apparently automatic monetary mechanisms and the repeal of the Corn Laws instigated free trade (Polanyi 2001). There was unprecedented economic growth, with capitalism also spreading first to other parts of Europe, then North America and by the end of the century incorporating most of the world within European empires. By the 1870s, liberalism was established as the ruling ideology in Britain. The neoclassical or marginalist revolution now reasserted a more thoroughgoing (in the sense of more clearly individualist) liberalism against radical challengers. However, it seems little coincidence that with capital’s expansion, neoclassical ideas developed more or less independently and simultaneously in several European countries and shortly afterwards also in the United States. Similar ideas had been articulated previously, but ignored in the different social and intellectual climate (Fusfeld 2002). Now the world was ready for an economics which barred discussion of history and society and for which scientific method became the reduction of social relations to physics-like formulae. Neoclassical ideas still battled with alternatives, for example the German Historical School and approaches that continued to stress the social and institutional construction of the economy. However, they eventually established their hegemony over what, now dropping the label ‘political’, became the discipline of economics.

Thus a thoroughgoing individualism and support for free markets won out even as giant corporations came to dominate national economies and imperial states carved up the globe. However, the victory was never complete. Times of crisis challenged the consensus. The Great Depression proved too great an anomaly for theories that asserted self-correcting markets. In the long post-war boom, what came to be called a neoclassical – Keynesian synthesis prevailed; any theoretical tensions were largely overlooked. However, by the 1970s the ideas of Hayek and Friedman and a reinvigorated neoclassical orthodoxy in turn challenged Keynesianism. Neoliberalism came to dominate the economics profession and international policy circles, at least for a while. Thus, as the social situation changed, liberalism proved adaptable. What was at the margin in one period moved to centre stage the next. Individualism, support for free markets and the promotion of a minimal state took on different meanings in different contexts, as the following sections will elaborate.

Individualism

Individualism is at once the great achievement and great limitation of liberalism. In the name of freedom it provides an enduring challenge to totalitarianism, past and present. Almost literally inconceivable in earlier, pre-capitalist societies, it captures an important aspect of capitalist political economy and provides a powerful analytical device. It is limited because, taken to its logical conclusions, it precludes discussion of how individuality is constructed, let alone how it might be changed. It reifies a real and important, but historically specific, partial and ever contested aspect of social life under capitalism as the essence of human existence. In positing individual freedom against collective oppression it denies the possibility or desirability of conscious, collective decision making. A thoroughgoing individualism is hard to sustain and in practice interpretations vary.

Individuals and families had long amassed great wealth, but the scope increased in the eighteenth century, particularly in Britain, where entrepreneurs like Arkwright and Wedgwood made fortunes, sometimes from modest beginnings. The intellectual climate changed too. By the end of the eighteenth century, views that economic prosperity was and should be based on individual greed may have ceased to be heresy, but remained to some extent oppositional. Guild regulations were still in place and it took another 70 years before free trade became British government policy. Elsewhere, even limited capitalist versions of liberty, equality and fraternity had as yet made little progress. Thus early liberals’ individualism contested the previously dominant religious or absolutist state-based collectivisms, which blocked the rise of new wealth.

Smith’s optimism meant he believed that even the poor lived better than had the rich in more primitive societies. Based on ‘a certain propensity in human nature … to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’ (1997:117), his description of the ‘invisible hand’ became a powerful and enduring metaphor for the way in which the market, left to itself, allowed the free play of individual interests to distribute efficiently. ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests’ (1997:119). Thus through the interaction of self-interested individuals, commercial society became the highest and wealthiest form of human organisation. Smith’s individualism was, however, qualified. He was aware of class differentiation and that people were shaped by their wider society, by ‘habit, custom, and education’ (1997:120). Hunt (1992) argues that an ambiguity runs through Smith as to whether harmony or conflict dominates class relations. His faith in competitive individualism sits in tension with a sensitivity to inequality and poverty and with seeing property rights as a defence of the rich against the poor. Individual judgement remained fallible and the object was explicitly national wealth.

The tension between individual and class position reflects a real ambiguity in capitalist society. Classes are composed of individuals while individuality is shaped and experienced differently depending on social position. However, analyses were pulled in different directions. Ricardo makes clearer than Smith the opposition between classes in general and wages and profit in particular. Moreover, labour would continue to live at a bare subsistence minimum. Any wage rises above this would depress profits and economic activity, reducing pay. Marx, while rejecting such an iron law of wages, affirmed the basis of capital’s wealth as lying in labour’s exploitation, but also emphasised the priority of social being over individual consciousness (1973a, 1976).

Conversely, the marginalist or neoclassical revolution of the late nineteenth century would banish class analysis and insist on a more thoroughgoing individualism. It did so in opposition to the subversive direction taken by Marxist political economy, but also in changed social and economic conditions. In many respects these made it still more counterfactual. Capitalism, as Marx anticipated, was becoming more centralised and concentrated, dominated by large firms less easily interpreted (except in law) as rational individuals. Conversely, it may have gained plausibility as conditions did improve for some workers in Western Europe and America. They now had some choices beyond whether to eat or starve and could be depicted as competitive and utility-maximising consumers. There was also an emerging layer of managerial elites, including professional academics, who were the product of an increasingly organised capitalism, but who were nevertheless receptive to ideas of choice and individual achievement.

This new individualism provided the basis for analytical models on which it was possible to develop a discipline of economics as if it were a natural science. Some marginalists like Walras drew explicitly on the earlier liberal tradition of Bentham and ‘Utilitarianism’. Bentham advocated what he called a felicific calculus, or psychological hedonism. People try to maximise their utility; they weigh up pleasure and pain and act accordingly. Amongst other things they are naturally lazy. So work is a pain to be avoided, but this can be overcome through wages and therefore pleasure. In the language of economics, people calculate profit and loss. So, for example, drugs may be pleasurable, but are costly in various ways, perhaps with unpleasant side effects. Lectures are boring, but may help bring valuable qualifications. In each case, each person weighs their choices. In allowing these choices liberalism asserts its democratic and anti-authoritarian principles. The state cannot decree, nor can the social scientist ascribe, individual choices as more or less rational or particular commodities as more or less valuable. With preferences equally valid, the best that is possible is ‘Pareto optimality’, where a change for the better for one person can only be achieved to the detriment of another. On this basis, powerful, ‘robust’ and suitably detached arguments about the operation of markets were constructed.

However, individual utility provides a fragile basis for economic models. The system can become circular and self-referential. Utility is understood as what makes individuals want particular things – and we know particular things have utility because people want them. Alternatively, a prior philosophy and psychology must be invoked to underpin assumptions of utility maximisation (Dowd 2004). This threatens to undermine the studied objectivity of notions of rationality and choice. The two concepts wear each other rather thin. Most social choices become incomprehensible once they are detached from their social construction. But if social content is allowed back, utilitarianism can have dangerously egalitarian consequences, the last shilling, as Pigou highlighted, bringing greater happiness to the pauper than the millionaire (Stilwell 2006). Marginalism therefore cannot pursue utilitarianism too thoroughly without bringing into question its own assumptions about the equivalence of utility and price and hence undermining its whole framework. There can be no intrinsic rationale for preferring one person’s cancer treatment to another person’s yacht, poor relief over corporate tax cuts. Individualism has to be separated from the way individual endowments and preferences are constructed (Himmelweit 1977) requiring the highly political act of dumping social content as a precondition for an economics as impartial and objective social science.

Methodological individualism (MI) usually provides the necessary theoretical underpinnings. MI simply insists that the individual is conceptually prior to and independent of social institutions (Ashley 1986:274). People, and only people, have wants, which motivate them to act accordingly. There is nothing ‘outside’. This may mean that people act in concert to form institutions, but these have to be understood ‘from the bottom up’ as no more than the sum of their parts. Social structures are derivative; they arise as the consequence (albeit sometimes unintended) of individual human action. Thatcher famously insisted of society that ‘There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families’ (1987). This almost, if presumably unknowingly, brilliantly summarises MI. It also provides a window onto some of mainstream economics’ contradictions. The last four words are interesting. Economists do usually regard ‘the household’ as the unit of analysis; tending to rationalise the often subordinate position of women and children within them. This also compromises MI; and if relations within families cannot be reduced to calculating self-interest, what of those within other institutions? People are shaped by diverse institutions, membership of which can have a specific rather than simply generic individuality. MacIntyre gives the example of an army as an institution composed of individual soldiers, which concept already implies that of an army (Thompson 1978). As discussed below, ‘the firm’ too, is often treated as a rational utility-maximising individual. If firm behaviour is at root the simple sum of multiple individual rationalities (Friedman and Friedman 1980), it is unclear why it should ever act with the singular predictable rationality required by economic theory. Convenient, but similarly counterfactual assumptions of rationality are similarly often made of states in the international system, confirming the methodological chaos.

Liberalism has recently been reasserted with renewed confidence. Once criticised for its failure to engage with the world beyond that of markets, liberal economics indeed now takes an interest in many other fields – in order to colonise them. Methods of explaining and quantifying ‘market imperfections’ within their own field of study are extended to other fields, most obviously the enduring presence of the state (Mackintosh et al. 1996; Sloman and Norris 1999). ‘Game theory’ has become fashionable in both economics and political science. Developed on thoroughly asocial and individualised premises, it nevertheless shows numerous circumstances in which individually rational action is constrained by imperfect information and necessarily informed by others’ beliefs and behaviour. This means, at the very least, a world in which, as some contemporary liberals acknowledge, individual rationality is ‘bounded’, choices are socially constructed and, with many games being played simultaneously, outcomes are often unpredictable (Simon 1982; Keohane 2005).

In a capitalist society people do and must act with a calculating individuality. They compete, often in more destructive ways than liberal interpretations suggest. However, liberal economics exaggerates competitive individualism, to insist on a theory of ‘everyone, everywhere, all the time, being calculating, rational human beings: no classes, no history, no past, no tomorrow’ (Dowd 2004:39). It also overstates the possibilities of anticipating economic behaviour on the basis of such assumptions. Much of human action is not based on calculating individuality, but is imbued by habit and motivated by numerous directly social objectives. To the extent that selfish individualism dominates, the task should be to understand how this came to be – so that it might be changed.

Support for Free Markets

For liberalism, competitive individualism underpins successful free markets. Smith, Ricardo and other classical political economists believed in, even celebrated, the efficiency of the market as a distributive mechanism. However, classical PE again left creative tensions that would lead on the one hand to Marxism, on the other to marginalist economics. Like the individualist methodology on which it depends, characterising markets under capitalism as ‘free’ masks vital aspects of the real economy; non-price competition, the bureaucratically organised nature of the firm and production, the systematic inequalities of class, economic volatility and the myriad things governments actually do. Markets are not free as the models depict. Support for free markets then means attempting to make the world conform to the theory, belying claims of objectivity and supporting particular freedoms while overlooking others.

For Smith, typically, ‘publi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Theories of The Global Political Economy
• Part II: The Origins of Global Capitalism
• Part III: Structures, Issues and Agents
• Conclusions: What Prospects for the State, Capital and Labour?
• References
• Index