Alberto Ganis
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Power is a very complex term that changes meaning based on the context in which it is used. In general, according to theMerriam-Webster dictionary, power can be described as the “ability to act or produce an effect, the legal or official authority, capacity, or right and the possession of control, authority, or influence over others”. In political economy, it is crucial to consider power and how it is connected to capitalism at large. The common idea is to unveil the different ways in which capitalism exercises power in society and how this is problematic for world balance, with two main manifestations of power leading the way: labor power and state power.
Labor power: Harvey (2018) discusses labor power through Marxist lenses and describes it as a commodity that has to be purchased by the capitalist in order to maintain the cycle of capital. The value of such labor power is dictated by the production costs contextualized in a given standard of living. Proletarians have to sell their labor as a means of survival since they are alienated from the means of production. Through this understanding, power is framed as the control exerted by the proletarians on their own body and their “freedom” to sell their labor via their bodies. Yet, proletarians can also be stripped of their labor power when they are coerced into a working activity. This practice is called unfree labor, and it encompasses forms of exploitation described as forced labor, human trafficking, and ‘modern slavery’ (Lebaron & Phillips 2019). Nonetheless, free and unfree labor “are going to coexist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market” (Grosfoguel 2011, 10). In fact, even though by definition, the worker has the power of labor, in the end, the capital is going to appropriate the powers, skills and capacities of the proletariat, commodifying them into free goods (Harvey 2018). Labor power is organized by capital in an international division of labor of core and periphery that goes beyond the state borders, in the periphery, which is often represented by developing countries, the capital extracts labor around coerced and authoritarian forms (Grosfoguel, 2011). In Balibar’s (1991) words “core and periphery strictly speaking are relational concepts that have to do with differential cost structures of production. The location of these different production processes in spatially distant zones is not an inevitable and constant feature of the relationship. But it tends to be a normal one” (Balibar, 79). Due to this international reach of capital forces, the states are exerting their authority, their power to regulate (or not) the fluxes of capital and labor.
State power: A state is an organization that claims a special kind of supreme jurisdiction over a given piece of territory (sovereignty), therefore having the legal or official power over such territory and its citizens. Within the field of political economy, are seen as policymakers, as agents of regulation and criminal justice enforcement, which played a significant role in facilitating the movement of capital and labor (Lebaron & Phillips 2019). From the readings, it emerges that states play an important role in the existence and the development of the capitalist system as its policies can promote or resist the flux of capital and labor that are crucial for capitalism to thrive. The degree of state involvement and its associated levels of taxation are some of the aspects that affect the economy, these variables depend to a large extent on the balance of class forces as well as the ideological fight over the benefits or disadvantages of state interventions in the circulation of capital (Harvey 2018) Furthermore, the way a state exercises its power is also affected by as well as its geopolitical power and position within the state system. This is related to macroeconomic events like massive crises (such as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s or the 2018 Recession) that often call for more effective and wide state interventions, where the institutions use their authority and power to affect policy and economic change (Harvey, 2018). The readings underline many ways in which the state can rely on its authority to provoke change. According to Cohen (2016), one of the ways used by states to establish their position among other states, is money. Money can be seen as “an instrument of statecraft, concerned with the deliberate exploitation of monetary relations to influence others” (13). The state can also exert its power within the system by exploiting the North-South dynamics that resulted from the capitalist expansion of the West (North) during the colonial era. “The old colonial hierarchies of European versus non-Europeans remain in place and are entangled with the “international division of labor” and accumulation of capital at a world-scale” (Grosfoguel 2011, 15). Through these structural inequalities, some states are able to stay at the top of the capitalist pecking order since states closer to the core of capitalism have “historically arranged that world-wide and over time money and goods have flowed more ‘freely’ than labour. The reason for doing this is that core states have thereby received the advantages of ‘unequal exchange’” (Balibar 1991, 123). This is why core states become stronger than peripheral states, they use this differential power to maintain a degree of interstate freedom of flow of capital and labor. An example of policies that can be used to restrict the flow of labor can be the specific migration governance employed by the United States that focuses on punitive mobility and border control regimes aimed at decreasing the amount of (ill-)legal workers entering the American market.
(See Biopolitics, Labor Power, Geopolitics, the State)
Bibliography
Balibar, Etienne. “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, and Class: Ambiguous Identities, 169-188. London: Verso, 1991.
Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of Money Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 5 (2016).
Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011).
Harvey, David. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
LeBaron, Genevieve, and Nicola Phillips. “States and the Political Economy of Unfree Labour.” New Political Economy 24, no. 1 (2019): 1-21.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 2019.