Anthony Bencomo
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

A definition of poverty usually involves looking at the absence of money and/or material goods. Poverty has been somewhat difficult to define, especially as there is a quantitative component linked to the term. Even the census, the main measuring tool of the state, has faced criticism for their definition. Currently they measure various forms of income (earnings, rents, survivor benefits) and weigh that in consideration of the measure of need, which includes the size of the family and the ages of the children. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services presently lists, for a family of four, that the poverty guideline is $25,750 a year (U.S. Federal). The numbers of families that are at or fall underneath this number help determine money for federal assistance programs such as Head Start and food stamps, meaning the poverty rate has real consequences for budgets and for the everyday lives of individuals. There are other factors that are tossed around such as crime in the neighborhood and access to food are cited as being ignored when income is the sole measure (Uchitelle 2001).

Furthermore, should poverty in the United States only be compared to richer countries? Many are quick to cite that poverty in the United States is generally much better than some of the poorest nations in the world. In the United States the poverty rate translates to around $16 a day. Typically, $2 a day is the norm as the poverty line in poorer nations. It was found that there are people living in the United States who fall below this $2 a day marker; about 1 to 5% of families are included in this statistic (Rosen 2014). 

Some definitions are removed from strictly numbers to a more holistic approach. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in Economics defined poverty as “the lack of freedom to have or do basic things that you value.” with political scientists Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons stating “A person deprived of things that everyone around him has is likely to suffer a sense of inadequacy, a loss of dignity and self-respect.” establish that it is a person being blocked from meeting their material needs and human dignity could be looked upon as poverty (Uchitelle 2001). These explanations also illustrate how difficult it can be to label poverty with so many contested meaning, each with its own particular insight.

Obviously, there are numerous negative consequences to living in poverty that encompass health, education, and relations with the criminal justice system. Poverty also has a large hand in shaping cities, where people live and how resources are allocated in those areas. It is one of the biggest factors in determining life outcomes. Fresno serves as a prime example of this as newer development and richer people tend to continuously move to the northern parts of the city. This geography also reflects health trends and life outcomes as residents living in the richer part of the city live to an average age of 90 with people in the poorer parts of Fresno living around 20 years less (Thebault 2018). In the United States, women and minorities tend to live in these poorer areas and tend to be subject to these negative consequences on a more frequent basis. It was identified that, rather than looking to build up their neighborhood, many poor people are looking to escape their surroundings, showing the brain drain and economic flight that able residents carry out (Desmond and Travis 2018, 874).

On a political level, politicians fear adjusting the poverty level due to their anxiety that the percentage of impoverished Americans would formally increase as new people fell underneath the adjusted poverty line. At face value, without the qualifier noting that the poverty level was adjusted, politicians would be burdened with this increased number during reelection (Uchitelle 2001). Refusal to adjust the number also means some continue to struggle but do not qualify for federal programs as they do not meet or fall underneath $16 a day. It would be assumed that individuals blocked from resources and material wealth, especially in wealthy nations, would lash out against the system in multiple ways. Instead what has been found is that these groups living in poverty in the United States tend to be less engaged politically. Rather than blaming the system, individuals frequently look solely at their own faults when faced with problems that stem from their own poverty like evictions. Residents do have a level of social support, but this rarely becomes political action (Desmond and Travis 2018, 873-890).

While we tend to think of poverty as a national problem, the global community does have an effect in creating and enforcing poverty. Residents of East St. Louis witnessed business owners move factories to poorer nations, leaving the city’s black residents without the main employers, causing 35% of residents to be considered under the poverty line (Hamer 2011, 79). However, their story is the story of survival and shows how some communities have managed to push back against poverty; one particular outgrowth has been the development of the underground economy. While of course this underground economy encompasses drug dealing, it also consists of people catering out of their homes, gardening neighbor’s yards or cutting hair (Hamer 2011, 79-80). This is not to discount the effects that neoliberalism and deindustrialization had on this area but instead an acknowledgement of the residents for their ability to find ways of survival, and their resilience in an ever-growing globalized neoliberal economy.

Bibliography

Desmond, Matthew, and Adam Travis. “Political Consequences of Survival Strategies among the Urban Poor.” American Sociological Review 83, no. 5 (2018): 869–896.

Hamer, Jennifer. Abandoned in the Heartland: Work, Family, and Living in East St. Louis. University of California Press, 2011.

Rosen, Rebecca J. “The Bottom 1%.” The Atlantic, August 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-bottom-1-percent/379400/.

Thebault, Reis. “Fresno’s Mason-Dixon Line.” The Atlantic, August 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/fresnos-segregation/567299/.

Uchitelle, Louis. “How to Define Poverty? Let Us Count the Ways.” The New York Times, 26 May 2001.

“U.S. Federal Poverty Guidelines Used to Determine Financial Eligibility for Certain Federal Programs.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 11 Jan. 2019. https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines.

Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

What is the state? The state is usually defined as an entity constituted by a population, a defined territory, and a government. This reductionist definition, however, could reproduce an essentialized understanding of the state which is then analyzed as a fixed idea and as a given unity or a coherent and static actor. As Bob Jessop analyzes, this could lead to distorted and frozen perceptions of a historical phenomenon such as the state. Jessop proposes an understanding of the state as a historical and complex social relation that exists at the level of social formations. As a social relation, the state can only be understood as a matter of power. For Jessop (2016), state power “is a relationship between social forces mediated through the institutional structures and selectivity of the state” (307). What is the capitalist state? According to Jessop (2002), “the capitalist type of state has a distinctive, form-determined strategic selectivity with major implications for the organization and effectiveness of state intervention” (37). Some of its features are the exercise of sovereignty, the rule of law, and the institutional separation between market economy, sovereign state, and a public sphere (civil society).

What is the role of the state for capitalism? Is it a functional instrument for reproducing capitalist relations of production? Is state intervention just a secondary activity for capital accumulation? From a state-theoretical perspective, Bob Jessop demonstrates the absolutely essential role of the state to capitalist production and market relations. First, the state provides important conditions for capital accumulation through extra-economic institutions such as “a formally rational monetary system, a formally rational legal system and the reproduction of labour-power as fictitious commodity” (Jessop 2002, 43). Second, as Jessop argues, structural contradictions and dilemmas are inherent in the capital relation and the state has a major role in managing these contradictions. Therefore, “Neither capitalism as a whole nor the capital-labour relation can be reproduced purely through market relations. Both require supplementary modes of reproduction, regulation and governance – including those provided through the operations of the state” (Jessop 2002, 11).

In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012) argue that “states need to be placed at the center of the search for an explanation of the making of global capitalism. The role of states in maintaining property rights, overseeing contracts, stabilizing currencies, reproducing class relations, and containing crises has always been central to the operation of capitalism” (1). Thus, from a theory of the capitalist state, Panitch and Gindin study the role of the American state in the making of global capitalism. As the authors explain, one of capitalism’s defining characteristics is the legal and organizational differentiation between state and economy. For them, “as capitalism developed states in fact became more involved in economic life than ever, especially in the establishment and administration of the juridical, regulatory, and infrastructural framework in which private property, competition, and contracts came to operate…Capitalism could not have developed and expanded unless states came to do these things” (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 3). The establishment of the rule of law and liberal democracy are characteristic of the capitalist state. These are precisely the two pillars that have added legitimacy to the American empire. As Panitch and Gindin (2012) argue,

just as the liberal democratic project of reconciling formal equality of citizenship with the inherently unequal social relations of capitalism obscured the realities of class, so did the attempt to reconcile national self-determination and the formal equality of states with the inherently asymmetric inter-state relations in a capitalist world economy likewise obscure the new realities of empire. (9)

The neoliberal economic and political project has become hegemonic. This involves a new accumulation regime along with institutional and discursive transformation. For Loïc Wacquant (2012), under neoliberalism the remaking and redeployment of the state is fundamental to the political project because the state is “the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential” (68). In this context, according to Jessop (2003), “the state is actively involved in developing new accumulation strategies, state projects, and hegemonic projects based on the discourses of globalization and structural competitiveness” (15). However, this structural transformation has had an impact on democracy and national sovereignty. Although, according to Jessop (2002), democratic institutions are not a feature of the capitalist type of state (40), under neoliberalism it is difficult to maintain liberal democracy because democracy slows the dynamic of capital accumulation. For Jessop (2003), “The national state will remain a key political factor as the highest instance of democratic political accountability” (12), but at the same time, “we are seeing the authoritarian statism of neoliberalism” (Jessop 2016, 314). Changes in authoritarian control are evident through an increase in punishment under neoliberalism. According to Wacquant, the expansion and exaltation of the penal state and the culture of control are integral components of the neoliberal state. This could be explained for two reasons. First, neoliberalism has undermined the state’s role in social reproduction. Second, state sovereignty is being eroded; especially weaker states have lost power to legislate in their territories. Thus, as Wacquant (2012) argues, “the state restores the authority of the governing elite by reaffirming ‘law and order’” (76).

For Bob Jessop, a key role remains for the national state: its general political functions. In the same vein, Nancy Fraser (2014) argues that the role of the state and the international system is crucial for the processes of capital accumulation to constitute the “political conditions of possibility.” Additionally, Jessop (2003) argues that “the national state is still the most significant site of struggle among competing global, triadic, supranational, national, regional, and local forces” (12). Capitalism doesn’t only require state support for the valorization of capital and social reproduction, but also because of its political responsibility in maintaining institutional integration and social cohesion. Even under neoliberalism, “the postwar national state is acquiring new economic and social functions and remains significant as a general political force” (Jessop, 2003, 16).

Bibliography

Gindin, Sam and Leo Panitch. The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Fraser, Nancy. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review 86 (2014): 55–72.

Jessop, Bob. “Capitalism and the Capitalist Type of State.” In The Future of the Capitalist State, 11-54. Cambridge: Polity, 2002, 

Jessop, Bob. “Narrating the Future of the National Economy and the National State? Remarks on Remapping Regulation and Reinventing Governance.” Lancaster U, Department of Sociology, 2003. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/jessop-narrating-the-future.pdf

Jessop, Bob. “Reading the Conjuncture: State, Austerity, and Social Movements, an Interview with Bob Jessop.” Interview by Mikkel Flohr and Yannick Harrison. Rethinking Marxism 28, no. 2 (2016): 306–321, doi: 10.1080/08935696.2016.1163988

Wacquant, Loïc. “Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism.” Social Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2012): 66–79, doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8676.2011.00189.x

Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Governmentality is a concept developed by Foucault in its 1977-1978 lectures on Security, Territory, and Population (2007). By governmentality, Foucault (1991) means three things:

1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes ‘governmentalized.’ (102-103)

The analytical tools created by French philosopher Michel Foucault are extremely useful to approach the analysis of the state as power relations. For Foucault (2012), the idea of power as coercion and domination is a totally insufficient conceptualization. Therefore, one of his most powerful insights is the notion of governmentality for understanding the real functioning of power. This concept plays a decisive role in the analysis of state power because it connects the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state. 

For German sociologist Thomas Lemke (2002), this concept offers a view on power beyond a perspective that centers either consensus or violence, and helps to differentiate between power and domination (51). From the perspective of governmentality, “government refers to a continuum, which extends from political government right through to forms of self-regulation” (Lemke 2002, 59). According to Lemke (2002), “Governmentality is introduced by Foucault to study the ‘autonomous’ individual’s capacity for self-control and how this is linked to forms of political rule and economic exploitation” (52). For Foucault (2002), government refers to systematized, regulated, and reflected modes of power which is the idea of the technology of power. Therefore, as Lemke (2002) states, the notion of governmentality is useful to investigate the relations between technologies of the self and technologies of domination (52). It is impossible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality behind them. As Lemke (2002) argues, political rationality is “an element of government itself which helps to create a discursive field in which exercising power is ‘rational’” (55). By producing new forms of knowledge that provide arguments and justifications, the political rationality contributes to the “government” of new domains of regulation and intervention. Therefore, the production of new modes of subjectivity is linked to governmental technologies (Lemke 2002, 59, 55).

Lemke (2001) explains the two sides of governmentality,

On the one hand, the term pinpoints a specific form of representation; government defines a discursive field in which exercising power is ‘rationalized’. This occurs, among other things, by the delineation of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, the provision of arguments and justifications, etc. In this manner, government enables a problem to be addressed and offers certain strategies of solving/handling the problem. On the other hand, it also structures specific forms of intervention. For political rationality is not pure, neutral knowledge which simply ‘re-presents’ the governing reality; instead, it itself constitutes the intellectual processing of the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include agencies, procedures, institutions, legal forms, etc., that are intended to enable us to govern the objects and subjects of a political rationality. (191)

British sociologist Mike Gane works on the emergence, development, and critique of neo-liberal governmentality and culture. In his “The New Foucault Effect” (2018), Gane argues that today there is a new Foucault effect, which has arisen around the courses on governmentality, neoliberalism, and biopower. How can the concept of governmentality be used to analyze neoliberalism? What are the specific neoliberal technologies of government? Lemke (2001) underlines the concept of governmentality and the critical political angle it provides for an analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism. Foucault discusses the basic definition of the practices of the neoliberal art of government (neoliberal governmentality) in its 1978-1979 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). While in his 1978 lectures Foucault traced the genealogy of governmentality from Classical Greek and Roman days via the early Christian pastoral guidance to the notion of state reason and the science of the police, the 1979 lectures focused on the study of liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Foucault concentrates in particular on two forms of neoliberalism: German post-war liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School, which derives from the former and takes German post-war liberalism a step further to give it a more radical form (Lemke, 2001).

For Foucault, “neoliberalism is not the end but a transformation of politics that restructures the power relations in society” (Lemke 2002, 58). Thus, the concept of governmentality allows us to pinpoint the specific character of the neoliberal notion of rationality and its power techniques and forms of knowledge which translate into specific practices, political programs, and social policies. As Lemke (2002) argues, “the concept of governmentality construes neoliberalism not just as ideological rhetoric, as a political-economic reality, or as a practical antihumanism, but above all as a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists” (60). The new principles, practices, agencies, and instruments of government under the neoliberal model have shaped new realities and subjectivities creating governable domains and governable persons. The concept of governmentality allows us to make more complex analyses of neoliberal forms of government and to shed light on the effects of neoliberal governmentality in terms of (self-)regulation and domination. It also allows us to analyze the close link between power relations and processes of subjectification as well as the processes for the creation of legitimacy and hegemony to reproduce the neoliberal model. 

Bibliography

Gane, Mike. “The New Foucault Effect.” Cultural Politics 14, no. 1 (2018): 109-127, doi: 10.1215/17432197-4312952

Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: with Two Lectures by and An Interview with Michel Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller,  87-104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Foucault, Michel. Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. The Mesh of Power. Viewpoint Magazine (2012). https://www.viewpointmag.com/2012/09/12/the-mesh-of-power/

Lemke, Thomas. “‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality.” Economy and Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 190-207, doi: 10.1080/03085140120042271

Lemke, Thomas. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 3 (2002): 49-64, doi: 10.1080/089356902101242288

Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

The coloniality of power refers to a new model of global power which started with the Conquest of the Americas in 1492. This new model of power has two fundamental axes: the idea of race and a new structural control of labor. On the one hand, race and racial identity were established as instruments of social classification and domination of “inferior” or non-European races. Consequently, the idea of race granted legitimacy to the relations of domination imposed by the conquest. The idea of race helped to “naturalize” colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. On the other hand, the new global model of labor, global capitalism, implied the domination/exploitation of race/labor. Additionally, the racist form of controlling labor under world capitalism entailed the articulation of all forms of labor control around capital. 

Eurocentrism refers to a specific rationality or perspective of knowledge associated with Western Europe which became universal (Quijano 2000, 549). This new hegemonic representation and mode of knowing claims universality for itself and relies on “a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center” (Dussel 2000, 471). Thus, Eurocentrism denotes the new intersubjective universe of the global model of power in which Western Europeans are the only producers and protagonists of modernity. Through the coloniality of power theory, the concept of modernity refers to a new space/time that was constituted materially with America. For Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, modernity, as experience and as an idea, is colonial from its origin. In sum, coloniality of power refers to the colonial/modern, capitalist, and Eurocentered axis of the global model of power that started with the invention of America. As Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2008) argues,

the coloniality of power is a category of analysis that makes reference to the specific structure of domination imposed on the American colonies since 1492. According to Quijano, Spanish colonizers established a relationship of power with the colonized based on ethnic and epistemic superiority of the former over the latter. (281)

The concept of coloniality, introduced by Aníbal Quijano in 1989, refers to the epistemic strategy of domination. While colonialism refers to particular political relations, coloniality refers rather to relations of power, and to conceptions of being and knowing that produce a world divided between legitimate human subjects and others who are fundamentally dispensable, denoting only negative or exotic meaning (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 119). Coloniality is the invisible and constitutive side of modernity. That the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are two sides of the same coin is an idea developed by Argentine philosopher and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo. Mignolo builds on the work of Anibal Quijano and argues specifically for the necessity of epistemic decolonization.

The geopolitics of knowledge, a pertinent category broadly utilized by Mignolo, refers to the local historical grounding of knowledge. For Mignolo (2005),

knowledge is always geo-historically and geo-politically located across the epistemic colonial difference. For that reason, the geo-politics of knowledge is the necessary perspective to dispel the Eurocentric assumption that valid and legitimate knowledge shall be sanctioned by Western standards. (43)

Geopolitics of knowledge refers to the process of converting local histories into a unique and universal point of enunciation and production of knowledge. According to Mignolo (2000), the geopolitics of knowledge is organized around the diversification, through history, of the colonial and the imperial differences (59). The irreductible colonial difference refers to “the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial world and those who have been left out of the discussion” (Mignolo 2000, 63). Referring to Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge, Castro-Gómez (2008) argues that “knowledge that is not produced in the centers of power or in the circuits controlled by them is declared irrelevant and ‘prescientific’…Asia, Africa, and Latin America…are not viewed as producers but rather as consumers of knowledge generated by the centers” (279-280).

For Argentinian philosopher María Lugones, the colonial/modern gender system is constitutive of the coloniality of power. Like race, gender was also an instrument of classification and domination. This process entailed the imposition of the heterosexual understanding of gender relations among the colonized. According to Lugones (2008), “Women racialized as inferior were turned from animals into various modified versions of ‘women’ as it fit the processes of Eurocentered global capitalism” (13). Therefore, we have to add the effects of the coloniality of gender to the material and subjective implications of the coloniality of power, capitalism, and Eurocentrism. Lugones (2008) also specifies that “the gender system is heterosexualist, as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority” (15). The gender system constitutes the modern/colonial meaning of “men” and “women.” This gender system has been functional to the capitalist economic system not only because it reproduces domination and the reproduction of labor but also because it makes labor racialized and gendered. For Lugones, Quijano’s idea of the coloniality of power is limited in revealing these gender dynamics. Therefore, Lugones approaches the logic of race and gender and the intersection of these two “structural axes” of global capitalism as necessarily based on oppression, exclusion, and violence.

Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel also elaborates on the coloniality of power in his analysis of the capitalist world-system. He calls attention to the risks of using a hierarchical theory of power when thinking about the modern/colonial world-system. For Grosfoguel (2011), the colonial power that “arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the word-system is unable to account for” (8). Therefore, for Grosfoguel, we need to move towards what the Greek sociologist Kyriakos Kontopoulos (1993) called heterarchical thinking. Heterarchical thinking is an attempt to conceptualize structures with a new language that goes beyond the paradigm of Eurocentric social science inherited from the nineteenth century. The old language is for closed systems because it has a unique logic that determines everything else from a single hierarchy of power (Castro-Gómez 2007, 18). When the logic of power is understood in hierarchical terms, global market relations determine the functioning of all other power relations, even at local levels. In contrast, the genealogical analysis thinks of power as a multiple net that functions as a heterarchy where there is no  “basic logic” of power that determines the logic of all other relations.

Grosfoguel conceptualizes the coloniality of power as an entanglement of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (“heterarchies”) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic, and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide reconfigures all of the other global power structures. For Grosfoguel (2011), what is new in the “coloniality of power” perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (11). The analysis of these entangled heterarchies led Grosfoguel to propose an alternative decolonial conceptualization of the world-system. For the author (2011), 

Given the hegemonic Eurocentric “common sense,” the moment we use the word “capitalism,” people immediately think that we are talking about the “economy”. However, “capitalism” is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix of what I called, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, “Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric Modern/Colonial World-System.” (13. See also Grosfoguel and Cervantes 2002)

We are living then in the era of the capitalist/patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system.

Bibliography

Castro-Gómez, Santiago. La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e Ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750-1816). Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2007.

Castro-Gómez, Santiago. “(Post)coloniality for dummies: Latin American perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.” In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Enrique Dussel, Mabel Moraña and Carlos Jáuregui, 259-285. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Dussel, Enrique. “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism.” Nepantla 1, no. 3 (2000):  465-478.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity 1, no. 1 (2011), 1–36.

Grosfoguel, Ramón and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez. The modern/colonial/capitalist world-system in the twentieth century: global processes, antisystemic movements, and the geopolitics of knowledge. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Kontopoulos, Kyriakos. The Logics of Social Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise 2, no. 2 (2008): 1-17.

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Mignolo, Walter. “(Post)Occidentalism, (Post)Coloniality, and (Post)Subaltern Rationality.” In The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, 86-118. Duke University Press, 2000.

Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005.

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla 1, no. 3 (2000), 533-580.

 Politics Graduate Students at the University of California, Santa Cruz

The Mundell-Fleming approach is a macroeconomic model that was developed to show the relationship between factors contributing to balance of payments. This model illustrates the tensions involved in an international political economy based on the integration of ostensibly sovereign individual units. The approach is commonly cited as the primary way to what is known as the Impossible Trinity (also referred to as the unholy trinity, the policy trinity, The Mundell-Fleming trinity, The Trilemma, and so on). Briefly, the Impossible Trinity states that it is impossible for a state to achieve all three of the following policy goals at one time, and the state must choose two: an autonomous monetary policy, capital mobility (financial integration), and a stable exchange rate. As Cohen (2017) explains, this principle complicates the policy choices a state has available for responding to a deficit balance of payments, which occurs when a country imports more capital, goods, and services than it exports. This entry briefly discussed each side of the Impossible Trinity before turning to an examination of their dynamics.

The ability for capital (particularly financial capital) to move across borders (i.e. capital mobility) has been widely regarded as a primary characteristic of the modern international political economy since the late 1970s. As Frieden (1991) notes, this mobility has been seen as undermining or contravening national policy, especially as it relates to monetary policy. Monetary policy, according to Cohen (2017) refers to control, by a central bank, of the money supply and of interest rates, which determine the rate of return on capital. Thus, an autonomous monetary policy entails that the state, typically by way of a central bank, can effectively make decisions concerning the amount of money within an economy and the interest rate without external constraint. Cohen’s analysis draws on previous work (Cohen 2006) on monetary power wherein he argues that monetary power allows a state to minimize the costs of adjusting its balance of payments through various policy options. Finally, a stable exchange rate is typically achieved through a pegged exchange rate regime, which entails a state controlling the supply of both foreign and domestic currency. To achieve a set exchange rate, a state can buy or sell amounts of either the foreign or domestic currency.

It is in this final consideration of what a state must do to achieve a fixed exchange rate under conditions of capital mobility that we see the trade-offs with an autonomous monetary policy, particularly in terms of controlling the supply of money. As Cohen (2017), Frieden (1991), and Aizenman (2010) explain, if a state increases the supply of money, this will create a downward pressure on domestic interest rates, which will cause capital to shift from investment in domestic bonds to higher yielding foreign bonds. This increased demand for foreign currencies to purchase foreign bonds provides a dilemma for the central bank, which must interfere in the currency market to maintain a stable exchange rate: the bank must sell its reserve of foreign currency, in order to maintain the exchange rate, and buys back the domestic money it created in the first stage of the process. Thus, as these authors explain, maintaining a fixed exchange rate with capital mobility entails giving up monetary autonomy. The same logic can be applied across the Impossible Trinity.

Empirically, Aizenman (2010) argues that multiple historical financial crises can be explained by attempts to achieve all three sides of the Impossible Trinity: the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 2001 Argentinean financial collapse. Interestingly, Aizenman (2013) argues that due to the significant costs of deleveraging crises, which are associated with recessions, the Trilemma framework should be updated as a Quadrilemma with the inclusion of financial stability.  

Notably, the Impossible Trinity can be used to further justify Grosfoguel’s pessimism of the futility of nation-level liberation struggles. The Impossible Trinity appears to indicate that the ability for a single nation-state to remain integrated into the international policy economy while retaining autonomy over important aspects of domestic governance is limited. Although, Grosfoguel would perhaps argue that it is unrealistic to achieve monetary autonomy, insofar as that monetary autonomy is used towards decolonization, democratization, and social justice.

Bibliography

Aizenman, Joshua. “The Impossible Trinity (aka the Policy Trilemma): The Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization.” Working Paper, No. 666, University of California, Economics Department, Santa Cruz, CA, 2010.

Aizenman, Joshua. “The Impossible Trinity: From the Policy Trilemma to the Policy Quadrilemma.” Global Journal of Economics 2, no. 1 (2013).

Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of Money Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy, 2016.

Frieden, Jeffry. Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance. International Organization, 1991.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–36.

Ingy Higazy
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Considered to be the single most continuous historical event in, and thus an integral feature of, human history, war is a historically loaded term to engage with. How can one begin to define a ubiquitous past and present event and, to some, human condition such as war? One approach to defining war, and thus an approach to the scholarly study of war, begins with an historical chronology of the development of modes and norms of warfare. This approach is most common in the discipline of International Relations (IR), which begins its study of war with the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece. Despite its limitations, a chronological history of the development of warfare is crucial, because the seeming historical continuity of war might mistakenly suggest a continuity in the modes and methods of war (essentially, war-making). Thus, accounting for the mutations in war, and the relationship of war to politics, society, and the economy more generally paints a more in-depth picture of what war is, and why it is important to account for it as a central term/pillar in the study of Political Economy.

Modern warfare revolutionized how and, most importantly, where war battles are fought, as well as who fights them. Beginning with Napoleon in France in the early nineteenth century, wars have become highly organized and economic (in this sense, calculated) undertakings. Thus, modern war-making revolutionized society and began to underpin political and social, as well as urban, organization in the nineteenth century onward. The French philosopher Michel Foucault perhaps best traces modern war’s revolutionizing of society—and the extent of the war-making machine, the military—in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). For Foucault, the social organization and logic of war not only gave birth to processes of discipline and surveillance in society, but also constituted its very political logic(s). For Foucault, the discipline needed to produce and sustain efficient militaries found its way into the spatial organization of prisons, schools, and hospitals. Thus, Foucault famously argued, by inverting von Clausewitz’ statement,[1] that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault 2003, 15). Foucault’s inversion of the statement introduced a new framework through which social theorists could begin to conceptualize of war. It establishes that war, not politics, is the main driver behind the project of modernity and is an instrument and effect of modern power. It also troubled the distinction, widely accepted and especially advocated for within the liberal strand of IR, between war and peace. In doing so, Foucault effectively argues that what we usually perceive of as realms of peace, and within foreign affairs, diplomacy, are simply different iterations of war. In his study of the emergence of the modern Egyptian Military in the nineteenth century, historian Khaled Fahmy situated his study as a critical response to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. While Fahmy did not reject Foucault’s diagnosis of modern power, through his study of the nascent war-making institution in Egypt, he argued that such a theoretical standpoint—that war underpins all life processes—overshadows moments and windows of resistance to wars and war-making. To Fahmy, such moments of resistance, like war-making, also defined the course of modernity.

Yet, what is war? And why is it central to modernity? The Oxford Dictionary approaches its definition of war from a solely political, state-based framework, and begins by defining war as first and foremost “an armed conflict between political actors.” However, within the subfield of historical sociology, war is conceived of as, first and foremost, a social process (see Mann 

1988). Thinkers like Charles Tilly conceived of war-making as essential in the development and organization of large-scale bureaucracies. Thus, for Tilly, modern war-making efforts essentially made the modern state (see Tilly 1992 and 1985). Ingrained within Tilly’s theory of modern war-making and state-making is the role of circulation and exchange, and thus of economics (broadly conceived), in war. Thus, war is also an economic process. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, in The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012), clearly engage war as a tool of global capitalism. Their extensive analysis of the role of several wars, namely the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II, in the making of the United States (US) a global facilitator and police of capital attest to the centrality of war in political economic processes, and especially capitalist processes of production. In fact, war was essential in the construction of global infrastructures for the movement of capital. Panitch and Gindin trace extensively how the construction of continental infrastructures in the US opened new spaces for capital accumulation, and how such infrastructures later aided the American capitalist class in exporting its products, and relations, abroad (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 29-31).

War is furthermore crucial to the functioning and understanding of one of modernity’s most central and uneven processes: imperialism. The French-Egyptian Marxian thinker and theorist Samir Amin conceptualizes of the trajectory of modern capitalism as essentially imperialist, building on Lenin and critics of capitalism who avidly thought about the centrality of imperialism in the capitalist project. In his last interview, Amin argued that: “We cannot discuss how to prevent war. War and chaos are inscribed into the logic of this decaying system” (“Globalization and Its Alternatives: An Interview with Samir Amin,” 13). Thus, for Amin and his anti-imperialist critique of capitalism—or more accurately, his critique of the intertwined processes of capitalism and imperialism—war is not an aberration or an outlier. It resides at the very heart of the capitalist process. Thus, war, especially the Cold War, was an instance of anti-imperialist organizing which situated ‘abstaining’ from and opposing the war as a platform for anti-imperialist and Third World solidarity.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975.

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. Picador, 2003.

Mann, Michael. “States, War, and Capitalism.” Social Forces 67, no. 3 (1989): 699-724.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990. Blackwell, 1992.

Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169-191. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Double Movement is a concept originated by Hungarian-American political economist Karl Polanyi in his 1944 The Great Transformation. It refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. American sociologist Fred Block writes in an introduction to the 2001 edition that “because efforts to disembed the economy from society inevitably encounter resistance, Polanyi argues that market societies are constituted by two opposing movements-the laissez-faire movement to expand the scope of the market, and the protective countermovement that emerges to resist the disembedding of the economy” (xxviii. On Polanyi’s double movement, see also Block 2008). Thus, as Polanyi explains in Chapter Eleven, social history in the nineteenth century was the result of a double movement: the market expanded continuously only to be met by a countermovement checking its expansion in definite directions. This countermovement was a reaction against dislocations attacking the fabric of society. Since this social reaction was looking for the protection of society, it found itself incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself (Polanyi 2001, 136). The double movement is the interaction of two organizing principles in society:

one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market-primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes-and using protective legislation restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods. (Polanyi 2001, 138-9)

Thus, the double movement refers to a dialectical process of marketization and its negation in the form of a push for social protection against that marketization. The argument rests on Polanyi’s distinction between so-called real and fictitious commodities. Since land, labor, and money are not produced in the market, they are, Polanyi claims, fictitious commodities. Modern economists treat fictitious commodities as if they behave in the same way as real commodities, and this places human society at risk (Block 2001, xxv). As Polanyi (2001) explains,

Self-regulation implies that all production is for sale on the market and that all incomes derive from such sales. Accordingly, there are markets for all elements of industry, not only for goods (always including services) but also for labor, land, and money, their prices being called respectively commodity prices, wages, rent, and interest. (72)

The commodity fiction not only allows to keep production going, it also became a vital organizing principle of society. “This means that the development of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself” (Polanyi 2001, 79). A protectionist countermove or movement of self-preservation originated as a result of this destructive and annihilating principle. In Polanyi’s words, “the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones” (2001, 79).

Polanyi’s intuition that history advances through a series of countermovements has been adapted to interpret the neoliberal turn. For example, in The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (2014), sociologists Fred Block and Margaret Somers (2014b) argue that the ideas of Karl Polanyi are crucial to understanding the 2008 recession and its aftermath. Additionally, the idea of double movement acts as a frame for Rolando Munck’s analysis of the rise and fall of neoliberalism across Latin America. In Rethinking Latin America: development, hegemony, and social transformation (2013), Argentinian sociologist Rolando Munck shows “the relevance of the Polanyian ‘double movement’ (market dis-embedding and re-embedding) for a reading of social transformation in Latin America” (130. On Polanyi’s double movement, see also Munck 2002). According to Munck (2003), “We can posit that the emergence of ‘globalization’ in the last quarter of the twentieth century represents the belated fulfillment of the nineteenth internationalizing phase of human history characterized by ‘an attempt to set up one big self-regulating market’” (132). Thus, “the Polanyi problematic provides…a complex and dialectical framework for an understanding of globalization and contestation” (Munck 2003, 164).

Despite the structural similarities between today’s crisis and that of the 1930 as well as the potential of Polanyi’s idea of a double movement to analyze contemporary reality, the concept does not allow us to fully grasp some specificities of the present conjuncture. In the article “A Triple Movement?” (2013), Nancy Fraser argues that “we lack a double movement in Polanyi’s sense… While today’s crisis appears to follow a Polanyian structural logic, grounded in the dynamics of fictitious com­modification, it does not manifest a Polanyian political logic, figured by the double movement” (121). Fraser offers several explanations to explain the absence of a double movement. The first hypothesis refers to failures of political leadership. The second refers to the shift from a Fordist regime of accumulation to a post-Fordist one, dominated by finance. A third hypothesis focuses on another structural shift that has taken place since the 1930s. For Fraser (2003),

What has changed, in this case, is the scale on which crisis is experienced—and therefore the frame through which it must be addressed. What is at stake, specifically, is the shift from a 20th-century crisis scenario that was framed in national terms, as requiring action by territorial states, to a 21st-century scenario, which has destabi­lized the national frame without yet generating a plausible replacement. (125)

Thus, the project of social protection can no longer be envisioned in the national frame (Fraser 2003, 126).

Although these hypotheses shed light on why there is no double movement in the present conjuncture, they still “failed to grasp the specifically political dynamics that have derailed Polanyi’s scenario” (2003, 127). So, Fraser refers to the emancipatory movements which do not fit within the scheme of the double movement. The paramount aim of these movements was not to defend society but to overcome domination. “In general, then, the social movements of the postwar era do not fit either pole of the double movement. Championing neither marketiza­tion nor social protection, they espoused a third political project, which I shall call emancipation” (Fraser 2003, 128). For Fraser, the conflict between marketization and social protection cannot be understood in isolation from emancipation. Emancipatory movements encompassed both protectionist and marketizing tendencies. They have often neglected the impact of marketizing projects on their struggles with protectionist forces. Therefore, “In the conflict zone of the triple movement, emancipation has joined forces with marketization to double-team social protection” (Fraser 2003, 130). Thus, for Fraser (2003),

Occulted by Polanyi’s figure, this project needs to be given a central place in our efforts to clarify the grammar of social struggle in the 21st century. I propose, accordingly, to analyse the present constellation by means of a different figure, which I call the triple movement. Like Polanyi’s figure, the triple movement serves as an analytical device for parsing the grammar of social struggle in capitalist society. But unlike the double movement, it delineates a three-sided con­flict among proponents of marketization, adherents of social protection and partisans of emancipation. The aim here is not simply greater inclu­siveness, however. It is rather to capture the shifting relations among those three sets of political forces, whose projects intersect and collide. The triple movement foregrounds the fact that each can ally, in principle, with either of the other two poles against the third. (128)

Bibliography

Block, Fred. “Introduction.” Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Block, Fred. “Polanyi’s Double Movement and the Reconstruction of Critical Theory.” Interventions Économiques Pour Une Alternative Sociale, 38 (2008): 1-16.

Block, Fred and Margaret Somers. The power of market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s critique. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014a.

Block, Fred and Margaret Somers. “The free market is an impossible utopia.” Interview by Henry Farrel.   The Washington Post, Jul. 18, 2014b. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/18/the-free-market-is-an-impossible-utopia/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.06d90a14f125

Fraser, Nancy. A triple movement? New Left Review 81 (2013): 119–132.

Munck, Ronaldo. Globalization and Democracy: A New “Great Transformation”? Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 581 (2002): 10–172.

Munck, Ronaldo. Rethinking Latin America: development, hegemony, and social transformation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Lucia Vitale
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

In its most basic definition, welfare is a form of state assistance which helps individuals meet their basic needs. Folbre defines the welfare state as “…a public sector providing education and a social safety net…” (Folbre 2009, xxx), where the social safety net is comprised of services such as health, old age security, and education (Folbre 2009, 325). In many ways the welfare state and how it has been defined since the writings of Marx has reflected not only the political and economic principles of the time, but also hegemonic ideas of the roles of women and migrants in a market society.

While welfare is not explicitly referenced in the writings of Marx, the reproduction of labor power is a related concept, and one that is later taken up by feminists and Marxist geographers in order to explore themes of welfare in contemporary times. Marx writes: “Given the individual, the production of labor-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance… the value of labor-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the laborer” (Marx 1867, 115). The value of labor power must be sufficient in the short run to satisfy a laborer’s natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing. In the long run it must also “…include the means necessary for the laborer’s substitutes, i.e., his children…” (Marx 1867, 116). The capitalist, who is able to accumulate capital only when the laborer produces surplus value, is motivated to keep wages low so that they may cover the minimum required to reproduce the worker. Without this process of reproducing the laborer, there would be no laborer for the capitalist to accumulate surplus labor from. The reproduction of labor power requires wages from the employer to purchase goods on the market such as food. Unpaid female labor which is, for example, used to cook the food purchased from the market, is one way that labor power is reproduced. Alternatively, or in addition to, labor power may be assisted by the state through welfare programs used to acquire necessary goods such as housing and access to medical care.

In a discussion on Marx’s conception of capital as value in motion, Marxist geographer David Harvey writes how this motion begins with a capitalist going into the market to purchase labor power. The price of purchasing this labor power, Harvey writes, is determined by the costs of reproducing labor power at a given standard of living. Inherent in this calculation, then, are questions of who is responsible for the reproduction of labor (the two examples above were women and the state). Harvey writes,

In effect capital relies upon the workers and their families to take care of their own processes of reproduction (with perhaps some assistance from the state). Marx follows capital and likewise treats of social reproduction as a separate and autonomous sphere of activity providing in effect a free gift to capital in the persona of the laborer who returns to the workplace as fit and ready to work as possible (Harvey 2018, 14, italics added).

The capitalist, then, is reliant on unpaid labor from the family and, if present, support from the state in the form of welfare given as free gifts to his laborers.

Feminist scholar Nancy Folbre picks up on these themes of reproduction of labor, arguing that mens’ pursuit of self-interest is made possible only when women act in an altruistic manner, i.e. caring for children, the elderly, and performing housework necessary to reproduce the laborers in her household. In one passage she uses Adam Smith’s critique of state intervention into the economy, writing on how Smith was a known critic of his era’s “poor laws” and how they would hinder free trade and mobility of labor while simultaneously stifling male initiative (Folbre 2005, 65). Folbre traces this idea through time, and comments on how early welfare state policies have often been called the nanny state, a term which “…is often used to deprecate public policies that seem fussy, intrusive, and expensive, policies that would perhaps be unnecessary if individual women were more virtuous” (Folbre 2005, 268). State welfare, often deemed an inefficient intrusion onto a free market economic system, doesn’t provide support for traditionally market-based activities, but rather finances forms of care such as education and childcare, which are traditionally performed by women. Extending rights to women, then, allows them to exit their care roles, thereby facilitating state intervention through welfare and, as we will later see, a subsequent market co-optation of these public goods.

The New Deal era in the post-war “golden age” led by Americans was “…usually presented as the victory of the interventionist, or welfare, economy over the market economy” (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 9). It is this protective response to the marketization of society that Karl Polanyi calls the double movement (Polanyi 1944). During this time of interventionist welfare programs, Keynesian macroeconomic policies allowed, among other things, states to run deficits in order to invest in public works projects. This investment laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state, and its subsequent eradication (Hardt and Negri 2001, 242). As public monies were put to work establishing systems of Social Security, unemployment payments, and public health programs in the 1930s, the largest immigration surge in US history was underway. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were in motion, immigrants, including white European immigrants and Mexican immigrants, made up 12% of the US population. Race and ethnicity, tied up with immigrant status, were used as exclusionary tools in protecting the welfare state from “undeserving recipients”. In an impressive comparative project which considers welfare access by European immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and Black Americans in the United States from the Progressive Era to the New Deal, Cybelle Fox (2012) considers the racial and ethnic exclusionary practices employed to keep state resources aimed at groups thought to possess the ability to “assimilate” into American culture. Just as welfare programs provoked anxieties surrounding the emancipation of women, so too did they provoke racial and ethnic anxieties of the “worthy” recipient.

As the Keynesian promise of full employment was fulfilled, workers gained bargaining rights and saw their social wage rise (both in terms of wage paid and in welfare received). The resulting squeeze on capitalist surplus spurred a decrease in the rate of profit and sparked a backlash in the 60s and 70s. As inflation soared through the 70s, Chair of the Federal Reserve Paul Volker hiked interest rates in an effort to break inflation. “Fundamentally, the Volker shock was not so much about finding the right monetary policy as shifting the balance of class forces in American society” (Panitch & Gindin 2012, 171). It was under this pretense that the Ronald Regan presidency was able to cut welfare, food stamps, Medicare, public pensions, and unemployment insurance.

These programs had been developed with public funding and, as such, had become a certain basket of public goods existing in the commons to which citizens were entitled. Hardt and Negri write, “The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 301). Since the structure of public assistance and their distribution systems were created through publicly-funded projects, their subsequent co-optation by the market represents privatization and expropriation for private gains. The commons are the basis for the concept of the public, and when they are privately appropriated by market regimes and neoliberalism “…the immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced by the transcendent power of private property” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 301).

Not only is the privatization of publicly-funded social programs existing in the commons a hallmark of neoliberalizing processes, so too is exposure to risk. In his book on the 2008 financial crash Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Philip Mirowski (2013) considers the American neoliberal entrepreneurial spirit, writing that “…Anyone who participates in the welfare states is just a dull drone, lost in a vegetative state. They are debased because they expect the state to shield them from risk, when in fact, they should be reveling in the opportunity to remake themselves” (116). The contemporary neoliberal individual, then, is conditioned to reject welfare services on the basis that the “nanny state”, to borrow Folbre’s term, prevents the development of a self-sufficient, entrepreneurial market subject.

Also writing from the Great Recession, Eva Bertram uses the term “workfare” to describe the patchwork American welfare state and its requirement of (often private) employment in order to receive state benefits. This process, which she identifies as beginning in the 1960s and reaching its peak in the 1990s, occurred alongside deindustrialization and the resulting inability of low-wage jobs to provide income security and stability. She writes that “workfare policies were imposed in the context of sweeping economic changes that made low- wage work an increasingly unreliable path from poverty to economic security” (Bertram 2015, 6). The policies, another example of welfare state policy following the contours of political economic development, effectively kept lower classes from achieving social mobility.

Bibliography

Bertram, Eva. Workfare: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats. American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume One, The Process of Production Capital. 1867.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso 2013.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. New York: Octagon Books, 1944.

Alyssa Mazer
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

As capitalism and its specific form of sexual as well as class division of labour developed…wives were pushed into a few, low-status areas of employment or kept out of economic life altogether, relegated to their ‘natural’, dependent, place in the private, familial sphere. Today, despite a large measure of civil equality, it appears natural that wives are subordinate just because they are dependent on their husbands for subsistence, and it is taken for granted that liberal social life can be understood without reference to the sphere of subordination, natural relations and women. The old patriarchal argument from nature and women’s nature was thus transformed as it was modernized and incorporated into liberal-capitalism. (Carole Pateman 1989c, 123)

While not a traditional political economic term, wife is a title that denotes a very specific role. A wife is best described in negative form, in opposition to a citizen and a worker; by definition, a wife can be neither a public individual nor a free laborer. Although individual women may not end up becoming wives, women at large are coerced into the role and therefore contractually subordinated through the institution of marriage.

For the purposes of this definition, a wife is understood as a political, social, and economic subordinate to the rational individual of liberal economic theory, expected to provide unpaid labor to enable his success; this is a position maintained by legal, cultural, and financial circumstances. This entry introduces the various processes and expectations associated with the idea of a wife through a brief description of liberal theory, via Carole Pateman’s feminist critique.

Pateman’s groundbreaking work The Sexual Contract, originally published in 1988, explains that the initial social contract of liberal theory delineates sex-specific realms and roles. By their (either implicitly or explicitly) sexed articulation of a consenting, free individual and his place in the public sphere, liberal theorists have continuously emphasized that the rational individual—capable of contracting the use of his labor power for a wage, capable of participating in civil society and exercising his public capacities—can only ever be a man. This is an understanding of liberal society that questions key pieces of the contemporary political structure, troubling the foundations of a theory that proclaims individual freedom yet legally enforces arbitrary hierarchies.

One of Pateman’s most thorough critiques, which appears again in her 1989 collection The Disorder of Women, lies in her examination of how “marriage” is described by liberal theorists. Before more specifically considering her description of the wife’s role, it is important to begin with how the wife comes to be subordinated in theory.

Many liberal theorists root the wife’s subordination in nature; John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argue that marriage occurs in the state of nature—the abstract time before our recognizable, organized society (Pateman 2018a, 54). They argue that families are already well-established by the time husbands consent to be governed and leave the state of nature (Pateman 1989a, 19). According to these thinkers, wives are natural subjects, not rational individuals, and are therefore justly controlled by their husbands for their many reproductive capacities (Pateman 2018a, 53).

Likewise, and more explicit about the purpose of marriage, Hegel argues that women are naturally incapable of participating in civil life. His articulation of women’s political disruptiveness is not dissimilar from Rousseau’s, and they both hold that the social contract necessarily delineates a distinct private sphere to which women are incorporated “as members of the family” (Pateman 1989d, 182). To these theorists, “The family is seemingly the most natural of all human associations and thus specially suited to women, who cannot transcend their natures in the manner demanded by civil forms of life” (Pateman 1989a, 19).

This sexed division helps reveal how the role of a wife is socially assigned, and for a particular reason. Although he doesn’t recognize it, Thomas Hobbes’ description of marriage reveals two of liberal theorists’ core assumptions about the formation of a civil public: first, men have brought it into existence and only men have the proper capacities to govern it; second, their own rules dictate that the proper way to exclude women from it is to legally secure their subordination through marriage (Pateman 2018a, 48-9). Controlling women in this way is vital for the success of the state and the economy. In order to maintain their civil relationship, rational individuals need to organize access to wives that will enable their success in the public sphere. The same way that the individuals entering the social contract agree to their legal equality, they acknowledge their collective interest in accessing women’s bodies and labor (1989b, 43).

Because civil (public) society is a crucial aspect of how the wife comes to be, citizenship—while a word worth unpacking on its own terms—is a useful concept for articulating the wife’s public position. If a citizen is a free and equal individual who trades independence for state protection, the role of a wife is diametrically opposed. This wife vs. citizen tension is most obviously identified in two examples contemporary to the 1980s, and arguably still apparent today.

Pateman writes that legal conditions in Britain, the US, and Australia deny a wife’s right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband, thereby demonstrating her lack of personhood (1989d, 186). In addition, wives are economically subordinated by husbands, not only because he relies on her labor in the home to reproduce his labor power, but also because the expectation that a woman will become a wife limits the wage she can earn in the marketplace and the support she can receive from the state (1989d, 190); she is therefore forced to enter the marriage contract for her own survival.

Importantly, this is a historical condition. While Pateman does not agree that women’s subordination is natural, their position as such has been continuously maintained for centuries, solidifying itself as a kind of common sense. This inequality especially appears in their economic conditions. Despite multiple generations of “equal rights” enjoyed by women, they are more likely than men to live in poverty (1989d, 180); it is not a coincidence that, meanwhile, “the legislation, policy-making and higher-level administration of the welfare state…remain[s] predominantly in men’s hands” (181).

Finally, on the economic role of the wife, it is important to note that her labor is not equivalent to that of a worker. However, the liberal theorists’ reliance on this family structure helps to reveal the fundamental importance of a wife’s labor in the home. The nature of this relation appears most poignantly in Hobbes’ assertion that all people are servants of a particular kind, and wives embody the specific domestic servitude reserved for women (Pateman 2018a, 50).

There are empirical parts of a liberal state, society, and economy that make the idea of wife as servant obvious. According to Pateman’s telling, the legally recognizable position of a wife was nonexistent in the liberal societies of Britain, the US, and Australia until the late 1800s: a wife could not claim an independent identity, and instead was completely subsumed under the master-husband. Wives were regularly sold and treated as property; for example, a man could sue someone for damages inflicted on his wife. Wives had no bodily autonomy, no right to refuse a husband anything he asked, and they worked full time, their entire lives, without pay (2018b).

In the hundred-odd years between then and when Pateman is writing, the legal subordination of wives has changed faces, but its practical effects have not become less coercive. From Pateman’s perspective in the late twentieth century, the wife is a domestic servant, and marriage subordinates the wife to the husband as a kind of laborer. Most married women work outside the home and yet must also be readily available to provide for their husbands and arrange their lives exactly how he asks (2018b, 128). While men have at least some choice in where and to whom they contract the use of their labor power, “women collectively are coerced into marriage” socially and economically (2018b, 132). Both in the theoretical social contract and in practical life, women are made into wives.

The fact that a wife and a worker are definitional opposites further explicates this relation. The distinction is definitional in that the very idea of the worker is constructed as “the other side” of the wife; indeed, the role of a worker “presupposes that he is a man who has a woman, a (house)wife, to take care of his daily needs” (Pateman 2018b, 131). As a practical matter, this sexed division of labor is the norm in political, social, and economic hierarchies; for example, “the labours of housewives are not included in official measurements of national productivity” (Pateman 2018b, 137). The relative invisibility of the wife’s labor is further enforced—or perhaps mandated—by lack of reference to women’s labor in classical economic literature overall.

By now it should be clear that the role of wife is directly linked to women’s subordination in liberal societies. Succinctly, the claim is not that men have political, social, and economic dominance over women and, by unrelated incident, have also institutionalized marriage. This feminist critique demonstrates that the act of making—the many processes coercing—women into wives is what establishes, justifies, and reproduces those many forms of dominance.

(See Social Reproduction, Feminist Economics, Primitive Accumulation, Power)

Bibliography

Pateman, Carole. “‘The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 17-32. Stanford University Press, 1989a.

_____________. “The Fraternal Social Contract.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 33-57. Stanford University Press, 1989b.

_____________.“The Public/Private Dichotomy.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 118-140. Stanford University Press, 1989c.

_____________. “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 179-209. Stanford University Press, 1989d.

_____________. “Contract, The Individual, and Slavery.” In The Sexual Contract, 30th Anniversary Edition, 39-76. Stanford University Press, 2018a.

_____________. “Wives, Slaves and Wage Slaves.” In The Sexual Contract, 30th Anniversary Edition, 116-153. Stanford University Press, 2018b.

Boyeong Kim
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) is a social program that directly transfers cash to qualified low-income households that satisfy health and education-related requirements. It has been widely adopted by governments in the global South since the 2000s and generally has been assessed as having improved poverty indicators. However, critical approaches have investigated how the rise of CCTs as a popular social initiative has been related to the deepening of financial capitalism. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia provides a good example. Launched in 2003, Bolsa Familia has gained worldwide recognition as an innovative and effective (at the same time, less costly and politically rewarding) CCT that has contributed to poverty reduction. Conditions that eligible families must comply with include sending children to primary school and having them vaccinated and get medical check-ups. While various positive outcomes of the program has been observed – e.g. in reducing child mortality, improving tuberculosis treatment, and increasing women’s decision power within households (Rasella et al. 2013; Oliosi et al. 2019; De Brauw, Gilligan, Hoddinott, and Roy 2014) – the financialization of social policy has resulted that debt and credit relations have replaced social security. Exploring the deeper impact of Bolsa Familia, Lavinas (2018) explicates that on one hand, the program is exclusively funded through indirect taxation, thus its redistributive effect has been limited; on the other hand, a phenomenon that the author calls the collateralization of social policy has been taking place, in which the explosive expansion of personal and consumer credit under the center-left governments is now allowing the beneficiaries of CCTs to take out more loans holding the government aid money as collateral. The continued lack of public services leads to the dependency to private loans and insurance, exacerbating insecurity and inequality.  

Soederberg (2012) highlights another dimension of financialization of the social in Latin America by looking at how the strategy to promote financial inclusion of the poor in Mexico has led to the colonization of informal spaces. Since the mid-2000s, the “bottom of the pyramid (BOP)” market, or “poverty industries,” targeting the “unbanked” informal sector workers went through a remarkable growth under lax regulation that it became a common practice that leading economic groups that own banking and retail chains offer credit to the working poor with an extortionate interest rate to purchase their products. This process has been mediated by what she terms the “debtfare state” that facilitates a debt-driven accumulation strategy, in which the poor get incorporated into the financial market but excluded from capital relations.

Yet another important aspect of the financialization of social policies is its disciplinary effect. As Lavinas (2018) puts, “microcredit and CCTs act as a moral lever aimed at transforming the behavior of the poor and those at the bottom of the social ladder (508)”. The conduct-shaping effects of the financialization of social policies involve the construction of an ethical standard defined by the compliance to the power relations between creditors and debtors, in which the notion of social entitlement fades away and debt relations dictate the details of life conduct of subjects (Lazzarato 2012).

Bibliography

De Brauw, Alan, Daniel O. Gilligan, John Hoddinott, and Shalini Roy. “The Impact of Bolsa Família on Women’s Decision-making Power.” World Development 59 (2014): 487-504.

Lavinas, Lena. “The Collateralization of Social Policy under Financialized Capitalism.” Development and Change 49, no. 2 (2018): 502-517.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Semiotext(e), 2012.

Oliosi, Janaina Gomes Nascimento, Barbara Reis-Santos, Rodrigo Leite Locatelli, Carolina Maia Martins Sales, Walter Gomes da Silva Filho, Kerollen Cristina da Silva, Mauro Niskier Sanchez, et al. “Effect of the Bolsa Familia Programme on the Outcome of Tuberculosis Treatment: A Prospective Cohort Study.” The Lancet Global Health 7, no. 2 (2019): e219-e226.

Rasella, Davide, Rosana Aquino, Carlos AT Santos, Rômulo Paes-Sousa, and Mauricio L. Barreto. “Effect of a Conditional Cash Transfer Programme on Childhood Mortality: A Nationwide Analysis of Brazilian Municipalities.” The Lancet 382, no. 9886 (2013): 57-64.

Soederberg, Susanne. “The Mexican Debtfare State: Dispossession, Micro-lending, and the Surplus Population.” Globalizations 9, no. 4 (2012): 561-575.