Tamara Ortega-Uribe
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Neoliberalism is often related to economic policies to opening national markets and liberalizing economies in the global markets with the minimized role of nation-states. Free markets, free trade, and a sort of economic dominion over the political sphere (states included). However, considering the term from its economic theory origin, and its practical implementation through specific policies, neoliberalism is a polysemic concept and a multifaceted reality that has been challenged and become more complex over time. A considerable amount of literature has been written about neoliberalism and its multiple definitions. From the earlier theoretical ideas about neo-liberalism contended by the Mont Pelerin Society since the forties to the neoliberal policies implemented from different nation-states in the seventies onwards. Indeed, the seventies is the crucial period of time when neoliberalism was carried out, having one of the most successful experiments during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, which Milton Friedman called the “miracle of Chile”. But it was during 1978 and 1980 with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan when the neoliberal principles of economic thought were implemented, based on the idea of Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” (TINA). As a result, neoliberalism was spread as the only path to guide the new global order, through international institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization), which made neoliberal policies as the hegemonic consensus. In this sense, the Washington Consensus, through structural reforms that increased the liberalization of developing countries’ economies, allowed neoliberalism to become the new political economic arrangements throughout the western world.  

According to Harvey (2005, 2), “neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”. Based on this definition, the nation-states have a specific role to play in this particular political and economic arrangement. Following the same author, “the role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices…it must also set up those military, defence, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary.” (Harvey 2005, 2). However, the role of the state is limited, and it has to intervene at a minimum level because, according to Hayek (1945), the state only has a small fraction of knowledge and information of all members in the society. Then, a free-market society means decentralized planning and price-fluctuations instead of a centralized and planned economy by the state, which cannot achieve a rational and efficient economic organization. Additionally, this brings to the center of neoliberalism’s definition the problem of freedom.

Certainly, the ideal of freedom, and specifically individual freedom, were part of the common claims during the second half of the twentieth century, where the promoters of the free market offered a compelling theoretical framework that sought to pursue this ideal as fundamental values of the neo-liberal societies. The Mont Pelerin Society pointed out:

The central values of civilization are in danger…In some countries, freedom has disappeared entirely; in others it is under constant menace. Even freedom of thought and expression is being curbed. Freedom is being sacrificed to a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards and questions the desirability of the rule of law. This requires study on several fronts: explaining the crisis of the time; redefining the functions of the state; reaffirming the rule of law; establishing minimum standards that are compatible with the market; combating the misuse of history; and safeguarding international peace, liberty, and trade…The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda…it is politically unaligned, aiming only to help preserve and improve the free society by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common. (Mont Pelerin Society)  

Nevertheless, the theory does not always correspond with reality. As David Harvey has pointed out, there is gap between the theory and practice of neoliberalism, where the failures of the market, the differentiated freedom between the members of society, and the role of state in market crisis have shown that the neoliberal theory acquires different processes of neoliberalization (Harvey 2005). The multifaceted nature of neoliberalism and neoliberalization processes also materializes in the fact that the role of state would acquire different relevance to guarantee free market and competition according to neoliberalism or ordoliberalism, which have overlapping origins and definitions[1]. At the end, the critical point is what Sparke (forthcoming) points out, “neoliberalism is never automatic in practice…The anti-state state requires all sorts of active pro-market state-making and re-regulation.” (3).

In this regard, neoliberalism is not only an economic configuration, as the Document Index of Paul Treanor suggests “neoliberalism is not just economics: it is a social and moral philosophy”. Following Harvey (2005), it can be understood that neoliberalism was adopted as an economic method, but with a clear political goal: the restoration of class power. Thus, neoliberalism as a political project has been quite effective modifying all human relations, challenging the state sovereignty, designing new social and political arrangements throughout the world, and achieving a certain level of consensus (Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism as a political domain works through concrete neoliberal policies, practices and discourses (Brand & Sekler 2009) that, among other things, undermine the basis for organized class struggle and the channels for the effective mobilization of popular discontent (Portes & Hoffman 2003). Similarly, Wendy Brown (2015) contends that neoliberalism eliminates the people’s sovereignty and the homo politicus, imposing the homo oeconomicus over the political capacity of the demos, and overestimating the economic definition of neoliberalism. While this definition focuses on the distinction between economic and polity, and the common idea of economy reigning over polity, Foucault highlights the differences between neo-liberalism and liberalism. Neoliberalism is a redefinition of the relation between the state and the economy, where the market is the organizational principle for the state and society (Foucault, Lecture 31 January 1979; Lecture 7 February 1979).

In addition, neo-liberalism creates a new type of government that places freedom as a rational principle for economic-rational individuals (Lemke 2001, 200). In other words, neoliberalism can be understood as a specific form of governmentality, which is more than an ideological rhetoric, and a political-economic reality, it is a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists. Thus, this definition allows us to pay attention to the biopolitical nature of neoliberalism as a new paradigm of power (Lemke 2002), and as a political regime, where individuals are experiencing neoliberalism through a sort of everyday neoliberalism (Mirowski 2014). In this sense, Sparke (forthcoming) offers seven self-making practices as market-modeled behavior: responsibilization, entrepreneurialization, self-capitalization, self-commodification, personalization, fragmentation, and externalization. Nevertheless, while Sparke and others have emphasize that these types of behavior would configure the homo oeconomicus and neoliberal subjectivity that transform citizenship toward a depoliticization, precarity, and cruelty (Brown 2015; Sparke forthcoming), Gago (2017) observes that the self-involvement practices on neoliberalism and its contestation are creating something she calls neoliberalism from below, as a proliferation of forms of life that reorganize notions of freedom, calculation, and obedience, projecting a new collective affectivity and rationality within the very center of neoliberal realities.

On the other hand, recent works have pointed out the critical juncture that neoliberalism is facing in current societies, where the lack of legitimacy of neoliberal policies has brought the interest to think of it from new theoretical debates, even considering the need to dismiss the concept, but at the same time recognizing that the term has become truly heterogeneous and diverse (Slobodian & Plehwe 2020). Therefore, neoliberalism is not a monolith, on the contrary, it has the capacity for improvisation and flexible responses to policy problems, as the key to understand the different forms that neoliberal ideologies have taken recently, such as conservative-neoliberal, progressive neoliberal (Slobodian & Plehwe 2020; Fraser 2019), and authoritarian “Frankenstein” neoliberalism (Brown 2018). This multifaceted and flexible nature of neoliberalism highlights the relevance of analyzing concrete and historical placed realities. Following Gago’s claim, “the character of neoliberalism makes it impossible to define it in a homogenous way because it depends on its landings and connections with concrete situations” (Gago & Brown 2020).

The polysemic nature of neoliberalism as well as the crisis of hegemony and legitimacy of neoliberal political institutions (Sader 2009; Gago & Sztulwark 2009) show an open debate about its definition, also considering the need to understand theoretical and political paths of a transitional stage known as postneoliberalism that could take the form of anti-neoliberalism or not, depending precisely on the different perceptions of neoliberalism (Brand & Sekler 2009).

(See Governmentality, Ordoliberalism, The Capitalist State, Neoliberalism)

Bibliography

Brand, Ulrich, and Nicola Sekler. “Postneoliberalism: Catch-all Word or Valuable Analytical and Political Concept?” Development Dialogue 51 (2009).

Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century ‘Democracies’.” Critical Times 1 (1) (2018): 60-79.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Fraser, Nancy. The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born. London/New York: Verso Books, 2019.

Gago, Verónica, and Wendy Brown. “Is there a Neoliberalism ‘from Below’? A Conversation between Verónica Gago and Wendy Brown.” Verso Books. Accessed March 14, 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4926-is-there-a-neoliberalism-from-below-a-conversation-between-veronica-gago-and-wendy-brown (2020).

Gago, Verónica. Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2017.

Gago, Verónica, and Diego Sztulwark. “Notes on Postneoliberalism in Argentina.” Development Dialogue 51 (2009).

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: University Press, 2005.

Hayek, Friedrich. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35 (4) (1945): 519-530.

Lemke, Thomas. “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism 14 (3) (2002): 49-64.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London/New York: Verso Books, 2014.

Mirowski, Philip, Plehwe, Dieter, and Quinn Slobodian, eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London/New York: Verso Books, 2020.

Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1) (2003): 41-82.

Sader, Emir. “Post Neoliberalism in Latin America.” Development Dialogue 51 (2009).

Sparke, Matthew. Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell. (Forthcoming).

Md Mizanur Rahman
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Feminist Economics is an approach that critically looks at the implicit gender biases prevalent in theories and practices in the study of economics. It has already emerged as an integral sub-field of economics. Feminist Economics challenges extant biases in economics, attempts to revise them, and searches for adequate alternatives both in theory and policy areas. Nelson writes, “it includes both studies of gender roles in the economy from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the content and methodology of the economics discipline” (Nelson 2008). The field emerged with a critique to the studies of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, where women’s lesser market earnings were not discussed, rather women’s specialization in household works was idealized, giving a justification for their unpaid household responsibilities and lesser market income (Nelson 2008). This research addressed women issues neither to equalize earnings nor to democratize working conditions but to rationalize women’s lower earnings and unpaid household responsibilities (Nelson 2008).

Feminist Economics focuses on the areas of research that are relatively ignored in mainstream economics, namely unpaid care works, intimate partner violence, the economics of sex workers. The research that ignited the field is Marilyn Waring’s If Women Counted (1988), which provocatively and systematically critiques the standard of measuring economic growth in mainstream economics that excludes the value of unpaid works of women and nature due to its biased understanding of the concept of productivity. It unravels how women’s traditional works have been made invisible within the national accounting systems and identifies the damages the economy incurs. The book, thus, “encouraged and influenced a wide range of work in ways, both numerical and otherwise, of valuing, preserving, and rewarding the work of care that sustains our lives” (Nelson 2014, ix-x). Nevertheless, Feminist Economics as a field of study emerged with the edited volume Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics published in 1993, and subsequently, the journal Feminist Economics appeared in 1994. 

The volume shows that Feminist Economics challenges to mainstream economics, “not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough” (Ferber and Neslon 1993, 1). It argues that Feminist Economics can improve the objectivity of economic practices by including gender effects in economic thinking, focusing on “how economics could be improved by being freed from the straitjacket of masculine mythology” (Ferber and Neslon 1993, 8). Its objective was both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the volume shows how men have dominated the making of economics as a discipline from the classical to the contemporary theorization of the field. Feminist Economics declares that it tends to break this hegemony incorporating women’s voice in the discipline. Empirically, it shows that the standpoint from that traditional economists’ world view has been man-centric that either ignored or assumed facts about women and their works, which were not bolstered by empirical data. It further claims that the questions mainstream economics asked were so dominated by male understanding and patriarchal social norms that they either missed or ignored the crucial economic issues of equal pay for women and counted women’s unpaid care work. For example, they “ignore the socialization and education processes undertaken at home as well as the care from birth (or even from before birth, as in maternal health and nutrition) devoted to creating and developing a child’s capacities” (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 5). The essays of this volume also explain that men’s growth and the emergence of “economic man” was dependent on the nurture he got from women as an infant, care for his children, and promise to care for him in old age. They argue that a society cannot take these cares as a given.

Feminist Economics attempts to reshape the bias questions and ask the questions that remained excluded in the economic research. Diana Strassmann tells us the topics with which Feminist Economics is concerned and the questions it tends to ask in a recent interview with New Economic Thinking. She posits, “we want to measure human wellbeing…widespread care works, and care works’ interactions with the paid economy” (Strassmann 2020). She claims that without considering the economics of these works, the research in paid and unpaid sectors remains one-sided and less rigorous. For her, here, not only the unpaid women’s work is neglected, but the economics of earning women is misanalysed. According to Strassmann, Feminist Economics wants to ask: why are labor markets disaggregated? Why are women hired in specific jobs and not in others? How does that interact with social norms? Are not some occupations structured so that women cannot pursue them as the work condition does not fit with women’s social norms and their bodies and lives? Can we simply reduce them to women’s choices? What are the social, cultural, and structural factors that determine women’s eligibility for certain types of occupations?   

These questions and concerns may raise the question of how Feminist Economics differs from feminism and other relevant fields of study. Ferber and Nelson (1993) clarify that Feminist Economics is not an entirely new approach to the study of economics, and it is inherently intersectional. Although Feminist Economics approach challenges the inbuilt biases of scientific economic investigations, it does not reject them. Rather, it tends to find “a new conception of where such methods fit in the overall picture of human knowledge and a willingness to consider methods previously rejected, not because they were bad or ineffective but simply because they were perceived as feminine” (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 14).    

Feminist Economics has several perspectives; the central three include liberal feminist economics, constructivist feminist economics, and critical feminist economics. Liberal feminist economics focuses on gender equality through equal access to the labor market and institutions. It believes that if structures could be shaped in favor of women’s equal access and wages, individuals would realize their potentials, and gradually the berries of gender equality would be dissolved. Constructivist feminist economics concentrates on gender identities and gender performativity. They argue that gender identities influence economic decisions, structures, and processes. At the same time, processes and structures have repercussions on identities and other spheres. In the case of performativity, constructivist feminist economics is concerned if “women reproduce gender inequalities and stereotypes if they exercise a labor perceived as ‘female’ and thereby meet social expectations” (Urban and Pürckhauer 2016). Finally, critical feminist economics, dominated by Marxist feminist economists, focuses on the role of material foundations to understand inequalities. Marxist feminist scholars like Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa began debates on women’s unpaid reproductive labor and its relations in the production process; an integral aspect of the debate was to critique the Marxist labor theory of value, which does not account for the reproductive labor carried out by women (Urban and Pürckhauer 2016). They consider homework in the context of exploitative labor relations. They argue for the incorporation of reproductive labor in the capitalist production process. However, Marxist feminist scholars believe that “women’s liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women’s labor is uncompensated” (Feruson, Hennessy, and Nagel 2019).

Nevertheless, Feminist Economics is a well-grounded sub-field in the study of economics. Nancy Folbre (2009) argues that Feminist Economics, with a host of other approaches, substantially contributed to the changing nature of the discipline by facilitating a better understanding of the ways in which “individuals come to identify with and care for, others…challenging the conventional assumption that self-interest is just another word for selfishness” (Folbre 2009, 306). Folbre maintains that Feminist Economics research mainly contributes to drawing attention to the inherent intellectual bias in the discipline and resists the disciplinary bias in the data collection and research in viewing “family as an idealized, moral, feminine, non-economic realm.” It places the sexual wage inequality in the center of the economic debates, looking not at the effect of that, but unraveling their causes. Folbre further claims that Feminist Economics did not attempt to replace the rational economic man with irrational loving women but wanted to develop a broader perspective—economics for humans. She is optimistic that “feminist economics with roots in both the individualist and social traditions can flourish in the new terrain of institutional and behavioral economics” (Folbre 2009, 319).

(See Economic Reason, Primitive Accumulation, Social Reproduction)

Bibliography

Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Ferguson, Ann, Rosemary Hennessy, and Mechthild Nagel. “Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/feminism-class/ (retrieved on May 2, 2021).

Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Nelson, Julie A. “Feminist Economics.” In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_2210-1, 2008.

Nelson, Julie A. “Foreword.” In Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics, edited by Margunn Bjørnholt and Ailsa McKay. Bradford: Demeter Press, 2014.

Strassmann, Diana. “What is Feminist Economics?” November 18, 2020. Institute for New Economic Thinking. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/what-is-feminist-economics (retrieved on April 18, 2021).

Urban, Janina, and Andrea Pürckhauer. “Feminist Economics.” December 18, 2016. https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/orientation/feminist-economics/ (retrieved on May 1, 2021).

Nate Edenhofer
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

There are at least two broad ways of defining the keyword “class” and the related “classes.”  The first we could describe as an income definition. The other corresponds to different positions in the relations of production and class struggle. These are two related conceptions of the term, but which have different political trajectories. In this entry, I will spend time comparing these two notions, but with an increased emphasis on exploring the relational model, particularly the interconnection of objective and subjective notions of class and classes. 

 Table 1 previews the differences to be discussed in this entry. 

One way class is used refers to the income and wealth of a person or family. This is the most common conception of class in popular parlance and the way mainstream punditry seems to refer to class. People are grouped into lower, middle, and upper classes based on wealth and income. For example, a US News and World Report article titled “Where Do I Fall In the American Economic Class System,” simply lays out the income ranges for lower, middle, and upper classes while complicating the picture slightly by saying that many people “identify” as middle class (Snider 2020). Hence, it is a status based on individual (if relative) levels of prosperity or poverty.  At the aggregate level, the nature of income inequality in any society can usefully be measured through a Gini Index to show how concentrated wealth and income are.

The alternative approach to this treats class as a position in the relations of production. That is, classes have a qualitative, not only quantitative, definition, and are directly related to each other, often antagonistically. Marx and Engels propose this when they famously stated that all prior history has been that of various class struggles: slave and master, serf and lord, etcetera (Marx and Engels 1848). What is important about these are that they are positions in the mode of production that oppose and define each other. Marx’s fundamental classes in capitalism are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Capitalist accumulation requires the exploitation of workers to produce surplus value, but because capitalists own the means of production workers must sell their labor power for wages to survive (Marx 1867). Thus, the capitalist class (bourgeoise) and the working class (proletariat) are related to each other in an antagonistic way. These classes do roughly correlate to quantitative class definitions, i.e. lower class, middle class, upper class. For example, the proletariat must be in a lower income position as a class than capitalists, because by definition capitalists enrich themselves via the exploitation of workers for surplus value. Nevertheless, they represent two different analytical approaches.

We can also think of classes in the Marxian style both objectively and subjectively, as a social reality and as agents in that reality. First, objectively, this means that there is in fact a class relation between workers and capitalists. Capital is the driver of the economic system and workers have an objective relation to it, or else it would not be capital. However, this is a simplification of a much more complex objective class structure. There are a number of other classes in society. For example, the largest and historically most revolutionary class has been the peasantry. There are also the petty bourgeoisie, small capitalists. In recent years, there has been a dramatic expansion of the managerial class, who are not the proletariat, not owners, yet are aligned with owners against the proletariat.  Different societies have different class structures within the larger world capitalist system. For example, Latin America has a much larger informal proletariat and informal petty bourgeois, and a smaller formal working class. It relatedly has a significant semi-proletarian class, workers that engage in some wage labor and some means of subsistence (Portes 1985; Portes and Hoffman 2003).

Even within these more complex objective class categories there are fragments and antagonistic tendencies. For example, the capitalist class has its own fractures, blocs, and sectoral differences. Industrial capitalist class  and rentier capitalist class can have differing interests (ie. high rents require higher wages) (Stein 2019). Resolving conflicts within the ruling class thus requires the state to manage, whose members form a class apart in the bureaucracy but are linked to other classes (Miliband 1977). For example, US and global capitalism relied on “…the relative autonomy of the American state in developing policy and strategic directions and bringing about political compromises among diverse capitalist forces—and between them and other social forces (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 7).

The relational concept of class also carries with it a subjective form. That is, there is a balance of power between classes, meaning that they are not only structures but agents. For example, Panitch and Gindin (2012) emphasize this balance of power between working and capitalist classes as a crucial factor in the development of US and global capitalism, with the capitalist class organizing itself to defeat the working class following the profit crisis of the 1970s. 

However, classes as actors do not automatically emerge from their objective class positions. In marxist language, classes in themselves (objective) have to become classes for themselves (subjective) to be fully understood as agents in the class struggle. When and how this happens is a matter of some debate, with figures like Miliband noting that an active process consciousness is what makes the shift from “mass” to “class” (Miliband 1977, 23) while thinkers like James Scott and E.P. Thompson describe class and class consciousness emerging from struggle itself:

To put it bluntly, classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucial, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process. (E.P. Thompson, quoted in Scott 1985, 297)

Scott further notes that class struggle occurs in concrete contexts of experience, meaning that class antagonisms (and thus class struggle and formation) occur among other social relations that shape how those antagonisms are experienced and acted on (Scott 1985, 40–47). When Marx and Engels describe this in the Communist Manifesto, the class as a subject appears through linking sporadic struggles:

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. (Marx and Engels 1848, 481)

What this all seems to entail is that rather than a clear linear logic, a coevolution of antagonisms, struggle, consciousness, and relations of production produce classes objectively and subjectively, and must be historically situated to make sense of this coexistence. For example, the project of subordinate classes acting for themselves is complicated by the various strategies to contain them from dominant classes. Attempts to undermine a subjective working class have appeared through the creation of ethnicity as a labor control regime to stratify the labor force in the colonies of the burgeoning capitalist world system (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 550–51). Others have described white citizenship in the US as explicitly as a “cross-class alliance” central to preventing a working class for itself in America, most clearly emerging in response to Bacon’s Rebellion (Olson 2004). The same is true for the constructions of gender difference dividing the subordinate classes (Federici 2004). In this way, if class is to be understood subjectively at all, then social relations like gender and race should not be seen as separate phenomena from class (and classes), but deeply related and co-constitutive, and vice versa (see Haider 2020).

So on the one hand, classes correspond to the objective relations of capital. On the other hand subjective classes are tightly linked struggle rooted concrete antagonisms. From these two points we should ask ourselves, are there undertheorized objective classes and subjective classes beyond the “working class?” What are the relations of capital today and where are the corresponding antagonistic experiences? If we follow David Harvey (Harvey 2018) (himself following Marx), we can see that the capital as value in motion moves through steps beyond only production, but also to realization, social reproduction, the distribution of value (Harvey 2018, 48). Through the neoliberal period we have seen an increase in the power of the financial capital, rooted in  US housing markets and mortgage debt (Panitch and Gindin 2012), and real estate capital has also become increasingly dominant (Stein 2019). Do we now see an objective tenant class in a co-constitutive relation with a rentier class? Do we also see a debtor and creditor class? Is there theoretically any reason to think that tenants and debtors could not become subjective classes? Rentiers and bankers undoubtedly already do act as classes. Additionally across the world, but acutely in Latin America, capital’s reliance on raw materials has drawn dramatic conflicts against extractive industry multinational corporations. These conflicts represent an antagonism over the use of common resources (like water) for social reproduction versus for capitalist appropriation. As such they represent conflicts at the boundaries of the background conditions and foreground of capital (Fraser 2014). In Central America for example, these conflicts have been rooted in the experiences and threats of destructive mining practices, but have also diffused into national, and regional coalitions against mining and even into other issues, like struggles over broader water rights in El Salvador. Is this an environmental or social reproductive class formation?

Contrasting the income versus social relations model of defining class and classes, we should ask what the different political implications are of each model. For the income model of classes, this could involve things like redistribution or social services via taxation at best. At the worst these are individual-centric policies like job training and targeted financing through things like microloans, reproducing a capitalist debtor-creditor dynamic (see Federici 2018). These individual-centric solutions (even if they are broadly introduced) cannot change the class relations that underlie the inequality in incomes. More job training will not change much if those jobs are still controlled by capitalist bosses. The relational notion of class leads us to think about altering the central relations of production, that is creating a democratically owned economy, or at least finding ways for the currently subordinate classes to shift the balance of class power in their favor. The two political directions are not necessarily exclusive. For example, redistribution would surely lessen the power of capitalists over their workers. But the income notion of class seems less equipped to take account of power, which is why classes as subjects will be necessary.

(See Accumulation, Capital, Critical Political Economy, Feminist Economics, Labor Power, Power, Social Reproduction, Urban Political Economy)

Bibliography

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004.

———. Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, 2018.

Fraser, Nancy. “Nancy Fraser, Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode, NLR 86, March–April 2014.” New Left Review, 2014. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II86/articles/nancy-fraser-behind-marx-s-hidden-abode.

Haider, Asad. “Class Cancelled.” 2020. https://asadhaider.substack.com/p/class-cancelled.

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

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Edited by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach. V. 1: Penguin Classics. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469–500. Norton, 1848.

Miliband, Ralph. Marxism and Politics. Oxford University Press, 1977.

Olson, Joel. The Abolition of White Democracy. U of Minnesota Press, 2004.

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

Portes, Alejandro. “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change During the Last Decades.” Latin American Research Review 20 (3): 7–39, 1985.

Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1): 41–82, 2003.

Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein. “Americanity as a ‘Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World.” International Social Science Journal 44 (4): 549–57, 1992.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1985.

Snider, Sussana. “Where Do I Fall in the American Economic Class System?” US News & World Report, 2020. https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finance/articles/where-do-i-fall-in-the-american-economic-class-system.

Stein, Samuel. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Verso Books, 2019.

Nate Edenhofer
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

What is ‘capital’? In all accounts capital seems related to the means of production. Yet there is a crucial distinction between neo-classical economics and Marxian political economy in how they use the term. This distinction rests on whether capital is attributed as purely the means of production (the neo-classical view), or as a social relation (the Marxian view).

Orthodox economics sees capital as simply the means of production. In any introductory, mainstream micro- or macro-economics course, capital is likely to be introduced as one of the four factors of production: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. One economics text book defines it as “…the stock of equipment and structures used to produce goods and services” (Wessels 2006, 100). Capital in this definition remains a neutral entity, purely material or economic.

This is largely the understanding of Adam Smith. For Smith, individuals have their ‘stock,’ their property, and if they have enough saved, they may convert some of it into revenue: “His whole stock, therefore, is distinguished into two parts. That part which, he expects, is to afford him this revenue, is called his capital. The other is that which supplies his immediate consumption” (1776, 363). Seeking revenue from their capital portion of stock, someone may either invest it in fixed capital (improving land, buying equipment, etc.) or in circulatory capital (buying and selling for a profit). Yet how this is returned as revenue appears as natural, and without need for explaining, besides that fixed capital must eventually engage with circulatory capital for exchange if they ever hope to make any revenue.

Yet for Marx, capital retains a distinction beyond simply being the means of production, and instead is defined as a social relation. Like Smith, Marx understands that capital requires circulation to operate. Capital requires markets, where the value of commodities are realized in the process of exchange. Marx recognizes that commodities have both a use-value (their utility), and their value (the socially necessary labor required to create them), and this value is realized in exchange (their exchange value) (Marx 1867, chap. 1). That is, human labor creates commodities (C), whose values are exchanged into money (M) (as Marx says there is a ‘metamorphosis’), which turn back to commodities again as people secure what they need to survive in a society with a division of labor. This is represented as C-M-C, where through exchange the value of a producer moves from commodity and back to commoddity, or C-C. Yet Marx also notes that because money and commodities both are expressions of value, it is possible for money through exchange to buy commodities, resell, and to return back to money M-C-M, a process which only makes sense for the initial holder of money to put into exchange if they expect to receive more money. This is represented by M-C-M’, M’ equalling surplus value. This M-C-M’ is the “general formula for capital, in the form in which it appears directly in the sphere of circulation” (Marx 1867, 257). M-C-M’ is the formula for capital: money purchasing commodities to return with more money, in other words, value increasing its own value—M-M’. But to move past Smith and neo-classical economics, it is necessary to explain why this is a social relation.

First, the valorization of capital cannot occur only in exchange. Buying low and selling high will be balanced out into equilibrium eventually (Marx 1867, chap. 4). Instead, to get more value from capital can only occur through labor power, a commodity which produces more value than it takes to create. In other words, humans are capable of working longer than needed to produce enough to live. Because workers with their own means of production and reproduction might as well work as little as possible, this labor power is only available to capital as a commodity when workers do not control the means of production. This means that they must be forced to sell their labor. The worker must be doubly “free,” free to sell their labor power and free from means of production. (Marx 1867, 272–73). So capital represents and requires—definitionally for Marx—the exploitation of the laborer as the source of surplus value by the owner of the means of production. This is the capitalist, who is “capital personified…” whose aim is “the unceasing movement profitmaking” (Marx 1867, 254).

We can describe the development of capital as a social relation in the following steps:

• C-C⇒Exchange based in value. 
• C-M M-C⇒ Through money, the temporal and spatial aspects of exchange are set loose, allowing circulation.
• C-M-C ⇒ Use value oriented. Money as means of payment/exchange. Ends in consumption.  
• M-C-M ⇒ Exchange value oriented. Money as capital. Never ends. 
• M-C-M’ ⇒ M’=Surplus Value=Labor power commodity

What this means is that capital can take the material appearance of the means of production, but it is the social context that makes it capital. “A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton . It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the price of sugar” (Marx 1849, 207). The fact that capital appears in the form of commodities further shows the social relations, because for Marx commodities in exchange are a fetishized form of human labor being exchanged, because the value of all commodities are based in labor (Marx 1867, chap. 1). The labor in the commodities of the means of production continues to confront the labor commodity in the production process “It is only the domination of accumulated, past, materialised labour over direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital” (Marx 1849, 207).

Understanding capital as a social relation is especially important when we consider the similarities between Marx, and Smith, and even Hayek (1945) on the division of labor and what Marx calls the social metabolism of society (Marx 1867, 198–99). All of these thinkers show that the division of labor has created a highly complex set of economic relations that create interdependencies throughout society. Yet the neoclassical economists only understand this process of exchanging commodities and deriving revenue from capital as the best way to run the economy. Here is Smith:

To maintain and augment the stock which may be reserved for immediate consumption is the sole end and purpose both of the fixed and circulating capitals. It is this stock which feeds, clothes, and lodges the people. Their riches or poverty depends upon the abundant or sparing supplies which those two capitals can afford to the stock reserved for immediate consumption (Smith 1776, 370).

So for Smith, capital exists simply as a factor of the necessary production in society. Marx takes a much more critical stance. First he notes that “[t]he simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs” (253). This is Smith’s stance more or less, but then Marx continues: “As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless” (Marx 1867, 253). As this valorization requires labor acting upon natures use values as the source of new use values in commodities, it is clear that what capital drives towards is not the wealth of society, but the endless accumulation of capital, and thus endless exploitation of labor. Almost strangely, capital exists to expand itself it is an autonomous entity. ““For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization’ [Selbstverwertung ]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.” (Marx 1867, 255)

The social relation of capital is also complicated further when Harvey describes capital in Marx as value in motion, through production and valorization, purchase and realization, and the reintroduction of value back into production (Harvey 2018). Furthermore, capital and value appear in various forms (for example fixed capital like a factory or railway). This means for Harvey that capital must be viewed simultaneously as a thing and a process, and the contradiction between value fixed in capital and the need for value in motion is central (Harvey 2014, 70–78).

These distinctions between capital as wealth or the means of production and as a social relation matter for contemporary politics. A debate between Tomas Pikeyty and Frederic Lordon shows this. Lordon launched one of few critiques from the left of Pikkety’s Capital in the 21st Century (Lordon 2015). The critique centers around the problem of, first and foremost, what capital is. Lordon criticizes Piketty’s conception of capital as wealth, the general holdings of the wealthy and counters that capital is a social relation. It is not only property, but is “lucrative property,” and following Marx the only way to make property into self-valorizing capital requires the addition of labor, and thus the social relations of employment. Thus, while Piketty notes the returns on capital outpace growth, he does not explain why, the most important question. This differentiation between capital as the wealth of the wealthy versus capital as a social relations of domination affects political strategy.  Lordon critiques Piketty’s proposed solution of a global wealth tax to undermine inequality because taxation treats the symptoms, not the causes of problems of capitalism. Instead the focus should be on employment relations wages labor that form the relational model of capital (Lordon 2015; See also a television version of this debate Ce Soir (ou jamais!) 2015).

(See Accumulation, Class, Money)

Bibliography

Ce Soir (ou jamais!). “Frederic Lordon + Thomas Piketty: ‘Does Capitalism Deserve a Good Lesson?’ (English Subtitles).” Vimeo, 2015. https://vimeo.com/312817077.

Hayek, F. A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30.

Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Lordon, Frédéric. “Why Piketty Isn’t Marx.” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1, 2015. https://mondediplo.com/2015/05/12Piketty.

Marx, Karl. “Wage Labour and Capital.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 203–17. WW Norton, 1849.

———. Capital, Volume One. In The Marx-Engels Reader, 294–438, 1867.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. UK ed. edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1776.

Wessels, Walter J. Economics. 4th ed. Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Cameron Hughes
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

In the Marxist critique of political economy, labor power is a concept distinct, though not wholly separate, from “labor”. Put quite simply, labor power is the ability to work. This is to say, as Marx posits in the sixth chapter of Capital, that labor power refers to a person’s mental and physical faculties, which they actively engage when producing any variety of use-values (Marx 1992). The distinction here is subtle, but important. Approaching the two concepts from another angle, we might think of labor power as a potential yet to be realized, while labor(ing) is the activity that realizes this potential and thus depletes it.

As anyone who has made use of their labor power comes to find out, it is not a spring from which we can draw indefinitely. In fact, Marx explicitly points out that the act of exercising one’s labor power uses up a quantifiable amount of their “muscle, nerve, [andbrain.” (Marx 1992). Work, therefore, can not be carried on without pause. In this way, while a capitalist may dream of a worker who does not need to eat, sleep, or use the restroom, the real existing human body imposes biological limitations on the production process. It is only by attending to the above mentioned needs that a worker can reproduce their labor power so that they may return to work.

Under a capitalist mode of production, the working class is dispossessed from the means to create its own subsistence (food, shelter, etc). It is through this process of deprivation (i.e. primitive accumulation) that the working class is created — its very existence being defined by ownership over nothing more than its labor power. Having been stripped of all else, in order to survive and reproduce itself within a capitalist economy, the working class is forced to secure its livelihood through the only avenue made available: the sale of its labor power on the market. Capitalists and ‘free’ laborers encounter one another in the market and enter into a contract that promises a definite amount of labor power for a certain price, which appears to us in the form of remuneration, or a wage. Thus, through this process, labor power becomes transformed into a commodity.

Like any other commodity, labor power has a value. Marx asserts that the value of labor power is determined in the same way that the value of any other commodity is determined: “by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article” (Marx 1992). As we’ve explored above, labor power is the ability or potential for activity, which once realized, leaves labor power depleted, necessitating renewal through the fulfilment of a worker’s biological needs. It’s here that we can see how the value of labor power is formed. The cost of the socially necessary labor time required to fulfill the average biological needs of a worker forms the basis of labor-power’s value.

However, Marx takes care to point out that labor power is a strange commodity, different from others insofar as the determination of its value is subject to the specific historical-social conditions in which it is being or has been formed. This means that there will be some unevenness across geographies in what workers require or expect as necessary to carry out the reproduction of their labor-power.

While Marx’s analysis in Capital assumes an ‘ideal’ capitalist system, we must also pay attention to other externalities that can change and disrupt how the value of labor power is determined — for instance, by class struggle. Workers, acting in their own interest, will and have historically demanded an increase to the value of their labor power, usually via the concrete struggle for increased wages. A hyper-localized example of this can be found in the 2019-2020 Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) strike initiated by academic student employees across the University of California (Cowan 2020).

Bibliography

Cowan, Jill. “Why Graduate Students at U.C. Santa Cruz are Striking.” New York Times, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/us/ucsc-strike.html

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1992.

Cameron Hughes
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Capital did not magically emerge from the mists of prehistory. Instead, like all things, it has a historical-material genealogy that can be traced. Classical political economists like Adam Smith however, glossed over the kind of archaeological work that would be necessary to uncover where and how capital first came into being. As Smith states in The Wealth of Nations: “A weaver cannot apply himself entirely to his peculiar business, unless there is beforehand stored up somewhere […] a stock sufficient to maintain him. […] the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour” (Smith 2003, emphasis added). This is short shrift to be sure, but according to most contemporary scholars, it’s the first reference to a type of accumulation that is a necessary precondition for the advent of capitalism (Perelman 2004).

The central feature powering the nascent capitalist economy, as depicted by Smith, was that of diligent individuals who, by thrift and ingenuity, came to accrue wealth by locating or creating markets where commodities could be sold. These individuals, more precisely merchants, were simply turning to their advantage another process portrayed by Smith as naturally emergent; that of the division of labor. While Smith doesn’t discount the possibility of conflict, exploitation, or conquest in the course of this process, he fails to recognize their presence as essential midwives in the birth of capitalism.

Rather than obscuring the arrival of capitalism by casting its appearance as natural, Marx insists that we must investigate the specific material forces that led to this particular outcome. Unlike Smith, Marx turns our attention to the 16th and 17th century’s mass dispossession of European peasants from their lands. It was these acts of de jure expropriation — which Marx finds exemplified in the English enclosure movement — that transformed the feudal peasant into the proletarian and thus began to consolidate the constituent elements of a capitalist mode of production:

Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (Marx 1992)

Marx, contravening Smith, asserts that this was not a process of mostly peaceful evolution driven by innovation. Instead it combined the legal and physically coercive powers of the state with the private will of landlords. The reality of this mass dispossession entailed the obliteration of traditional feudal lifeways, the divorcing of peasants from their means of subsistence, and the quite literal uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people from the land that they had lived on for generations.

This new “double freedom” that Marx points to — freedom from old obligations to the feudal system, but also freedom from the means of production — forced the pupal proletariat class to become purveyors of the only thing that it retained claim to: labor power. In supplanting serfdom, this new arrangement, Marx posits, is the intinus of the entire capitalist system. In his own words: “The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. […] The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process” (Marx 1992).

It was not lost on Marx that this process of dispossession and seizure had been exported globally in the form of European colonialism. As Marx saw it, though the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples had begun as a project galvanized by aspirations of national enrichment and glory, the birth of the market gave colonialism new purpose. The material spoils of colonial accumulation worked to supercharge the end-stage transformation of European economies from feudal to market based. Put bluntly by Marx: “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital” (Marx 1992).

Fundamentally Marx is making the assertion that violence, dispossession, and coercion — in short, primitive accumulation — were not ancillary to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but that these were its definitive features. Recent scholarly contributions have challenged the orthodox understanding of primitive accumulation as a temporally confined event. Of particular interest is Silvia Federici’s Marxist-Feminist interpretation of primitive accumulation in her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch. In it, she argues that capitalism requires a constant influx of looted capital in order to function. Moreover, she challenges Marx’s thesis that the supplantation of feudalism by capitalism was a positive and necessary historical stage on the road to socialism. Instead, Federici asserts that the birth of capitalism represented a reaction to efforts by peasants who sought to further expand the commons. Within this argument she draws special attention to the constant and continuous expropriation of women’s social reproductive labor as the primary example of historical and ongoing primitive accumulation (Federici 2014).

Bibliography

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2014.

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1992.

Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Duke University Press, 2004.

Smith, Adam, and Andrew S. Skinner. The Wealth of Nations. Penguin, 2003.

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

Fetishism refers to the perception of the social relation involved in production not as relation among people, but as economic relation among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. In Karl Marx’s 1867’s Capital. Critique of Political Economy, the theory of commodity fetishism is presented in Volume I in the first chapter at the conclusion of the analysis of the value-form of commodities, to explain that the social organization of labor is mediated through market exchange. To explain the process where social relations between people assume the fantastic form of relation between things, Marx uses an analogy from the religious world: fetishism. For Marx (1887), fetishism “attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (1887).

Part of Marx’s critique to political economists is that some are misled by the fetishism inherent in commodities. Marx shows that fetishism of commodities has its origin in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them. For Marx (1887), a commodity is a mysterious thing:

Simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.

Massimiliano Tomba (2009) explains that “Marx is looking for a distinctive element, capable of indicating what transforms ordinary products into commodities. It is the very nature of exchange that changes in the capitalist mode of production. The fetishism of the commodity derives from this” (48-49). For Marx, the most developed perversion, the constituted fetish of capitalist society, is the relationship of capital to itself, of a thing to itself. The extreme expression of this perversion is interest bearing capital: the “most externalised and most fetish-like form” of capital (Bonefeld 2001, 3). In his analysis of Marx’s theory in commodity fetishism, Soviet Marxian economist Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1937), argues that Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has not occupied the place which is proper to it in the Marxist economic system. For Rubin (1990), “The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value” (5). In his introduction to I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Fredy Perlman points out that Rubin’s book is a comprehensive, tightly argued exposition of the core of Marx’s work, the theory of commodity fetishism and the theory of value. Rubin clarifies misconceptions which have resulted, and still result, from superficial readings and evasive treatments of Marx’s work (Perlman 1990, xi).

As previously mentioned, Marx borrowed a concept from the religious world to explain the process wherein a social relationship of production is transformed into an object. In his essay, “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought” (2003), Argentinian/Mexican philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel provides a textual “rereading” of Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism. Dussel rereads this concept according to Marx’s scattered but significant comments on religion as they extend throughout the whole of his work. In Part I, “The Place of the Subject of Religion in the Whole Work of Marx,” Dussel demonstrates Marx’s differentiation between a critique of the essence of religion and its manifestations, arguing that there is a space in Marx for an anti-fetishized liberatory religion. In Part II, “Toward a Theory of Fetishism in General,” he provides a methodological account of such a religion, as well as a panorama of the content of this essence of religion. These accounts provide the basis for more clearly identifying both religious fetishism and the fetishist character of capital.

According to Dussel (2003b), “Marx always starts from the exteriority of living labor, of the other than capital whose supposed elimination can fetishize capital. The fetishization needs as a condition the annihilation of that which is other than capital” (102). The other than capital, the “no-capital,” is the worker. The worker is the condition of possibility of fetishization (absolutization) of the totality of capital but it is negated by capital. The negation of the worker or the negation of exteriority means the absolutizing self-affirmation of capital—the self-positioning of capital as a totality without an external relation to itself—which is the ontological base of fetishism, of value, and all of its determinations.

Thus, the negation of the other as other is the essence of the fetishistic character of capital. As Dussel (2003b) states, the “absolutization of a ‘part’ (capital) from the ‘whole’ (capital-work) constitutes the reality of the fetishist character” (106). However, capital not only negates the other but also the community of persons as the place of production which permits the constitution of capital. As Dussel (2003b) explains, “On the one hand, the other, the poor, the worker as exteriority is denied and subsumed in capital as a wage earner…On the other hand, concretely and by the dissolution of the former modes of appropriation and production, the worker isolated from his community of origin is individually and privately subsumed by capital” (104).

For Dussel (2003b), in the form of the commodity appears the fetishist character of capital where value, as the ultimate essence of capital, turns into a fetish: “it has turned into an autonomous, autonomized Power, which begins to have all the attributes of a ‘god’: a subject self-creator out of nothing, eternal, infinite in space (destroying all barriers until reaching the world market), a civilizing power, a source of freedom and equality” (107). But capital is the fetish to which the blood of human victims is offered: “the worker is sacrificed in the holocaust of the fetish” (Dussel 2003b, 118). As Dussel (2003b) argues:

For Marx capital is the fetish that accumulates human blood (value). Human blood, value, circulates in capital. And ‘in this as in religion man is dominated by the works of his own brain, in capitalist production he is dominated by the works of his own hand,’ by a ‘cannibalistic voracity of surplus labour.’ If that god made by man’s hand exists objectively to whom living work is sacrificed, the fetish demands, as true worship, the holocaust of the capitalist himself. (108)

Dussel then analyzes the fetishist character of each determination of capital. First, the fetishist character of commodity is based on the fetishist character of capital as a base now separated from every reference to living work. Second, money, the form of manifestation closest to being capital, is the determination or form of capital which by nature appears as the fetish as such. Third, work as capital: the fetishization of live work—for the capitalist and for the worker himself. “Work subsumed in capital, work as capital, is a form of the appearance of capital (as its own creative source of value), and therefore ‘work (living) is indeed identified with wage labour’, work has been fetishized by the worker himself: for him he is a commodity” (Dussel 2003b, 112). According to Dussel, the fetishization of the labour capacity is produced when it is not related to the productive labour force of living work. Thus, “The fetishization of work is the subjective constituent of the fetishization of value, of capital as such” (Dussel 2003b 113). Fourth, the means of production, especially the machine, is fetishized. As Dussel (2003b) argues, “Marx always thinks of the machine as a monster, a fetish, a dead organism that is only revived and resurrected due to living work” (114). Therefore, for Dussel (2003b), Marx “thinks anew on the fetishized means of production, as divine immortal entity in whose veins the absolute circulates (the absolutized value: not relative to work, nor to its social condition, nor to its essential exchangeability or need for realization)” (114). Fifth, the product not as product (the fruit of living work), but as capital first and secondly, capital as a fetishized product. Fetishization or false appearance are two phenomena that come from the same source: the absolutization of value. The product has a value: value refers to all the paid and unpaid labour contained in it. The fetishization of the product consists in believing that the cost price is equal to the value of the article. As Dussel explains, the fetishization of capital (of value) institutes the fetishization of the product. But on the fetishization of this hangs the fetishization of circulation.

The product would seem to have value in itself, as a thing, for that, value would have to be attributed to the product as product, and the market (fetishization of circulation with respect to production) must also be fetishized. “The fetishization of the ‘world of commodities’ of the horizon of circulation, of the market, is what establishes the ‘form of commodity (warenform)’ which all the products of capital adopt” (Dussel 2003b, 117). What the fetishization of circulation hides is the place of production as a curse: “The temple of the Beast, the fetish is the factory; it is the place of the death of the worker and of his exploitation, like a hell” (Dussel 2003b, 118). As Dussel (2003b) argues, “for Marx there is a superficial fetishized level of circulation where it would seem that profit is generated (more value from capital itself) and the other term of the relationship is denied and hidden: the productive process, the deep level. Again fetishization, like absolutization, is to deny one term of a relation by autonomizing the other (in this case circulation, the market)” (119). As Dussel (2003b) explains:

The invisibility of the origin, of the reality and explanation of invisible phenomena permits the fetishization of value (of capital); it is the foundation for such an ideological mechanism. Thus the enigma, the mystery, the mystification, the fetishization of all the determinations of capital and especially profit is possible because everything is situated on the mere horizon of circulation. The fetishization of circulation is an ontological horizon from whence is known that everything that is presented in the capitalist system as the origin of the mechanism of ideologizing the capitalist political economy. By ignoring the production process (where the surplus value is produced), circulation is absolutized. The law of value becomes the law of reality. The totality of capital and circulation has denied the outward appearance of living work and production. (119-120)

Finally, Dussel refers to the progressive fetishization of the valorization process. Capital which yields interest is not related directly to the work which produces surplus value and presents to view the character of a capital that creates new capital, value which produces value from itself. According to Dussel (2003b):

To the false consciousness, interest would seem to be the fruit of money: value created from nothing by the power of capital. God on earth, fetish, Moloch—inasmuch as, in reality, the life of such a fetish is the blood of workers offered in the holocaust of the accumulation of value. Fetishized, autonomized or absolutized (separated from the relation where it is only a term) we reach the final consequence of this “secular” or “worldly religion”…Behind fetishized capital, land and wage labor, is the fetishization of value as such—as the origin of these three fetishes, these three gods, this worldly, secular trinity like the three faces of Moloch, the Beast, like the parody of an inverted Christianity…Each fetish, each face of Moloch has its fruit, its pleasure, its pay and all by virtue of their own value: capital, the profit; land, the rent; and wage labor, its salary…All these fetishized forms (separated from their origin) hide their base: the living work or labor that has created them. The denial of the relation to living work or labor is the origin and possibility of their fetishization. (121)

Marx unveils capital, commodity, money, etc., as religious gods or divine forms. For this reason, Dussel considers that Marx develops a religious critique of political economy. As Dussel (2003b) explains, “In the strict sense Marx makes a religious critique of political economy; that is, he uncovers the mechanisms of domination of capitalism as fetishist structures that are demoniacal, satanic and idolatrous. The ‘fetishist character’ of capital is precisely its strict religious statute” (122).

Bibliography

Bonefeld, Werner. “The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution.” The Commoner 2 (2001), http://www.commoner.org.uk/02bonefeld.pdf

Dussel, Enrique. “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought: Part I of II.” Radical Philosophy Review 6, no. 1 (2003): 1-28.

Dussel, Enrique. “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought: Part II of II.” Radical Philosophy Review 6, 2 (2003): 93-129.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1887). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf

Perlman, Fredy. “Introduction: Commodity Fetishism.” In Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, edited by Isaak I. Rubin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990.

Rubin, Isaak I. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990.

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44–65.

“Regime” can be defined as a regular pattern of occurrence or action (as of seasonal rainfall), the characteristic behavior or orderly procedure of a natural phenomenon or process, mode of rule or management, a form of government, a government in power, or a period of rule. The widespread informal meaning is a pejorative term describing a government that the speaker doesn’t like or that has authoritarian features (The Assad regime in Syria). Within the political science meaning, a regime is the set of institutions[rules] that determines who gets access to principal offices of the state, and how publicly binding decisions are made. The three main types of political regimes are Autocracy, Anocracy, and Democracy. In general terms, in a democracy the most powerful decision-makers in the state (executives and legislators) are selected through periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes with near-universal adult suffrage. An anocracy is defined by real but unfair competition and access, which mean that the will of the people is not truly translated into representation. Some of the impairments to democracy can be electoral fraud, unfair media access, patronage, etc. An autocracy is not representative and can assume the forms of dictatorship, single party systems, military governments, etc.

The conceptual definition of regime is quite broad, but being a mode of rule or management, it is connected to principles of political economy and modes of production. Capitalist production regimes are intertwined with many societal players like governments and transnational courts, they are “institutional framework conditions for economic activity. They structure the production of goods and services by way of markets and market-related institutions. The “rules of the game” of economic activities, that is, the incentives and constraints of economic transactions, will be formulated through an ensemble of institutions in which economic activities are embedded” (Teubner, 2017, p. 84). Within capitalism, there are two main production regimes: liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economy (CMEs). In LMEs most firms coordinate many of their activities via market mechanisms, while, in CMEs a typical firm’s relations with other actors turn more heavily on strategic coordination (Hall, 2001). If we consider labor institutions and their connection to regimes of production, research points out that companies in CMEs tend to make “extensive use of specific skills, while those in LMEs rely on general skills can be used to explain, not only cross-national variations in firm strategy but also national differences in educational systems, social policy regimes, and gender segmentation across occupations” (5). 

We are seeing how varieties of capitalism are determined by specific regimes of productions, but also by their interaction with other institutions. These institutions are regimes themselves, as they implement a set of procedures that influence the movement of capital. Important players in the capitalist game are transnational arbitration courts like the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the United Nation Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) (Cutler & Dietz 2017). These courts are crucial in the regulation of international trade as their rulings end up affecting the movement of capital across nation-states, as well as the relationships among institutions worldwide. These juridical regimes can go as far as weighing in contractual disputes between firms and entire countries. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is an instrument that allows an investor to bring a case directly against the country hosting its investment, without the intervention of the government of the investor’s country of origin. This juridical regime has emerged as a concrete example of the private transnational governance by contract involving a complex network of private and public authorities that link local and global politico-legal orders within dense contractual agreements (Cutler & Dietz 2017). ISDS contractual disputes are arbitrated by private ad hoc tribunals established either under the auspices of the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) (Nichols 2018). The establishment and the development of these transnational courts are a response to the growth of capitalism beyond the borders of the nation-states, the production regimes presented above have their “historical sources in the old unity of nation-state and national economy. However, with the dominance of transnational enterprises and their subsidiaries, and with the globalization of markets and their differentiation into various branches, this unity has been broken. The production regimes have expanded beyond their territorial state borders” (Teubner 2017, 84). Yet, international trade tribunals are also active contributors of such expansion due to their procedural bypassing of state law.

Bibliography

Beckers, A., and Kawakami, M. T. “Why Domestic Enforcement of Private Regulation Is (Not) the Answer: Making and Questioning the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Codes.” Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 1-13. Indiana University Press.

Cutler, A. C., and Dietz, T. The Politics of Private Transnational Governance by Contract. 1st ed. Routledge, 2017.

Hall, P. A., and Soskice, D. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003.

Nichols, S. “Expanding Property Rights under Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS): Class Struggle in the Era of Transnational Capital.” Review of International Political Economy 25, no. 2 (2018): 243-269. doi:10.1080/09692290.2018.1431561.

Teubner, G. “Corporate Codes in the Varieties of Capitalism: How Their Enforcement Depends on the Differences Among Production Regimes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 81-97. Indiana University Press.

Europe as a construct is more than its geographical representation. In order to shed light on the concept of Europe, it is crucial to consider its geographical, historical, political, economic, and social aspects. 

According to Merriam-Webster, Europe can be defined as “continent of the eastern and northern hemispheres that has the Atlantic Ocean to its west, the Arctic Ocean to its north, Asia to its east, and Africa and the Mediterranean and Black seas to its south…area 3,997,929 square miles.” This geographical definition is often paired with an overlapping understating of Europe as the European Union, a supranational institution of twenty-seven member states. However, we can better define the concept of Europe through five main areas—geography, history, politics, economics, and society—informed by Michael Hard and Antonio Negri, and Michel Foucault among others. Ultimately, this expanded definition of Europe is rather blurry, and it overlaps with the terms like empire and capital.

Geography:

While the geographical connotation is often the most commonly known, it is important to connect Europe with the notion of nation-state. According to Negri and Hardt in Empire (2000), the modern system of nation-states developed out of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which defined the territorial boundaries that became fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: “Modern sovereignty is a European concept in the sense that it developed primarily in Europe in coordination with the evolution of modernity itself. The concept functioned as the cornerstone of the construction of Eurocentrism”  and thus, the modern idea of Europe (70).

History:

Hardt and Negri refer to the Roman Empire as a precursor to the modern, global Empire that they theorize, and Rome played a central role in the creation of Europe. Taking over the role of the Greeks, the Romans came to represent the Occident, as the natural opposite of the Orient. This distinction was mainly drawn upon religious and cultural lines, but it fueled an early imagination of what is in Europe and what is outside it, what is East and what is West, and what is European and what is the “other”. According to Stuart Hall (2018), the first time that the term Europe was recorded seems to be in the eight century in reference to Charles Martel’s victory over the Spanish Moors at Tours, France. Since then, the blocking presence of Islam to the south and east became the defining feature of Europeanness; “Its continental identity was primarily Christian, for its name was Christendom more often than it was Europe” (Hall, 197).

Politics:

Connecting with the core feature of the nation-state and popular understanding, Europe can also be understood as the EU, a supranational confederation of sovereign nation states that agree to transfer part of their powers to a central power in exchange for real or perceived positive outcomes. The European Union is a unique economic and political union between 27 EU countries in the European continent. Its first iteration, the European Economic Community (EEC) was created after WW2, to foster economic cooperation, with the goal of avoiding conflict by making the member countries become economically interdependent (Europa). From a juridical standpoint, even though Hardt and Negri (2000) talk about it referring to the United Nations, the EU can be seen as “a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts” (9).

Economy:

The economic sphere is central in defining Europe as capitalism is intertwined with the development of Europeanness. Exploration, colonialism and imperialism evolved the idea of Europe by increasing contact with the “other”, and by exploiting the technological divide between civilizations. Exploration began as a capitalist endeavor and culminated with the colonial exploitation of much of the world. Negri and Hardt present Empire as the modern manifestation of covert capitalist interest, corroborating the idea that the development of the West has been indeed a story of economic gain. “Capital has indeed always been organized with a view toward the entire global sphere, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and financial corporations really begin to structure global territories biopolitically” (Foucault in Hardt and Negri, 31). Nowadays, private corporations have supplanted the national colonialist and imperialist systems in earlier phases of capitalist development. Like them, corporations directly structure and influence territories and populations across the globe.

Society:

While numerous and complex, the sociological implications of the concept of Europe can be linked to biopolitical production: “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, xiii). Foucault’s concept of biopolitics traces the historical development of a European society relying on disciplinary institutions to one of control, a society of control (Empire) that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Examples of this are visible in some policies actualized by the EU that aim at creating and fostering an Europeanness that is not really there. Programs like Erasmus (student exchange) and visa-less travel within EU countries are affecting the identities of people and normalize certain constructs. In a hegemonic manner, the state/society/corporation/ruling class can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and enacts (in)voluntarily (Foucault, 2008). Supranational corporations in particular, act beyond Europe and its “borders” producing needs, social relations, bodies, and minds—in other words, producing producers (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 32). From a Marxist perspective, the Empire brings to the world the annihilation of space by time, where the individual is no longer confronted with the local mediations of the universal but with a concrete universal itself (Hardt & Negri,19). In Doreen Massey’s words, the global reach of capital/Empire/Europe enact economic, political and cultural social relations each “full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination, stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 7).

(See Empire, Enclave, Enclosure/Border, De/Reterritorialization, Sovereignty)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Aims and Values.” European Union, 2019. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/principles-and-values/aims-and-values_en. 

“Europe Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Europe. 

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978- 1979, New York: Palgrave, 2008.

Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest:Discourse and Power [1992].” Essay. In Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, edited by David Morley. Duke University Press, 2018. 

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” aughty, [1991].
http://www.aughty.org/pdf/global_sense_place.pdf.

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

Amy Kapczynski defines intellectual property rights as an “…alchemy that turns immaterial expressions and ideas into tradable commodities…” and, more specifically, the “…legal entitlements that give their holders the ability to prevent others from copying or deploying the covered information in specific ways” (2010, 23). As described by Nichols (2018), intellectual property is the idea that knowledge might be captured as a unit of property and then kept from others who might benefit from its use. It is often justified with the assertion that protecting the processes of research and development has bigger, generalizable benefits to society. “In this way, the interests of the industries benefiting from the expansion of intellectual property rights are articulated as synonymous with those of the general interest…” (247). ‘Intellectual property rights’ as a term may be broken into two constitutive elements: that of ‘property’, and that of ‘rights’. In order for pharmaceutical companies to claim ownership over an immaterial object, each of these components must undergo important permutations.

As enshrined in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), intellectual property comes in three main forms, patents, copyrights, and trademarks. In order for a patent to be granted, an invention must be new, useful and ‘nonobvious,’ and once granted, an inventor can prevent others from making, using or selling their invention for twenty years. Once a copyright is granted, which are principally used for expressive or literary works, authors or artists can prevent others from copying or performing ‘derivatives’ of their original work for upwards of 100 years. The trademark is used to protect a distinctive trade name in commerce, thereby permitting the holder to place protections around its use so as to “…ensure that consumers are not confused about the origin of the good” (Kapczynski 2010, 23). Heywood (2002) calls the TRIPS agreement “the most refined institutional attack on health” for the ways it not only expanded Western intellectual property law, but also the way TRIPS suddenly invoked rights language to defend intellectual property ‘rights’ (221). Patent protections have arguably had some of the most explicit consequences for global wellbeing and carry with them a constellation of institutions which uphold and protect these ‘immaterial expressions.’ 

Marx’s Capital (1867) considers property an indispensable part of the capitalist production cycle. Without landed property and rent, a capitalist will be unable to accumulate from the commons. Harvey (2018) writes that while Marx was attentive to the distinctive capitalist forms of property, he was unable to predict the extension of market logics into the immaterial realm:

What [Marx] did not anticipate was that new forms of capitalist rent might also evolve within the evolutionary structures of capitalism and that rent-seeking might go well beyond that which he found both necessary and functional as well as politically tolerable for a mature form of capitalist development…what are we to make of rent-seeking through ownership of intellectual property rights? (Harvey 2018, 37)

Just as capitalist economies developed institutions to protect the landed property of the bourgeois class in Marx’s time, so too have contemporary capitalist economies developed institutions to protect the immaterial intellectual property of actors such as multinational corporations. If we see new, useful and ‘nonobvious’ ideas as a part of the commons just as landed property was, in Marx’s eyes, a part of the commons, then the notion of who is able to claim these rights becomes an important one.

In a 1949 essay critiquing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Hannah Arendt provocatively asks her reader “who has a right to claim rights?” (Arendt 1949a). Centering the individual, Arendt asserts that the ‘universal’ and ‘inalienable’ nature of the rights put forth by the UDHR cannot exist outside of a political community which can guarantee these rights. The Declaration therefore embodies a paradox, how can the rights of man be inalienable if they require a state and a corresponding legal apparatus to uphold them? Without the protection of a political community, an individual is therefore alienated from her rights. Agamben (1995) calls this figure cast out of the Bios (and therefore political life) and reduced to bare life, homo sacer, a figure that can be sacrificed with impunity. If an individual can only be endowed with the full rights of man when a legal apparatus is present, how might we explain non-person entities claiming rights?  The landmark 2008 US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) asserted that conservative non-profit Citizens United had, just as individuals, the right to free speech under the First Amendment and could therefore not have its expenditures on political communications be restricted by the government. In this way, the US Supreme Court extended the ‘right to claim rights’ to a non-person. Taking two important permutations of the components of “property” (claims on material goods become claims on immaterial goods) and of “rights” (an individual’s rights claim becomes a non-human’s rights claim) in the term intellectual property rights allows entities such as pharmaceutical companies to protect ‘property’ such as lifesaving vaccine formulas. In this way, intellectual property law can be said to “regulate life itself” (Kapczynski 2010, 24).

The notion of intellectual property rights carries with it an institutional legacy that has legitimated claims of exclusion on the grounds of ownership for several decades. Refined over eight rounds of negotiations, twenty-three countries signed onto The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1948 during the post-WWII years. It was not until the United Nation’s (UN) World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was established in 1967 that ‘intellectual property’ had a more central role in global governance. WIPO promised “…to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among States and, where appropriate, in collaboration with any other international organization” (Convention Establishing the WIPO 1967). While intellectual property rights became more formally acknowledged as ‘property’, WIPO did not contain in its articles any formal punitive measure for countries not in compliance with the protections. The World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the GATT in 1995 as the central organizing institution of trade at the global scale. In the same year that the WTO was established, WTO member countries signed the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to ensure “…minimum standards of protection and enforcement that each government has to give to the intellectual property held by nationals of fellow WTO members” (WTO 2021). The TRIPS Agreement contained within it a dispute settlement system, and the authority to sanction countries who did not comply (Birn, Pillay, and Holtz 2017, 312, 392).

While the patents protected by intellectual property laws have arguably been the most consequential to the distribution of global wellbeing (over, for example, copyrights or trademarks), medical patents by pharmaceutical industries have received a bulk of the attention from activists over the last decades. In 2001, after years of coordinated protest actions, AIDS activists around the world were successful in pressuring global intellectual property legal apparatuses in amending the original TRIPS Agreement with the Doha Declaration. When scientists identified the HIV/AIDS virus in the 80s, the epidemic was already spreading around the globe. In 1996 antiretroviral therapy (ART), an effective treatment for the management of the HIV/AIDS virus, emerged as an answer to stopping the epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS. The patent for ART treatment was protected under TRIPS for a period of twenty years at the time of its invention, sparking activist groups in South Africa, notably the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), and in the United States, notably the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), to pressure national and supranational legal institutions that protected the intellectual property rights of ART treatments. In 1999, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association (PMA) v. The President of the Republic of South Africa case was brought to the South African supreme court. The PMA argued that manufacturing generic drugs while still under patent was a violation of the South African government’s ratification of the 1994 TRIPS Agreement and was therefore a violation of their rights to intellectual property. Also employing rights language, TAC framed their argument in terms of “the rights to ‘life, dignity and access to health care services’ as enshrined in the South African Constitution and numerous international human rights agreements” (George 2011, 184). Ultimately, PMA’s withdrawal of the lawsuit helped to form “…a strong normative foundation upon which to build further protection for the right to health” (George 2011, 197).  

 In 2001, just weeks after an anthrax scare in the United States, 140 trade ministers gathered in Doha, Qatar and enshrined the following protections in the “Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health”, also known as the Doha Declaration,

…the TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health. Accordingly, while reiterating our commitment to the TRIPS Agreement, we affirm that the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. (Doha WTO Ministerial 2001)

Motivated by the anthrax scare and its efforts to stockpile generic Cipro, an antibiotic that could be used to treat anthrax exposure in the case of a large-scale bioterrorist attack, the US signed the declaration (Sun 2004). Two legal mechanisms, compulsory licensing[1] and parallel imports[2], comprised the legal base upon which the TRIPS Agreement was modified. Klug (2005) argues that even these modifications were not capable of ensuring equitable access to life-saving medicines. Since compulsory licensing, the more easily accessible of the Doha Declaration’s legal mechanisms, required countries to have access to their own manufacturing, it inherently excluded countries without the capacity to produce their own pharmaceuticals. The 2003 pre-Cancún agreement laid out a pathway for countries without manufacturing capabilities to claim compulsory licensing rights to protect the public health of their populations, although it “…has since been criticized for placing so many preconditions on its implementation as to make it unworkable” (135).

Sociologist Deborah Gould (2004) considers the role of emotion in the ACT UP protests of the 1980s and 1990s, specifically focusing on the idea of the ‘public funeral’ as a social movement tactic. In it, AIDS activists would perform funeral services for their comrades lost to the AIDS virus in front of government buildings. Figure 1 calls attention to the similar political nature, i.e. that both diseases have excluded the deployment of life-saving medication using claims at intellectual property rights, of both the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 viruses (ACT UP 2021). 

Despite these criticisms, the Doha Declaration has nonetheless provided an important legal infrastructure to bypass intellectual property rights in the name of public health, leaving many in the midst of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out pushing for a special TRIPS waiver to, as one particular activist campaign terms it, “free the vaccine” from exclusionary intellectual property protections (“Free The Vaccine” 2021). South Africa and India called for a TRIPS waiver on the intellectual property contained in the COVID-19 vaccine in October of 2020, and the United States followed on May 5, 2021. Just three days after the United States’ statement, biotechnology company and one inventor of the MRNA vaccine against COVID, Moderna Therapeutics, Inc., released a statement asserting that it would not enforce its intellectual property rights during or after the pandemic (Moderna 2020). In a response to the statement, James Love, director of non-profit Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), called for “every manufacturer of a vaccine, drug or diagnostic [to] follow suit and publish the patents relevant to the technology, waive or license rights in those patents, and provide constructive transfer of manufacturing know-how and access to cell lines and data when necessary” (Love 2020). Vocal opponents of sharing the vaccine’s “recipe” with other manufacturers include Bill Gates, a major influencer of global public health policy. During an interview on Britain’s Sky News, Gates cited safety standards in manufacturing, and explicitly not intellectual property constraints, to explain why a TRIPS waiver will ultimately fail to bring the world closer to equitable vaccine access (Savage 2021; Kapczynski and Ravinthiran 2021). Sparke (2017) categorizes global patent protections as one way that economic neoliberalization keeps lifesaving medical technologies and drugs out of reach to the world’s poor. It is through the legal apparatuses of institutions like the WTO, and through our legal understanding of what it is to claim a “right” that immaterial objects, such as the recipe to produce lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines, are taken out of the commons and claimed as property.

[1] “Compulsory licensing enables a competent government authority to license the use of a patented invention to a third party or government agency without the consent of the patent-holder” (“Intellectual Property: Protection and Enforcement” 2021).

[2] “Parallel importation is importation without the consent of the patent-holder of a patented product marketed in another country either by the patent holder or with the patent-holder’s consent” (“Intellectual Property: Protection and Enforcement” 2021).

 (See Accumulation,  Free Trade)

Bibliography

ACT UP. “ACT UP NY Face Backlash Over Equating COVID-19 Pandemic with AIDS Crisis.” Attitude. 2021. https://attitude.co.uk/article/act-up-ny-faces-backlash-over-face-mask-equating-covid-19-pandemic-with-aids-crisis/23089/.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Arendt, Hannah. “The Rights of Man: What Are They?” Die Wandlung, 1949a, 4th edition.

Birn, Anne-Emanuelle, Yogan Pillay, and Timothy H. Holtz. “Health Equity and the Societal Determinants of Health.” In Textbook of Global Health. Oxford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199392285.001.0001.

Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization. 1967. https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283854.

Doha WTO Ministerial. “Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health.” TRIPS WT/MIN(01)/DEC/2. 2001. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/min01_e/mindecl_trips_e.htm.

“Free The Vaccine.” Campaign website. Free The Vaccine for COVID-19. 2021. https://freethevaccine.org/about/.

George, Erika. “The Human Right to Health and HIV/AIDS: South Africa and South-South Cooperation to Reframe Global Intellectual Property Principles and Promote Access to Essential Medicines.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18 (1): 167, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2979/indjglolegstu.18.1.167.