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

Tomas Ocampo
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Extractivism is derived from the word “extract” or “extraction.” To extract is to take something out using effort or force, while extraction refers to the act or process of extracting something. Typically, extraction refers to obtaining a substance or resource, such as natural resources like metals or oil, via physical force—to literally remove them from their location. However, the word extract can reference any kind of extraction, from digital information to labor and culture. Extractivism today is used to reference many of these other “frontiers” from which something can be extracted, not just extractive industries of natural resources (Riofrancos 2020). Additionally, the concept of extractivism is related to the Spanish word extractivismo, which refers to the discourse of “left-intellectuals and grassroots activists in Latin America” on the extractive model (extractivism) that has been adopted by several Latin American governments (Riofrancos 2020). As such, extractivism for them is a political and economic model of accumulation, or appropriation, founded on intensive and extensive exploitation of natural resources (Riofrancos 2020; Svampa 2019). Therefore, extractivism concerns the intensive exploitation of natural resources under a capitalist mode of production, and the social struggles resulting from the impacts of extractivist activities. In this sense, the term extractivism connects the theoretical concept to political contestation (Gudynas 2013). However, despite the increasing attention to the topic, especially in Spanish speaking countries, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language still does not include the term extractivismo (Acosta 2013). 

Extractivism refers not only to natural resource extraction but also large-scale excavation activities of renewable and non-renewable resources that “are not processed (or processed only to a limited degree), especially for export” (Acosta 2013, 62). Similarly, Eduardo Gudynas (2013) contends that the concept of extractivism should include three dimensions: volume of resources extracted; intensity of extraction; and destination of the resource. In this sense, extractivism is a particular case of extraction of natural resources, in large volume or high intensity, which are essentially oriented to be exported as raw materials without or with minimal manufacturing (Gudynas 2013, 3). Some activities included in this understanding of extractivism are mining, hydrocarbons, export monocultures, and fisheries (Gudynas 2013); hydraulic fracturing for unconventional gas (known as “fracking”), coal and oil extraction; gold, copper and ore mineral mining, and the surrounding infrastructure including roads, pipelines and storage facilities; large-scale single-crop or cash-crop plantations (i.e. palm, soy) that do not support or feed surrounding communities; projects that take critical water sources from communities and ecosystems, such as hydroelectric dams and commercial water bottling operations; corporate- and profit-driven renewable energy and climate mitigation projects carried out at the expense of rights of indigenous peoples and local communities (Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach).

 These activities have caused immense environmental damages —in some cases irreversible  damages— and lead to deleterious social consequences, including: deforestation and biodiversity loss; acidification of soils and water in natural run-off, which pollute rivers, seas, air, and soils; massive holes in the ground/earth; the toxification of soil and ecosystems from the use of toxic chemicals in minerals extraction; public health problems resulting from toxic waste and polluted water; forced displacement of peoples; negatively altered traditional ways of life and means of subsistence; impoverishment and unemployment; division of communities; destruction of indigenous peoples’ sacred places; and the violation of human rights, discrimination, persecution, and criminalization of social activists. In this sense, the definition of extractivism is deeply linked to the social and environmental transformations carried out historically by extraction as an economic model, unevenly distributed across geographies and axes of social difference. As such, the extractive economic model is a type of accumulation based on an over-exploitation of natural resources as well as the expansion of frontiers to territories formerly considered ‘unproductive’, building large-scale projects of transport, communication and infrastructure with high levels of capital investments and risks for society, the economy and environment (Svampa 2012).

Extractivism is sustained by extractivist industries that export raw materials, while domestic industries are underdeveloped. This causes enclave economies, where the primary export activities are not integrated in the rest of the economy, inputs and technologies are imported, a significant proportion of technical staff is recruited from abroad, and do not foster national industrial chains, thus remaining tied to international financial markets and fluctuations (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2013; Svampa 2012). In addition, the increasing complexity of the global capitalist economy has put into practice a sort of subordination of industrial activities, which are subordinated under financial logic, changing traditional structures and processes of industrial paradigm (Gago & Mezzadra 2017), showing thus the evolving but dependent nature of the extractive sector.

Additionally, extractivism does not refer only to particular activities, but is part of a specific mode of accumulation (Acosta 2013), or as a development model itself (Wolff 2017; Brand et al., 2016), because extractivist activities are deeply rooted in transnational commodities flows and are part of the territorial unevenness of global capitalism (Riofrancos 2020). The topic has been widely developed by contemporary Latin American scholars, highlighting the colonialist implications of extractivism. Certainly, Latin America and the Caribbean have historically experienced extractivism as a structuring model of the region. It constituted an economic mechanism of colonial and neocolonial capitalist plunder, appropriation (Acosta 2013), and dispossession, which unfolded in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Therefore, extractivism is deeply linked to the colonial capitalist system. However, the important changes carried out by neoliberal capitalism has marked a different tendency of the extractivism model. The commodity boom at the beginning of the twentieth first century has marked the increasing growth in the exportation of natural resources, causing what Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale (2014) called the transition from the Washington Consensus to the Commodities Consensus. Indeed, in recent years, extractivism has spread throughout Latin America and beyond, precisely because of international demand. However, despite the historical nature of extractivism, it has acquired recent aspects based on new types, scales, speed, and integration of extractivism across environments/societies. The result is that extractive ventures are approved and implemented to serve export interests, perpetuating the subordination and dependence of those countries. As a result, the capacities of national governments to regulate extractivism are limited and subordinated (Gudynas 2013).

 Problematizing the structural nature of extractivism, scholars have developed Marxist perspectives that understand extractivism as an economic problem internal to capitalism regarding the ever growing and intensive use of energy in the capitalist accumulation process (Diamanti 2018). Extractivism thus represents a technical system of processing nature through labor, introducing greater transformation. In this sense, it is a technical form of the capitalist mode of production, rather than a mode of production itself. Nevertheless, any mode of accumulation develops certain relationships between human beings and nature, and according to Alvaro García Linera (2013) all societies, capitalist or non-capitalist, have performed a certain level of extractivist activities. As such, extractivism constitutes a specialization in the productive activities within capitalist societies, based on the colonial and post-colonial division of labor and production throughout the world. As a consequence, dependent economies on the extraction and exportation of raw materials are located mostly -but not exclusively- in certain places in the world, such as Latin America and Africa. However, other analyses offer different and new perspectives to understand the extractive industries into transnational supply chains, based on Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital (Arboleda 2020b) and the financial exploitation in contemporary capitalism that operate under extractive modes (Gago & Mezzadra 2017).

 The complexities of extractivism have opened new analysis and conceptualizations and the concept has acquired new striking paths from different approaches and fields, pluralizing the initial idea of extraction of natural resources, and turning towards urban extractivism, data extractivism, financial extractivism, and green or aeolian extractivism (Riofrancos, 2020). Recent studies point out that extractivism has even moved to extra-global frontiers like lunar and outer space landscapes (Klinger 2017), or raise the idea of deterritorialized extraction, which transforms the spatio-temporal processes of extractive industries, including the nonhuman nature in the production of value (Labban 2014). Regardless, the political debate around extractivism identifies certain continuities and variegated forms it acquired regarding different political projects, mainly placed in Latin America, showing the discursive/ideological realm of the term. For instance, the idea of “neoliberal” extractivism versus “neo-” or “progressive” extractivism (Burchardt and Dietz 2014; Gudynas 2009), which shows the structural continuities of an extractive imperative in the region (Arsel et al. 2016). The most prominent conceptual stem is neo-extractivism. Neo-extractivism refers to the continued reliance on extractive activities under a nationalist developmental stance to improve the social welfare of the population through the benefits of exportation of raw materials (Acosta 2013), a criticism that Latin American scholars have pointed out against progressive governments, mainly the so-called pink tide. The central claim of this criticism is that progressive governments in Latin America continued the same extractive economic model rather than moving towards a new economic model.

Some scholars have posited that neo-extractivism maintained and reproduced key elements of the extractivism from the colonial period (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2013). In this sense, neo-extractivism maintained the same structure that subordinates Latin America’s position in global markets, something that some scholars have called the extractive imperialism (Veltmeyer & Petras 2015), and from a different perspective, the resource imperialism in late capitalism (Arboleda 2020a).

On the other hand, neo-extractivism is not only linked to progressive governments in Latin America, but to different countries and realities especially since the year 2000 as part of a new phase in the capitalist development and socio-ecological transformation (Brand et al. 2016). According to some scholars, “neo-extractivism is not only an economic/technical form of resource appropriation or a renaissance of the Latin American economic model, but rather should be seen as a central expression of political domination, in which the material, cultural, and socio-political dimensions and conflicts of a new development model coalesce” (Brand et al. 2016, 150). Based on this perspective, we are facing a neo-extractivist development model or transformation in the capitalist mode of accumulation, which we can think of as a geography of extraction that transcends the focus on intensity and scale of natural resources because it is rooted in the internal dynamics of the production of value at the world scale (Arboleda 2020a). Similarly, Veronica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra (2017) have pointed out the need to expand the notion of extractivism considering contemporary processes of valorization and accumulation of capital, where current development models of capitalism take place, alongside social struggles and progressive governments of Latin America. Thus, a new notion of extractivism comprises other economic domains, such as finance, real estate, logistics, digital technology, and knowledge (Gago & Mezzadra 2017; Arboleda 2020a). In this sense, there are no such continuities in the development model, leaving peripheral extractives spaces in a strictly subordinated position, but a new phase of contemporary capitalism, where a critique of neo-extractivism should expand the category of exploitation, including financialization, and rethink dispossession (Gago & Mezzadra 2017).

Finally, another recent debate seeks to elaborate knowledge toward alternatives to extractivism, such as post-extractivism, Buen Vivir or Sumak Kawsay, the ecosocial pact, economic degrowth or stationary growth (Riofrancos 2020; Arsel et al. 2016). These proposals seek to promote a “re-encounter with indigenous worldviews in which human beings not only coexist in harmony with Nature but form part of it” (Acosta 2013, 81). These efforts stem from calls from scholars and activists to rethink how communities and governments can move beyond extractivism, and from indigenous groups and movements that have long witnessed – and felt – the effects of extractivism on their territories. Whatever direction a “post-extractivism” future holds, the rich debate on extractivism and its many delineations and perspectives continues. Some ongoing questions are related to the links between the criticisms from post and anti-extractivism, and the possibilities for a structural change, just transitions, climate justice, and indigenous sovereignty, among others. The continued relevance of these debates are significant issues to many academic disciplines including political economy.

[1] The author acknowledges the members of the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster at University of California Santa Cruz, for the meaningful conversations and contributions to this definition. 

(See Accumulation, Enclave, Fossil Fuels, Nature, Neocolonialism, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty)

Bibliography

Acosta, Alberto. “Extractivism and neoextractivism: Two sides of the same curse.” In Beyond development: Alternative visions from Latin America, edited by M. Lang & D. Mokdrani, 61–86. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2013. https://www.tni.org/en/publication/beyond-development.

Arboleda, Martin. Planetary mine: Territories of extraction under late capitalism. New York: Verso, 2020.

Arboleda, Martin. “From Spaces to Circuits of Extraction: Value in Process and the Mine/City Nexus.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 31 (3): 114–133, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2019.1656758.

Arsel, Murat, Hogenboom, Barbara, and Lorenzo Pellegrini. “The extractive imperative in Latin America.” The Extractive Industries and Society 3 (4): 880–887, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2016.10.014.

Brand, Ulrich, Dietz, Kristina, and Miriam Lang. “Neo-Extractivism in Latin America – one side of a new phase of global capitalist dynamics.” Ciencia Política 11 (21): 125–159, 2016. https://doi.org/10.15446/cp.v11n21.57551.

Diamanti, Jeff. “Extractivism.” Krisis Journal for Contemporary Phylosophy 2: 54–57, 2018. https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/31857636/Krisis_2018_2_Jeff_Diamanti_Extractivism_2.pdf.

Ellner, Steve. Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020.

“Extract.” Lexico. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/extract.

“Extraction.” Lexico. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/extraction.

“Extraction.” Merriam-Webster. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extraction.

Gago, Veronica, and Sandro Mezzadra. “A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism.” Rethinking Marxism 29 (4): 574–591, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2017.1417087.

García Linera, Álvaro. “Once Again on So-called ‘Extractivism.’” MR Online, April 29, 2013. https://mronline.org/2013/04/29/gl290413-html/.

Gudynas, Eduardo. “Extracciones, Extractivismos y Extrahecciones. Un marco conceptual sobre la apropiación de recursos naturales.” CLAES, Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social, 2013. https://ambiental.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/GudynasApropiacionExtractivismoExtraheccionesOdeD2013.pdf.

Klinger, Julie Michelle. Rare Earth Frontiers. From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. https://cornellopen.org/book-details/.

Labban, Mazen. “Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (3): 560–576, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.892360.

Riofrancos, Thea. “Extractivism and Extractivismo.” In Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South. https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/extractivism-and-extractivismo.

Svampa, Maristella. “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development.” Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik 28 (3): 43–73, 2012. https://doi.org/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-28-3-43.

Svampa, Maristella. “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114 (1): 65-82, 2015.

Svampa, Maristella. Neo-extractivism in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Svampa, Maristella, and Enrique Viale. Maldesarrollo. La Argentina del extractivismo y el despojo. Buenos Aires: Katz editores, 2014. http://www.katzeditores.com/svampa/svampaMD.htm.

Veltmeyer, Henry, & James Petras. “Imperialism and Capitalism: Rethinking an Intimate Relationship.” International Critical Thought 5 (2): 164–182, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2015.1031943.

Wolff, Jonas. “Contesting Extractivism: Conceptual, Theoretical and Normative Reflections.” In Contested Extractivism, Society and the State, edited by B. Engels & K. Dietz, 243–255. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58811-1_11.

Revised by UCSC Politics Graduate Students

Empire is commonly defined as the rule of one monarch, oligarchy, or sovereign state over another group of states or countries (Lexico). While sometimes conflated with imperialism, empire is generally considered distinct in that imperialism is seen as a policy or system of extending a country’s power over another society through colonization or military force (Lexico). This practice of imposing foreign control over another territory is commonly known as colonialism, or the practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, including occupation and economic exploitation (Lexico). Whereas imperialism is the mechanism of colonialism, colonialism is the arrangement of political control of one country over territory via military force and occupation. Again, these terms are often conflated, however they are considered distinct and in the case of empire, the onus is on the absolute control of one political entity (the state) over another. Looking at Michel Foucault (2008), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012), and Matthew Sparke’s (2005) works can help us explore the concept of empire in two ways: “Empire” as a distinct, “decentered global space,” and empire as an “informal imperialism operating in and through increasingly globalized networks” linked to American hegemony after the end of World War II (Sparke 2000, 244-245).

While connotations of words usually relate to their social construction, as in, how people generally perceive of the word and what they might think of when they consider it, looking at its root can open the door to different ways of looking at the word, and help us understand a deeper meaning of what the word might convey. The word empire comes from the Latin root imperium which comes from the word imparare: (im-/in- meaning either “within/throughout” or sometimes “without/not”) and (-parare meaning order, prepare, command and provide, which is derived from the root -pere meaning to produce/bring forth/grant/allot, and also encompasses the reciprocals of these words). Related to these are words like “imperative,” or “operate.” In Latin, the word imperium means supreme power, command, and authority – bearing similarity to the English definition of empire, which refers to an extensive group of states under a supreme authority, or as the absolute control over a person or a group.

Delving deeper into the inner workings of the concept, empire can be conceptualized as not only invasive, that is, a dynamic of power in which the supreme commands and rules what is under it, but also pervasive, “within and throughout,” that which orders, prepares, commands, and provides. It is control over, and management throughout. It is the dye which colors the structures, architectures, livelihoods, and social lives of all that it encompasses (Hardt & Negri 2000). Empire is thus related to Foucault’s conception of “biopower,” which is understood as the power over human bodies, including the management of populations of people (Foucault 1978). Foucault conceives of it as the circumstance in which power in the modern world has become encoded into the social order of human beings. It is distinct from discipline, which by ways of deterrence and punishment of people seeks to enforce the status quo of a ruling power and manifests as the project of protecting the biological livelihood of people, who constitute the power of the body politic. According to Foucault, the state in the modern world has become a ‘scientific’ apparatus of ‘truth’, meaning that the state has restricted its own self from “over-governing” in modern times as it submits to the logic/rationale or truth of the political economy (less governance equals less interference with the truths that arise from the logics of the market, like ‘true prices’). In becoming so, things like the “health of the workforce” become precious to the state as the efficiency of the population is tantamount to the establishment of the “truths,” which rule the style of governance. As scientific discoveries become a hegemonic force for the establishment of truth in the modern day, people submit to the truths of science, which promise to illuminate the path towards the optimum well-being of people.

Therefore, while the rational indicates the new style of the state, one which strives towards maximum efficiency, it also lays claim to the behavior and social life among people, who perpetuate the rational through their behavior and interaction, and contribute to the creation and reification of this empire. Essentially, history, defined as sets of practices which extend backwards into past time-space and relay the truths of that time-space, has eventually culminated into this new set of practices and thus “truths” in which we find ourselves in today, and these truths and logic (of efficiency, particularly economic/market efficiency) require that we submit to them as the best path towards human well-being, but also that we continue to perfect them and discover more of these truths to submit ourselves to. This is what births biopower: the entirety of the state has a vested interest in the biological efficiency of the population, and ultimate authority over births, lives and the deaths of mutineers of this rationale. Thus, the empire is: invasive, it commands; and it is pervasive, it is lived.

In part of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) book Empire, the authors conduct a historical review of the transformations of power in authorities and societies to show how it has culminated in the “empire” that we live in today. Hardt and Negri examine the European origins of “Empire” and link the concept of Empire with “the Christian origins of European civilizations” (10). They write that “Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths” (10). To maintain the social order and achieve social peace, the conductor is given the power to do whatever is necessary, from launching “just” wars against external enemies to fighting against threats within. However, physical force itself is not the basis of “Empire.” Hardt and Negri argue that “the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace” is paramount (15). It is called into being to resolve conflicts and it enlarges the “realm of consensus that supports its own power” (15).

For Hardt and Negri, “Empire” is a concept of a single logic of rule that controls economic and social production and exchange (xii). This rule became a “new global form of sovereignty” following the globalization of the 20th century which saw the decline of nation-state sovereignty and the inability of nation states to control their economic and cultural exchanges. “Empire” developed in step with capitalism and became the global form of sovereignty that best furthered its processes (xvi). This makes “Empire” a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii).

“Empire” is a concept characterized by a lack of boundaries to its rule, which Hardt and Negri outline in four parts (xiv). First, this concept posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or rules over the entire world without territorial boundaries. Second, it operates as an order that does not originate from conquest, suspends history and fixes its existence to eternity; in other words, a regime without temporal boundaries outside of history or at the end of history. In this view, the “Empire” is all that ever was or will ever be. Third, the “Empire” operates on all parts of the social order (it is totalizing). Beyond its control over territory, population and human interaction, the “Empire” creates the world it inhabits and seeks to directly rule over human nature and social life, making “Empire” a paradigmatic form of biopower. Lastly, “Empire” is always dedicated to a perpetual and universal peace despite the violence encoded within it (xv). It “presents its order as permanent, eternal and necessary” (11). The new Emperor is not a fixed point of supreme authority which reigns over the “Empire,” but rather, the Emperor exists within and without the social order, the subjects and the sovereign mutually constitute one another, though all seem to be subordinate to this empire.

Although Hardt and Negri believe that European imperialism is over, they do not place the US at the center of their “Empire” (and in fact would argue there is no central state that forms the heart of “Empire”), though it is still important to sustaining capitalism’s logic of rule. For Panitch and Gindin (2012), however, the US is the central state that has shaped the international order post World War II and worked to shape laws and institutions within states, making it a kind of informal empire. The supranational world power through which US as an empire arose is in part due to the United Nations and the international order it shaped following the end of World War II that was at once built on state sovereignty as much as it acted above state sovereignty. Rather than force other countries via colonization or imperialism to adopt capitalist economic policy, the US helped create the international institutions that governed the international order, including the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and so forth. By setting the parameters under which countries could operate, and enforcing this order through coercive actions unilaterally and multilaterally, it became the aegis of capitalism in the 20th century, a new kind of empire. This conception of the US as an empire of finance capitalism is noted by former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism: “Here is the ‘empire’, the empire of finance capital, in fact if not in name, a vast sprawling network of inter-continental activity on a highly diversified scale that controls the lives of million of people in the most widely separated parts of the world, manipulating whole industries and exploiting the labour and riches of nations for the greedy satisfaction of a few” (35-36). Attending to the ways that the current global system of finance capital (or global capitalism) has been shaped and constructed by states, especially the American state, is crucial for Panitch and Gindin, and others. The end of the Bretton Woods system, rise of neoliberalism and globalization requires examining the United States’ role as an informal empire and the tensions and contradictions that American hegemony brings. Matthew Sparke (2005) discusses this at length in “Empire’s Geography: War, Globalization and American Imperialism,” and argues that the “Empire” of Hardt and Negri smooths over the global space to develop a singular force acting as the sovereign, which “obscures and enables the privileges that accrue to the United States as the major structuring and steering influence of contemporary global capitalism” (258). If there is an actual existing empire tied to global capitalism, the US is closer to the center of it than any other state. Sparke makes a prescient note of this empire that goes a bit further than Hardt and Negri’s conception of “Empire”: the dynamics of neoliberalism and globalization have facilitated a “biopolitically productive regime that has actually worked to legitimize and consolidate ongoing and generally informal forms of American imperialism” (Sparke 2005, 311).

(See Accumulation, Geopolitics, Neocolonialism)

Bibliography

“Colonialism.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/colonialism.

“Empire.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/empire.

“Imperialism.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/imperialism.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism. Panaf Books, 1970. First published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., London. Accessed 1965. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/.

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

Sparke, Matthew. “Empire’s Geography: War, Globalization and American Imperialism.” In The Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Alberto Ganis
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

According to Merriam-Webster, an enclosure can be defined as the act or action of enclosing, or the quality or state of being enclosed. It also refers to the legal process in England of consolidating (enclosing) small landholdings into larger farms, where the land’s use became restricted to the owner, and it ceased to be common land (Polanyi, 2001). The concept of enclosure relies on its connection with the idea of border, which is simply understood as an outer part or edge of something. Yet, the sociopolitical as well as economic reverberances of borders are everything but simplistic. According to Alessandro Mezzadra (2013) different kinds of borders are experienced in different ways based on belonging to different social groups’ experience. Borders also perform ‘‘several functions of demarcation and territorialization—between distinct social exchanges or flows, between distinct rights, and so forth. Without the world-configuring function they perform, there would be no borders—or no lasting borders’’ (Balibar in Mezzadra 2013, 4). The development of capitalism as a world system has articulated the demarcations generated by economic processes and the borders of the state. An early example of this interconnectedness between capital and borders is represented by enclosures. The consolidation of holdings for private use epitomized the surge of the interests of the rich against the ones of the poor. By doing this: 

the lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs. (Polanyi 2001, 37)

The establishment of these physical borders around property signify capitalist interests, and go beyond the mere existence of a physical wall. Enclosures offer an example of how borders affect social relations through regulating access to resources as well as speeding up or slowing down different flows simultaneously. In other words, the same border can enhance flows of capital while interfering with flows of labor forces, inevitably affecting poor and rich people differently. Another socioeconomic manifestation of borders is within the stratification of the labor force itself; “often it seems as if skilled and unskilled migrants occupy different universes of migration, living in parallel worlds where the experiences and political stakes of their mobilities are radically incongruous” (Mezzadra, 2013, 137).

(See Enclave, Europe, De/Reterritorialization, Sovereignty)

Bibliography

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

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

Sophie Trobitzsch
Department of Politics, University of California Santa Cruz

Monetarism is a macroeconomic theory stating that monetary policy is the primary driver of economic growth and controls the business cycle. According to monetarist theory, governments maintain economic stability by controlling the rate at which the money supply increases and decreases. Therefore, monetarists argue that central banks should aim to maintain a stable growth rate of the money supply (Mathai).

Monetarists believe that during an economic upswing, central banks should adopt deflationary monetary policies such as increasing the interest rate, selling or lending securities, or increasing the reserve ratio. Accordingly, during a recession, central banks should adopt inflationary monetary policies by lowering interest rates and buying or borrowing government securities in order to stimulate activity (Mathai).

Monetarism first appeared in 1959 and is mainly associated with Milton Friedman and his critique of John Maynard Keynes’ theory of inflation (Blyth 2002, 139). According to Keynesian economics, governments should use contractionary or expansionary fiscal policy to regulate unemployment and inflation. Friedman, however, contends that Keynesian demand management underestimates the importance of a stable supply of money (Jones 2012, 201). Friedman's ideas reject the core ideas of embedded liberalism, which include full employment and social welfare primarily shaped by government intervention (Blyth 2002, 141). Friedman argued that fluctuations in the money supply had been a major influence on business cycles in the United States (Bleaney 1985, 135). Specifically, Friedman explains that the Great Depression was not due to a fall in aggregate demand, but was instead caused by the Federal Reserve System (Friedman and Schwartz 1963, 44). Thus, although Friedman emphasizes the importance of controlling the money supply as a tool to create economic stability, he highlights that it would be inefficient for central banks to pursue a positive stabilization policy by varying the money supply in a contra-cyclical manner (as Keynes and his followers argued). Instead, central banks should maintain a steady expansion of the money supply at a fixed rate (Kaldor 1970, 3). As highlighted by Friedman in “The Role of Monetary Policy,” “the precise rate of growth, like the precise monetary total, is less important than the adoption of some stated and known rate” (Friedman 1995, 16).Friedman concludes that a steady rate of growth promotes economic stability.

Furthermore, monetarism offers an alternate conception of the natural rate of unemployment that differs from the Keynesian view by focusing on the supply of labor, rather than the demand (Hoover 1984, 62). Friedman argued that after a monetary expansion, the price of goods would rise, causing money wages to rise, but real wages would fall proportionately due to wages being essentially a fixed cost. Hence, due to the rise in money wages, unemployment would fall in the short term because more people would be willing to work at the apparent higher wages. However, because only moneywages would rise, and real wages remain the same, this would either cause employed workers to force up wages to equilibrate the real and money wage rate, or it wouldcause newly employed workers to withdraw their labor (Blyth 2002, 140). Furthermore, while the money supply determines prices and incomes, it does so with a time lag that can vary substantially (Kaldor 1970, 3). This argument counters the embedded liberal idea that unemployment is a function of the failure of demand. Therefore, Friedman assumed that unemployment was voluntary and that there was a natural rate of unemployment (Blyth 2002, 140). Friedman’s argument also challenges the assumptions of the Phillips Curve, which suggests that there is an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment (Del Negro et al. 2020, 304). Friedman argued that policymakers could not permanently trade higher inflation for lower unemployment. Instead, he contends, the Phillips curve only shows the supply curve of labor (Blyth 2002, 140).

One of the most recent applications of monetarism could be observed during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As highlighted by Pinter (2022), “Central banks around the world have resorted to unconventional monetary policies on an unprecedented scale to deal with the economic risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis” (2). Starting in March 2020, entire sectors of the American economy were closed, and people temporarily withdrew from many kinds of social and economic activity to help slow the spread of the virus (Powell 2022). As a result, 115 million Americans experienced a loss in employment income from March 2020 through February 2021 (Monte 2021). This economic downturn, attributable to the steps taken to slow the spread of the virus, was distinct from post-World War II recessions which were often linked to a cycle of high inflation. As a response, the U.S. central banking system (Fed) reduced interest rates to close to zero and facilitated the flow of credit in the economy by purchasing securities, implementing liquidity and funding measures, and enforcing temporary regulatory adjustments to encourage and allow banks to expand their balance sheets to support their household and business customers (Powell 2022).

Monetarism has achieved limited success in the past for a few reasons. Firstly, central banks do not have full power over the supply of money and credit. For example, the Fed can only implement certain measures in “unusual and exigent circumstances” and with the consent of the Secretary of the Treasury, such as extending credit directly to private nonfinancial businesses and state and local governments, which was implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic (Powell 2022). Secondly, electoral politics and economic theory do not always go hand in hand. During an inflationary period, monetarist theory calls for deflationary monetary policy, which might be electorally undesirable and socially costly (Blyth 2002, 144). Thirdly, implementing monetary policy bears the risk of causing severe recessions or inflations and creating high levels of unemployment. As highlighted by Friedman (1995) himself, “every major inflation has been produced by monetary expansion – mostly to meet the overriding demands of war which have forced the creation of money to supplement explicit taxation” (Friedman 1995, 12). Thus, monetary policy can often only achieve limited success. As emphasized by the Fed’s Chair Jerome Powell, “the Fed has lending powers, not spending powers” (2022). For this reason, monetary policy is usually combined with fiscal policy to regulate economic growth (Davig and Leeper 2011).

(See Economic Reason, Money, Neoliberalism, Variegated Neoliberalism)

Bibliography

Bleaney, Michael. The Rise and Fall of Keynesian Economics: An Investigation of Its Contribution to Capitalist Development. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.

Blyth, Mark. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Davig, Troy, and Eric M. Leeper. “Monetary-Fiscal Policy Interactions and Fiscal Stimulus.” European Economic Review 55, no. 2 (2011): 211–27.

Del Negro, Marco, Michele Lenza, Giorgio E. Primiceri, and Andrea Tambalotti. “What’s Up with The Phillips Curve?” Brookings Papers On Economic Activity 2020(1): 301–57.

Friedman, Milton. A Program for Monetary Stability. New York: Fordham University Press, 1959.

Friedman, Milton. “The Role of Monetary Policy.” In: Essential Readings in Economics, edited by S. Estrin and A. Marin. Palgrave, London, 1995.

Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Vol. 9. United States: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Hoover, Kevin D. “Two Types of Monetarism.” Journal of Economic Literature 22, no. 1 (1984): 58–76.

Jones, Daniel Stedman. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Kaldor, Nicholas. “The New Monetarism.” Lloyds Bank Review 97, no. 1 (1970): 18. Retrieved from: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~kdh9/Courses/Graduate%20Macro%20History/Readings-1/Kaldor.pdf

Mathai, Koshy. “Monetary Policy: Stabilizing Prices and Output.” International Monetary Fund: Finance & Development. Retrieved from: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back-to-Basics/Monetary-Policy

Monte, Lindsay M. “Historical Look at Unemployment, Sectors Shows Magnitude of COVID-19 Impact on Economy.” United States Census Bureau: Putting Economic Impact of Pandemic in Context. Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/03/putting-economic-impact-of-pandemic-in-context.html

Pinter, Julien. “Monetarist Arithmetic at COVID‐19 Time: A Take on How Not to Misapply the Quantity Theory of Money.” Economic Notes 51, no. 2 (2022): 1–17.

Powell, Jerome H. “Current Economic Issues.” Remarks at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Retrieved from: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20200513a.htm

Alberto Ganis
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Power is a very complex term that changes meaning based on the context in which it is used. In general, according to theMerriam-Webster dictionary, power can be described as the “ability to act or produce an effect, the legal or official authority, capacity, or right and the possession of control, authority, or influence over others”. In political economy, it is crucial to consider power and how it is connected to capitalism at large. The common idea is to unveil the different ways in which capitalism exercises power in society and how this is problematic for world balance, with two main manifestations of power leading the way: labor power and state power.

Labor power: Harvey (2018) discusses labor power through Marxist lenses and describes it as a commodity that has to be purchased by the capitalist in order to maintain the cycle of capital. The value of such labor power is dictated by the production costs contextualized in a given standard of living. Proletarians have to sell their labor as a means of survival since they are alienated from the means of production. Through this understanding, power is framed as the control exerted by the proletarians on their own body and their “freedom” to sell their labor via their bodies. Yet, proletarians can also be stripped of their labor power when they are coerced into a working activity. This practice is called unfree labor, and it encompasses forms of exploitation described as forced labor, human trafficking, and ‘modern slavery’ (Lebaron & Phillips 2019). Nonetheless, free and unfree labor “are going to coexist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market” (Grosfoguel 2011, 10). In fact, even though by definition, the worker has the power of labor, in the end, the capital is going to appropriate the powers, skills and capacities of the proletariat, commodifying them into free goods (Harvey 2018). Labor power is organized by capital in an international division of labor of core and periphery that goes beyond the state borders, in the periphery, which is often represented by developing countries, the capital extracts labor around coerced and authoritarian forms (Grosfoguel, 2011). In Balibar’s (1991) words “core and periphery strictly speaking are relational concepts that have to do with differential cost structures of production. The location of these different production processes in spatially distant zones is not an inevitable and constant feature of the relationship. But it tends to be a normal one” (Balibar, 79). Due to this international reach of capital forces, the states are exerting their authority, their power to regulate (or not) the fluxes of capital and labor.

State power: A state is an organization that claims a special kind of supreme jurisdiction over a given piece of territory (sovereignty), therefore having the legal or official power over such territory and its citizens. Within the field of political economy, are seen as policymakers, as agents of regulation and criminal justice enforcement, which played a significant role in facilitating the movement of capital and labor (Lebaron & Phillips 2019). From the readings, it emerges that states play an important role in the existence and the development of the capitalist system as its policies can promote or resist the flux of capital and labor that are crucial for capitalism to thrive. The degree of state involvement and its associated levels of taxation are some of the aspects that affect the economy, these variables depend to a large extent on the balance of class forces as well as the ideological fight over the benefits or disadvantages of state interventions in the circulation of capital (Harvey 2018) Furthermore, the way a state exercises its power is also affected by as well as its geopolitical power and position within the state system. This is related to macroeconomic events like massive crises (such as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s or the 2018 Recession) that often call for more effective and wide state interventions, where the institutions use their authority and power to affect policy and economic change (Harvey, 2018). The readings underline many ways in which the state can rely on its authority to provoke change. According to Cohen (2016), one of the ways used by states to establish their position among other states, is money. Money can be seen as “an instrument of statecraft, concerned with the deliberate exploitation of monetary relations to influence others” (13). The state can also exert its power within the system by exploiting the North-South dynamics that resulted from the capitalist expansion of the West (North) during the colonial era. “The old colonial hierarchies of European versus non-Europeans remain in place and are entangled with the “international division of labor” and accumulation of capital at a world-scale” (Grosfoguel 2011, 15). Through these structural inequalities, some states are able to stay at the top of the capitalist pecking order since states closer to the core of capitalism have “historically arranged that world-wide and over time money and goods have flowed more ‘freely’ than labour. The reason for doing this is that core states have thereby received the advantages of ‘unequal exchange’” (Balibar 1991, 123). This is why core states become stronger than peripheral states, they use this differential power to maintain a degree of interstate freedom of flow of capital and labor. An example of policies that can be used to restrict the flow of labor can be the specific migration governance employed by the United States that focuses on punitive mobility and border control regimes aimed at decreasing the amount of (ill-)legal workers entering the American market.

(See Biopolitics, Labor Power, Geopolitics, the State)

Bibliography

Balibar, Etienne. “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, and Class: Ambiguous Identities, 169-188. London: Verso, 1991.

Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of Money Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 5 (2016).

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011).

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

LeBaron, Genevieve, and Nicola Phillips. “States and the Political Economy of Unfree Labour.” New Political Economy 24, no. 1 (2019): 1-21.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 2019.

Jess Fournier
Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Coined in the early 2000s, the term non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) describes the relationship between non-profit or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and private business, to emphasize the role of these organizations in political economies. For the purposes of analyzing the non-profit industrial complex, we will use Hardt & Negri’s definition of an NGO as “any organization that purports to represent the People and operate in its interest, separate from (and often against) the structures of the state” (Hardt & Negri 2000, 312). Within this category are international human rights/humanitarian organizations and US nonprofits that operate domestically to provide direct social welfare services or “transform whole groups of people’s personal feelings and sense of self, to cure them of their social ills by empowering them” (Eliasoph 2011, 20-1). While the missions and structures of non-profit organizations vary, the concept of the non-profit industrial complex illuminates the similar role they play in enforcing American hegemony and empire around the world. 

Dylan Rodriguez defines the non-profit industrial complex as “the set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements” (Rodriguez 2009). Rodriguez critiques the non-profit structure as the “convergence of state and capitalist/philanthropic forces in the absorption of progressive social change struggles” into 501(c)(3) organizations with strict regulations that ultimately curtail radical movements (Rodriguez 2009). Early use of the term was popularized by San Francisco Bay Area activists in the early to mid-2000s to call attention to the impact of state repression and professionalization on anti-capitalist, queer and trans, and Third World liberation movements (Rodriguez 2009). Many of these concerns are collected in the 2009 South End Press anthology edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s loss of a Ford Foundation grant in 2004 sparked their interest in the non-profit industrial complex. They argue that the state uses non-profits to “redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing… [and] allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through ‘philanthropic work” (INCITE!).

 The non-profit industrial complex is related to theorization of the prison industrial complex by Bay Area organizations like INCITE! and Critical Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines the role of non-profit organizations in the US as a complement to the prison industrial complex; the two are connected materially and ideologically to quell resistance to the US’ efforts to marketize and privatize social welfare (Gilmore 2009). Gilmore defines non-profits as the “third sector” – neither state or business, but operating as the “shadow state” that provides direct social services previously provided by New Deal/Great Society programs until the 1970s (Gilmore 2009). While the third sector provides social services, government agencies that the state is actively seeking to dismantle have become “policing bodies” that oversee and set the parameters of service provision to those populations “abandoned” by the state (Gilmore 2009). Gilmore and other 2000s critics of the non-profit industrial complex ultimately argue that the links and shared repressive goals of the state, business and non-profit organizations make revolutionary movements incompatible with non-profits. Non-profits are “without significant political clout, forbidden by law to advocate for systemic change, and bound by public rules and non-profit charters to stick to its mission or get out of business and suffer legal consequences if it strays along the way” (Gilmore 2009).

Most analyses identify the non-profit industrial complex as an outgrowth of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s that dismantled “state institutions meant to cushion citizens against economic risk,” such as welfare, unemployment, or public housing (Mananzala & Spade 2008, 55). The privatization of social welfare not only “curbed the efforts of social movements – especially labor movements – that challenged the fundamental profit logic of capitalism and neoliberalism” but generated crises for communities suffering the harshest impacts of neoliberalization (Mananzala & Spade 2008, 56). Non-profit organizations became one means for the state sought to offload the costs of social reproduction, made more difficult by neoliberal policies (Elias & Roberts 2016, 792). However, this offloading did not represent a separation from the state but rather a “subcontracting” of particular responsibilities to non-profits (Bernal & Grewal 2014, 7). As of 1993, US and European NGOs received 75% of their funding from their country’s governments, with levels as high as 80% for some Canadian NGOs (Efuk 2000, 48), demonstrating the continued enmeshment of the state and non-governmental organizations. In addition, NGOs can serve as part of the state’s efforts to “impose a moral agenda in the context of austerity politics” (Elias & Roberts 2016, 794). In the United Kingdom, child welfare and anti-poverty programs are a means for the government to “exert greater control over the everyday life” of poor families (Elias & Roberts 2016, 793). Child welfare and other social service programs demonstrate the linkages between neoliberal austerity policies, social conservatism, and criminalization that Gilmore identifies in the relationship between the non-profit and prison industrial complexes.  

Non-governmental organizations not only reflect, but actively construct frameworks for governance in different moments. Jessica Whyte notes the ideological basis for the role of NGOs under neoliberalism predates the 1980s retrenchment of the welfare state. The particular human rights definition adopted by NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in the wake of the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights “defended the same (anti-)political virtues the neoliberals attributed to the market: restraining political power, taming violence and facilitating a margin of individual freedom” (Whyte 2019, 23). While humanitarian NGOs advocated against state repression, their narrow definition of civil and political rights meant that “poverty and economic inequality were not of concern in their own right,” (Whyte 2019, 101). In 1970s Chile, NGOs criticized Pinochet’s disappearance and imprisonment of dissidents but blamed communist groups for violence and omitted the role of the neoliberal economic policies promoted by Pinochet and the Chicago School that resulted in mass unemployment and starvation (Whyte 2019, 101). NGO intervention in Chile served to reinforce the interests of Western capitalist nations that benefited from the dictatorship and constrained the field of ‘acceptable resistance’ to nonviolent political speech.

In addition, Hardt & Negri describe the role of NGOs as creating a moral justification for imperial intervention, even as they position themselves as neutral advocates for freedom and democracy. By reporting on particular forms of ‘human rights abuses,’ humanitarian NGOs “prefigur[e] the state of exception from below…armed with some of the most effective means of communication and oriented toward the symbolic production of the enemy” (Hardt & Negri 2000, 36). For example, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch initially corroborated the manufactured Nayirah Congressional testimony in 1990, which was eventually revealed to be an organized propaganda campaign to generate support for the invasion of Iraq (MacArthur 2018). While NGOs present as independent entities not beholden to governments or private business, it is clear that they can construct pretexts for neocolonial military intervention under the guise of human rights.  

The interconnected nature of different institutions in constructing political economies that the non-profit industrial complex describes challenge notions of the state as absent in the era of neoliberal governance. Writing about Puerto Rican feminist collective La Colectiva’s work in the aftermath of Hurricane María, Rocío Zambrana notes that the group’s “tactics challenge the view that in merely actualizing the interests of capital the state is absent… The state was not in the service of citizens, but this does not mean that it was not operating effectively” (Zambrana 2020). 

Bibliography

Alvarez, Sonia. “Beyond NGOization? Reflections from Latin America.” In Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, edited by Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014

“Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Accessed June 10, 2021. https://incite-national.org/beyond-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/.

Bernal, Victoria and Inderpal Grewal. “The NGO Form: Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism.” In Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, edited by Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Efuk, Soforonio (2000). “Humanitarianism that harms’: A Critique of NGO Charity in Southern Sudan. Civil Wars 3, no.3: 45-73.

Elias, Juanita & Adrienne Roberts (2016). “Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo.” Globalizations 13, no. 6: 787-800

Eliasoph, Nina. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “In the Shadow of the Shadow State.” In The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Boston: South End Press, 2009. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shadow-of-the-shadow-state/0/.

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

Mananzala, Rickke and Dean Spade (2008). “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Trans Resistance.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 5, no. 1: 53-71.

MacArthur, John R. “How False Testimony and a Massive US Propaganda Machine Bolstered George H.W. Bush’s War on Iraq.” Democracy Now! December 5, 2018. https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive

Rodriguez, Dylan. “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” In The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Boston: South End Press, 2009. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/dylan-rodriguez-the-political-logic-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/.

Whyte, Jessica. The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. New York: Verso, 2019.

Zambrana, Rocío. “Black Feminist Tactics: On La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción’s Politics without Guarantees.” Society + Space. February 25, 2020. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/black-feminist-tactics-on-la-colectiva-feminista-en-construccions-politics-without-guarantees.

Jess Fournier
Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Originally articulated by Karl Marx, the concept of social reproduction has been expanded to analyze particular aspects of economic and social life that are sometimes overlooked in political economic analysis. This differs from Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of social structure reproduction, which focuses on the economic and cultural reproduction of social classes, including the lifestyles of particular social classes and the perpetuation of inequality in fields such as education (Farid, et al. 2021, 2). While they might address some similar topics, the study of social reproduction in the Marxist and Marxist Feminist tradition focuses on questions of value production, the centrality of unpaid labor to capitalism and modes of everyday resistance.

In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx discusses the social reproduction of labor power as part of the process of capitalist reproduction. In order to continue selling their labor power, workers must be able to access “the means of subsistence” to support their lives: food, clothing, housing and fuel (Marx 1995, 121). Because capitalism has alienated workers from the means of production, workers must sell their labor power for a price to purchase the commodities they need to survive, thus continually providing the labor power that capitalist production requires (Bhattacharya 2015). The cyclical nature of workers’ need to reproduce themselves in order to work, and to work in order to reproduce themselves, fuels capitalist production. As Marx says, the capitalist system “produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer” (Bhattacharya 2015). The system of capitalist production and reproduction structures both the daily lives and social roles of the capitalist and the worker. 

While Marx defined the reproduction of labor power as a circuit outside of capitalist value production (Bhattacharya 2015), further analyses of social reproduction have debated whether socially reproductive activities generate value. Alessandra Mezzadri identifies two major trends in the study of social reproduction: Early Social Reproductive Analysis in the 1970s-1980s and Social Reproduction Theory in the 2010s-present (Mezzadri 2020, 3). 

Early Social Reproductive Analysis (ESRA) challenged Marx’s conception of social reproduction as outside circuits of capitalist value production (Federici 2019, 155-157). In the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist Feminists including Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Leopoldina Fortunati argued that capital relies on women’s unwaged reproductive activities like unpaid domestic labor, care for children and the elderly, procreation and sex work (Ed. Bhandar & Ziadah 2020, 32). They argued that while these activities are conceived of as “a personal service offered (or paid when commercialized) in a social relation of private exchange,” they generate surplus value for capitalism because they maintain the waged male workforce and reproduce the next generation of workers (Mezzadri 2020, 3). The Wages for Housework campaign critiqued the naturalization of women’s unpaid household labor as part of larger systems of capitalist exploitation of waged and unwaged workers (Ed. Bhandar & Ziadah 2020, 232).  

More recently, Tithi Bhattacharya, Susan Ferguson, Nancy Fraser and others have articulated an approach that Mazzadri terms Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). Like Early Social Reproduction Analysis, Social Reproduction Theory analyzes the “co-constitutive relation of class, gender, and racial oppression” through social reproduction, with a specific focus on neoliberal austerity, financialization and global care chains (Mezzadri 2020, 6). However, Social Reproduction Theory follows a more classical Marxist line that views social reproduction as not creating value directly but as enabling its creation (Mezzadri 2020, 6). Tithi Bhattacharya discusses the institutions that socially reproduce the working class in addition to the nuclear family, including public education and healthcare. She analyzes how capitalist production influences these and other non-economic spheres of life (Bhattacharya 2015). Bhattacharya also identifies in Marx an understanding of the production and reproduction of commodities and labor power as unified rather than as discrete spheres (Bhattacharya 2015). This may challenge Mezzadri’s claim that SRT proponents “reproduce the invisibility of unpaid contributions to value” (Mezzadri 2020, 7). Nancy Fraser’s account of contemporary climate crisis identifies the connection between unwaged or undervalued social reproduction labor and ecological extraction, as capitalist economies are parasitically dependent on “processes, defined as ‘non-economic,’ that make ‘the economy’ possible” (Fraser 2021, 99-100). 

Following feminist economist Diane Elson’s work on Marx’s value theory of labor, Alessandra Mezzadri points out that “capitalism is not defined by the presence/absence of wage labor. It is a mode of production based on the extraction of labor-surplus through a variety of ‘forms of exploitation’ of which wage-labor represents one possibility” (Mezzadri 2020, 9). A major focus of social reproduction analysis in both ESRA and SRT traditions is capitalism’s reliance on various forms of superexploited, unpaid and unfree labor and on the racialized and gendered hierarchies used to support these forms of exploitation. 

Marxist Feminists note that patriarchal gender roles are grounded in and facilitate labor exploitation under capitalism. Silvia Federici argues that gender relations developed historically as “relations of production,” that reflect capitalism’s need for particular forms of labor to remain unpaid (Federici 2019, 157). In addition to invisibilizing childcare or household work as labor, patriarchal ideologies create a sexual division of labor that cheapens the cost of women’s labor, even when done for a wage (Mezzadri 2020, 4). The sexual division of labor in turn enforced power hierarchies within the working class that make worker unification more difficult (Federici 2019, 156). 

Black Marxist and feminist analysess of social reproductive labor emphasize the centrality of enslaved labor and colonialism in capitalist accumulation and production (Ed. Bhandar & Ziadah 2020, 358). Alyosha Goldstein argues that the “social process of reproduction relies on restaging colonial possession and differentially racialized devaluation in order to sustain and extend capitalist social relations” (Goldstein 2017, 43). Racialized and gendered economic exploitation are key to capitalist social reproduction. Joy James’ analysis of the Black Captive Maternals reveals how colonial and capitalist systems are constituted through violence and theft of Black women’s reproductive labor, theft of time, labor, bodies and longevity during and after enslavement (James 2016, 263). James describes how capitalism constructed racialized gender roles for “biological females or those feminized into caretaking and consumption,” and how these conditions of racial violence and enslavement are foundational to Western democracy (James 2016, 255). In analyzing the prison industrial complex as a site of capitalist extraction under American racial capitalism, Ruth Wilson Gilmore says that “if, as Stuart Hall argued back in the late 1970s, race is the modality through which class is lived, then mass incarceration is class war” (Gilmore 2017, 230). 

Because socially reproductive labor reflects the particular political and economic context in which it is embedded, it serves as a “structural link between global political economy and the everyday” and offers a window into the lived effects of political and economic events in different locations (Elias & Roberts 2016, 791). Neoliberalism and global capitalist economic restructuring have created “a transnationalized system of social reproduction” (Elias & Roberts 2016, 793). As Global North countries and employers are unwilling to provide social welfare for their populations and more women in the Global North enter the waged workforce, these countries externalize their reproductive costs to migrant women from the Global South (Mezzadri 2020, 11). This international division of reproductive labor – a global care chain – results in a global “precarity chain” for migrant domestic workers, reproducing financial instability, debt, and low wages regardless of their movement across physical space (Silvery & Parreñas 2020, 3461). Patterns of feminized low-wage labor and migration are a means for capitalist governments to mitigate the contradiction caused by their simultaneous investment in economic policies that make it more difficult for workers to sustain their social reproduction in highly exploitative working conditions and disavowal of state responsibility to provide for social welfare. Instead, the state targets racialized communities’ attempts to socially reproduce themselves with criminalization and state intervention (Elias & Roberts 2016, 794). 

As the site of the everyday reproduction of capitalism and labor power, social reproduction is also a site of contradiction and class struggle (Bhattacharya 2015). Social reproduction and daily life therefore offers a window to analyze the creation of new forms of collectivity as resistance to capitalist social and economic relations. Karl Polanyi notes that the form of oikonomia defined as an individual household is a relatively recent form of social organization, and that human needs for reciprocity and redistribution do not need to take the form of a capitalist nuclear and patriarchal family (Polanyi 2001, 55-6). Indeed, Federici argues that “if the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it is women…who must take the initiative to reclaim the house as a center of collective life,” and in so doing provide the foundation for anti-capitalist resistance and new collective forms of reproduction” (Federici 2019, 111-112). 

In the face of neoliberal austerity and climate crisis, theorists note the new forms of collective social reproduction that emerge from anticapitalist movements, such as the the collective childcare, community kitchens, neighborhood assemblies, and roadblocks women organized during the piqueteras movement in Argentina in 2001 (Federici 2019, 140-1). The Red Nation, a North American Indigenous communist collective, argues that “queer Indigenous feminism names the social relations that make the larger political project of communism possible” (The Red Nation 2020, 12). Social reproduction as caretaking demonstrates a model for activism and for future social formations grounded in Indigenous traditions. 

Organizing social reproductive activities collectively and publicly during this movement and elsewhere is a means for the working class, whose unpaid and paid reproductive labor is exploited by capitalism to resist capitalist encroachment in every aspect of daily life. Whether waged or unwaged, performed in the Global North or Global South, today or historically, social reproduction affirms that the everyday is a terrain of political struggle, and that workers who are racialized, gendered subjects are political subjects. In discussing the position of enslaved Black women in early American capitalism, Angela Davis complicates an understanding of domestic labor as exclusively oppressive. She notes that for enslaved communities, domestic life was “the only life at all removed from the arena of exploitation, and thus [an] important source of survival” (Davis 1981, 12). Performing the domestic labor that ensured enslaved people’s survival even under conditions of constant violence and extreme exploitation, Black women’s acts of social reproduction made resistance “thoroughly intertwined in the fabric of daily existence” (Davis 1981, 15). 

(See Feminist Economics, Price System, Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation)

Bibliography

Bhattacharya, Tithi. “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class.” Viewpoint Magazine, October 31, 2015. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/how-not-to-skip-class-social-reproduction-of-labor-and-the-global-working-class/#f+5148+1+28

Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” The Black Scholar 12, no. 6 (1981): 2-15.

Elias, Juanita, and Adrienne Roberts. “Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo.” Globalizations 13, no. 6 (2016): 787-800.

Farid, S., Abbasi, S.U.R.S., and Mahmood, Q.K. “Modelling Bourdieusian Social Reproduction Theory.” Social Indicators Research (2021): 1-37.

Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019. https://www.stateoffashion.org/documents/26/Re-enchanting_the_World__Feminism_and_the_-_Silvia_Federici.pdf

Fraser, Nancy. “Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism.” New Left Review 127 (2021): 94-127.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, New York: Verso, 2017.

Goldstein, Alyosha. “On the Reproduction of Race, Capitalism, and Settler Colonialism.” In Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy, 2017. https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/04/Race-and-Capitalism-digital-1.pdf

James, Joy. “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal.” Carceral Notebooks, 12 (2016). https://sites.williams.edu/jjames/files/2019/05/WombofWesternTheory2016.pdf

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1995. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Mezzadri, Alessandra. “A Value Theory of Inclusion: Informal Labour, the Homeworker, and the Social Reproduction of Value.” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (2020): 1-20.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, second edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

The Red Nation. Communism is the Horizon, Queer Indigenous Feminism is the Way. September 2020. http://therednation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/TRN-pamphlet-final.pdf

Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah. New York: Verso, 2020.

Silvey, Rachel, and Rhacel Parreñas. “Precarity Chains: Cycles of Domestic Worker Migration from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46, no. 16 (2020): 3457-3471.

Tomas Ocampo
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Neocolonialism can be briefly defined as the continued or renewed relations of domination of a nation by another nation following the end of formal colonization (Phipps 2012). Typically, this relation of domination is primarily described as economic in scope, however other uses of the term have incorporated military, cultural, and/or political domination or interference. It is also often conflated with imperialism, or the “indirect systems of influence and domination of the developing nations by dominant nations, particularly the United States” (Phipps 2012, 1233-1234). However, it can be best distinguished as a distinct form of imperialism that emerged as a concept following the decolonial movements in Africa.

The term bears its origin from the anti-colonial and liberation movements in Africa during the 1950s and 60s and was discussed extensively at the All-African People’s Conference in Accra (1958), Tunis (1960) and Cairo (1961). The first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre also engaged with the term and expressed in their work some of the sentiments around it that arose at these conferences and in the movements for decolonization across the continent. Today the term has grown beyond its origins. We can understand neocolonialism more broadly than economic domination and distinguish it still from imperialism, in that it is a different form of imperialism that has taken place following the end of formal colonization for most of the Global South in the middle-to-late twentieth century. Nkrumah’s Marxist analysis of neocolonialism is particularly significant to understand the term. For Nkrumah, neocolonialism is in fact a far more complex system that was all-encompassing, operating at the political, economic, social, and cultural level. Not only had it been actively shaped by the Western industrialized countries on each of these levels (especially the US), it operated to maintain a colonial relationship with their former subjects despite their formal independence. Neocolonialism can then be understood as a system of informal colonization that shaped the economic, political, and social dimensions of the world (particularly the Global South) following the end of formal colonialism.

In Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah (1970) details the new relationship established between formerly colonized countries (mainly in Africa) during their independence and their colonizing countries (mainly Europe or the West). In brief, he describes neocolonialism as a state that is considered independent and has “all the outward trappings of international sovereignty” but “In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside” (ix). Like other definitions of neocolonialism, Nkrumah is quick to note that this colonial relationship is typically “exercised through economic or monetary means” rather than military occupation (ix). Provisions to accept manufactured goods from the former colonizing country, economic advisors and civil servants that can dictate policy, and imperial control of the banking system that sets exchange rates for the newly independent country comprise some ways that neocolonialism operates according to Nkrumah. The “Balkanisation” of the African continent is primarily how Nkrumah explores neocolonialism in his seminal work, situating his conception of the term in the experience of countries in Africa achieving independence during the 1960s (14). He argues that the break-up of large territories into states that cannot achieve self-sufficiency and remain dependent on their colonial masters is the main instrument of neocolonialism. The critical result of neocolonialism, then, is the continued exploitation of the developing world that keeps it in a subservient position to the West, mainly the US after the end of World War II (x).

Nkrumah (1970) wrote comprehensively about the way that neocolonialism takes place and made the case that it is not purely economic- that neocolonialists used “the old colonialist methods of religious, educational and cultural infiltration” (35). He argues that neocolonialism was achieved through several mechanisms that were economic and political, but also social and cultural in nature (239-253). This included:

• the agreements made by developing countries for their independence, which often included privileges for the former colonizing country such as maintaining military bases, prospecting rights to natural resources, exemptions from customs duties, or exclusive rights to Western information services;
• development aid from colonizing countries to their former subjects, which often came with stipulations for their use subject to the goals of the former colonizing country, and typically acted as credit for the colonizing country since it is used to make the developing country profitable;
•  the international finance and trade system, which resulted in agreements that favored the West and their corporations, at the expense of the developing countries, such as the shipping rates;
•  multilateral aid through international organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank, which came with higher interest rates and conditions to structure developing countries’ internal affairs;
• the US/Western military and intelligence agencies, which used physical force and espionage to enforce the interests of their corporations and meddle in the internal affairs of developing countries, sometimes through religious groups or non-governmental organizations;
• the nominally left parties and unions in the West that supported “free trade” and facilitated the expansion of capital investment in Africa, and/or acted as a cover for intelligence operations;
• control over journalism and film media by the US and West, which set the narratives of liberation struggles across the world that painted rebels as “communists” or “terrorists,” and produced films depicting indigenous peoples as villains and white police or federal agents as heroes;
• and the propaganda organized through intelligence institutions and disseminated through media, which included efforts by the US Information Agency to establish media institutions that spread anti-socialist propaganda and prevented the rise of independent national media.

These mechanisms essentially created a de facto colonial relationship between the newly independent countries and their colonizing country, but largely this relationship became one between the Global North (with the US at the helm) and the Global South. Neocolonialism can therefore be understood as an all-encompassing system that shaped the conditions of countries emerging from formal colonization and those already nominally independent (e.g. Latin America), and maintained the global order established by the US and West.

In large part, the focus on the economic dimension in neocolonialism stems from what Nkrumah and others observed about the global capitalist system. Despite having extraordinary wealth in natural resources, many African countries remained poor, those resources were extracted and exported to the West, along with the profits from those resources. African countries had achieved political independence but remained trapped in the same economically exploitative relationship that characterized colonialism. This critique came at a time when the right to self-determination was being expanded to the newly independent countries. While the right was first employed to argue in favor of political independence of the colonized countries, it came to be expanded to the right of countries to determine their own economic development free from the interference of their colonial masters, and the global capitalist system (Getachew 2018). Nkrumah and others believed that Africa’s development should not follow the same path as Europe and the US, laissez-faire economics, but should be directed through comprehensive socialist planning (Whyte 2019). As such, the “struggle against neocolonialism took the form of new demands for economic rights, including rights to development and ‘Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources’” (Whyte 2019, 69).

Today, the mechanisms Nkrumah described and whether they comprise neocolonialism could be debated, as well as his belief that neocolonialism represented the “last hideous gasp” of imperialism (253). Because the international economic system today has adapted to the changes following the end of formal colonialism, the end of the Bretton Woods system, and the rise of neoliberalism, it will be necessary to update our understanding of neocolonialism under these conditions Still, it should not be a surprising fact that the same issues he detailed in his 1965 book are evident in the international system today, from disputes over trade conditions at the World Trade Organization that favor Western countries, to the intrusion of Western military and intelligence forces across the globe. Attending to how neoliberalism has shaped neocolonial relations of power will reveal new insights about the neocolonialism Nkrumah and others developed and its implications for the Global South. In that regard, the term still bears significant relevance to the study of political economy and beyond.

(See Coloniality of Power, Empire, Geopolitics, Underdevelopment) 

Bibliography

Afisi, Oseni Taiwo. “Necolonialism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/neocolon/

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2019.

Mwaura, Ndirangu. Kenya Today: Challenges in Post-Colonial Africa. Pluto Press: London, 2007.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism. Panaf Books, London:1970. First published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., London.

–. 1965: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/

Nkrumah, Kwame. “The Organisation of Afro-Asians Rekindled.” The Pan-Africanist Review, Vol 2, No 1 (1965): 57-64.

Phipps, P. “Neocolonialism”. In H. K. Anheier, & M. Juergensmeyer (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Global Studies (Vol. 1, pp. 1233-1236). SAGE Publications, Inc: 2012. Accessed from: https://www.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218557.n384

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Colonialism and Neocolonialism. Routledge, New York: 2001. First published in 1964 by Gallimard.

Young, Robert J.C. “Chapter 4: Neocolonialism.” Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, UK: 2016. DOI:10.1002/9781119316817

Whyte, Jessica. The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Verso: New York, 2019.

Jess Fournier
Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Price is an expression of the socially agreed-upon exchange value of a commodity, typically expressed as a quantity of money or gold (Marx 1995). The price system describes an economy formed around exchanging commodities based on their prices (Baumol & Stigler, et al. 2011). Analyzing the formation and fluctuation of prices offers insight into debates within different theories of political economy and forms of economic organization. When considering the price system, two questions arise: First, how are prices formed? Second, what purpose do prices serve in the economy? 

While at the most basic level price is an expression of value, the relationship between price and value is more complex than it initially appears. Adam Smith defines a commodity’s “natural price” as the price that it costs its creator to produce it, while its “actual price” is the price at which it is commonly sold—which can be lower, higher, or equal to the natural price due to supply and demand fluctuations in particular industries (Smith 1937,  Chapter VII). Even natural price is not necessarily a faithful expression of the cost of its production—rather, the natural price is the lowest amount that is sufficient for the producer to continue producing and selling the commodity. This makes natural price an “enabling condition,” that ensures ongoing production and supply (Andrews 2015, 275). 

Karl Marx notes that these “quantitative and qualitative incongruities” between price and value are necessary for the capitalist market economy to function (Marx 1995, Chapter 3). Marx defines price as the expression of a commodity’s value (itself an expression of the amount of labor-time expended to produce a commodity) in the form of money. Price is a “purely social form” of value. In other words, value must be expressed as a price in order to provide a basis for exchange. However, once a commodity is assigned a price, that price can express the value of the commodity or deviate from it in order to describe the amount of money the commodity can be sold for in different circumstances (Marx 1995, Chapter 3). Marx also describes “imaginary prices,” prices that are applied to things that are not produced by human labor but which become commodities when sold for a price, including uncultivated land, honor or conscience (Marx 1995, Chapter 3). David Harvey notes that price can also represent “reputational value,” which is also not directly derived from labor, but could include the reputation or status of a particular brand like Apple (Harvey 2019). Imaginary prices make clear that prices are not always or exclusively an expression of labor-time or of the cost to produce a particular commodity. In fact, Harvey notes that the equilibrium of supply and demand necessary in a capitalist market economy can only work if prices positively or negatively deviate from the labor-time value of a commodity depending on supply and demand conditions (Harvey 2019). The “equilibrium price” of a commodity is the closest approximation of its value (Harvey 2018, 63).

This brings us to the question of the purpose of price. In a free market economy, the price system is a means to regulate supply and demand and seek an equilibrium (Harvey 2019).  Like the “invisible hand” of the market, Smith’s definition of natural price reflects an understanding of the price system as the mechanism that allows supply and demand forces to self-regulate and to allow producers to continue producing and selling commodities. 

Friedrich Hayek describes the price system of a capitalist free-market economy as a method for communicating economic knowledge efficiently among diffuse actors who do not have perfect or complete knowledge. Prices act as “price signals” to coordinate the actions of different people in networks of commodity production to increase or decrease production of a particular commodity without direct instruction or control from any individual or group of people (Hayek 1945). Because the price for any one commodity is related to that of every other commodity, people only need information directly relevant to them in order to make the most rational decision about what to produce and how to price their products. While not a product of direct human intervention, the free market price system “consists in inducing the individual, while seeking his own interest, to do what is in the general interest” (Hayek 1945). 

Hayek’s text is part of the socialist calculation debate between classical, neoclassical, and Marxian economists. The debate focused on whether socialist societies could use central planning to replicate or improve upon a capitalist market economy, including the question of how a collectivist state would set and use prices (Levy & Peart 2018, 12672). As a classical economist, Hayek’s notion of price signaling is a critique of centrally-planned socialist economies and economists who endorse them, such as Oskar Lange.  Hayek argued that planned price formation is impossible. Due to the vastness and constantly changing conditions of the economic system, no central group of planners could set prices efficiently or rationally (Shapiro 1989, 139).  However, some proponents of socialist planned or market economies argue that price has a different purpose in a planned economy than in a market economy. Czerwinski argues that the purpose of price theory is a mechanism to explain fluctuations that are not part of a socialist price system. Because prices are set by a central authority in a planned socialist economy, there is no need for a price theory to explain price changes, while in a market economy the price theory “can be used by economic policy-makers for controlling the economy in so far as the capitalist mode of production allows for intervention” (Czerwinski 1978 , 373). Because a central authority directly controls a planned economy, the system must construct a “rational price system” to indicate how prices should be set to achieve particular goals. Hayek characterizes the market economy as rational because it coordinates the effective utilization of resources when complete knowledge is impossible and the end results for each individual producer or consumer are unknown. In contrast, Czerwinski notes that a price system can only be understood as rational or irrational  because of its consequences: “the particular acts of production and exchange which it induces producers and consumers to perform” relative to stated goals – such as increased food production, intensive industrialization, etc. (Czerwinski 1978 , 375-6). 

That the price system serves particular goals is evident in theories of socialist planned economy, but is also a reality in capitalist ones even if not directly stated. The existence of monopsonies and government-set prices are further evidence that prices in a capitalist economy are not exclusively determined by market forces.  

Price can also serve as a means to extract surplus value for companies or private actors. In Mariana Mazzucato’s critique of value extraction practices in the financial, tech and pharmaceutical sectors, among others, she notes that high drug prices have little to do with their efficacy in treating disease or their cost to produce, but that these prices generate value that the pharmaceutical company then extracts (Mazzucato 2018, 8). Similarly, Harvey argues that investors fix prices for items that are not produced by labor– such as art, currency, and carbon futures– as a means to generate surplus value. This surplus value does not continue to circulate in commodity production (Harvey 2019, 94). These examples reflect Marx’s discussion of imaginary prices, where price comes to represent something besides an exchange value or the labor that produced an object. These prices do not form an enabling condition of commodity production or lead to the kind of rational decision-making that Hayek predicts will follow from supply and demand adjustments. Instead, high prices that generate surplus value in speculative markets ensure that “the rational capitalist behaves irrationally from the standpoint of the reproduction process of capital as an evolving totality” (Harvey 2019, 94). In addition Silvia Federici credits the role of state policy in setting prices in the 1450-1650 period of the European Price Revolution as instrumental in the development of capitalist accumulation.  Federici notes that government policies that prevented laborers from organizing and giving merchants maximum freedom resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the wage’s purchasing power in a few decades (Federici 2004, 76). In this case, rise in prices of goods corresponded with a decrease in wages. This also challenges Hayek’s notion that the price system is the best way to share knowledge. Rather than a representation of value or a signal to alter commodity production, Federici’s analysis reveals that price was used to specifically change the economic and social status of laborers. In considering how prices deviate from value, it is crucial to understand how price can re-shape value rather than being a representation of it. 

(See Capital, Neoliberalism, Fetishism)

Bibliography

Andrews, David. “Natural Price and the Long Run: Alfred Marshall’s Misreading of Adam Smith.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 39, no. 1 (2015): 265–279.

Baumol, W. J. and Stigler, George J. “Price System.” Encyclopedia Britannica. June 6, 2011. Accessed https://www.britannica.com/topic/price-system.

Czerwinski, Zbigniew. “Prices in a Planned Economy: Theory and Practice.” Soviet Studies 30, no. 3 (1978): 372–383.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.

Hayek, Friedrich A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519-30. Accessed https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Harvey, David. “Reading Marx’s Capital Vol 1 – Class 3, Chapters 2 & 3.” The People’s Forum. 2019. http://davidharvey.org/2019/02/reading-marxs-capital-vol-1-class-3-chapters-2-3-2019/

Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1995. Accessed https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. New York: Penguin, 2018.

Levy D.M., Peart S.J. “Socialist Calculation Debate.” In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Accessed https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1057%2F978-1-349-95121-5_2070-1. 

Shapiro, Daniel. “Reviving the Socialist Calculation Debate: A Defense of Hayek Against Lange.” Social Philosophy and Policy 6, no. 2 (1989): 139–159.

Smith, Adam. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House Inc., 1937. Accessed https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/

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

Outlined in a 2013 article published in the New Left Review, the “triple movement” is a concept introduced by critical political theorist Nancy Fraser. In the article, Fraser addresses the recent resurrection of Karl Polanyi’s seminal work The Great Transformation (2007 [1944]) (specifically his notion of the double movement) by scholars hoping to apply its insights in an analysis of the conjuncture that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis (Burawoy 2003, 2000; Levien and Paret 2012; Arrighi and Silver 2003; Brie and Klein 2011). Fraser seeks to challenge this renewed interest, not by doing away with Polanyi’s framework wholesale, but by attempting to update and extend its key precepts so as to make it relevant to the contemporary period of global financial capitalism.

Defined briefly, the double movement describes the dialectical motion of two counterposed social forces interacting with and against one another. Arrayed on one side are politicians, parties, and business interests working to implement Laissez-faire reforms, while on the other is a cross-class/cross-sectoral coalition brought together through opposition to such reforms. Polanyi contends that these proposals for Laissez-faire restructuring act to disembed the economy from its historical nesting within society. The ultimate aim of the liberal reformers is the total subordination of society to the market, which its proponents are convinced is ideal given the market’s supposed capacity for self regulation. In Polany’s analysis, attempts at the subsumption of society by the market happen primarily through the increasing transformation of land, labor, and money, into what he calls “fictitious commodities”. These commodities are fictitious insofar as they originate outside of the market and thus were not produced according to its logics. The social carnage resulting from these attempts to establish market supremacy invariably produces a reaction — a variety of politically and socially disparate actors rising up to “protect” society by “re-imbedding” the market, usually through regulations (e.g. labor law, environmental protections, financial ordinances) (Polanyi 2007).

From this point of departure, Fraser asks why, in the face of extreme degradation wrought by the “great recession”, has there not emerged the sort of unified corrective social force promised by the double movement? While she acknowledges mass social movements like Occupy in the U.S. and the Indignados in Spain, Fraser points out that these movements failed to coalesce into anything resembling the material forces of re-imbedding that, during Polanyi’s era, had produced the New Deal, the Soviet Union, Continental Social Democracy, and in its darkest iteration, fascism. Instead, what Fraser asserts we are left with today are austerity policies driven by a neoliberal consensus firmly lodged in the highest echelons of state power. 

Following this, Fraser posits several hypotheses for the present absence of a coherent counter-hegemonic front. First, and perhaps most simplistically, is the lack of political leadership capable of energizing such a movement. This is evidenced by Fraser in the stark contrast between the prevarications of Barack Obama in 2012 and the brashness of Franklin D. Roosevelt some 76 years earlier. Next, Fraser turns her attention to the profound structural changes that have transformed the global economy into something that would be nearly unrecognizable to Polanyi or his contemporaries. Hyper financialization paired with deindustrialization, Fraser asserts, cut the legs out from under labor in the global north. Thus, not only are class antagonisms less visible, but any hope that labor could reprise its historic role as a main vector of struggle is similarly reduced. Finally, Fraser considers whether the erosion of fixed national identities has compromised what was previously an effective tool for popular mobilization. Here Fraser’s argument betrays its age a bit, as we are now all too familiar with the resurgent nationalism which has recently swept through the U.K., U.S., Hungary, Ukraine and elsewhere (Gusterson 2017).

Fraser makes clear that none of these explanations are satisfactory, taken either alone or in combination. But instead of continuing to dwell on how and why movements for social protection have not emerged, Fraser submits that we should reframe the question entirely. Rather than focus on that which is not there, Fraser calls us to examine what is. She then invokes those movements which blossomed only shortly after Polanyi’s death in the early 1960’s — the Black freedom movement, anti-imperialist/war movements, the second wave of the feminist movement, LGBTQ liberation movements — and asseets that none of these fit neatly into the binary categories provided by the double movement framework. Fraser argues that this is because these movements did not seek institutionalized social protection (they were in fact highly critical of its provisions), but rather aimed at critiquing the myriad forms of domination that they were encountering. As they side with neither the camp promoting marketization, nor the camp insisting on social protections, Fraser believes that this diverse collection of movements champion what she calls “emancipation” therefore constituting a third force in an extended Polanyian analysis (Fraser 2013, 128).

Fraser concludes that our current moment allows for an ever shifting series of alliances between each of these poles. In some cases the constituents of the emancipatory pole may align with those forces seeking to expand marketization, while in others they may partner with groups organizing for social protection. Thus, the double movement of Polanyi’s epoch becomes the triple movement in ours.

(See Double Movement, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, The Welfare State)

Bibliography

Brie, Mircea, and David Klein. “The Second Great Transformation: Towards a Solidarity Society.” International Critical Thought 1 (1): 18-28, 2011.

Burawoy, Michael. “For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi.” Politics & Society 31 (2): 193-261, 2003.

Burawoy, Michael, Pavel Krotov, and Tatiana Lytkina. “Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia.” Ethnography 1 (1): 43-65, 2000.

Fraser, Nancy. “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi.” In Beyond Neoliberalism, edited by S. Sassen, 29-42, 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Gusterson, Hugh. “From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American Ethnologist 44 (2): 209-214, 2017.

Levien, Michael, and Mary Paret. “A Second Double Movement? Polanyi and Shifting Global Opinions on Neoliberalism.” International Sociology 27 (6): 724-744, 2012.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press, 2007.

Silver, Beverly J., and Giovanni Arrighi. “Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’: The Belle Époques of British and US Hegemony Compared.” Politics & Society 31 (2): 325-355, 2003.