World Political Economy

Responses to the definitive evidence that the existing order of things will inevitably lead to an ecological doomsday often take one of two approaches, not counting outright deniers of climate change. The more optimistic of the two assumes that we could regain a reasonable balance of life on Earth through individual lifestyle adjustments. The second dominant approach is pessimistic to the degree of embracing apocalypticism, for it assumes the ecological catastrophe is altogether unavoidable. In either case, the capitalist system is perceived as the only possible order of things and goes unquestioned. Refuting both positions, I argue that the impending ecological catastrophe could only be avoided if collective progressive action puts an end to the capitalist modes of production. In the absence of universal movements grounded in revolutionary ecological politics, capitalism will continue to thrive not despite but because of the escalating ecological crisis. As climate change continues...

The first Marxist theories of capitalist geopolitics emerged in the early 20th century as theories of imperialism and uneven and combined development. They were also the first theories of capitalist geopolitics. While they explained the intensification of imperialism through new interpenetrations of politics and economics in national states and economies, the revival of Marxist thinking about capitalist geopolitics in the English-speaking world in recent decades suffers from a purely economic conception of capitalism, uncontaminated by politics, by nation-states. It is, as a consequence, also a cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In it the very object of study disappears. This article argues that it does so because so many Marxists have come to share the cosmopolitan biases of mainstream thinking by accepting the discourses of "globalization" and "empire" and shows how this is so in the case of two pioneers of the recent revival of Marxist geopolitical thinking, Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke.

The article argues that the reproduction prices introduced in the first chapter of Sraffa's book are not necessarily compatible with the profit equalising prices that form the substance of the book. It uses probabilistic arguments about how probable it is that reproduction prices will approximate to profit equalising prices. By use of random matrix techniques, it shows that the solutions space associated with prices of production is similar to that associated with classical labour values. In the latter part of the article, a random sample of reproduction schemes is simulated over time, under assumptions of capital movement, to see whether such systems dynamically converge on profit equalising prices. It is found that some converge and some fail to converge.

The paper studies the influence of states’ dependence on the exploitation and export of non-renewable natural resources on the development of conflicts, the so-called resource conflicts. Various authors describe the term “geopolitical economy” in a number of different ways. A major distinction between their views pertains to the role and the importance that the state has in the international political economy and also at the global level. However, drawing mainly on R. Desai’s thesis that the modern world is predominantly characterized by uneven and combined development and that states have the dominant role in it (states dominate the political economy on the domestic level and the geopolitical economy on the international level), different types of conflicts will be compared and put into different “geopolitical economies.” The main research thesis is that resource conflicts can be described as geoeconomic-geopolitical conflicts, and these conflicts evolve as outcomes of the geopolit...

Venezuela's economic history has shown strong industrial growth since the mid-20th century and particularly from 1960 to 1970, generally related to the Industrialization by Import Substitution model. this growth ended abruptly with the sharp decline in oil prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s. An economic collapse of the non-oil sector followed the contraction in oil rent. the magnitude of the collapse was so great that even the strong growth during the 2000s has not led to a full recovery. the product per worker is at the same level in 2008 as in 1980 and only 14% higher than its level in 1970 (Baptista 2006). this scenario is even worse when compared to the great increase in productivity in the rest of the world, including latin America. this decline is not only significant in terms of progress but also with regard to the levels. the growth of income per worker generated by the manufacturing sector was at a similar level to the USA in the late 1960s (i.e., according to United Nations Industrial development Organization [UNIdO] data in 1969, the average income by industrial worker in Venezuela was 90% of the level in the USA).1The general explanation for the development of countries based on commodity exports is that the high income of the external sector generates a breakdown in the productive structure by causing an appreciation of the exchange rate with a negative impact on industrial sector competitiveness. Even the so-called dutch disease and resource curse (Auty 2001; corden 1984) explanations that take into account the real problems of countries with high incomes from commodity exports, like the difficulties in the industrial sector, fail to explain the cause of these problems.In the case of Venezuela, these interpretations cannot explain the reason for which, if the oil revenue windfall is the cause of the malfunction of capital accumulation in the industrial sector, the oil boom was followed by a strong expansion of capital accumulation during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the industrial sector, with an increase in fixed capital stock, particularly from 1974 to 1979 and 500% growth during the boom in oil prices.This problem has already been stated by authors such as Hausmann and rodriguez (2014), and shows the inconsistency of trying to explain the growth by the same factors that explain the collapse. A similar problem arises when the explanation is not focused on the oil revenue windfall, but on the mechanisms of appropriation, particularly in debates regarding the overvaluation of the Bolivar in relation to the dollar, as there is a far from negative correlation between overvaluation and industrial growth. for an alternative explanation, we must conduct a closer analysis of the relationship between the oil and the non-oil sectors throughout Venezuela's history and the transformation of its role in the international division of labor. this will allow us to explain the general dynamic of capital accumulation in Venezuela and, more importantly, to analyze the specificity of chavism as a process of social transformation, examining the changes in state intervention and the appropriation of oil rent in historical terms. Without this long-term and international perspective, we risk analyzing chavism as an autonomous political process and not as the result of the trends of development of global capitalism in Venezuela.1. oil rent and its appropriationThe measurement of oil rent and its distribution over time is the fundamental step required for the rest of our analysis. Since rent is the consequence of extraordinary profits, we measured the rate of profit in the oil branch compared to the industrial and non-oil sector rate of profit in Venezuela. this gives us the oil rent that the state (as owner of the oil land in Venezuela) distributes directly to capital by direct and indirect subsidies and by lowering the price of the labor force through the social wage. But this is insufficient, since the dispute over rent exists before the oil sector receives its profits. …

This article attempts to outline the economic steps that would be necessary to convert a capitalist economy like the EU into a socialist one. We examine the issue in very concrete terms and propose specific policy measures. The measures we propose differ significantly from the tradition of 20th-century European Social Democracy. The main differences are (1) that we advocate measures to abolish exploitation prior to measures to take the means of production into public ownership;(2) that we advocate radical action against the ...

In 1946, the economist Maurice Dobb published a book that attempted to explain how feudalism gave way to capitalism. Dobb's book began a debate among economists and historians that has continued until this day. Dobb thought that feudalism went into decline and was replaced by capitalism because of endogenous causes rooted in the class struggles between serfs and noblemen. An early and prominent critic, Paul M. Sweezy, thought that the factors which led to the decline of feudalism and rise of capitalism were exogenous, and these factors included the development and growth of international trade, production for markets and money, the growth and importance of cities, and the need for European monarchies to unite their kingdoms and to finance their wars and overseas empires. This paper does some preliminary empirical testing of these hypotheses using data from Britain from the 1200s to the 1800s. The findings of this paper are informative in trying to better understand the debate an...

Observing the apparently anomalous retention of pre-capitalist forms amid rapid economic transformation, Marxists in early 20th-century Japan grappled with the theoretical challenges posed by a set of practices that did not adhere to the presumed teleology of capitalist development. In response, they proposed a sophisticated treatment of nationalism as an essential (but inherently temporary) stabilizing feature of capitalism, requiring constant reinvention as part of capitalism's fundamentally unstable and contradictory growth process. The validity of this treatment can be witnessed today with respect to populist backlashes in Europe and North America, and strident nationalist and even genocidal state policies in South Asia, amid a general stalling of the neoliberal globalization project that has increasingly been seen to fail in the unfolding aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

Small economies are usually classified by the size of their GDP. Among the small states, which can be determined by various criteria, there are many small economies. Smallness of the economy influences the vulnerability of the state, and if it is connected with the other potentially negative factors (land-locked or island position) or reliance on a few export products, it can create vulnerable economies. Concurrently, smallness of the economy can be an advantage, since it provides better conditions for faster economic growth and makes transformations of the economy easier. This article brings a quantitative comparative study of the small economies, classified by the size of their total GDP. Sets of macroeconomic data (foreign direct investment [FDI] net inflows in current US$ and GDP in current US$; external debt and GDP) were studied, for which the correlation between the FDI and GDP was calculated (for 40 smallest economies), as was the regression analysis between the FDI net infl...

Fred Moseley's Money and Totality (2016) presents the author's “macro-monetary interpretation” of Marx's value theory, with particular reference to the transformation of value into price of production in Capital, Volume III. This theory, while trying to be faithful to Marx's texts, accomplishes this by means of a logically indefensible claim, which, if it came to be seen as representing Marx's work as such, would contribute to sidelining and disconfirming the Marxist tradition. Review of the long-standing “transformation problem” debate, in the light of Moseley's contribution, in non-technical terms, suggests that the way forward is to avoid text-based orthodox defenses of Marx in favor of re-working his core insights, building on the accomplishments of Marxist theory in the 20th century, and using the tools and methods of modern economic theory and social science wherever possible.

This introduction contextualizes the articles that follow in a discussion of relevant elements of the critical theme of the “materiality of nations” in geopolitical economy. In particular, it focuses on the need to understand the evolution of capitalist states and their domestic and international economic roles in terms of the contradictions of capitalism; the need to unite the normally separated economic and political logics of capitalism in an overall historical understanding; the need to understand combined development as including capitalist combined development and the dialectic of uneven and combined development as the key driver of capitalist international relations.

In the political and academic debates on development aid in the post-Cold War years, there is often reference to a “new aid architecture.” This study explores what is new about this “new architecture of aid” and traces change and continuity by comparing the form and essence of aid architecture in the Cold War and the post-Cold War years. It discusses to what extent development aid can be interrogated within the inter-systemic competition during the Cold War period. After having located aid into a systemic framework, it seeks to understand the emergence of the “new aid architecture” in the post-Cold War years. To this end, it first analyses the relevance of aid to the hegemonic project that pursues the proletarianization of the world's poor. It then focuses on aid's role in transforming social and industrial relations to promote capitalist competitiveness at the global level. In this respect, it pays particular attention to “global value chains.” This study argues that “new a...