Category: Political Economy

So, Global or International Development: Why Not Both? Marx in the Field, Planetary Immanent Development, and Centering Political Economy in Development Studies

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In a compelling new contribution in the journal Development and Change, a political economy collective led by Jeorg Wiegratz builds a strong case against calls to “universalize” Development Studies shifting the focus from “International” to “Global” Development. Indeed, many such calls at universalization – at least in the two influential “pandemic papers” the collective thoroughly revises, one is main-authored by Oldekop and the other by Leach – are misguided. As convincingly argued by the collective, these calls tone down the structural historical nature of the Global North-Global South divide; they erase development paradigms and understandings from the Global South and trivialize the nature of challenges emerging from long histories of colonialization and plunder, which still regenerate along global value chains and networks, as authors like Suwandi have shown, as well as distinct regimes of social reproduction and contemporary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as I explain here and here.

Yet, universalizing and globalizing are not the same thing; they can be operated in distinct ways, and through entirely different intellectual projects. Moreover, the discipline of Development Studies, in its mainstream dominant avatar, badly needs “globalizing,” given its Eurocentrism – yet in ways that center the experiences in/of the majority world; think through plural frameworks and locations; and speak to the extraordinarily diverse material realities and practices of power, inequality, and subordination across our planet. Crucially, such experiences, realities, and practices are, at once, the result of trajectories mediated by the Global North-Global South Divide, as emphasized in critical International Development frameworks, yet also always been global in nature – calling for Global Development lenses – unlike what narrow development economic theorizing heavily relying on modernization theory has and still suggest/ed. Ultimately, one may wonder: in the debate between “International” and “Global” Development, why and what exactly do we need to choose?

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Review:* Special issue of Africa Development by Post-Colonialisms Today**

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A new calendar year ushers in the usual array of tropes on Africa. They include why the continent is failing, what it should be doing better and why it has so much resilience in dealing with its own frailty. Overwhelmingly, Western institutions (NGOs, credit rating agencies, etc.) repeat tired mantras of the international financial institutions, ignoring the insights of African scholar activists and the historical backdrop to the continent’s contemporary crises. Neglect of such analysis leads to the failure to understand why and how different African countries are in the mess that they are and why the mess has structural continuities and conjunctural discontinuities. The antidote to Western-centric analysis is the superb collection of essays in a special issue of Africa Development, a journal of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), which emerged from the Post-Colonialisms Today project. The range and insight of the collection is difficult to capture in a short review, but there are two continuous themes among contributors: the importance of revisiting the historical past and the significance of sovereignty, or the absence of it.

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Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Post-Soviet Currency Boards

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The surge of right-wing populism in East-Central Europe is often portrayed as an unforeseen shift from the earlier post-1989 liberalization path. The “illiberal transformation” narrative underlines stark differences between the policy arsenals that informed democratization and marketization reforms in the early 1990s and those fueling current “democratic backsliding.” Yet this framing conceals the analytical maneuver of disconnecting the political sphere from its socioeconomic counterpart, thereby limiting democracy to the former and defining democratic participation based on electoral competition.

It was precisely this separation, which at the dawn of post-communist transformation, tended to align democratization not with leveling erstwhile power and wealth disparities, but with eradicating rent-seeking by the lingering elements of Soviet bureaucracy. Conceived in this way, democratization was deemed to be an engine of market reforms. Insofar as much of the “transitology” scholarship operated with a parochial “democracy” versus “authoritarianism” dichotomy, it repeatedly obscured authoritarian tendencies in consolidating democratic systems.

In the recently published article Democratic Facades, Authoritarian Penchants: Post-Communist Monetary Restructuring in the Baltic States, I argue that the corpus on “authoritarian neoliberalism” is well-positioned to instigate a much-needed departure from this externalization of “political” and “socioeconomic” spheres when revisiting the intricacies of post-communist transformation in general and monetary reforms in the Baltic states in particular.

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Hierarchies of Development podcast

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In collaboration with EADI and King’s College, London, Developing Economics has launched a new podcast on Hierarchies of Development. The podcast offers long format interviews focusing on enduring global inequalities. Conversations focus on contemporary research projects by critical scholars and help us understand how and why structural hierarchies persist. Join hosts Ingrid Kvangraven (KCL/DE) and Basile Boulay (EADI) for this series of discussions on pressing issues in the social sciences.

The first episodes was on environmental hierarchies, with the brilliant guests Leon Sealey-Huggins and Tejal Kanitkar:

This podcast was developed with editing support from Jonas Bauhof. Subscribe to get updates on new episodes here (you can choose your preferred platform).

From Post-Marxism back to Marxism?

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The Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism I co-edited with Alex Callinicos and Stathis Kouvelakis aims to present the development of Marxism as a militant tradition in dialogue with other traditions and within itself. Even if it was conceived almost six years ago, the multiple crises we are confronting today – economic, political, social, gender, environmental and biological – vindicate the spirit of our project. The project seeks to look at Marxism as a tradition that is rooted in and addresses the totality of capitalist social antagonisms and, by doing so, is able to think strategically beyond capital. 

Several contributions challenge reductionist interpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy, and the idea that Marxism is irremediably Eurocentric and underestimates race, gender and ecology. This opens a space for a more complex, and I would say fertile, dialogue with Post-Marxists currents. The format of the Handbook – combining longer contextual essays and shorter essays on individual thinkers mainly – aims at facilitating this dialogue. We chose this format, rather than concentrating on themes and concepts, in order to capture the specificity of, and interactions between, individual thinkers and problematics. 

In the final part of the book, “Marxism in an Age of Catastrophe”, John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi forcefully argue that Marx inaugurated traditions of thought that can intellectually encompass the present age of catastrophe, announced by the floods and fires around the world as well as by the Covid-19 pandemic. These reflections complement the first part of the Handbook, “Foundation”, which points to the strong connection Marx and Engels posited between the critique of political economy and a politics of working-class self-emancipation. Thanks to this connection, they were able to conceive of capitalism as a global, gendered, racialized and ecological class antagonism in which struggles over wages and working conditions are organically linked to struggles over dispossession, social reproduction, ecology, imperialism and racism. Support for the demands of the most oppressed is thus crucial for the advancement of the working class as a whole. 

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A new Washington Consensus on the role of the state?

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By Ilias Alami, Adam Dixon and Emma Mawdsley

In a recent op-ed, Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times argues that “the conversion by the IMF and World Bank to support the activist state would put Saul of Tarsus to shame.” According to him, we may be witnessing the rise of a new Washington Consensus, which embraces deficit spending (by rich countries), “temporary solidarity surtaxes” on the rich and businesses, green public investment, and other forms of government intervention. This is not only to address the short-term effects of the pandemic, but also to stimulate demand across the world economy. Sandbu finds evidence of this new consensus in the benign view that the IMF has taken on Biden’s “rescue package”, and claims that “the new Washington consensus could prove as politically powerful as the old one.” In another op-ed in October 2020,

Sandbu characterised this new consensus as follows:

“After 1945, the guiding assumption was, first, that the state knew best, then that the private sector was best. We are about to transcend both, in favour of an economic worldview based on finding ways in which government intervention can guide the private sector to perform better. In that sense, economic planning and the activist state are back.”

It is indeed striking that the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, and other multilaterals, have adapted their discourse on the role and place of the state in development. This predates the COVID-19 pandemic. In an open access paper recently published in Antipode, we document the emergence of this new vision of the state in development and outline its key features. Since the early 2010s, these institutions have produced a remarkable wealth of material explicitly concerned with old and new forms of state ownership and intervention. Witness, for instance, this November 2020 EBRD Transition report titled The State Strikes Back, or this chapter dedicated to state-owned enterprises in the IMF 2020 Fiscal Monitor. Our analysis of such policy documents and others suggests that we are witnessing a gradual yet fundamental reorientation of official agendas and discourses about the state. This emerging vision embraces a fuller role of the state in development (than the post-Washington Consensus), including as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital. Our analysis expounds the material context in which this vision is emerging. Two interrelated transformations are particularly important.

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Enduring Relevance: Samir Amin’s radical political economy

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By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Maria Dyveke Styve, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani and Ray Bush

In moments of great uncertainty there is refuge to be found in the work of intellectual titans like Samir Amin. After the sad news of his passing in August 2018 in Paris, aged 86, we began thinking about how best to explore the enduring relevance of his analysis and concepts to make sense of contemporary crises.

The pertinence and analytical heft of Amin’s work is particularly important in the contemporary period marked by the interconnected crises related to COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, the climate emergency, and looming debt crises across the periphery. In the years ahead, confronting these multiple and intertwined crises will require the kind of commitment to combining research with political engagement that Amin demonstrated.

Amin’s ability to weave together thorough analysis of the polarising effects of capitalism with concrete political projects for an international radical left makes his work particularly relevant in our quest to understand capitalism, its particularities across the world, and oppositions to it. There is a younger generation of scholars, of which we are a part, that is particularly hungry for Amin’s perspectives, one that came of age in a time where the universities have been thoroughly marketised and moulded by neoliberal processes, and where intellectual production and debates are not necessarily embedded within social struggles.

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What is a Developed Country?

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Any discussion of economic development – either implicitly or explicitly – contains the distinction between developed countries and developing (or under-developed) countries. While there are many theories on what promotes development and how best to achieve it, in all cases the goal is for a country to eventually become ‘developed’.

This begs the question – what is a developed country? There are at least three common definitions, which are presented below. These definitions overlap in many cases, but in others they are at odds. This piece argues that a broader definition is needed in light of recent failures of several ‘developed’ countries to cope with shocks ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to natural disasters.

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