The Australian Accord

The Austrialian Labor government that came to power in 1983 based its economic policy on an ‘Accord’ with the trade union movement. The Accord was a wide-ranging agreement built around an incomes policy which was designed to simultaneously tackle unemployment and inflation. This article seeks to assess the success of the Accord as an economic strategy. But it also seeks to assess the claim that it is a socialist economic strategy. The article considers whether the Accord fosters class solidarity, an interventionist economic programme, the opportunity for workers to intervene and a more political unionism.     

Competing Models of Socially Constructed Economic Man: Differentiating Defoe's Crusoe from the Robinson of Neoclassical Economics

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seldom been read as an explicitly political text. When it has, it appears that the central character was designed to warn the early eighteenth-century reader against political challenges to the existing economic order. Insofar as Defoe's Crusoe stands for ‘economic man’, he is a reflection of historically produced assumptions about the need for social conformity, not the embodiment of any genuinely essential economic characteristics. This insight is used to compare Defoe's conception of economic man with that of the neoclassical Robinson Crusoe economy. On the most important of the ostensibly generic principles espoused by neoclassical theorists, their ‘Robinson’ has no parallels with Defoe's Crusoe. Despite the shared name, two quite distinct social constructions serve two equally distinct pedagogical purposes. Defoe's Crusoe extols the virtues of passive middle-class sobriety for effective social organisation; the neoclassical Robinson champions the establishment of markets for the sake of productive efficiency.     

Karl Polanyi on economy and society: a critical analysis of core concepts

The Review of Social Economy was founded to highlight the irreducible social aspects of economic activity. Yet, the nature of the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ are both unresolved, and they are much more problematic than often assumed. This article probes Karl Polanyi’s depiction of the relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ and subsequent discourse on ‘embeddedness’. In his Great Transformation (1944) Polanyi associated the ‘economic’ with motives of material gain, while ‘social’ referred to norms of reciprocity and redistribution: his distinction between the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ then focused primarily on different kinds of motivation. But in a 1957 essay he brought in different kinds of institutions that engender different types of motivation. Polanyi (1944) argued that after 1800 Britain was transformed into a market-oriented ‘economic’ system, based on motives of greed and material gain. He also proposed that an effective market system had to be ‘self-adjusting’ and free of political interference, despite his important additional claim that the state was involved in its creation. Some of Polanyi’s core concepts and arguments are contradictory and problematic, and need to be reconsidered, especially if his enduring insights are to be salvaged.     

论《资本论》的研究对象、方法和分析范式

马克思在《资本论》第一卷序言中明确指出:"我要在本书研究的,是资本主义生产方式以及和它相适应的生产关系和交换关系。"这句话是关于《资本论》的研究对象的经典表述。我们可以将马克思这一经典表述解读为:作为资本主义经济形成的生产力基础的生产组织或劳动方式,以及和它相适应的生产关系和交换关系。在《资本论》中,马克思将历史唯物主义运用于资本主义经济形态的研究,发现了这种经济形态的特殊运动规律。这就是说,《资本论》的研究方法就是历史唯物主义。在《资本论》的宏大的理论体系的展开过程中,历史唯物主义的世界观这个根本的方法论原则,具体化为经济学分析的一系列规范:(1)从生产力与生产关系的矛盾运动中解释社会经济制度变迁;(2)以生产资料所有制为基础确定整个社会经济制度的性质;(3)在历史形成的社会经济结构的整体制约中分析人的经济行为;(4)依据经济关系来理解政治和法律的制度以及道德规范。     

The Institution,the Economy and the Market: Karl Polanyi's Institutional Thought for Economists

This paper aims to clarify the logical structure of Karl Polanyi's concept of institution, especially with regard to his most important contribution to political economy—the conception of self-regulating markets as institutions. Although Polanyi did not provide a well-developed concept of institution, this article argues that such a concept exists in his work. Moreover, there is in Polanyi's work a sophisticated institutionalist account of the self-regulating market that has been largely overlooked as Polanyi does not present it explicitly. Analyzing the economy as an institutionalized process, as Polanyi does, reveals that the market is neither a natural nor a spontaneous phenomenon—a conclusion that runs counter to conventional economic thinking. Polanyi's approach enables us to view capitalism (the ‘market society’ in Polanyi's language) through a highly specific cultural fact: the fiction of the self-regulating market. This institutional perspective needs to be reassessed beyond new-institutionalist theoretical constructions.     

Institutional economic theory: the old versus the new

The object of this paper is to make some limited comparisons between the ‘new’ institutionalism of Williamson, Schotter, Hayek and others and the ‘old’ institutionalism, particularly of Veblen. It is argued that a fundamental feature of the ‘new’ institutionalism in which it contrasts with the ‘old’ is its close attachment to the idea of the abstract individual of classic liberal ideology. This attachment is found even in those minority subsets of ‘new’ institutionalists who are hostile to promarket policies, or non-neoclassical in matters of theory. Consequently, ‘old’ institutionalist warnings against proceeding on such individualistic assumptions should not be ignored, despite the value of much ‘new’ institutionalist analysis.     

Securing Japan in the ‘West’: The US-Japan Alliance and Identity Politics in the Asian Century

Why has the military dimension of the US-Japan relationship remained the central point of reference for Japanese foreign relations, despite the demise of the Soviet Union? Why has Japan, deepening economic interdependence notwithstanding, remained politically distant from East Asia? Based on analysis of statements by Japanese and US political elites and academics regarding the US-Japan alliance, this article argues that the rise of China, coterminous with the rise of ‘Asia’, challenges the notion of the ‘West’ as, according to standards of industrial modernity, a superior social and political order. These moving ideational boundaries question Japan’s position as the most advanced Asian nation and member of the (Western) international society of states. Therefore, the US-Japan alliance has since the mid-1990s become increasingly important for securing Japan in the ‘West’ and the ‘West’s boundaries in East Asia.     

Cross‐border regionalisation in the ‘New Europe’ ‐ theoretical reflection with two illustrative examples

Regionalisation has recently become a catchword both in political practice and academic discourse. Even if the idea of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ is no longer uncritically accepted, regional imagination still frequently informs the analysis of the European political order. This article seeks to chart alternative ways of understanding political change in Europe. It first outlines the current understanding of the role of regions in Europe, and seeks to put contemporary ideas into historical perspective. The article then examines the standard way of analysing regionalism, the ‘top‐down, bottom‐up’ metaphor. By looking at the scales of politics from a social constructionist perspective the article shows that this widely‐used metaphor does not adequately capture much of the political history of region building, nor is it able to identify the relations of power involved in regionalisation in the era of expanding trans‐boundary linkages and networks across state borders. By illustrating cross‐border regionalisation with examples from Karelia and Catalonia, the article seeks to assess some of the tensions that arise between the new deterritorialised forms of trans‐regional governance and the traditional democratic practice, which is still tightly connected to areal political spaces both institutionally and in terms of the inhabitants’ collective identity. The article argues for a heightened awareness of the relational social power characteristic of network governance and potential leaks in the ‘territorial containers’ of democracy.     

Racism and Far Right Imaginaries Within Neo-liberal Political Economy

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the connections between neo-liberalism and the politics of the far right through the prism of race. Contesting the claims of neo-liberal theorists and politicians as to its ‘post-racial’ character, it seeks to both historise the significance of racism within neo-liberalism through its connections to liberal political thought and practice over the longue durée and examine the relationship between neo-liberalism and far right politics. It does this through (1) highlighting the political significance of the far right in securing the electoral–political hegemony of neo-liberalism within Britain and the United States since the early 1980s; and (2) the way in which the socio-economic insecurities produced by neo-liberalism have helped to provoke far right responses as an alternative form of racialised moral economy. Consequently, while the relationship between the far right and neo-liberalism is contradictory, racial signifiers and racism have provided an important means through which such contradictions have been eased.     

The Structure of the ‘EU’ropean Ensemble of State Apparatuses and Its Geopolitical Ambitions

Against the backdrop of the international political and economic system’s increasing fragmentation, this article attempts to analyse the geopolitical ambitions of the EU. Currently, the EU strives to become an independent global power. For this purpose, the EU tries to establish greater independence from the US and, to a certain degree, from its Member states. This is closely linked to (a) the emergence of the Euro as a currency competing with the US dollar for the status of the ‘global reserve currency’ and (b) the construction of a common foreign and ‘security’ policy. Taking the German literature on the political economy of the state and on the European Integration, insights from neo-Gramscian International Political Economy, and the ‘scale debate’ in Anglophone geography as point of departure, I analyse the European ensemble of state apparatuses and demonstrate that these ambitions have failed, due to the status quo of a fragmented Europe.