Topology of economic systems

An economic topology can have many uses to the academician, student and practitioner. Refining a topology of economic systems helps to bring together seemingly disparate characteristics and to point out potential long run trends. The progression of economic systems over time and also brief explanations of each system are given. We argue that most modem economic systems have some remnants of earlier forms, that is, most economies today are some mixture of what might be considered pure systems. Measurable characteristics to identify a particular system are developed that allows progress to or from a particular classification to be charted for individual countries.     

列宁利用资本主义思想与中国特色社会主义道路

十月革命胜利后,列宁探索出了一条在小农经济占优势的国家利用资本主义建设社会主义的新路.列宁利用资本主叉的思想是他的迂回过渡理论的核心和精髓.利用资本主义发展社会主义.实际上就是通过国家资本主义向社会主义迂回过渡.现实社会主义国家利用资本主义的实践,是对列宁利用资本主义思想的证明和运用.     

Developing global champions: Why national oil companies expand abroad

National oil companies (NOCs) have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign oil and gas assets. Why have some governments increased their NOC outward investments, while others have not? I argue that domestic structures can influence a government's calculus that potential benefits, such as added revenues and fuel supply, outweigh potential costs, such as information asymmetries and inefficiencies associated with NOCs. Nationally, partisan competition limits democratic tolerance for failures by NOCs. Bureaucratically, overlapping authority in energy policy undermines coherent NOC governance. Based on investments by NOCs hailing from 79 countries, 2000–2013, I find robust evidence for the national hypothesis.     

Starve all the lawyers: four theories of the just price

The only “sense in which we can meaningfully talk about just wages or just prices”, said Friedrich Hayek, is for wages and prices “determined in a free market without deception, fraud or violence”. Conversely, after reviewing three theories of the just price, this paper proposes a classical liberal theory of the just price, called the “catallactic” theory, according to which our understanding of just prices must account for the background institutions of markets. Some transactions could not happen in a market without a certain theory of just prices and such transactions will feed into our understanding of markets, hence making just prices a de facto reality.     

西方金融资本主义下的寄生阶级、债务通缩与大萧条——兼评迈克尔·赫德森的金融资本主义批判理论

金融资本生成于产业资本、商业资本和银行资本的垄断融合。在支配生产、流通和信用的基础上,金融资本通过定价权、金融投机、地租寻租、支配国债、滥用货币发行权等途径而建立一套寄生性的积累机制。随着金融资本对生产关系的全面支配,金融资本的寄生性积累也越来越系统化、自主化,造成的社会危机也越来越不容易从外部加以克服,但同时,金融资本内部自我否定的逻辑却表现得越来越强烈。金融资本的寄生性积累导致债务膨胀和产业萎缩相互加强的危机,即债务通缩危机。新自由主义量化宽松的反通缩政策,在一定程度上避免了旧版大萧条,却导致了更难以解决的新版大萧条。美国学者赫德森把对金融资本寄生性积累的批判纳入到从古典政治经学到马克思主义政治经济学的传统中,从金融资本的寄生性积累探讨西方经济、政治危机的根源,虽然其金融资本批判理论还因缺乏辩证逻辑而有一定的缺点,但是该理论基本的理论方向是值得肯定的。     

Competition and Corporate Social Responsibility under Creative Capitalism

This article focuses on the changing nature of market competition and on responsible business conduct on the global stage. The article explores the concept of creative capitalism and seeks to address whether or not corporate social responsibility (CSR) is better realized under creative capitalism. This study is conceptual in nature. While it identifies the forces that facilitate and sustain creative capitalism and strengthen executives' commitment to CSR, it proposes a model that can enhance the possibility of a thriving CSR under creative capitalism. The article advocates that under creative capitalism it is more likely to easily channel executives' passion into broad and purposefully driven endeavors; thereby strengthening executives' capacity for understanding how CSR creates value both for their organizations and for society.     

Stories of Rural Accumulation in Africa: Trajectories and Transitions among Rural Capitalists in Senegal

This paper analyzes primary qualitative evidence from life histories of rural capitalists in contemporary Senegal. Various common themes in the declining literature on rural capitalism in Africa are discussed with reference to the specific individual trajectories of rural farm capitalists in Senegal. The themes include the emergence of rural capitalism in the context of protracted, uneven and gradual rural social differentiation and the various processes that have accompanied it; the condition of 'entrepreneurship' in such changing historical contexts; the symbiotic relationship between different spaces (loci) of accumulation, especially trade, transport and farming and the historical context in which they take place; the crucial but sometimes contradictory role of the state in spurring or constraining rural capitalist accumulation; and the variety of 'idioms of accumulation', which reflect transitions and synthesis between non-capitalist and capitalist forms of labour surplus appropriation at the level of individual capitalists, despite some uniformity in the general logic of capital and the spread of capitalist relations of production and exchange. The paper also discusses the methodological power and limitations of oral narratives as a method to gather evidence on long-term processes of agrarian change and accumulation in rural Africa. Finally, the life histories shed some light on the origins of rural capitalists and show that there is a combination of instances of 'capitalism from above' and 'from below' but that no dominant pattern can be clearly discerned at least in the space of one or two generations.     

Historical Materialism and Agrarian History

Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation , by Jairus Banaji. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010 . Historical Materialism Book Series Volume 25 . Pp. xix+406. €101 (hb). ISBN 978‐90‐04‐18368‐1 The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji's original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism and their histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji's emphatic arguments for long histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumulation across different times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of merchant capital, traverse these three themes.     

规制资本主义及其兴起探源:一个马克思主义的解释

20世纪70年代以来的资本主义进入了规制资本主义阶段。与之前的福利资本主义不同,规制资本主义建立在政府提供规则与规则约束下企业间竞争的基础上。对于规制资本主义的兴起,西方经济学或将之归因于市场失灵、或解释成利益集团之间的博弈。马克思则从资本主义国家职能的二重性、自由竞争与生产集中的矛盾、单个企业生产的有组织性与社会生产无政府状态之间的矛盾、生态环境恶化等方面做出了更为全面科学的解释。     

Online,on call: the spread of digitally organised just‐in‐time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT‐related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.