Jacqueline Best, Colin Hay, Genevieve LeBaron and Daniel Mügge, eds, Special Issue on "Blind spots in political economy: revisiting the historical foundations of current thought", New Political Economy, 26, 2, 2021.
Genevieve LeBaron, Daniel Mügge, Jacqueline Best and Colin Hay, eds, Special Issue on "Blind Spots in IPE", Review of International Political Economy, 28, 2, 2021.
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RATING: 75
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This somehow turned into an 8,000-word essay, give or take. Sorry about that.
You know how it is. You wait for years for an exploration of blind spots in approaches to studying the international, then three come along at once. The hugely self-contradictory special issue of International Organization edited by David Lake, Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse was the subject of my last review. The two reviewed here originated in a workshop held at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) in March 2019, co-hosted by the two journals involved, and are presented as a ‘double special issue’ (hereafter, NPE and RIPE respectively), edited by a single group of four, with Jacqueline Best named first for NPE, and Genevieve LeBaron for RIPE. The impulse behind them – to make issues around race, gender, colonialism, nationalism, and North-South divides more central to political economy/IPE – is unequivocally to be welcomed. But the critical edge of the whole project is blunted by framing this in terms of placing greater emphasis on culture and identity and correcting too narrow a focus on global capitalism and class. Beyond that, the two volumes have some problematic features that detract from the success of the enterprise even on its own terms. The first part draws on the two introductions to review issues I find problematic. The second and third review the remaining contributions from each, and the fourth offers a brief conclusion.
I
To be a blind spot in a strong sense, something should be rendered invisible by the premises or assumptions on which a theoretical perspective is based – such as class, for example, in marginalist neo-classical economics. Going beyond this, NPE sets out to ‘contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases and omissions they contain, and more reflexive about the potential costs of these blind spots’ (Best 2021, 217). It then identifies some specific assumptions made in ‘mainstream’ political economic analysis (a tendency to rely exclusively on the lens of instrumental behavioural assumptions and the problematic Humean “constant conjunction” theory of causation, and to see constitutive processes as non-causal, ibid, 223), but not in critical political economy, whose ‘blind spots’ are no more than topics that haven’t had the prominence or centrality they deserve. RIPE describes the motivation for the joint project as the ‘suspicion that key dimensions of the world we live in [continue] to remain at the margins of IPE inquiry, even though they [deserve] to be far more central’ (LeBaron 2021, 284). Then the two offer different lists of the ones that matter, with NPE primarily citing race/ethnicity, colonialism, nationalism, and gender, and sometimes adding climate change, while RIPE suggests that ‘gendered, racial, and North-South inequalities deserve particular reflection’, but also lists ‘the rise of big tech, intensifying corporate power, and climate change’ (ibid, 283-4). And both include contributions that address further ‘blind spots’, sometimes quite narrowly defined, that don’t bear any obvious relationship to the primary agenda of bringing issues of culture and identity around gender, race, colonialism and nationalism to the fore.
When these ‘blind spots’ are classified as conceptual, empirical, or disciplinary, other issues arise. The first two categories are ‘intimately connected’ (Best 2021, 223) and actually hard to tell apart on the account given, but the issue of disciplinarity is the most problematic. RIPE focuses on ‘IPE’, and NPE on ‘political economy’, with the latter sometimes embracing liberal, institutionalist, ‘mainstream’, and equilibrium as well as ‘critical’ approaches, so across the two collections the definition of ‘the discipline’ is unstable. Then contrasting approaches are taken to ‘IPE’. RIPE wants it ‘to reflect again on the analytic assumptions it adopts in the light of a full appreciation of … crucial dimensions of contemporary capitalism’ (LeBaron 2021, 287). NPE in contrast wants it not to define itself at all, on the grounds that ‘too many of the “great debates” that have taken place in these [two] journals have sought to define what is (and therefore what isn’t) IPE’, and it is precisely this “gatekeeping” approach to the field that ‘creates blind spots that limit our ability to make sense of key problems and dynamics in the world around us’ (Best 2021, 224; cf. Best and Paterson, 2015: 739-40). I don’t mind a bit if ‘IPE’ becomes a casualty to the need ‘to expand what counts as political economy so that we are capable of seeing the things that truly matter in the lived experience of real-world subjects – things like identity, race, culture and gender’ (Best 2021, 219), as nobody beyond the authors and publishers of some unreadably weighty textbooks will be worse off. But the failure on the part of the same four individuals to agree on whether ‘IPE’ is or is not, or should or should not be a discipline, and if so, what its broad contours might be, throws the whole question of ‘blind spots’ into confusion.
Second, the account given of previous and current scholarship in and beyond these journals is seriously misleading. It is not helpful that NPE relies solely upon an analysis of the founding editorial statements of RIPE (1994) and NPE (1996) itself to identify four (overlapping) ‘key omissions’, accusing them of neglecting non-Eurocentric perspectives and specifically the history of colonialism; treating culture and identity as secondary, and failing to refer to ‘race, ethnicity, nationalism or – even more strikingly – to gender’; overlooking ‘the potential role of the dynamic of nationalism’, so missing the way in which identity, race and nationalism have been ‘weaponised for political economic advantage around the world today’; and adopting a stylised periodisation of political and economic time and temporality that is eventually a-historic (ibid, 221). This damning indictment is qualified in RIPE, which describes the label “blind spots” as ‘obviously provocative’, as ‘there certainly is no shortage of scholarship tackling them’, ‘some of the contributors to our double special issue have been writing about them for a long time [five references]’, and ‘both journals have published articles on these topics before [six references], if far less frequently than on other ones’ (LeBaron 2021, 284). But even this is nothing like an adequate assessment of previous NPE/RIPE content, first because not a word is said on the content of the contributions mentioned, and second because these few references barely scratch the surface of the past content of the two journals. Two of the articles referenced – Elson (1998) and Steans and Tepe (2010) – were in themed groups, the former a set of five, ‘Towards a gendered political economy’ introduced by Georgina Waylen, the latter on social reproduction, with contributions, among others, on migrant domestic labour by Elias (2010) and the political economy of the household by LeBaron (2010) herself. These significant landmarks in the agenda being promoted should have been recognised as such. Similarly, RIPE had a themed section in 1995, apparently now forgotten, on the power of representation in International Political Economy, introduced by Craig Murphy and Cristina Rojas de Ferro. It insisted that ‘systems of production operate in distinctive cultural domains’, invoked identity formation as a key process, and argued that
‘When orthodox political economy sees the rise of capitalism as a story of changes in the production and circulation of things it overlooks the linkage between capitalism and its accompanying messages about who is “wealthy” and who is “poor”, who is “advanced” and who is “behind”, who is “rational” and who is “irrational”, who is “peaceful” and who is “violent”. Perhaps even more significantly, orthodox political economy overlooks whose representations of the world have ended up answering those questions for most of us, and whose have not’ (Murphy and Rojas de Ferro, RIPE 2, 1, 1995, p. 63).
Individual contributors explored the potential for ‘empathetic collaboration among postmodernism, feminism and postcolonial criticism’ as ‘the way to address the question of difference in IPE’; the manner in which ‘Canada's cultural and identity distinctiveness [had] become a central concern of those opposing the market-based economic restructuring of free trade and transnationalization’; the appropriation of ‘Western’ or global culture to affirm local identities and inform political struggle in beauty pageants in Belize; the ‘unequal power positions that characterized the “dialogue” between the United States and Latin America countries at the end of the war’; and the way that the introduction of laissez-faire policies in mid-nineteenth century Colombia was accompanied by violent policing of the differentiated (gendered and raced) labour force. In the following year, an editorial explicitly addressed the issue of ‘historicizing IPE’ (Amin and Palan, 1996). Examples could be multiplied. Coming closer to the present, in 2013 RIPE’s twentieth anniversary special issue carried John Hobson’s two-part critique (2013a and b) of the Eurocentric foundations of IPE; three years ago NPE carried a path-breaking special issue on ‘Raced Markets’ (23, 5, 2018), referenced here but again not discussed, in which Gurminder Bhambra and Robbie Shilliam (contributors here) both featured, along with Richard Saull on racism and far-right imaginaries, Sawyer Phinney on racialised geographies of austerity in Detroit, Sibille Merz and Ros Williams on racialised bodies in the neoliberal bioeconomy, and Kumar Rajaram on refugees as surplus population; and two years ago RIPE published a lengthy review essay on decolonising the IPE syllabus (Mantz 2019).
I am at a loss to explain the suppression of this record. Equally, there is very little recognition of material in other IR journals or beyond. The two introductions take no account of neo-Gramscian currents in IR and IPE, nor do they refer to the literature on uneven and combined development (addressed, as it happens, in a current special issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs introduced by Justin Rosenberg, 2021); or to debates over a ‘non-Western’ or ‘Global IR’ (Tickner, 2003; Acharya 2014) and related approaches (Anderl and Witt, 2020). Journals such as Cambridge Review, the International Studies Quarterly, and Millennium, in which these last few references appear, are ignored unless one or other editor has published there. And although boundaries between disciplines are called into question, there is no engagement with work in adjacent fields such as development studies or human geography.
Third, NPE aims to ‘unsettle’ the centrality of global capitalism, but declines to offer any clear reformulation of its own. It rejects at the outset the search for an ‘ontological panacea’, opting instead for ‘a more modest kind of scholarship; one that is still critical and engaged but also more consciously aware of its own (inherent and inevitable) limitations’ (Best 2021, 219). Continuing in the same precautionary vein, it identifies three ways of ‘getting history wrong’: getting the “shape” of history wrong, ‘typically by committing too rigidly to a particular theory of the historicity of political economic dynamics’ (the ‘equilibrium thinking’ of mainstream economic theory, that still also ‘characterises much ostensibly critical political economy even today’; the ‘taking of evidence of incremental, gradual or path dependent change as confirmation of the existence of some condition of dynamic stability (or meta-stable equilibrium) within the system in question’; and the failure to recognise the ‘contingency of political economic dynamics’); problems of periodisation, as with the ‘dangers of fetishing particular and widely accepted periodisations which privilege conventional analytic categories to the exclusion of others’; and misreading foundational moments ‘in the stylised pre-histories of the present that have shaped conventional political economic narratives’ (ibid, 224-5). So, while the editors ‘do not propose a new manifesto for political economic scholarship’, they do have ‘a few suggestions of how we define and practice political economic research – by broadening our conception of what counts as political economy and by cultivating greater reflexivity about what we do and do not know’. On the first point, the ‘most consistent thread throughout the contributions [to NPE] is the conviction that once we look more carefully at the shape of political economic history, we cannot help but recognise that identity and culture have been central and under-recognised driving forces’:
‘Even critical political economists tend to remain wedded to the assumption that the central object of their analysis – the chief global political economic force that they must make sense of – is global capitalism. While we would not want to question the importance of this kind of analysis, one of the aims of this Special Issue is to unsettle this particularly pervasive ontological assumption, and to ask what political economic scholarship would look like if it were more attuned to the complex and often-contradictory intersection of a range of global structural forces – including patriarchy, colonialism, anthropocentrism and, of course, capitalism’ (ibid 226).
As a slogan, ‘Unsettle the assumption without questioning its importance’ is on a par with ‘Rectify the anomaly’, with which the AUT electrified pay restraint debates in the 1970s. Here the intent is to avoid any ranking of ‘structural forces’, and to keep an open mind about interactions between them. Although the terms are different, it is akin to Robert Cox’s identification of three categories of forces (material capabilities, institutions, and ideas) among which no one way determinism is assumed, Susan Strange’s identification of security, finance, production and knowledge as four dimensions of structural power, or, come to that, David Lake’s pluralist endorsement of eclecticism and middle-range theory (Cox 1981; Strange 1988, Part II; Lake 2009, 2011, 2013). NPE appears at one point to endorse Bhambra (2021) in identifying colonial relations, as opposed to class, as ‘the primary political economic identity’ (Best 2021, 223), but concludes on the whole that although ‘we must always start with some kind of ontological assumptions and draw some boundaries around the object of our analysis … we can treat those assumptions and boundaries as provisional:
‘Rather than insisting on a strong ontology that makes foundational claims about what truly exists as political economic actors and forces, we can adopt instead a more modest ontology that remains open to question and challenge - and, above all, that is aware of and sensitive to its own partiality. Such an approach will not only make us more attuned to the potential for presentism and other biases as we look to the past, but will also make us more open to the possibility of surprises in the future. Given that we see this as a precautionary principle for political economic analysis’ (ibid: 227).
Finally, this ‘precautionary principle' is open to two quite different interpretations. It is perfectly possible to propose ‘a strong ontology that makes foundational claims about what truly exists as political economic actors and forces’ (as Bhambra does) while at the same time modestly remaining ‘open to question and challenge’, so it is not clear whether this rules out foundational claims altogether, or simply advocates a becoming humility in the way that positions are expressed. The inclusion in RIPE of an article by Kevin Young (2021) advocating the cultivation of a ‘scientific ethos’ which would mean ‘mutually subjecting one another to more openness, more clarity and more genuine intellectual exchange than we [scholars in IPE] have entertained thus far’ suggests the latter, but his concluding call ‘to encourage a broader and more rigorous engagement with one another’s work’ (Young 2021, 416), is so anodyne that it is impossible to say how if at all it relates to issues of ontology.
II
Leaving these problems aside, there is a shared commitment in the two introductions to (critical) political economy, and agreement that it is excessively dominated by too narrow and rigidly defined a focus on global capitalism and class, and should attach greater centrality to race, gender, colonialism, nationalism, North-South divides, culture, and identity. I now turn to the remaining seventeen contributions, which fall into two groups. In the first are twelve papers that either do not address the ‘blind spots’ highlighted or do so in ways that contribute little to the proposed agenda, and sometimes work against it. In the second, discussed in the following section, are five that do better.
Young’s paper, already discussed, falls into the first group. Next, André Broome and Leonard Seabrooke take a thoroughly mainstream constructivist position in a relational-discursive-constructivist account of authority and knowledge production in relation to governance, focused on ‘the policy scripts, templates and benchmarks that are produced and reproduced through recursive processes linking the system and its constituent actors’ (Broome and Seabrooke 2021, 372). Their so-called ‘blind spots’ – conceptually, the exaggeration of agency or reification of authority as a property of organisational types, and empirically, the failure to recognise that governance tools are increasingly constructed in an environment where recursive recognition has become commonplace – are about as far from blind spots as could be, as their substantial bibliography shows. Louis Pauly, situating himself in IPE from a liberal perspective, harks back to a brief global federalist moment after World War II, and wonders whether federal or quasi-federal rather than intergovernmental options might still be ‘feasible governing arrangements at the global level’ (Pauly 2021, 306). Paul Langley proposes ‘a different agenda for political economy research into the form of financialized capitalism that has taken hold in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-9’, based on closer attention to assets and ‘assetization’, but makes only a token effort to pretend that this is a ‘blind spot’ (Langley 2021, 382-3, 390). It is better seen as an emerging area of research arising from new developments in finance capitalism (Birch and Muniesa 2020). The same applies to Maha Rafi Atal’s account (2021) of technology platform companies. Whatever you make of her argument that the rise of platform companies casts doubt on the characterisation of twenty first century capitalism as fragmented and decentralised (I’m not convinced), she has no more to say than do Young, Broome and Seabrooke, Pauly, or Langley about gender, race, colonialism, economic nationalism or the North-South divide.
A further seven papers address the ‘blind spots’ of economic nationalism (Eric Helleiner, Kristen Hopewell and Andrew Gamble), colonialism (Marieke de Goede) and race (Erin Lockwood, J.P. Singh and Robbie Shilliam), but in ways that either conflict with or add little to the project.
Helleiner focuses on political economy (PE) approaches to economic nationalism, identifying ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neomercantilist’ strands, and arguing that too great an emphasis on List has led to empirical and conceptual blind spots. First, ‘List’s ideas are much less useful for interpreting the neomercantilist content of contemporary American populist conservatism than the distinctive ideas of two other historical thinkers who receive very little attention in contemporary PE writing about economic nationalism: Henry Carey and Sun Yat-sen’; second, this neglect stems from ‘two deeper conceptual blind spots in this scholarship. Although scholars have effectively highlighted diverse forms of economic nationalism beyond the "conventional" neomercantilist kind, they have devoted insufficient attention to diversity within the neomercantilist form itself; and the neglect of Sun’s thought also reflects the broader Western-centric nature of PE’s intellectual history’ (Helleiner 2021, 230). Helleiner compares ‘contemporary American populist conservatism’ and ‘Chinese developmentalism’ as pursued by Donald Trump and Xi Jinping respectively, devoting most of a short article to arguing that Trump does not take a Listian approach (obviously, as this involves catching up through protection as a prelude to succeeding in a free trade regime) but is better understood as reflecting ‘Lincolnian protectionism’, which was in turn influenced by the ideas of Henry Carey (whom to his knowledge Trump has never cited, and whose ideas differed in crucial respects, not least in that Carey ‘was much more welcoming of immigration and foreign investment than Trump and his supporters’: ibid, 234). Sun Yat-sen gets two pages. Helleiner notes that he ‘argued forcefully that China’s development ambitions could not be realised without outside financial support’ (ibid, 236). He did indeed:
‘[The] miserable condition among the Chinese proletariat is due to the non-development of the country, the crude methods of production and the wastefulness of labor. The radical cure for all this is industrial development by foreign capital and experts for the benefit of the whole nation. Europe and America are a hundred years ahead of us in industrial development; so in order to catch up in a very short time we have to use their capital, mainly their machinery. If foreign capital cannot be gotten, we will have to get at least their experts and inventors to make for us our own machinery’ (Sun [1920] 2021, 103-4).
Sun’s The International Development of China was a project explicitly directed to the ‘various [Western] Governments of the Capital-supplying Powers’ after the First World War, seeking a massive programme of investment: it hardly challenges a ‘Western-centric’ approach to political economy. The thought occurs, then, that Helleiner would have made a stronger contribution if he had focused, say, on varieties of economic nationalism developed in independent countries outside the emerging capitalist core in the period in which List was writing, or made a broader case for widening the historical roots of IPE beyond Western thought, or looked for cases that do challenge ‘Western’ models of development and imperialist ambition, for example by advocating autarky. Surprise! He has done all three, in articles that he has the good grace not to mention here (Helleiner and Rosales 2017; Helleiner 2020, Helleiner 2021a). It looks as if three fine little pigs have gone elsewhere, and NPE has been sold a pup. If you do want to know more about Chinese economic thought that pre-dates classical Western political economy, try Lin, Peach and Fang, eds, 2014; or for the colonial origins of classical Western political economy, have a look at Goodacre, 2020.
Hopewell, also situating herself squarely within IPE, offers a realist critique of liberal accounts of the US commitment, pre-Trump, to the liberal international trade order, arguing that a ‘key blind spot in IPE is that it has taken American leadership of the liberal international economic order – and its core pillar, the multilateral trading system – for granted, failing to recognise the fragility of that order, or the contingent and precarious nature of the US commitment to global economic institutions’. She caricatures critical political economy in the process, claiming that Panitch and Gindin (2012, no page reference given) among others argue that after the global financial crisis ‘the American empire – centred on governance institutions like the WTO – remained as strong as ever, with no real threat on the horizon’ (Hopewell 2021, 273). In fact, they argue that ‘[h]owever much global capitalism was made in the image of American capitalism, this took place in a manner that was full of contradictions, and was also always contested’, and identify as crucial ‘the internal contradiction which the American state faces in acting as both the state of the United States and the “indispensable” state of global capitalism’ (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 301, 333-4). She is right that the US resisted further liberalisation of trade under both George W. Bush and Obama, but this is hardly a ‘blind spot’, as NPE and RIPE have both published her on precisely this point (Hopewell 2013, 2015, 2019).
Gamble argues that a recurring blind spot in critical political economy is ‘the attribution of logic and rationality to long-run economic developments … but the attribution of contingency and irrationality to political trends and events’, linking this generally to a tendency to give primacy to the economic, and specifically to a failure to predict the upsurge of new forms of populism and nationalism after the global financial crisis (Gamble 2021, 283). He advocates a political economy ‘sensitive to different kinds of rationality, both political and economic, and to the contingency and bounded nature of rationality in the different practices which make up a social formation’, and identifies Marx as a major obstacle to such an approach: ‘The intellectual tradition Marx founded has shaped all subsequent schools of political economy, including liberal, realist and critical political economy. Many critical political economists acknowledge flaws in Marx’s approach, but they find it very hard in practice to abandon it’ (ibid, 284). What follows begins with a polarised contrast in which political developments are either ‘determined by prior economic events’ or ‘follow their own logic and autonomy’ (ibid, 285). Gamble then pinpoints the absence of ‘any attempt to transform the basis of the neo-liberal regime or forge a different model of capitalism’ in the wake of the global financial crisis, and a broader tendency for established parties to become unresponsive to voters, prompting the emergence of new outsider currents that may either be absorbed, or prompt a remaking of party systems. From this point, he moves to an explanation for the populist wave that would not have been out of place in International Organization: the core practices of neo-liberal regimes have included ‘the deskilling of many groups and the destruction of communities through the privatisation of state assets, marketisation of public services, and flexible labour markets’: ‘The way these processes were experienced led to a complex mix of economic grievances and cultural resentments. The loss of their self-respect, the feeling of being left behind and their voices no longer being heard, increased the number of citizens attracted to the populist nationalist movements’ (ibid, 287). In short, governing policy elites failed to respond to the crisis by changing tack, and so left space for the populist surge. At its heart the argument is that the ‘rational response to two decades of financial exuberance seemed to require the establishment of a policy regime prioritising state intervention, regulation and strategic management of the economy’, but that the ‘overwhelming urge in the western political class was to return to business as usual as soon as possible with as little disruption as could be managed to the basic structure of the political economy which had been established since the 1980s’ (ibid, 284-5). But why? The argument does not balance class identity with other forms of identity: it opts for a cultural-institutional explanation rather than one that explores the class affiliations of governing elites or the logic of capital in the context of globally competitive markets.
De Goede links the disconnection of a number of Iranian banks from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) network in 2018 to technical and political challenges of global payment that ‘date back to the eras of the slave trade and imperialism, and relate directly to the geographical and temporal horizons of the triangular Atlantic trade’, starting from the premise that IPE ‘with some notable exceptions – has a blind spot for the long-term, profoundly political, and colonial histories of financial infrastructures’ (De Goede, 352-3). She then moves to the broader argument that ‘infrastructural grids – of roads, electricity networks, payment routes – sediment historical power relations and core-periphery relations’ (ibid, 354). Infrastructures embody political rationality, she argues; they themselves have agency; and they shape and enable collectivities (ibid, 355-6). The neo- or post-colonial shaping of financial (banking) and physical (railways, ports) infrastructure was a staple theme in Latin American debates between imperial apologists and dependency theorists in the 1970s, and there is a substantial literature on the colonial origins of modern finance, as De Goede goes on to show, though she is strategically selective in her range of reference, citing Timothy Mitchell but not Claire Cutler, Paul Langley but not David Harvey, and Kai Koddenbrock but not Fred Block. The colonial roots of modern financial and other infrastructures are significant, and still visible today in the continuing building of the world market – but China’s Belt and Road Initiative suggests that the global politics of infrastructure are shifting in a way that a postcolonial perspective does not cover. De Goede is in danger of committing too rigidly to a particular theory of the historicity of political economic dynamics, and taking path-dependent change as evidence of perpetual continuity.
Turning now to the three contributions on race, Lockwood on the ‘antisemitic backlash’ to financial power is a puzzler. Its framing argument that ‘the structure (complexity, uncertainty, opacity) of financial power makes attributing responsibility for financial crises and the disruptions associated with financial innovation very difficult’, and therefore provides ‘ripe terrain for conspiracy theories [including antisemitic tropes and narratives] to flourish’ (Lockwood 2021, 262) is repeated several times in the opening pages, and eventually extended on its sixth appearance to a wider claim that ‘antisemitism is frequently directed at the consequences of financial power (rising inequality, the influence of the business community over politics, responses to crisis that prioritise capital over labor) rather than at particular financial institutions and actors’ (ibid, 265, emphasis mine). This broadening of the frame severs the argument from the historical material reviewed, which focuses more directly on ‘the Jewish moneylender’; and the only evidence presented for an antisemitic backlash to the global financial crisis and since is a reference to a widely reported statement made by Trump to the Republican Jewish Coalition (“[You]’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money … You want to control your own politicians”), and some statistics derived from surveys by the Anti-Defamation League (‘19 per cent of Americans believe that “Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street”, and 20 per cent of UK citizens, 22 per cent of German citizens, 60 per cent of Spanish citizens, and 73 per cent of Hungarians believe “Jews have too much power in the business world”’, ibid). This ‘evidence’ raises as many questions as it answers. Trump’s remark is typically crass, but it addresses lobbying, not the financial crisis, while the survey data prompts one to ask whether there is evidence of a rising trend through and after the crisis (there might be – Mell (2017, 6), from where the data are taken, comments in a footnote that estimates by the Anti-Defamation League between 2005 and 2011 ‘suggest that no more than 15 percent of the American population hold antisemitic views’), and the wide variation in assent to antisemitic tropes across the countries mentioned demands further investigation. Any level of antisemitic prejudice is to be condemned, but the analytical issue is that it is lowest in the countries centrally involved in the financial crisis. Lockwood is oblivious to this, and reverts to historical material, concluding with the thoughts that ‘we should take claims of antisemitism seriously in the first instance and be aware of the ways that particular tropes in contemporary populist rhetoric may resonate differently within different communities’, and ‘be reflective about the ways in which our own language may, quite unconsciously, reproduce pernicious tropes about the power of finance’ (Lockwood 2021, 268). Fair enough. But as she gives no evidence that authors in IPE or critical political economy have fallen short in these regards, it is hard to see what to make of this.
Singh argues, on North-South trade relations, that developing economies have improved the extent and profile of their trade only when they have taken their own steps to diversify their exports of industrial goods and services. Despite claims to the contrary, the advanced countries have not practiced ‘benevolence’ towards them, but have deployed a patronising discourse, while advocating policies they do not adopt themselves, and seeking to maximise their own gains while making as few concessions as possible. True, though not new, and better explicated elsewhere (Nunn and Price 2004; Langan and Price 2021). His evidence that this has something to do with race consists of three quotations (Singh 2021, 330), two of which don’t have anything to do with it (‘Developing countries such as Bangladesh, which recognize the importance of direct investment to their long-term economic development plans, now are taking actions to attract such investment. I hope that more countries follow the leadership Bangladesh has shown’ (US Trade representative Clayton Yeutter, 1986); and from 1992 (no source given): ‘The ATPA [Andean Trade Preferences Act] fulfils the U.S. commitment to improve access to the U.S. market for exports from the Andean nations. It is designed to help the beneficiary nations encourage their people to export legitimate products instead of illicit drugs. The United States supports the strong efforts of the Government of Ecuador to combat drug trafficking and to modernize its economy’). The third, reported in 2005, does (‘many Indian call-center workers say they regularly face particular abuse from Americans, whose tantrums are sometimes racist and often inspired by anger over outsourcing’), but has no bearing on trade relations. The conclusion confirms that Singh doesn’t have an argument:
‘The marginalization of the Global South from reciprocal international trade intensified over time, even as developing world advocacy for equality increased. Despite this marginalization, many developing countries garnered heavy trade volumes (if not reciprocal trade concessions) and became influential players in the global trading order mostly through domestic industrial or services diversification and strategic tactics at international negotiations’ (ibid, 331).
Finally in this group, Robbie Shilliam, who has path-breaking contributions elsewhere, addresses the ‘seeming paradox of neoliberal elites becoming populists’ in a narrowly focused paper that identifies Enoch Powell as Britain’s first neoliberal politician as a way into ‘a more adequate account of the contemporary relationship between racist populism and the neoliberal project’ (Shilliam 2021, 239). He certainly was a neoliberal, and a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, as Shilliam notes. But there is no paradox in populist neoliberalism. I argued this, as it happens, over two decades ago in relation to Latin America, and I was by no means the first, or the last. What matters, I thought, is the relationship of populist appeals to ‘specific conjunctural projects for the reorientation of capitalist reproduction, or models of accumulation’ (Cammack 2000, 155). In all modesty, I recommend it. To say that with Powell racist populism was a ‘formatively neoliberal project’ (Shilliam 2021, 242) is not to demonstrate a more general affinity between neoliberalism and racist populism. Powell may have been Britain’s first neoliberal, but he was not the first racist populist, and his fellows in this were not neoliberals. Shilliam’s concluding flourish: ‘Not all neoliberals are racist populists, but todays racist populists are all neoliberals – by intention or by effect’ (ibid, 247) is not a substitute for a careful comparison of the successive conjunctures in which Powell, Thatcher and Johnson respectively crafted their political appeals, nor does it address the question of when it becomes both necessary and possible to moderate a racist or nationalist element in a neoliberal appeal in order to switch the focus to increasing the level of competition in national labour markets.
III
The remaining five papers have much more to recommend them. Elisabeth Prügl offers ‘a reading of contemporary writings in Feminist Political Economy that is attuned to disrupting binaries’, to illustrate how ‘seeming opposites inhabit each other’, focused on ‘the opposition between production and reproduction’ and ‘spatial opposition between the public and the private, the state and the household’ (Prügl 2021, 296). Kate Bedford uses gambling liberalisation debates in the UK from the 1950s on and the specific case of the numbers game of chance bingo to explore ‘a different way of conceptualising political economy, where the state regulation of diverse economies is a central preoccupation’ (Bedford 2021, 250). Mathew Paterson, on climate change, addresses the challenge IPE faces in helping societies ‘understand the dynamics that will drive both whether we collapse or transform, and what sorts of transformations or collapses might unfold, with what consequences for human flourishing, inequalities, violence, power relations, and possibilities for democratic political life’ (Paterson 2021, 395). V. Spike Peterson begins with ‘the earliest state-formation processes (circa 3,500 BCE)’, and goes on to examine the ‘Eurocentric production of “race difference” in the modern era of state/nation-making, sexual/familial regulation and ideological legitimation of imperial/colonial power’ (Peterson 2021, 292). And in the most ambitious contribution, Gurminder Bhambra goes beyond the frequently asserted view that histories of capitalism fail to recognise the significance of colonialism to propose a ‘different systematic account’ on the basis of ‘a systematic consideration of colonial histories’ (Bhambra 2021, 308-9).
Prügl sets out the way in which feminist political economy challenges production/reproduction, public/private, and state/household as foundational dichotomies that are ‘thoroughly gendered, colouring the first part of the binary as masculine and the second as feminine, thereby establishing a hierarchy between them’ (Prügl 2021, 295). These are hardly blind spots, as she shows in a review of literature going back to the 1970s, but all the same her discussions of the emerging commercial care economy and the history and current significance of home working provide strong evidence that ‘the oppositions between production and reproduction, self-interest and caring, work and home, public and private’ are ‘untenable in the face of emerging practices and impracticable for imaging alternative futures’ (ibid, 302). Her concise and very useful overview insists on financialised capitalism’s ‘parasitic dependence on social reproduction and feminized care labour on the one hand, and on patriarchal household governance on the other’, when this dependence may arguably be better seen as an indication of the failure of capital yet to impose its logic fully over all social relations (Cammack 2020), but the tenor of her discussion does not rule out novel developments in these areas, such as the current revolution of home working as a consequence of COVID-19.
Bedford notes that gambling features in political economy primarily as a metaphor for risk-taking or the ‘casino’ of financial capitalism, but uses the history of legislation around bingo to focus on ‘more-than-capitalist’ economies, invoking themes of mutualism, community self-help and solidarity. Unfortunately, the editors of NPE (which unlike RIPE does not provide summaries of individual contributions) do not take up these themes, so miss the opportunity to address the heterogeneity of capitalism and its ‘regulatory interactions with other, more-than-capitalist economies’ (Bedford 2021, 251; cf. Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Bingo makes an excellent case study (it was very popular in Brackley in the 1950s, though my parents, as staunch Methodists, would have nothing to do with it), and it is a pity that the editors don’t make more of it.
Paterson’s diplomatically presented contribution turns the question of climate change as an ‘IPE blind spot’ to the argument that like many other fields it has failed to recognise either the depth of the social transformation entailed in addressing climate change adequately, or the catastrophic costs of failing to do so. He does say that IPE has ‘a set of conceptual tools’ that can help here, but adds that whether climate change leads to transformation or to collapse, it is unlikely that the ‘central theoretical and normative commitments of IPE’ will emerge unscathed (Paterson 2021, 395). He identifies a failure in much existing research to address ‘the dynamics of global political economy’, and turns to a far wider range of literature than is typically understood as ‘IPE’. As the discussion develops, ‘IPE’ shades into ‘political economy’, and the question of growth (to which with ‘a few notable exceptions, all major perspectives in IPE have a, mostly unstated but presumed, normative commitment’) shades into ‘the question of capitalism’, and its ‘fundamental institutional features – wage labor, commodity production, market competition – that create dynamics that both generate growth in a highly dynamic way, but also depend on that growth for its stability’ (ibid, 400). This requires attention to capitalism’s materialities ‘in ways that perhaps much work in IPE neglects’: IPE scholars ‘could make distinctive contributions to understanding how, for example, a rapid transition to electric vehicles will be shaped by questions of labor relations, inter-capitalist competition, intellectual property tights politics, and interstate competition, all features often neglected in existing research’ (ibid, 401-2, emphasis mine). But ‘some forms of IPE scholarship are more likely to be able to engage this research agenda than others’: ‘It needs an ontological starting point of capitalism rather than the market, in order to be able to understand dynamic forms of change, the grounding of the economy in material processes, questions of inequality and power. It needs to be able to think in terms of transformation and change rather than seeking stability’ (ibid, 402). Invoking Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capitalism (Verso, 2016) as a ‘central starting point’, Paterson clearly signals the need for a materialist/Marxist turn if IPE is to engage with the dynamics of climate change (cf. Oatley 2021, Siebert 2021). But this is not on the agenda of the editors, who present him as proposing ways forward within ‘IPE’, narrowly defined (LeBaron 2021, 291).
Peterson’s contribution is a (very) ‘condensed, very broad-stroke presentation’ (Peterson 2021, note. 1, p. 298) of decades of work, overlapping considerably with a concurrently produced article in the Review of International Studies (Peterson 2020). It traces linkages over time between ‘economic practices, racial logics and birthright citizenship regimes’, arguing that successful early state-making entailed ‘an unprecedented scale of slavery, coercion, regulation, and rigidification of hierarchical rule’ (Peterson 2021, 292), and attaching particular importance to intergenerational continuity and inheritance, and the ‘family’ as a nexus of power:
‘I emphasise here what conventional definitions assume but rarely make explicit: that intergenerational continuity is what state success is based on and marked by. While state theorists (implicitly) accept that intergenerational continuity is the register of state success, few seriously investigate the implications of this for regulating either sexual reproduction or the (inheritable) transmission of property and social/political status claims, including citizenship. Fewer still take seriously how the significance of inheritance and intergenerational continuity renders sexual/marital/kinship relations (henceforth, “family” in scare quotes) a focal – indeed indispensable and structural – nexus of power relations. In other words, all states have a stake in regulating who counts as “family” and how “family”/household units support the requisites of biological, socio-cultural and political economic reproduction. … In short, the requisites of state-making success constitute structurally intersecting inequalities of sex/gender, “class”, and Insider-Outsider’ (ibid, 292-3).
Peterson suggests that ‘these inequalities are not separate or coincidental developments but constitutively intersecting as the state’s definitive stratifications’: ‘Methodologically, this dynamic co-production means that in a world order based on states/nations, “economic” inequalities are never simply that but always – though variously and complexly – shaping and shaped by sex/gender and Insider-Outsider inequalities. Analytically, “seeing” this constitutive intersectionality is key to illuminating and more adequately understanding the production of inequalities in modern state/nation formation, the subsequent trajectory of within- and between-nation inequalities, and the effects of racialised inequalities in current crises’ (ibid: 293); and ‘postcolonial, decolonial, critical race and feminist studies make visible the manifold and interactive ways in which brutal practices, orchestrated violence, racialisation and sexual politics were constitutive of Europe’s colonial state-making practices and the emerging state-based world order’ (ibid). What follows is a compelling account of the way birthright citizenship and racial logics shape structural inequalities across the global economy, and one that gains impact from its short and synthetic nature. It should not be missed, either in this or the 2020 version. Peterson argues that capitalism is still served well by modernity’s relatively nucleated and “private” heteropatriarchal family/households, which I think is questionable (Cammack, 2020). But her broader argument that an idealised model of marriage that ‘signalled “white”/European superiority: heteronormative, patriarchal, monogamous, Christian matrimony and unequivocally “respectable” (read: civilised) sexual/family relations’ (ibid: 294) was used to racialise non-European populations as inferior still stands. Similarly, the negative implications of inheritance for both property and citizenship are brilliantly addressed. But the question remains: is this state of affairs required for the continued development of capitalism on a global scale, or has it rather become a fetter on such development?
Bhambra’s equally compressed presentation of an alternative framing of the history of capitalism is also essential reading. It has limitations that arise from its selective use of Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) as its interlocutor. But this should not detract from the merits of the model advanced, which should be judged on its own terms. It proposes four stages: colonialism through private property; state-managed colonialism, also known as empire; the (racialized) amelioration of labour exploitation; and neoliberalism and authoritarian populism. You don’t have to agree with the central role given to colonialism or accept the dismissal of Marx’s primary focus on the capital-labour relation to appreciate the significance of what is a radical proposal that explicitly rejects the notion of any ‘logic’ of capital theoretically separable from its specific history. Quite wrong, I would say, but this is not the place for an extended critique. In the first stage, the world is ‘produced’ for capitalism through ‘the colonial processes of appropriation, possession, enslavement and extraction’, and the second consists of ‘the establishment of empire as a national project’ (ibid, 311): leading European nations and the United States are characterised, generalising from Baker (2009), not as nations that happen to have empires, but as imperial states. Bhambra overlooks Baker’s main point – that after the Second World War Britain (his sole focus) deliberately abandoned its empire – in effect in order to become a colony of the United States (as it happens, a development that is germane to the politics of Enoch Powell too). And she notes from Sainty (1975) that ‘the reorganization of the remit of the Secretaries of State in the late eighteenth century in Britain … located responsibility for the colonies within the Home Office, that is, under the remit of the domestic and not of foreign affairs’ (Bhambra 2021, 313), but does not mention that in 1968 ‘the Colonial Office was wrapped into the Commonwealth Relations Office, and the Commonwealth Relations Office became a division of the Foreign Office (Baker 2009, 707). Equally, a key component of the overall model – the drain of resources from India – disappears in the wake of independence, and the focus shifts as we near the present to ‘the ways in which race comes to be foundational to capitalism as a consequence of the centrality of colonial processes to its emergence and development’ (Bhambra 2021, 320). I doubt if the demise of the welfare state can be shown to be a consequence of the pressure on previously racially circumscribed systems from racialized others from former colonial dependencies rather than of greatly increased levels of competitiveness in global capitalism, principally because the advanced capitalist states – not least the present and past members of the European Union – have been regrettably effective in denying access to others. The case would actually be stronger if even greater reductions in the provision of ‘welfare’ than have been experienced had been introduced in tandem with massively increased immigration and admittance to citizenship, except that this it also what a Marxist ‘logic of capital’ approach would expect. It will happen if the leading advocates of global competitiveness in all markets, the OECD and the World Bank, have their way (Cammack, forthcoming 2022). All the same, Bhambra’s proposal, generalising from the ‘other side of the debate’ across the whole period of the history of capitalism, is precisely the kind of contribution that is necessary if relations between colonialism, nationalism, race and capitalism are to be re-imagined.
IV
Where do we go from here then? There is a path not taken, hidden in plain sight, and glimpsed when RIPE comments that common modes of enquiry ‘rarely heed how … proper “labor markets”, of the kind political economists often study, [have] been predicated on social reproduction, unremunerated female labor, or unfree labor overwhelmingly performed by racialized and migrant workers, from the start’ (LeBaron 2021, 285). This in turn leads us to the 2018 issue of NPE on raced markets, and simultaneously suggests a need to broaden its agenda. The suggestions there that ‘race must be apprehended as a mode of classifying, ordering, creating and destroying people, labour power, land, environment and capital’, and that race even precedes class in assembling all the elements that Marx would come to call the “world market”’ (Tilley and Shilliam 2018, 537) provide a starting point. Labour markets, simultaneously local, national and global, are privileged loci for the investigation of capitalist accumulation in the context of the varying intersections of race, gender and citizenship across diverse societies in an increasingly integrated world market, and changes in their relative role and significance over space and time. A further step back in time to the Review of International Political Economy, 17, 5, 2010 and the full set of papers around the issue of social reproduction across the world market that it contains, followed by a return to the five papers highlighted in the previous section, might suggest that there is a way forward, albeit one that in all important respects leads away from anything recognisable as ‘IPE’.
References and Further Reading
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Bedford, Kate. 2021. Gambling and political economy, revisited, New Political Economy, 26, 2, pp. 250-60.
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2021. Colonial global economy: towards a theoretical reorientation of political economy, Review of International Political Economy, 28, 2, pp. 307-22.
Best, Jacqueline, Colin Hay, Genevieve LeBaron and Daniel Mügge. 2021. Seeing and not-seeing like a political economist: The historicity of contemporary political economy and its blind spots, New Political Economy, 26, 2, pp. 217-28.
Best, Jacqueline, and Matthew Paterson, eds. 2010. Cultural Political Economy, Routledge, London.
Best, Jacqueline, and Matthew Paterson. 2015. Towards a cultural political economy – Not a cultural IPE, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43, 2, pp. 738-40.
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Blyth, Mark, ed. 2009. Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (IPE): IPE as a Global Conversation, Routledge, Abingdon and New York.
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Cammack, Paul. 2007. RIP IPE, Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, No. 7, Manchester Metropolitan University, e-space Open Access Repository, May.
Cammack, Paul. 2011. Knowledge and power in the field of IPE, in Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff, and Huw Macartney, eds, Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate, Dissensus, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 149-68 (free to download as ‘Bye-Bye, American IPE’ (2012), at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2124360).
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction. Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cammack, Paul. Forthcoming 2022. The Politics of Global Competitiveness. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
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Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.
Helleiner, Eric. 2020. Globalizing the historical roots of IPE. In Ernesto Vivares, ed, Routledge Handbook to Global Political Economy: Conversations and Inquiries, Routledge: Abingdon and New York, Ch. 3.
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Helleiner, Eric. 2021a. The return of national self-sufficiency? Excavating autarkic thought in a de-globalizing era, International Studies Review, doi: 10.1093/isr/viaa092.
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Higgott, Richard, and Matthew Watson. 2007. All at sea in a barbed wire canoe: Professor Cohen’s transatlantic voyage in IPE. Review of International Political Economy, 15, 1, pp. 1–17.
Hobson, John. M. 2013a. Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE: A critical historiography of the discipline from the classical to the modern era. Review of International Political Economy, 20, 5, pp. 1024–54.
Hobson, John M. 2013b. Part 2 – Reconstructing the non-Eurocentric foundations of IPE: From Eurocentric ‘open economy politics’ to inter-civilizational political economy. Review of International Political Economy, 20, 5, 1055–81.
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You know how it is. You wait for years for an exploration of blind spots in approaches to studying the international, then three come along at once. The hugely self-contradictory special issue of International Organization edited by David Lake, Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse was the subject of my last review. The two reviewed here originated in a workshop held at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) in March 2019, co-hosted by the two journals involved, and are presented as a ‘double special issue’ (hereafter, NPE and RIPE respectively), edited by a single group of four, with Jacqueline Best named first for NPE, and Genevieve LeBaron for RIPE. The impulse behind them – to make issues around race, gender, colonialism, nationalism, and North-South divides more central to political economy/IPE – is unequivocally to be welcomed. But the critical edge of the whole project is blunted by framing this in terms of placing greater emphasis on culture and identity and correcting too narrow a focus on global capitalism and class. Beyond that, the two volumes have some problematic features that detract from the success of the enterprise even on its own terms. The first part draws on the two introductions to review issues I find problematic. The second and third review the remaining contributions from each, and the fourth offers a brief conclusion.
I
To be a blind spot in a strong sense, something should be rendered invisible by the premises or assumptions on which a theoretical perspective is based – such as class, for example, in marginalist neo-classical economics. Going beyond this, NPE sets out to ‘contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases and omissions they contain, and more reflexive about the potential costs of these blind spots’ (Best 2021, 217). It then identifies some specific assumptions made in ‘mainstream’ political economic analysis (a tendency to rely exclusively on the lens of instrumental behavioural assumptions and the problematic Humean “constant conjunction” theory of causation, and to see constitutive processes as non-causal, ibid, 223), but not in critical political economy, whose ‘blind spots’ are no more than topics that haven’t had the prominence or centrality they deserve. RIPE describes the motivation for the joint project as the ‘suspicion that key dimensions of the world we live in [continue] to remain at the margins of IPE inquiry, even though they [deserve] to be far more central’ (LeBaron 2021, 284). Then the two offer different lists of the ones that matter, with NPE primarily citing race/ethnicity, colonialism, nationalism, and gender, and sometimes adding climate change, while RIPE suggests that ‘gendered, racial, and North-South inequalities deserve particular reflection’, but also lists ‘the rise of big tech, intensifying corporate power, and climate change’ (ibid, 283-4). And both include contributions that address further ‘blind spots’, sometimes quite narrowly defined, that don’t bear any obvious relationship to the primary agenda of bringing issues of culture and identity around gender, race, colonialism and nationalism to the fore.
When these ‘blind spots’ are classified as conceptual, empirical, or disciplinary, other issues arise. The first two categories are ‘intimately connected’ (Best 2021, 223) and actually hard to tell apart on the account given, but the issue of disciplinarity is the most problematic. RIPE focuses on ‘IPE’, and NPE on ‘political economy’, with the latter sometimes embracing liberal, institutionalist, ‘mainstream’, and equilibrium as well as ‘critical’ approaches, so across the two collections the definition of ‘the discipline’ is unstable. Then contrasting approaches are taken to ‘IPE’. RIPE wants it ‘to reflect again on the analytic assumptions it adopts in the light of a full appreciation of … crucial dimensions of contemporary capitalism’ (LeBaron 2021, 287). NPE in contrast wants it not to define itself at all, on the grounds that ‘too many of the “great debates” that have taken place in these [two] journals have sought to define what is (and therefore what isn’t) IPE’, and it is precisely this “gatekeeping” approach to the field that ‘creates blind spots that limit our ability to make sense of key problems and dynamics in the world around us’ (Best 2021, 224; cf. Best and Paterson, 2015: 739-40). I don’t mind a bit if ‘IPE’ becomes a casualty to the need ‘to expand what counts as political economy so that we are capable of seeing the things that truly matter in the lived experience of real-world subjects – things like identity, race, culture and gender’ (Best 2021, 219), as nobody beyond the authors and publishers of some unreadably weighty textbooks will be worse off. But the failure on the part of the same four individuals to agree on whether ‘IPE’ is or is not, or should or should not be a discipline, and if so, what its broad contours might be, throws the whole question of ‘blind spots’ into confusion.
Second, the account given of previous and current scholarship in and beyond these journals is seriously misleading. It is not helpful that NPE relies solely upon an analysis of the founding editorial statements of RIPE (1994) and NPE (1996) itself to identify four (overlapping) ‘key omissions’, accusing them of neglecting non-Eurocentric perspectives and specifically the history of colonialism; treating culture and identity as secondary, and failing to refer to ‘race, ethnicity, nationalism or – even more strikingly – to gender’; overlooking ‘the potential role of the dynamic of nationalism’, so missing the way in which identity, race and nationalism have been ‘weaponised for political economic advantage around the world today’; and adopting a stylised periodisation of political and economic time and temporality that is eventually a-historic (ibid, 221). This damning indictment is qualified in RIPE, which describes the label “blind spots” as ‘obviously provocative’, as ‘there certainly is no shortage of scholarship tackling them’, ‘some of the contributors to our double special issue have been writing about them for a long time [five references]’, and ‘both journals have published articles on these topics before [six references], if far less frequently than on other ones’ (LeBaron 2021, 284). But even this is nothing like an adequate assessment of previous NPE/RIPE content, first because not a word is said on the content of the contributions mentioned, and second because these few references barely scratch the surface of the past content of the two journals. Two of the articles referenced – Elson (1998) and Steans and Tepe (2010) – were in themed groups, the former a set of five, ‘Towards a gendered political economy’ introduced by Georgina Waylen, the latter on social reproduction, with contributions, among others, on migrant domestic labour by Elias (2010) and the political economy of the household by LeBaron (2010) herself. These significant landmarks in the agenda being promoted should have been recognised as such. Similarly, RIPE had a themed section in 1995, apparently now forgotten, on the power of representation in International Political Economy, introduced by Craig Murphy and Cristina Rojas de Ferro. It insisted that ‘systems of production operate in distinctive cultural domains’, invoked identity formation as a key process, and argued that
‘When orthodox political economy sees the rise of capitalism as a story of changes in the production and circulation of things it overlooks the linkage between capitalism and its accompanying messages about who is “wealthy” and who is “poor”, who is “advanced” and who is “behind”, who is “rational” and who is “irrational”, who is “peaceful” and who is “violent”. Perhaps even more significantly, orthodox political economy overlooks whose representations of the world have ended up answering those questions for most of us, and whose have not’ (Murphy and Rojas de Ferro, RIPE 2, 1, 1995, p. 63).
Individual contributors explored the potential for ‘empathetic collaboration among postmodernism, feminism and postcolonial criticism’ as ‘the way to address the question of difference in IPE’; the manner in which ‘Canada's cultural and identity distinctiveness [had] become a central concern of those opposing the market-based economic restructuring of free trade and transnationalization’; the appropriation of ‘Western’ or global culture to affirm local identities and inform political struggle in beauty pageants in Belize; the ‘unequal power positions that characterized the “dialogue” between the United States and Latin America countries at the end of the war’; and the way that the introduction of laissez-faire policies in mid-nineteenth century Colombia was accompanied by violent policing of the differentiated (gendered and raced) labour force. In the following year, an editorial explicitly addressed the issue of ‘historicizing IPE’ (Amin and Palan, 1996). Examples could be multiplied. Coming closer to the present, in 2013 RIPE’s twentieth anniversary special issue carried John Hobson’s two-part critique (2013a and b) of the Eurocentric foundations of IPE; three years ago NPE carried a path-breaking special issue on ‘Raced Markets’ (23, 5, 2018), referenced here but again not discussed, in which Gurminder Bhambra and Robbie Shilliam (contributors here) both featured, along with Richard Saull on racism and far-right imaginaries, Sawyer Phinney on racialised geographies of austerity in Detroit, Sibille Merz and Ros Williams on racialised bodies in the neoliberal bioeconomy, and Kumar Rajaram on refugees as surplus population; and two years ago RIPE published a lengthy review essay on decolonising the IPE syllabus (Mantz 2019).
I am at a loss to explain the suppression of this record. Equally, there is very little recognition of material in other IR journals or beyond. The two introductions take no account of neo-Gramscian currents in IR and IPE, nor do they refer to the literature on uneven and combined development (addressed, as it happens, in a current special issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs introduced by Justin Rosenberg, 2021); or to debates over a ‘non-Western’ or ‘Global IR’ (Tickner, 2003; Acharya 2014) and related approaches (Anderl and Witt, 2020). Journals such as Cambridge Review, the International Studies Quarterly, and Millennium, in which these last few references appear, are ignored unless one or other editor has published there. And although boundaries between disciplines are called into question, there is no engagement with work in adjacent fields such as development studies or human geography.
Third, NPE aims to ‘unsettle’ the centrality of global capitalism, but declines to offer any clear reformulation of its own. It rejects at the outset the search for an ‘ontological panacea’, opting instead for ‘a more modest kind of scholarship; one that is still critical and engaged but also more consciously aware of its own (inherent and inevitable) limitations’ (Best 2021, 219). Continuing in the same precautionary vein, it identifies three ways of ‘getting history wrong’: getting the “shape” of history wrong, ‘typically by committing too rigidly to a particular theory of the historicity of political economic dynamics’ (the ‘equilibrium thinking’ of mainstream economic theory, that still also ‘characterises much ostensibly critical political economy even today’; the ‘taking of evidence of incremental, gradual or path dependent change as confirmation of the existence of some condition of dynamic stability (or meta-stable equilibrium) within the system in question’; and the failure to recognise the ‘contingency of political economic dynamics’); problems of periodisation, as with the ‘dangers of fetishing particular and widely accepted periodisations which privilege conventional analytic categories to the exclusion of others’; and misreading foundational moments ‘in the stylised pre-histories of the present that have shaped conventional political economic narratives’ (ibid, 224-5). So, while the editors ‘do not propose a new manifesto for political economic scholarship’, they do have ‘a few suggestions of how we define and practice political economic research – by broadening our conception of what counts as political economy and by cultivating greater reflexivity about what we do and do not know’. On the first point, the ‘most consistent thread throughout the contributions [to NPE] is the conviction that once we look more carefully at the shape of political economic history, we cannot help but recognise that identity and culture have been central and under-recognised driving forces’:
‘Even critical political economists tend to remain wedded to the assumption that the central object of their analysis – the chief global political economic force that they must make sense of – is global capitalism. While we would not want to question the importance of this kind of analysis, one of the aims of this Special Issue is to unsettle this particularly pervasive ontological assumption, and to ask what political economic scholarship would look like if it were more attuned to the complex and often-contradictory intersection of a range of global structural forces – including patriarchy, colonialism, anthropocentrism and, of course, capitalism’ (ibid 226).
As a slogan, ‘Unsettle the assumption without questioning its importance’ is on a par with ‘Rectify the anomaly’, with which the AUT electrified pay restraint debates in the 1970s. Here the intent is to avoid any ranking of ‘structural forces’, and to keep an open mind about interactions between them. Although the terms are different, it is akin to Robert Cox’s identification of three categories of forces (material capabilities, institutions, and ideas) among which no one way determinism is assumed, Susan Strange’s identification of security, finance, production and knowledge as four dimensions of structural power, or, come to that, David Lake’s pluralist endorsement of eclecticism and middle-range theory (Cox 1981; Strange 1988, Part II; Lake 2009, 2011, 2013). NPE appears at one point to endorse Bhambra (2021) in identifying colonial relations, as opposed to class, as ‘the primary political economic identity’ (Best 2021, 223), but concludes on the whole that although ‘we must always start with some kind of ontological assumptions and draw some boundaries around the object of our analysis … we can treat those assumptions and boundaries as provisional:
‘Rather than insisting on a strong ontology that makes foundational claims about what truly exists as political economic actors and forces, we can adopt instead a more modest ontology that remains open to question and challenge - and, above all, that is aware of and sensitive to its own partiality. Such an approach will not only make us more attuned to the potential for presentism and other biases as we look to the past, but will also make us more open to the possibility of surprises in the future. Given that we see this as a precautionary principle for political economic analysis’ (ibid: 227).
Finally, this ‘precautionary principle' is open to two quite different interpretations. It is perfectly possible to propose ‘a strong ontology that makes foundational claims about what truly exists as political economic actors and forces’ (as Bhambra does) while at the same time modestly remaining ‘open to question and challenge’, so it is not clear whether this rules out foundational claims altogether, or simply advocates a becoming humility in the way that positions are expressed. The inclusion in RIPE of an article by Kevin Young (2021) advocating the cultivation of a ‘scientific ethos’ which would mean ‘mutually subjecting one another to more openness, more clarity and more genuine intellectual exchange than we [scholars in IPE] have entertained thus far’ suggests the latter, but his concluding call ‘to encourage a broader and more rigorous engagement with one another’s work’ (Young 2021, 416), is so anodyne that it is impossible to say how if at all it relates to issues of ontology.
II
Leaving these problems aside, there is a shared commitment in the two introductions to (critical) political economy, and agreement that it is excessively dominated by too narrow and rigidly defined a focus on global capitalism and class, and should attach greater centrality to race, gender, colonialism, nationalism, North-South divides, culture, and identity. I now turn to the remaining seventeen contributions, which fall into two groups. In the first are twelve papers that either do not address the ‘blind spots’ highlighted or do so in ways that contribute little to the proposed agenda, and sometimes work against it. In the second, discussed in the following section, are five that do better.
Young’s paper, already discussed, falls into the first group. Next, André Broome and Leonard Seabrooke take a thoroughly mainstream constructivist position in a relational-discursive-constructivist account of authority and knowledge production in relation to governance, focused on ‘the policy scripts, templates and benchmarks that are produced and reproduced through recursive processes linking the system and its constituent actors’ (Broome and Seabrooke 2021, 372). Their so-called ‘blind spots’ – conceptually, the exaggeration of agency or reification of authority as a property of organisational types, and empirically, the failure to recognise that governance tools are increasingly constructed in an environment where recursive recognition has become commonplace – are about as far from blind spots as could be, as their substantial bibliography shows. Louis Pauly, situating himself in IPE from a liberal perspective, harks back to a brief global federalist moment after World War II, and wonders whether federal or quasi-federal rather than intergovernmental options might still be ‘feasible governing arrangements at the global level’ (Pauly 2021, 306). Paul Langley proposes ‘a different agenda for political economy research into the form of financialized capitalism that has taken hold in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-9’, based on closer attention to assets and ‘assetization’, but makes only a token effort to pretend that this is a ‘blind spot’ (Langley 2021, 382-3, 390). It is better seen as an emerging area of research arising from new developments in finance capitalism (Birch and Muniesa 2020). The same applies to Maha Rafi Atal’s account (2021) of technology platform companies. Whatever you make of her argument that the rise of platform companies casts doubt on the characterisation of twenty first century capitalism as fragmented and decentralised (I’m not convinced), she has no more to say than do Young, Broome and Seabrooke, Pauly, or Langley about gender, race, colonialism, economic nationalism or the North-South divide.
A further seven papers address the ‘blind spots’ of economic nationalism (Eric Helleiner, Kristen Hopewell and Andrew Gamble), colonialism (Marieke de Goede) and race (Erin Lockwood, J.P. Singh and Robbie Shilliam), but in ways that either conflict with or add little to the project.
Helleiner focuses on political economy (PE) approaches to economic nationalism, identifying ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neomercantilist’ strands, and arguing that too great an emphasis on List has led to empirical and conceptual blind spots. First, ‘List’s ideas are much less useful for interpreting the neomercantilist content of contemporary American populist conservatism than the distinctive ideas of two other historical thinkers who receive very little attention in contemporary PE writing about economic nationalism: Henry Carey and Sun Yat-sen’; second, this neglect stems from ‘two deeper conceptual blind spots in this scholarship. Although scholars have effectively highlighted diverse forms of economic nationalism beyond the "conventional" neomercantilist kind, they have devoted insufficient attention to diversity within the neomercantilist form itself; and the neglect of Sun’s thought also reflects the broader Western-centric nature of PE’s intellectual history’ (Helleiner 2021, 230). Helleiner compares ‘contemporary American populist conservatism’ and ‘Chinese developmentalism’ as pursued by Donald Trump and Xi Jinping respectively, devoting most of a short article to arguing that Trump does not take a Listian approach (obviously, as this involves catching up through protection as a prelude to succeeding in a free trade regime) but is better understood as reflecting ‘Lincolnian protectionism’, which was in turn influenced by the ideas of Henry Carey (whom to his knowledge Trump has never cited, and whose ideas differed in crucial respects, not least in that Carey ‘was much more welcoming of immigration and foreign investment than Trump and his supporters’: ibid, 234). Sun Yat-sen gets two pages. Helleiner notes that he ‘argued forcefully that China’s development ambitions could not be realised without outside financial support’ (ibid, 236). He did indeed:
‘[The] miserable condition among the Chinese proletariat is due to the non-development of the country, the crude methods of production and the wastefulness of labor. The radical cure for all this is industrial development by foreign capital and experts for the benefit of the whole nation. Europe and America are a hundred years ahead of us in industrial development; so in order to catch up in a very short time we have to use their capital, mainly their machinery. If foreign capital cannot be gotten, we will have to get at least their experts and inventors to make for us our own machinery’ (Sun [1920] 2021, 103-4).
Sun’s The International Development of China was a project explicitly directed to the ‘various [Western] Governments of the Capital-supplying Powers’ after the First World War, seeking a massive programme of investment: it hardly challenges a ‘Western-centric’ approach to political economy. The thought occurs, then, that Helleiner would have made a stronger contribution if he had focused, say, on varieties of economic nationalism developed in independent countries outside the emerging capitalist core in the period in which List was writing, or made a broader case for widening the historical roots of IPE beyond Western thought, or looked for cases that do challenge ‘Western’ models of development and imperialist ambition, for example by advocating autarky. Surprise! He has done all three, in articles that he has the good grace not to mention here (Helleiner and Rosales 2017; Helleiner 2020, Helleiner 2021a). It looks as if three fine little pigs have gone elsewhere, and NPE has been sold a pup. If you do want to know more about Chinese economic thought that pre-dates classical Western political economy, try Lin, Peach and Fang, eds, 2014; or for the colonial origins of classical Western political economy, have a look at Goodacre, 2020.
Hopewell, also situating herself squarely within IPE, offers a realist critique of liberal accounts of the US commitment, pre-Trump, to the liberal international trade order, arguing that a ‘key blind spot in IPE is that it has taken American leadership of the liberal international economic order – and its core pillar, the multilateral trading system – for granted, failing to recognise the fragility of that order, or the contingent and precarious nature of the US commitment to global economic institutions’. She caricatures critical political economy in the process, claiming that Panitch and Gindin (2012, no page reference given) among others argue that after the global financial crisis ‘the American empire – centred on governance institutions like the WTO – remained as strong as ever, with no real threat on the horizon’ (Hopewell 2021, 273). In fact, they argue that ‘[h]owever much global capitalism was made in the image of American capitalism, this took place in a manner that was full of contradictions, and was also always contested’, and identify as crucial ‘the internal contradiction which the American state faces in acting as both the state of the United States and the “indispensable” state of global capitalism’ (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 301, 333-4). She is right that the US resisted further liberalisation of trade under both George W. Bush and Obama, but this is hardly a ‘blind spot’, as NPE and RIPE have both published her on precisely this point (Hopewell 2013, 2015, 2019).
Gamble argues that a recurring blind spot in critical political economy is ‘the attribution of logic and rationality to long-run economic developments … but the attribution of contingency and irrationality to political trends and events’, linking this generally to a tendency to give primacy to the economic, and specifically to a failure to predict the upsurge of new forms of populism and nationalism after the global financial crisis (Gamble 2021, 283). He advocates a political economy ‘sensitive to different kinds of rationality, both political and economic, and to the contingency and bounded nature of rationality in the different practices which make up a social formation’, and identifies Marx as a major obstacle to such an approach: ‘The intellectual tradition Marx founded has shaped all subsequent schools of political economy, including liberal, realist and critical political economy. Many critical political economists acknowledge flaws in Marx’s approach, but they find it very hard in practice to abandon it’ (ibid, 284). What follows begins with a polarised contrast in which political developments are either ‘determined by prior economic events’ or ‘follow their own logic and autonomy’ (ibid, 285). Gamble then pinpoints the absence of ‘any attempt to transform the basis of the neo-liberal regime or forge a different model of capitalism’ in the wake of the global financial crisis, and a broader tendency for established parties to become unresponsive to voters, prompting the emergence of new outsider currents that may either be absorbed, or prompt a remaking of party systems. From this point, he moves to an explanation for the populist wave that would not have been out of place in International Organization: the core practices of neo-liberal regimes have included ‘the deskilling of many groups and the destruction of communities through the privatisation of state assets, marketisation of public services, and flexible labour markets’: ‘The way these processes were experienced led to a complex mix of economic grievances and cultural resentments. The loss of their self-respect, the feeling of being left behind and their voices no longer being heard, increased the number of citizens attracted to the populist nationalist movements’ (ibid, 287). In short, governing policy elites failed to respond to the crisis by changing tack, and so left space for the populist surge. At its heart the argument is that the ‘rational response to two decades of financial exuberance seemed to require the establishment of a policy regime prioritising state intervention, regulation and strategic management of the economy’, but that the ‘overwhelming urge in the western political class was to return to business as usual as soon as possible with as little disruption as could be managed to the basic structure of the political economy which had been established since the 1980s’ (ibid, 284-5). But why? The argument does not balance class identity with other forms of identity: it opts for a cultural-institutional explanation rather than one that explores the class affiliations of governing elites or the logic of capital in the context of globally competitive markets.
De Goede links the disconnection of a number of Iranian banks from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) network in 2018 to technical and political challenges of global payment that ‘date back to the eras of the slave trade and imperialism, and relate directly to the geographical and temporal horizons of the triangular Atlantic trade’, starting from the premise that IPE ‘with some notable exceptions – has a blind spot for the long-term, profoundly political, and colonial histories of financial infrastructures’ (De Goede, 352-3). She then moves to the broader argument that ‘infrastructural grids – of roads, electricity networks, payment routes – sediment historical power relations and core-periphery relations’ (ibid, 354). Infrastructures embody political rationality, she argues; they themselves have agency; and they shape and enable collectivities (ibid, 355-6). The neo- or post-colonial shaping of financial (banking) and physical (railways, ports) infrastructure was a staple theme in Latin American debates between imperial apologists and dependency theorists in the 1970s, and there is a substantial literature on the colonial origins of modern finance, as De Goede goes on to show, though she is strategically selective in her range of reference, citing Timothy Mitchell but not Claire Cutler, Paul Langley but not David Harvey, and Kai Koddenbrock but not Fred Block. The colonial roots of modern financial and other infrastructures are significant, and still visible today in the continuing building of the world market – but China’s Belt and Road Initiative suggests that the global politics of infrastructure are shifting in a way that a postcolonial perspective does not cover. De Goede is in danger of committing too rigidly to a particular theory of the historicity of political economic dynamics, and taking path-dependent change as evidence of perpetual continuity.
Turning now to the three contributions on race, Lockwood on the ‘antisemitic backlash’ to financial power is a puzzler. Its framing argument that ‘the structure (complexity, uncertainty, opacity) of financial power makes attributing responsibility for financial crises and the disruptions associated with financial innovation very difficult’, and therefore provides ‘ripe terrain for conspiracy theories [including antisemitic tropes and narratives] to flourish’ (Lockwood 2021, 262) is repeated several times in the opening pages, and eventually extended on its sixth appearance to a wider claim that ‘antisemitism is frequently directed at the consequences of financial power (rising inequality, the influence of the business community over politics, responses to crisis that prioritise capital over labor) rather than at particular financial institutions and actors’ (ibid, 265, emphasis mine). This broadening of the frame severs the argument from the historical material reviewed, which focuses more directly on ‘the Jewish moneylender’; and the only evidence presented for an antisemitic backlash to the global financial crisis and since is a reference to a widely reported statement made by Trump to the Republican Jewish Coalition (“[You]’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money … You want to control your own politicians”), and some statistics derived from surveys by the Anti-Defamation League (‘19 per cent of Americans believe that “Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street”, and 20 per cent of UK citizens, 22 per cent of German citizens, 60 per cent of Spanish citizens, and 73 per cent of Hungarians believe “Jews have too much power in the business world”’, ibid). This ‘evidence’ raises as many questions as it answers. Trump’s remark is typically crass, but it addresses lobbying, not the financial crisis, while the survey data prompts one to ask whether there is evidence of a rising trend through and after the crisis (there might be – Mell (2017, 6), from where the data are taken, comments in a footnote that estimates by the Anti-Defamation League between 2005 and 2011 ‘suggest that no more than 15 percent of the American population hold antisemitic views’), and the wide variation in assent to antisemitic tropes across the countries mentioned demands further investigation. Any level of antisemitic prejudice is to be condemned, but the analytical issue is that it is lowest in the countries centrally involved in the financial crisis. Lockwood is oblivious to this, and reverts to historical material, concluding with the thoughts that ‘we should take claims of antisemitism seriously in the first instance and be aware of the ways that particular tropes in contemporary populist rhetoric may resonate differently within different communities’, and ‘be reflective about the ways in which our own language may, quite unconsciously, reproduce pernicious tropes about the power of finance’ (Lockwood 2021, 268). Fair enough. But as she gives no evidence that authors in IPE or critical political economy have fallen short in these regards, it is hard to see what to make of this.
Singh argues, on North-South trade relations, that developing economies have improved the extent and profile of their trade only when they have taken their own steps to diversify their exports of industrial goods and services. Despite claims to the contrary, the advanced countries have not practiced ‘benevolence’ towards them, but have deployed a patronising discourse, while advocating policies they do not adopt themselves, and seeking to maximise their own gains while making as few concessions as possible. True, though not new, and better explicated elsewhere (Nunn and Price 2004; Langan and Price 2021). His evidence that this has something to do with race consists of three quotations (Singh 2021, 330), two of which don’t have anything to do with it (‘Developing countries such as Bangladesh, which recognize the importance of direct investment to their long-term economic development plans, now are taking actions to attract such investment. I hope that more countries follow the leadership Bangladesh has shown’ (US Trade representative Clayton Yeutter, 1986); and from 1992 (no source given): ‘The ATPA [Andean Trade Preferences Act] fulfils the U.S. commitment to improve access to the U.S. market for exports from the Andean nations. It is designed to help the beneficiary nations encourage their people to export legitimate products instead of illicit drugs. The United States supports the strong efforts of the Government of Ecuador to combat drug trafficking and to modernize its economy’). The third, reported in 2005, does (‘many Indian call-center workers say they regularly face particular abuse from Americans, whose tantrums are sometimes racist and often inspired by anger over outsourcing’), but has no bearing on trade relations. The conclusion confirms that Singh doesn’t have an argument:
‘The marginalization of the Global South from reciprocal international trade intensified over time, even as developing world advocacy for equality increased. Despite this marginalization, many developing countries garnered heavy trade volumes (if not reciprocal trade concessions) and became influential players in the global trading order mostly through domestic industrial or services diversification and strategic tactics at international negotiations’ (ibid, 331).
Finally in this group, Robbie Shilliam, who has path-breaking contributions elsewhere, addresses the ‘seeming paradox of neoliberal elites becoming populists’ in a narrowly focused paper that identifies Enoch Powell as Britain’s first neoliberal politician as a way into ‘a more adequate account of the contemporary relationship between racist populism and the neoliberal project’ (Shilliam 2021, 239). He certainly was a neoliberal, and a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, as Shilliam notes. But there is no paradox in populist neoliberalism. I argued this, as it happens, over two decades ago in relation to Latin America, and I was by no means the first, or the last. What matters, I thought, is the relationship of populist appeals to ‘specific conjunctural projects for the reorientation of capitalist reproduction, or models of accumulation’ (Cammack 2000, 155). In all modesty, I recommend it. To say that with Powell racist populism was a ‘formatively neoliberal project’ (Shilliam 2021, 242) is not to demonstrate a more general affinity between neoliberalism and racist populism. Powell may have been Britain’s first neoliberal, but he was not the first racist populist, and his fellows in this were not neoliberals. Shilliam’s concluding flourish: ‘Not all neoliberals are racist populists, but todays racist populists are all neoliberals – by intention or by effect’ (ibid, 247) is not a substitute for a careful comparison of the successive conjunctures in which Powell, Thatcher and Johnson respectively crafted their political appeals, nor does it address the question of when it becomes both necessary and possible to moderate a racist or nationalist element in a neoliberal appeal in order to switch the focus to increasing the level of competition in national labour markets.
III
The remaining five papers have much more to recommend them. Elisabeth Prügl offers ‘a reading of contemporary writings in Feminist Political Economy that is attuned to disrupting binaries’, to illustrate how ‘seeming opposites inhabit each other’, focused on ‘the opposition between production and reproduction’ and ‘spatial opposition between the public and the private, the state and the household’ (Prügl 2021, 296). Kate Bedford uses gambling liberalisation debates in the UK from the 1950s on and the specific case of the numbers game of chance bingo to explore ‘a different way of conceptualising political economy, where the state regulation of diverse economies is a central preoccupation’ (Bedford 2021, 250). Mathew Paterson, on climate change, addresses the challenge IPE faces in helping societies ‘understand the dynamics that will drive both whether we collapse or transform, and what sorts of transformations or collapses might unfold, with what consequences for human flourishing, inequalities, violence, power relations, and possibilities for democratic political life’ (Paterson 2021, 395). V. Spike Peterson begins with ‘the earliest state-formation processes (circa 3,500 BCE)’, and goes on to examine the ‘Eurocentric production of “race difference” in the modern era of state/nation-making, sexual/familial regulation and ideological legitimation of imperial/colonial power’ (Peterson 2021, 292). And in the most ambitious contribution, Gurminder Bhambra goes beyond the frequently asserted view that histories of capitalism fail to recognise the significance of colonialism to propose a ‘different systematic account’ on the basis of ‘a systematic consideration of colonial histories’ (Bhambra 2021, 308-9).
Prügl sets out the way in which feminist political economy challenges production/reproduction, public/private, and state/household as foundational dichotomies that are ‘thoroughly gendered, colouring the first part of the binary as masculine and the second as feminine, thereby establishing a hierarchy between them’ (Prügl 2021, 295). These are hardly blind spots, as she shows in a review of literature going back to the 1970s, but all the same her discussions of the emerging commercial care economy and the history and current significance of home working provide strong evidence that ‘the oppositions between production and reproduction, self-interest and caring, work and home, public and private’ are ‘untenable in the face of emerging practices and impracticable for imaging alternative futures’ (ibid, 302). Her concise and very useful overview insists on financialised capitalism’s ‘parasitic dependence on social reproduction and feminized care labour on the one hand, and on patriarchal household governance on the other’, when this dependence may arguably be better seen as an indication of the failure of capital yet to impose its logic fully over all social relations (Cammack 2020), but the tenor of her discussion does not rule out novel developments in these areas, such as the current revolution of home working as a consequence of COVID-19.
Bedford notes that gambling features in political economy primarily as a metaphor for risk-taking or the ‘casino’ of financial capitalism, but uses the history of legislation around bingo to focus on ‘more-than-capitalist’ economies, invoking themes of mutualism, community self-help and solidarity. Unfortunately, the editors of NPE (which unlike RIPE does not provide summaries of individual contributions) do not take up these themes, so miss the opportunity to address the heterogeneity of capitalism and its ‘regulatory interactions with other, more-than-capitalist economies’ (Bedford 2021, 251; cf. Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Bingo makes an excellent case study (it was very popular in Brackley in the 1950s, though my parents, as staunch Methodists, would have nothing to do with it), and it is a pity that the editors don’t make more of it.
Paterson’s diplomatically presented contribution turns the question of climate change as an ‘IPE blind spot’ to the argument that like many other fields it has failed to recognise either the depth of the social transformation entailed in addressing climate change adequately, or the catastrophic costs of failing to do so. He does say that IPE has ‘a set of conceptual tools’ that can help here, but adds that whether climate change leads to transformation or to collapse, it is unlikely that the ‘central theoretical and normative commitments of IPE’ will emerge unscathed (Paterson 2021, 395). He identifies a failure in much existing research to address ‘the dynamics of global political economy’, and turns to a far wider range of literature than is typically understood as ‘IPE’. As the discussion develops, ‘IPE’ shades into ‘political economy’, and the question of growth (to which with ‘a few notable exceptions, all major perspectives in IPE have a, mostly unstated but presumed, normative commitment’) shades into ‘the question of capitalism’, and its ‘fundamental institutional features – wage labor, commodity production, market competition – that create dynamics that both generate growth in a highly dynamic way, but also depend on that growth for its stability’ (ibid, 400). This requires attention to capitalism’s materialities ‘in ways that perhaps much work in IPE neglects’: IPE scholars ‘could make distinctive contributions to understanding how, for example, a rapid transition to electric vehicles will be shaped by questions of labor relations, inter-capitalist competition, intellectual property tights politics, and interstate competition, all features often neglected in existing research’ (ibid, 401-2, emphasis mine). But ‘some forms of IPE scholarship are more likely to be able to engage this research agenda than others’: ‘It needs an ontological starting point of capitalism rather than the market, in order to be able to understand dynamic forms of change, the grounding of the economy in material processes, questions of inequality and power. It needs to be able to think in terms of transformation and change rather than seeking stability’ (ibid, 402). Invoking Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capitalism (Verso, 2016) as a ‘central starting point’, Paterson clearly signals the need for a materialist/Marxist turn if IPE is to engage with the dynamics of climate change (cf. Oatley 2021, Siebert 2021). But this is not on the agenda of the editors, who present him as proposing ways forward within ‘IPE’, narrowly defined (LeBaron 2021, 291).
Peterson’s contribution is a (very) ‘condensed, very broad-stroke presentation’ (Peterson 2021, note. 1, p. 298) of decades of work, overlapping considerably with a concurrently produced article in the Review of International Studies (Peterson 2020). It traces linkages over time between ‘economic practices, racial logics and birthright citizenship regimes’, arguing that successful early state-making entailed ‘an unprecedented scale of slavery, coercion, regulation, and rigidification of hierarchical rule’ (Peterson 2021, 292), and attaching particular importance to intergenerational continuity and inheritance, and the ‘family’ as a nexus of power:
‘I emphasise here what conventional definitions assume but rarely make explicit: that intergenerational continuity is what state success is based on and marked by. While state theorists (implicitly) accept that intergenerational continuity is the register of state success, few seriously investigate the implications of this for regulating either sexual reproduction or the (inheritable) transmission of property and social/political status claims, including citizenship. Fewer still take seriously how the significance of inheritance and intergenerational continuity renders sexual/marital/kinship relations (henceforth, “family” in scare quotes) a focal – indeed indispensable and structural – nexus of power relations. In other words, all states have a stake in regulating who counts as “family” and how “family”/household units support the requisites of biological, socio-cultural and political economic reproduction. … In short, the requisites of state-making success constitute structurally intersecting inequalities of sex/gender, “class”, and Insider-Outsider’ (ibid, 292-3).
Peterson suggests that ‘these inequalities are not separate or coincidental developments but constitutively intersecting as the state’s definitive stratifications’: ‘Methodologically, this dynamic co-production means that in a world order based on states/nations, “economic” inequalities are never simply that but always – though variously and complexly – shaping and shaped by sex/gender and Insider-Outsider inequalities. Analytically, “seeing” this constitutive intersectionality is key to illuminating and more adequately understanding the production of inequalities in modern state/nation formation, the subsequent trajectory of within- and between-nation inequalities, and the effects of racialised inequalities in current crises’ (ibid: 293); and ‘postcolonial, decolonial, critical race and feminist studies make visible the manifold and interactive ways in which brutal practices, orchestrated violence, racialisation and sexual politics were constitutive of Europe’s colonial state-making practices and the emerging state-based world order’ (ibid). What follows is a compelling account of the way birthright citizenship and racial logics shape structural inequalities across the global economy, and one that gains impact from its short and synthetic nature. It should not be missed, either in this or the 2020 version. Peterson argues that capitalism is still served well by modernity’s relatively nucleated and “private” heteropatriarchal family/households, which I think is questionable (Cammack, 2020). But her broader argument that an idealised model of marriage that ‘signalled “white”/European superiority: heteronormative, patriarchal, monogamous, Christian matrimony and unequivocally “respectable” (read: civilised) sexual/family relations’ (ibid: 294) was used to racialise non-European populations as inferior still stands. Similarly, the negative implications of inheritance for both property and citizenship are brilliantly addressed. But the question remains: is this state of affairs required for the continued development of capitalism on a global scale, or has it rather become a fetter on such development?
Bhambra’s equally compressed presentation of an alternative framing of the history of capitalism is also essential reading. It has limitations that arise from its selective use of Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) as its interlocutor. But this should not detract from the merits of the model advanced, which should be judged on its own terms. It proposes four stages: colonialism through private property; state-managed colonialism, also known as empire; the (racialized) amelioration of labour exploitation; and neoliberalism and authoritarian populism. You don’t have to agree with the central role given to colonialism or accept the dismissal of Marx’s primary focus on the capital-labour relation to appreciate the significance of what is a radical proposal that explicitly rejects the notion of any ‘logic’ of capital theoretically separable from its specific history. Quite wrong, I would say, but this is not the place for an extended critique. In the first stage, the world is ‘produced’ for capitalism through ‘the colonial processes of appropriation, possession, enslavement and extraction’, and the second consists of ‘the establishment of empire as a national project’ (ibid, 311): leading European nations and the United States are characterised, generalising from Baker (2009), not as nations that happen to have empires, but as imperial states. Bhambra overlooks Baker’s main point – that after the Second World War Britain (his sole focus) deliberately abandoned its empire – in effect in order to become a colony of the United States (as it happens, a development that is germane to the politics of Enoch Powell too). And she notes from Sainty (1975) that ‘the reorganization of the remit of the Secretaries of State in the late eighteenth century in Britain … located responsibility for the colonies within the Home Office, that is, under the remit of the domestic and not of foreign affairs’ (Bhambra 2021, 313), but does not mention that in 1968 ‘the Colonial Office was wrapped into the Commonwealth Relations Office, and the Commonwealth Relations Office became a division of the Foreign Office (Baker 2009, 707). Equally, a key component of the overall model – the drain of resources from India – disappears in the wake of independence, and the focus shifts as we near the present to ‘the ways in which race comes to be foundational to capitalism as a consequence of the centrality of colonial processes to its emergence and development’ (Bhambra 2021, 320). I doubt if the demise of the welfare state can be shown to be a consequence of the pressure on previously racially circumscribed systems from racialized others from former colonial dependencies rather than of greatly increased levels of competitiveness in global capitalism, principally because the advanced capitalist states – not least the present and past members of the European Union – have been regrettably effective in denying access to others. The case would actually be stronger if even greater reductions in the provision of ‘welfare’ than have been experienced had been introduced in tandem with massively increased immigration and admittance to citizenship, except that this it also what a Marxist ‘logic of capital’ approach would expect. It will happen if the leading advocates of global competitiveness in all markets, the OECD and the World Bank, have their way (Cammack, forthcoming 2022). All the same, Bhambra’s proposal, generalising from the ‘other side of the debate’ across the whole period of the history of capitalism, is precisely the kind of contribution that is necessary if relations between colonialism, nationalism, race and capitalism are to be re-imagined.
IV
Where do we go from here then? There is a path not taken, hidden in plain sight, and glimpsed when RIPE comments that common modes of enquiry ‘rarely heed how … proper “labor markets”, of the kind political economists often study, [have] been predicated on social reproduction, unremunerated female labor, or unfree labor overwhelmingly performed by racialized and migrant workers, from the start’ (LeBaron 2021, 285). This in turn leads us to the 2018 issue of NPE on raced markets, and simultaneously suggests a need to broaden its agenda. The suggestions there that ‘race must be apprehended as a mode of classifying, ordering, creating and destroying people, labour power, land, environment and capital’, and that race even precedes class in assembling all the elements that Marx would come to call the “world market”’ (Tilley and Shilliam 2018, 537) provide a starting point. Labour markets, simultaneously local, national and global, are privileged loci for the investigation of capitalist accumulation in the context of the varying intersections of race, gender and citizenship across diverse societies in an increasingly integrated world market, and changes in their relative role and significance over space and time. A further step back in time to the Review of International Political Economy, 17, 5, 2010 and the full set of papers around the issue of social reproduction across the world market that it contains, followed by a return to the five papers highlighted in the previous section, might suggest that there is a way forward, albeit one that in all important respects leads away from anything recognisable as ‘IPE’.
References and Further Reading
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