Critical international political economy

Resumo: Recentes alterações nos processos produtivos parecem indicar a emergência de um novo paradigma industrial que vem sendo denominado de 4ª revolução industrial ou "Indústria 4.0" e cuja relevância transparece no fato de que governos, tanto de países do centro da economia-mundo como de outros que buscam se aproximar desse núcleo, lançaram planos estratégicos e implantaram políticas públicas para a inserção ativa de seus estados e empresas nacionais nesse novo contexto produtivo. O objetivo deste artigo é fundamentar a hipótese de que por não ter conseguido acompanhar as inovações industriais que vem ocorrendo desde os anos 1980, o Brasil encontra-se despreparado para acompanhar o emergente paradigma produtivo, já que o Brasil nem mesmo ingressou na indústria 3.0 (microeletrônica), que emergiu na década de 1970. Este despreparo ou debilidade estrutural será evidenciado através do comportamento de quatro dimensões da economia brasileira: estrutura produtiva, padrão de comércio exterior, políticas industriais recentes e sistema de ciência, tecnologia e inovação. A conclusão a que chegamos é que a falta de reação frente à Indústria 4.0 é um forte sinal de que a posição semiperiférica pode estar sendo ameaçada. Palavras-Chave Brasil; indústria 4.0; semiperiferia; ciência, tecnologia e inovação.
Abstract: Recent changes in production processes seem to indicate the emergence of a new industrial paradigm that has been called the 4th. industrial revolution or "Industry 4.0". The relevance of these changes is reflected in the fact that governments of both core countries of the world economy and others that seek to approach this nucleus have launched strategic plans and implemented public policies aimed to insert of their states and companies nationals in this new productive context. The purpose of this article is to substantiate the hypothesis that because it has not been able to keep up with industry 3.0 (microelectronics), which emerged in the 1970s, Brazil is unprepared to follow the emerging productive paradigm. The structural weakness will be evidenced through the behavior of four dimensions of the Brazilian economy: productive structure, foreign trade pattern, recent industrial policies and science, technology and innovation system. The conclusion we reached is that the lack of reaction to Industry 4.0 is a strong sign that the semi-peripheral position may be under threat. Keywords Brazil; Industry 4.0;
semiperiphery; Science, Technology and Innovation.

This book investigates the role of banking interest groups and lobbying in the making of the European Banking Union. Facing the politicization of financial regulation in the wake of the crisis, core players of the European banking industry managed to adapt and re-orient their lobbying resources and strategies to influence the reform process. This work advances an original Critical IPE approach, which combines structural power, the collective agency of key socio-economic groups and the issue salience as critical determinants to explain corporate influence in policy-making. The explanatory framework is applied to a comprehensive analysis, tracing the Banking Union’s development within the broader context of the EU post-crisis banking regulation. An in-depth scrutiny of the interest groups’ preferences, coalitions and attainments is thus provided on the pillars of the Banking Union, covering banking supervision, resolution, deposit insurance, as well as the reform of the banks’ prudential requirements and the failed project of an EU banking structural reform.

The coronavirus pandemic helped temporarily slow populism’s rise and relieve the pressure on status quo politics, contributing to Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race. However, Donald Trump’s legacy goes beyond his White House occupancy. Trumpism – and national populism more generally – is an expression of the existential crisis of contemporary capitalism. A second national-populist wave and a potentially even worse version of Trumpism is inevitable if – lured by centrism and blocked by obstructing Republicans – Biden’s administration does not fix underlying social tensions and economic dislocations. Sociology can aid politics in this effort. However, one specific sign of capitalism’s existential crisis has so far escaped most sociologists’ attention: workers’ declining life expectancy in deindustrialized, Rust Belt areas and the accompanying deepening of health inequalities.

Este curso visa examinar os problemas do regionalismo latino-americano no início deste século, com ênfase na experiência da União de Nações Sul-Americanas (UNASUL). A partir do exame das principais perspectivas críticas e heterodoxas internacionais e latino-americanas elaboradas nas últimas décadas, a questão da construção regional e do regionalismo na América do Sul será abordada através dos enfoques da Economia Política Global e da Sociologia Macro-histórica, isto é, uma abordagem multidisciplinar. Desta forma, além de revisar alguns dos principais estudos teóricos e empíricos desenvolvidos sobre a UNASUL, tanto gerais quanto específicos sobre as áreas mais relevantes de atividade do organismo sul-americano, será traçada uma interpretação da ascensão e declínio prematuro desta organização, enquadrando-a no âmbito de uma perspectiva histórica mundial de longa duração que tem na problematização da região “América Latina” e “América do Sul” seu fio condutor.

O curso está dividido em três blocos:

• Perspectivas e métodos para o estudo crítico das regiões e dos regionalismos numa época de caos sistêmico.

• O labirinto latino-americano na longa duração: formação e desenvolvimento de uma região mundial periférica.

• Ascensão e declínio do regionalismo pós-hegemônico. Seguindo os passos da UNASUL...

In this paper I am going to introduce two of the main authors of the Neo-Trotskyist scholarship, Justin Rosenberg and Neil Davidson. I will begin by pointing out the main characteristics of the concept of Uneven and Combined Development, as well as a summary of Justin Rosenberg´s and Neil Davidson´s articles. These authors agree on the general conceptualizations of Uneven and Combined development (U&CD from now on) that Leon Trotsky defined in his work The History of the Russian Revolution. However, these two authors have strong disagreements on the historical application of such a concept as it will be shown below. Besides showing the existing disagreements between both authors, I will provide historical data that justifies Justin Rosenberg´s stance on the historical application of Neo-Trotskyism.

The theory of capital as power (CasP) is radically different from conventional political economy.

In the conventional view, mainstream as well as heterodox, capital is seen a ‘real’ economic entity engaged in the production of goods and services, and capitalism is thought of as a mode of production and consumption. Finance in this approach is either a mere reflection/lubricant of the real economy (the mainstream view), or a parasitic fiction (the heterodox perspective).

CasP rejects this framework. Capital, it argues, is not a productive economic entity, but a symbolic representation of organized societal power writ large, and capitalism should be analysed not as a mode of production and consumption, but as a mode of power. In this approach, finance is neither a reflection nor a fiction, but the symbolic language that organizes and creorders – or creates the order of – capitalized power.

These are foundational claims. They go to the very heart of political economy, and they have far-reaching implications. So far-reaching, in fact, that if we accept them, we must rewrite, often from scratch, much of the theory, history and possible futures of the capitalist order.

Many have complained about CasP being aloof. Our approach, they have argued, insists on being ‘right’ – to the exclusion of all others. It shows no interest in ‘building bridges’. It dismisses neoclassical liberalism altogether, and although sometimes sympathetic to Marx, it aims not to revise Marxism, but to discard it altogether.

In this research note – excerpted and revised from our 2020 invited-then-rejected interview with Revue de la regulation – we explain the basis for these complaints and why CasP and conventional political economy cannot be easily bridged. Stated briefly, the problem is not unwillingness but built-in barriers. As it stands, political economy cannot accept capital as power. Its very foundations prevent it from doing so.

From their independences to their early 21st century, the Myth of Inevitable Prosperity has characterized Latin American countries due to their natural resources’ abundance. Since Prosperity has not been achieved and LAC countries remain in the condition of subordinated periphery to the Global North, there has been a long debate about the economic and political limits to capitalist development in the region.
This problem has been mainly analysed without taking into account the articulation between the economic and political limits for development, associated with the ruling classes and their relations with the State. Both liberal and the reformist/structuralist approaches provide limited answers for understanding the region’s development status, since they do not articulate the interests of the ruling classes, the role of the State, and regional capital accumulation (one of its main elements being exports based on natural resources).
Therefore, this text aims to identify and analyse the economic (external constraint and productive structure) and political limits (configuration of class fractions in the power bloc and the role played by the State) for capitalist development in Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century, in the context of the rise of China and US hegemony.
For this purpose, a political economic analysis is carried out, on both the balance of payments and the GDP dynamics, to identify which fractions are leading the power bloc in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil (BCAB); and to evaluate its impact on shaping public policy. The originality of this work lies in the use of the balance of payments (BOP) constraint articulated with the Poulantzian power bloc (“empirical” identification of class fractions) and the possibility of relative autonomy for the State and its public policies in a specific historical context.
Then, this research, divided into three parts, is guided by the following questions: (i) How does the global dynamic interact and allow or block capital accumulation in the region? What role do Latin American states play? (ii) How is capital accumulated in the region? What is the role played by the State? Which capitalist fractions in the power bloc lead this process? And, (iii) how does this accumulation dynamic affect the subaltern classes’ insertion in the labour market?
These questions are intended to be answered throughout this document taking into account the segmentation of time and geography and the connection between economics and politics.

The paper investigates the Italian institutional adaptation to Neoliberalism and contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we analyse Italian and international political economy developments since the late 1960s, employing a historical institutionalist approach, sequencing the shift from the ‘roll back’ of Fordism to the ‘roll out’ of neoliberalism. In doing so, we connect the long-standing relevance and re-emergence of neoliberal ideas among technocratic elites and major political parties to the progressive building up of a neoliberal turn in 1992. Second, we develop the notion of selective neoliberalism, defined as a modality of institutional adaptation to neoliberalism which starts from the margins after the 1992 critical juncture, hitting first weak social groups through a dualization process, and then expanding to the rest of society in the form of liberalisation. We illustrate how successive governments circumvented the resistance of trade unions and completed the process of neoliberal adaptation over time, through an analysis of labour market and pension reform processes. The notion of selective neoliberalism might be applied to other countries and policy domains, in particular where an incremental reform process undermines step-by-step the resistance of different veto players to neoliberalization.

This piece is a summary description of a forthcoming book titled 'Ethiopia: From Revolutionary Democracy to Prosperity. The book documents on the essential constructs of Ethiopian society in the period between 1991-2020. The focal point of narratives is to understand the dynamics in political, macroeconomic, socioeconomic, diplomatic, demographic elements in Ethiopia from local and global perspectives. The book would be an important document to those who are interested to have a comprehensive account on Ethiopia in the last three decades in particular

Until the late 2000s, our work focused primarily on why capitalism should be understood as a mode of power. We argued that capital itself is a form of organized power and researched how capitalists sustain, defend and augment their capitalized power. We called our approach ‘capital as power’ – or CasP, for short. But that’s only one side of the picture. Power is never unbounded. It is always resisted, opposed and constrained by those on whom it is imposed. And so, in the early 2010s, we started to examine more closely the limits of capitalized power and of the capitalist mode of power more generally. We called this research ‘the asymptotes of power’. In this paper, we revisit and update some of our work on these asymptotes in the United States and think about what they might mean for the future.

This book addresses the implications of current thinking on precarity, precariousness and the precariat for the study of International Relations and International Political Economy. Drawing on a broad range of critical theoretical resources including literatures on aesthetics and psychoanalysis as well as feminist, Foucauldian, Marxian and postcolonial social theory, it explores the implications of precarity thought for three concepts: Sovereignty, Solidarities and Work in International Relations. Does precarity re-inscribe or undermine the logic and practices of sovereignty? As a common condition and point of mobilization, does precarity represent a new labor activism or does it find ethical grounds for solidarities that destabilize identities? How is precarity located, practiced and occluded in work relations? Running counter to the contemporary impulse to grasp precarity and processes of its proliferation in homogenized terms as either being ensconced in national imaginaries, or as ushering in a condition of global precarity and a global precariat class, the book also underscores the entanglements of the global, national and local in the discursive and material production of precarity and precariousness in the present conjuncture.

Critical political economists on the Left regard the 2008 Global Financial Crisis as a symptom of long-term structural issues threatening global capitalist reproduction. Building on that view, a number of studies have argued that global capitalism will collapse in the coming decades. The three key structural issues they identify are: (1) mass technological unemployment of middle-class workers, (2) low growth and economic stagnation in advanced economies leading to global economic breakdown, and (3) declining Western growth and consumption cannot be offset by growth in China and Asia more broadly, thus leading to a breakdown of the global system. This article challenges each of these arguments on the grounds that they are theoretically flawed and empirically ungrounded. Key issues include a failure to adequately account for the role of global capitalist variation in driving growth and innovation, and an invalid representative model of global economic evolution based on trends in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Based on theoretical considerations concerning the state's role in generating institutional diversity, and in light of identified empirical trends concerning global growth and employment, I argue that the global political economy is in more robust condition than critics suggest.