Why do so many people who claim to 鈥渟ee the whole system鈥� remain blind to power?

This question struck me while listening to a recent episode of Planet Critical. The guest was Joseph Tainter, best known for The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter is celebrated as a pioneer of collapse studies and systems thinking. Yet when the conversation turned to the genocide in Gaza, his framing reduced it to Israel鈥檚 鈥渉istorical fear of Arabs.鈥� The structural realities of colonialism, imperialism, and resource politics 鈥� central to understanding both Gaza and the Middle East more broadly 鈥� disappeared. Here was a thinker revered for complexity, offering an analysis that was Eurocentric, ahistorical, and politically na茂ve.

This is not about Tainter alone. Similar patterns appear in the work of figures like Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger, both of whom have influenced me personally. Their mission is helping people make sense of the complex issues: Nate by weaving ecology, energy, financial systems and human behavior into accessible frameworks; Daniel by building sweeping syntheses across cognitive science, culture, and existential risk.

The often criticise most disciplines for their blindness. But their critique of blindness has its own blindness. Across their work, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and class power rarely appear as sustained focal points. Yes, Daniel sometimes critiques modernity and gestures toward indigenous knowledge, and Nate occasionally hosts guests who reference colonial history. But overall, the crisis is cast as a species-level problem 鈥� as though 鈥渉umanity鈥� collectively overshoots limits 鈥� rather than as the outcome of specific, historically rooted systems of exploitation with identifiable beneficiaries and victims.

A Larger Pattern

And this is not just about three individuals. They exemplify a broader tendency in the systems thinking and complexity science intelligentsia, especially in the Global North over the past half-century:

• Neutral meta-framing 鈥� presenting systems theory as above politics, which in practice avoids confronting entrenched power.
• Universalist problem definitions 鈥� describing crises as 鈥渉uman鈥� or 鈥渃ivilizational,鈥� obscuring vast inequalities in responsibility and vulnerability.
• Institutional safety 鈥� work that fits comfortably within universities, think tanks, or even corporate boardrooms, where radical critique is unwelcome. Systems thinking has become a staple of business schools.
• Selective canons and guest lists 鈥� political economists and sociologists are rarely invited into the conversation, despite the centrality of their disciplines to systemic change.

Even the Club of Rome鈥檚 Limits to Growth 鈥� groundbreaking in modeling planetary boundaries 鈥� exemplified this pattern: technocratic in tone, light on political economy, and silent on power. Many newer frameworks, like Doughnut Economics, while valuable as communicative tools, can replicate the same blind spots when applied in mainstream policy or corporate contexts without a critical power analysis.

This pattern has been noted by others (see Farwa Sial and Guney Isikara), including critiques of the 鈥減olycrisis鈥� framing itself, which warn that it risks flattening distinct crises into a vague meta-narrative that sidelines capitalism鈥檚 role as the structuring force behind them.

What鈥檚 Missing

In my view, at least two key layers are consistently underdeveloped in mainstream systems analysis.

1. Political Economy
Both Hagens and Schmachtenberger sometimes reference Marvin Harris鈥� cultural materialism, which builds on the Marxist base鈥搒uperstructure model. Harris divides societies into three layers: infrastructure (material and economic base), structure (social and political organization), and superstructure (ideology and culture).

In this framework, the infrastructure is precisely where political economy belongs 鈥� not in a narrow reductionist sense, but as the deep motor of systemic dynamics. Here historical materialism, dependency theory, world-systems theory, and the historical forms of capitalism鈥搃mperialism must be engaged.

What鈥檚 striking is that if you trace any strand of the polycrisis downward, you hit the same roots: exploitation and expropriation, concentration of power, accumulation of capital, and systems of unequal exchange within and between the Global North and South. These dynamics have been rigorously analyzed for generations within heterodox political economy.

So how can systems thinkers discuss polarization and anxiety in the attention economy without naming these forces? How can they map ecological overshoot without addressing the capital鈥搉ature contradiction? How can they talk about wars without situating them in the machinery of empire? If your framework claims to operate across layers but sidesteps these traditions, you are not mapping the system 鈥� you are mapping around it.

2. Sociology
A second blind spot lies in the leap from psychology to planetary scale. Most of these thinkers jump from individual behavior and neuroscience directly to global civilization, skipping over the ways societies shape human subjectivity. The result is an essentialist and ahistorical story of 鈥渉uman nature,鈥� as though competitive and extractive behavior were timeless traits rather than products of specific social and economic arrangements.

Sociology offers a crucial counterpoint: our subjectivities are formed historically, collectively, and institutionally. To ignore this is to miss how power reproduces itself not only in structures and infrastructures, but in the very ways we see ourselves and others.

Politicising The System Thinking

Leaving out political economy and sociology produces an analysis that may look comprehensive 鈥� rich in data, patterns, and correlations 鈥� but remains incomplete and non-transformative. As Callum Cant has , this kind of analysis lingers at the level of symptoms, describing overlapping crises without tracing them to structural roots. It often treats data as neutral and universal, overlooking how knowledge itself is shaped by power. The risk is that systems thinking, in trying to describe 鈥渢he whole,鈥� ends up naturalizing the current order, offering solutions that stabilize rather than challenge the relations of production.

If systems thinking is to fulfill its emancipatory potential, its lens must widen. Biophysical limits, cultural narratives, and human psychology must be placed in dialectical relation to the structural realities of power: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, class, and social formation at both national and international scales.

Only then can our analysis become both diagnostically complete and strategically transformative 鈥� able not just to map the mess, but to chart a way out of it. Otherwise, we risk becoming ever more sophisticated in describing the problem while still orbiting within the gravitational pull of the very system we claim to oppose.

Mohsen Anvaari聽has a PhD in IT from NTNU and is an IT consultant, photographer and activist based in Oslo. He explores the politics of digitalization, degrowth, and environmental justice.

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

The collection challenges 鈥渢he continued hegemony of neoliberalism in policymaking in Africa鈥� (Hormeku-Ajei et al. , 4). The introduction notes the amnesia about how early post-independence leaders tried to secure the 鈥渘ewly-won freedom of their countries through policies that were designed 鈥� to promote autonomous development processes anchored on the demands and needs of a home market鈥� (1). Nyerere, for example, rebuked the IFIs when they accused him of failure, noting that at independence 85% of Tanzania was illiterate and they had just two trained engineers and 12 medical doctors 鈥� after 43 years of British colonial rule. Under Nyerere, Tanzania ensured 91% literacy, that all children were in school and that per capita income grew dramatically. After reluctantly accepting IFI diktats, key social and economic indices plummeted. In discrediting the first 20 years of autonomous and autochthonous African post-independence development policy and strategy, the IFIs provided a narrative to justify what became the ruinous years of structural adjustment. While the heart of the neoliberal project is to discredit African strategy and practice, this collection highlights that the idea of African post-independence failure was manufactured and 鈥渄eliberately misleading鈥� (2).

The 铿乺st 20 years of post-independence Africa had promise and were in铿倁ential in trying to reverse the colonial inheritance: African, mostly radical, leaders were often successful, even if for a brief period of time, in addressing political and economic fragmentation (especially reliance on primary commodity exports). The authors of this collection explore how several African leaders recognised their country鈥檚 subordinate position in the global system and understood the importance of assembling African agency to address and change that relationship. A unifying theme in the collection is that 鈥淸d]ecolonisation across Africa brought about historical changes; it was a moment of solidarity, optimism, and radical rethinking of political and economic systems鈥� (Salem , 160). Contemporary rearticulation of colonial relationships has reproduced the problem of earlier independence leaders, who sought to reduce dependence upon former colonial powers by promoting nation building, industrialisation, economic and agricultural diversi铿乧ation, pan-Africanism, and the development of a new economic order. 

Jimi Adesina examines the pan-African agenda, reviewing variations and similarities of Senghor, Nyerere, and Nkrumah in their approaches to socialism, pan-African unity, nationhood, economic development, epistemology and democracy. In their different ways, the three African leaders each tried to develop, coordinate, and mobilise the full range of domestic resources to reduce dependence on external interests and maintain sovereignty. Adesina emphasizes the crucial Nyerere leitmotif 鈥渦nity鈥� (49) and obstacles to it, including the variable capacity across the continent to challenge imperialism. He highlights the importance of not reifying African leaders, the 鈥渄iversity of postcolonial imaginations鈥� (52), and that, quoting Nyerere, 鈥渢he sin of despair would be the most unforgivable鈥� (54). But so too would be an optimism that is not grounded in analysis of existing radical social forces and the power of imperialism. Unless imperialism is understood and challenged, new agendas for pan-Africanism, sovereign national projects, and policy autonomy will wither on the proverbial vine.

Kareem Megahed and Omar Ghannam review Nasser鈥檚 attempt to industrialise Egypt鈥檚 economy as a way of challenging imperial interests. They argue that, while new incumbents of the Nasserist state often used words like 鈥榮ocialism鈥� and 鈥榩lanning鈥�, they 鈥渄id not actually, as is commonly believed, implement a central planning nor a socialist approach鈥� (67). Nasser鈥檚 land reform and new tenancy laws transformed large sections of rural Egypt while leaving the property, rights, power, and influence of old feudal elites intact. Megahed and Ghannam provide a useful re铿俥ction on the external and internal limitations of Nasser鈥檚 postcolonial project, noting the inherited restricted industrial base and the need for increased investment. Their biggest critique is that Nasser 鈥渁ttempted to give workers a measure of economic freedom and progress without giving them the political means to protect these very gains鈥� (89). One of the reasons why the project fell apart, despite gains in productivity and improvement in the well-being of the poor, 鈥渨as the lagging of democratic workers鈥� representation, which allowed the project to be hijacked鈥� by imperial powers (92). 

Akua Britwum draws attention to the under-researched importance of agricultural transformation in challenging uneven incorporation into global capitalism and plotting a strategy for sovereignty. She explores this topic through the cases of Ghana and Tanzania, reminding readers of the key strategic potential of the state in production, distribution and employment creation. Britwum draws important connections to contemporary African development constraints, noting how the absence of sovereignty continues and is evident in the 鈥渇ailure to fully de-link national economies from the global capitalist political economy that had positioned African countries as primary producers鈥� (128). This means that dependence on 鈥渆arnings from cash crop exports to 铿乶ance development expenditure鈥� (128) remains, limiting any in铿倁ence the state might be able to exert over productive resources. Britwum is scathing about the failure of independence to reduce patriarchy and the development plans鈥� failure to recognise that gendered strati铿乧ation is 鈥渋nimical to national development鈥� (133). However, she makes clear that there are positive lessons for development planning from the Ghanaian and Tanzanian experiences, such as 鈥渢heir sturdy ideological focus that led them to prioritise domestic needs鈥�; the state鈥檚 role as a 鈥減rincipal economic actor鈥�; and their focus on agriculture (130). Nkrumah and Nyerere鈥檚 imperatives of African socialism provided an important, although not long lasting, 鈥渋deological grounding in the imperative for African socialism鈥� (131).

Cha铿乲 Ben Rouine reminds us of before neoliberalism, when countries鈥� central banks helped mobilise resources to facilitate post-independence agrarian reforms and industrial strategy. Ben Rouine highlights the historical success of Tunisia鈥檚 central bank in mobilising, controlling, and channeling credit to the needs of the national economy. He notes how the 1960s was a period when the state tried to develop a vision of decolonisation and self-centred development, though it ultimately floundered due to 鈥渢rust in external 铿乶ancial support, an overly centralised bureaucracy鈥� that did not understand the speci铿乧ity of Tunisian agriculture, and 鈥渁 vision of development too focused on the West鈥� (156). Tunisia鈥檚 limited but important attempt at greater autonomy from the world capitalist system ended after structural adjustment began in 1986 and neoliberalism destroyed central bank independence.

The volume is tied together by Sara Salem鈥檚 contribution on radical regionalism, feminism, sovereignty and the pan-African project. She argues that sovereignty in the immediate post-independence period was seen as a regional, pan-African, internationalist project of decolonisation.  Salem highlights the role that African feminists had in shaping policy that challenged colonial structures of global capital, including policies of industrialisation and nationalisation to promote independent development. She shows the important role that 鈥渞egionalism鈥� played in this, which for Salem refers to 鈥渢he Third Worldist belief in various decolonised regions coming together to confront colonial capitalism鈥� and is part of emerging pan-Africanism (160鈥�161). Salem鈥檚 analysis pushes contemporary pan-Africanism to explore 鈥渞adical regionalism鈥� and feminist contributions to 鈥渃onceptualise agency and sovereignty and incorporate gender into debates around African independence鈥� (162). 

The lessons in this collection apply to understanding the constraints and opportunities for meaningful African sovereignty in the twenty-铿乺st century. They are salutary and somewhat depressing, re铿俥cting on the ways in which attempts at autonomous postcolonial development were knocked back by the forces of imperialism. Yet they also provide the tools for understanding and confronting contemporary imperialism, reminding us of the need to interrogate the mantras of the IFIs and the triad of the US, EU and Japan. 

Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds and Briefings and Debates Editor of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).

* A more detailed version of this review is available as: Bush, R. (2023). ‘Africa Development’, Review of African Political Economy, 50(175), pp. 138-142. DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2023.2240674.

** Post-Colonialisms Today (PCT) is a research and advocacy project housed at and led by African activist-intellectuals recovering progressive policies from early post-independence Africa, and mobilizing them through a feminist lens to address contemporary challenges.  PCT released a special issue in the Africa Development journal () in 2022.

Photo of Nyerere’s statue in Dodoma by .

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

It was precisely this separation, which at the dawn of post-communist transformation, tended to align democratization not with leveling erstwhile power and wealth disparities, but with by the lingering elements of Soviet bureaucracy. Conceived in this way, democratization was deemed to be an engine of market reforms. Insofar as much of the 鈥渢ransitology鈥� scholarship operated with a parochial 鈥渄emocracy鈥� versus 鈥渁uthoritarianism鈥� dichotomy, it repeatedly obscured authoritarian tendencies in consolidating democratic systems.

In the recently published article , I argue that the corpus on 鈥渁uthoritarian neoliberalism鈥� is well-positioned to instigate a much-needed departure from this externalization of 鈥減olitical鈥� and 鈥渟ocioeconomic鈥� spheres when revisiting the intricacies of post-communist transformation in general and monetary reforms in the Baltic states in particular.

Bents of Authoritarianism and Baltic Exchange-Rate Regimes

As is well known, the unearths the manifestations of authoritarianism in the processes related to the reconfiguration of state and institutional power to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent. This focus on the technocratic forms of authoritarianism 鈥� where the presence of democratic institutions in part camouflages the practices associated with the removal of key decision-making areas from popular control 鈥� has helped scholars dissect .

While the propensity to substitute the forms of elusive compromise between capital and labor for an outright exclusion and marginalization of the latter has been particularly evident since the onset of the 2007-2008 global economic and financial crisis, the displays of authoritarian bents in the practices of neoliberal governance are, of course, not a recent phenomenon. Yet, this acknowledgement does not warrant the dismissal of the notion as such. On the contrary, if deployed as an 鈥渋nvestigative prism鈥�, authoritarian neoliberalism can be productively used to study earlier periods of restructuring that reveal a variety of disciplinary strategies to promote state interventions geared at 鈥渆mancipating鈥� the market.

One such case study is the construction of monetary orders in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Institutionalized during the Baltic states鈥� departures from the Rouble zone, those monetary orders were predicated on currency board arrangements (CBAs) and aimed to combat inflation through a foreign exchange anchor that subordinated economic policies to the priority of exchange rate stability and a steady inflow of capital. In the article, I argue that the scaffolding of CBA-based monetary regimes amounted to the political project based on the necessities to safeguard the implementation of currency and monetary reforms from public contestation and input, delegate policymaking to technocratic preferences and invoke moralization about capitalism as a legitimizing device.

Focused on curbing inflation and eliminating fiscal deficits, the post-communist 鈥渟tabilization reforms鈥� were an integral component in the Shock therapy framework. The state had to introduce mechanisms allowing prices to reach their equilibrium values, impose a hard budget constraint, promote private ownership, establish a steady exchange rate and efficient monetary authority, initiate banking sector reforms, and dismantle intra-Soviet trade by securing European Community free trade agreements. In the Baltic states, these tasks had to be accomplished amid widespread disruptions in trade and finances, loss of export markets, and dysfunctional payment systems due to their intent to exit the Rouble zone and introduce their own national currency units.

Originating in the British colonial trade policies in , currency boards denote an extreme version of a pegged exchange rate regime. They establish a fixed peg to a foreign anchor currency and mandate an unlimited and unconditional conversion of national currency into foreign 鈥渞eserve currency鈥�. This arrangement is underpinned by the requirement that the central bank鈥檚 holdings of foreign-exchange reserves be equivalent to the domestic components of a respective state鈥檚 monetary base. Suchlike fixed exchange rate regimes were a rarity in the post-communist orbit, with CBAs introduced only in and .

On a general plane, Baltic CBAs attested to the basic prerequisites for a neoliberal modality of regulating capitalist social relations of production and exchange. In the eyes of state managers, 鈥減olitical consensus鈥� amounted to a form of 鈥渢imid democratization鈥� and the launch of reforms had to coincide with the Schmittian 鈥減eriod of extraordinary politics鈥�. Democracy was thus enveloped in a euphemism for sophisticated forms of authoritarianism.

Trajectories of Monetary Restructuring in Estonia and Latvia

The article identifies the authoritarian bents in state-driven monetary restructuring in the mandates for planning, executing, and concluding 鈥渟tabilization reforms鈥� given to Estonia鈥檚 Monetary Reform Committee (MRC), Lithuania鈥檚 Litas Committee (LC), and Latvia鈥檚 Currency Reform Committee (CRC) in March 1991, November 1991, and May 1992, respectively. These state entities were comprised of three individuals (typically including the Prime Minister, the Governor of the Central Bank, and an 鈥渋ndependent鈥� advisor) and worked to prevent the Baltic Supreme Councils (parliaments) from overseeing reform trajectories.

In Estonia and Latvia, the three-member conclaves had the power to issue decrees, considered to have the same status as parliamentary decisions regarding any reform-related issue. They could determine the time of monetary reform and policies related to taxes, debt, securities, pensions, wages, and foreign trade. For example, even if the law on the CRC鈥檚 establishment obligated the latter to report to Latvia鈥檚 Supreme Council, Committee鈥檚 resolutions were legally binding. There was even a mechanism to overturn the legislative acts in place.

Insulated from parliamentary control, the MRC in Estonia and the CRC in Latvia could present inflation targeting as a panacea of restructuring and a value-free policy objective. The moralizing rhetoric about the necessity of reform was deployed to conceal its social costs. For the governor of the BoE, Kallas, 鈥渙rdinary people鈥檚 discontent and disappointment鈥� were the barriers in 鈥淓stonia鈥檚 struggle for democracy and independence鈥�. Thus, the success of monetary reform necessitated a 鈥渂reak with the socialist values鈥� of distribution and equalization to be achieved through a hard-fought 鈥渘ational struggle鈥�.

The opposition to the reform course was eradicated in part through the adoption of , passed in February 1992 and July 1994. These laws rendered a significant portion of Estonia and Latvia鈥檚 populations stateless overnight, barring certain individuals from property ownership, voting, or standing in national elections. The legislation silenced popular resistance from non-ethnic Estonian working-class groups. Latvia鈥檚 similar nationality law, though passed months after monetary reform, left a quarter of the country鈥檚 population stateless.

The concentration of power within the state bureaucracy and the central bank, alongside the quashing of opposition through constitutional means, combined with significant financial aid from the IMF, contributed to the relatively unchallenged nature of Latvia鈥檚 reform. After the CRC鈥檚 decisions in May 1992, the transitional currency (Latvian Rouble) was introduced, coexisting with the national unit 鈥� the Lats 鈥� starting from March 1993. By March 1994, the Lats was pegged to the IMF鈥檚 Special Drawing Rights鈥� (SDRs) basket of currencies. The Bank of Latvia (BoLv) retained conventional central bank functions (setting rates and serving as lender of last resort). However, due to minimal exchange rate fluctuations against the SDRs and substantial reserves, the monetary system effectively operated as a de facto CBA.

Estonia鈥檚 route to monetary restructuring was less direct. In 1991, discussions arose about tackling the issue of monetary overhang 鈥� sizable Rouble deposits from entities and individuals. The dilemma was whether to swiftly adopt an independent currency or phase it in via vouchers. This produced a clash between the Forest Committee, representing export-focused manufacturing, and the MRC and BoE, favoring rentiers and foreign investors. To gain clout, the latter group invited Jeffrey Sachs to Estonia. Sachs endorsed the Argentinian CBA in meetings with BoE officials, the government, and the IMF mission. This arrangement was deemed transparent and trustworthy. It proposed to bypass the absence of monetary expertise and address credit demands by making them unfeasible. The CBA required an exchange rate to be supported by foreign exchange reserves. Currency issuance depended on obtaining foreign reserves through export surpluses or foreign loans. Backed by the IMF mission, the Sachs-Hansson Plan was executed in June 1992. The Kroon replaced the Rouble and its exchange rate was fixed to the Deutschmark. With the domestic money supply backed by gold and foreign reserves, the BoE lost the authority to set interest rates and provide credit to the government, commercial banks, or enterprises.

Alternative Route: Lithuania

The Lithuanian case departs from conspicuous authoritarian statecraft in the Baltic north. This idiosyncrasy stems from the balance of social forces in the country where the breeding ground for monetary reform (and CBA) was located in a local think tank, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI), rather than directly inside the state apparatus (LC) or the central bank. Further differences include the LC鈥檚 limited mandate (focused on issuance dates of the national unit, the Rouble鈥檚 withdrawal, and setting the Rouble-Litas exchange rate), the parliament鈥檚 power to dissolve the committee, and ongoing political disagreements within the LC. On the one hand, these unique institutional aspects explain why Lithuania鈥檚 monetary reform took twice as long to implement. On the other, the Lithuanian case demonstrates that reform outcomes need not rely on authoritarian neoliberal practices by default.

Bereft of direct control over state apparatus, the group backing the currency board for Lithuania had to rely on contingencies to push through the preferred exchange rate arrangement. Conditions for a frontal attack were generated when following the withdrawal of interim currency (talonas) and the introduction of a new national unit (the Litas) under a managed float, the BoLt chose not to replicate exchange-rate-based stabilization programs underway in Estonia and Latvia. Instead of relying on a nominal exchange-rate fixity as an instrument for reducing inflation, the Bank sought to reduce the monetary base by restraining credit for the government鈥檚 budget deficit and keeping control over the exchange rate.

However, as the Litas appreciated in the second half of 1993, the Lithuanian Federation of Industrialists accused the BoLt of engendering an 鈥渦nstable and unpredictable environment鈥�, urging for a lowered and fixed exchange rate. Export-oriented national manufacturers鈥� preference for a weak currency reflected the election pledge of the Democratic Labor Party to stimulate production and output but placed the government in sharp conflict with the BoLt 鈥� seeking to consolidate its mandate over the conduct of independent monetary policy.

The clash between the government and the central bank accelerated the drive to reinvigorate the CBA campaign. Despite collaborative endeavors by the LFMI, the IMF, and a select group of economists, strong opposition emerged on the verge of the parliamentary vote on the 鈥淟aw on the Credibility of Litas.鈥� This opposition united economists from the Bank, ministries of Finance, Economy, and Foreign Affairs, Vilnius University鈥檚 Faculty of Economics, nationalist MPs, and the Association of Commercial Banks. Parliament鈥檚 approval of the law in March 1994 hinged on Lithuania鈥檚 Prime Minister鈥檚 ability to threaten the President with government resignation if the law was rejected. After establishing the US dollar as the anchor currency, Lithuania initiated CBA operations, ensuring full support of legal tender through foreign reserves, and diminishing the central bank鈥檚 role in monetary policy.

Legacies of Baltic Currency Boards

Born into varying institutional contexts and diverse national social dynamics, Baltic CBAs laid the foundation for externally oriented capital accumulation regimes. Notwithstanding mixed opinions within the neoliberal consensus on fixed exchange rates, CBAs earned 鈥渃redibility鈥� due to their commitment to peg maintenance, clear tasks, and low risks. However, claims that these policy arrangements served Baltic 鈥渘ational interests鈥� by placing decision-making in an independent monetary authority鈥檚 hands are . As shown in the article, the introduction of CBAs favored forces profiting from rent, interest, dividends, and foreign investments. International financial institutions and rating agencies also praised CBAs, which complemented fiscal restraint, privatization through foreign direct investment (FDI), and openness to capital inflows.

The CBAs were particularly lauded for their role in mitigating policy uncertainty and currency devaluation concerns that led to substantial FDI inflows. From 1989 to 1998, per capita FDI was notably higher in the Baltic trio compared to other transition states. After joining the European Union (EU) in 2004, private investments boosted Baltic economies, driving annual growth rates around 8% of GDP. However, much investment went into the non-tradeable sector (real estate, construction), leading to external trade deficits that did not enhance export sector competitiveness. Exchange rate arrangements from the 1990s prevented typical market responses to current account deficits, contributing to an when the 2008 credit crunch hit.

In conclusion, the article praises the effectiveness of “authoritarian neoliberalism” as an analytical prism, while also stressing the need to uncover its historical manifestations in East-Central Europe. By showcasing a broad spectrum of governance methods used to achieve similar reform results, I advise caution against potentially stretching the concept too far. This ensures that its explanatory power, which is applicable in two out of the three studied cases, remains intact.

Jokubas Salyga is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He tweets at .

Photo by .

By Nicolette Makovicky and J枚rg Wiegratz

Faced with rampant fraud and corruption, government and civic actors in Slovakia and Uganda have in response turned to appeals to discourses of public ethics, and personal responsibility, and patriotism rather than addressing issues of political economy and power.

Governments and NGOs across the world have recently started using a range of unorthodox methods to encourage the public to participate in the fight against private and public-sector fraud[1]. These include launching digital tools and phone lines for anonymous whistleblowing[2], lotteries which help citizens to report instances of tax evasion[3], and even reality TV shows which celebrate honest government officials[4]. Rather than targeting the perpetrators of fraud, or reforming inadequate processes of oversight and regulation, these initiatives aim to recruit citizens to fight malpractice. They use a mix of entertainment, financial rewards, and appeals to morality, citizenship, and national pride to incentivize populations to detect and contain fraud in private and public life. In this way, they transfer part of the responsibility for fighting fraud from the state and/or business to the citizen, extending the process of fraud detection and sanction to everyday activities such as shopping, picking up a prescription, watching television, or gossiping with neighbours.

Beyond their distinctiveness and novelty, these measures are interesting in several ways – we highlight two of them here.

First, there is the particular context in which these measures arise and proliferate: neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal societies are characterised by high-intensity fraud and corruption across economic sectors, the state, and society[5]. In 鈥榓djusted鈥� regions such as East Africa and Eastern Europe, frequent news about corruption and fraud scandals among elites and non-elites alike is matched in countries such as Uganda and Slovakia by campaigns to fight 鈥榲ice鈥� and clean up the economy and polity. Such 鈥榲irtue campaigns鈥� form part of a larger government- and/or civil society-led anti-corruption, anti-fraud, anti-money laundering policies[6]. These campaigns present the fight against fraud as a joint effort between state and society, calling on social actors 鈥� from businesses to religious institutions, to NGOs and citizen-consumers鈥� to stop and reverse the 鈥榤oral decline鈥� which ostensibly drives rampant economic wrong-doing. This discourse of moral decay (and decadence) is also popular amongst third sector anti-fraud campaigners, public commentators and journalists, who regularly portray business, politics, and society as having 鈥榣ost鈥� its moral compass, leading to a corrosion of public trust and the rule of law[7].

In Slovakia, for example, there have been repeated calls for a return to 蝉濒耻拧苍辞蝉钮 鈥� a term which can be translated as 鈥榗ivility鈥� or 鈥榙ecency鈥� 鈥� in the wake of the murder of the investigative journalist Jan Ku膷iak in 2018[8]. Ku膷iak鈥檚 work revealed unprecedented levels of state capture, tax avoidance, embezzlement and fraud amongst the Slovak elite, including their collusion with members of the Sicilian mafia. After his death, liberal civic activists, conservative centrists, and far-right, anti-system groups were united in a call for a return of 鈥榙ecency鈥� into public and political life. The term became a touchstone for both activists and politicians espousing universal democratic values, and populist calls for the protection of the public from predatory elites. 厂濒耻拧苍辞蝉钮 has since become a fixture in the language of Slovak politics, as well as major anti-corruption campaigns. As recently as April 2023, the Slovak President Zuzanna 膶aputov谩 told the audience at the anti-corruption festival 鈥楶ucung鈥� that she 鈥榖elieved that decency could still win鈥� [9].

This leads us to our second point. Underpinned by a rhetoric of moral deficiency, citizen-directed anti-fraud initiatives are not only meant to recruit citizens to address dishonesty and malpractice. They are also designed to produce 鈥榲irtuous鈥� citizens: efficient public administrators, good taxpayers, and active whistleblowers who internalize and act on prescribed norms in a demonstration of ethical citizenship. 鈥榁irtue campaigns鈥� thus aim to promote 鈥榠ntegrity鈥� amongst corporate subjects, public officials, and the general public, understood as 鈥榯he consistent alignment of, and adherence to, shared ethical values, principles and norms for upholding and prioritising the public interest over private interests鈥� (OECD 2017). Emphasizing that fraud is harmful to economic and social development, to wealth creation, and to the welfare of the individual and the collective, civic activists, aid agencies, and officials thus suggest the primary weapon against fraud is a demonstration of honesty.

Such calls for integrity are often accompanied by what we call 鈥榓ccountability patriotism鈥� 鈥� that is, the requirement that citizens regard themselves as co-managers of public life and resources. In Uganda, for example, posts and posters disseminated across social media and public space encourage citizens to report counterfeit products and to pay (rather than evade) their taxes. They are told that such acts of good citizenship can contribute to financing the country鈥檚 health, education, and infrastructure systems[10]. Government officials regularly explain widespread corruption in the public service as the result of a 鈥榣ack of patriotism鈥�, and present the production of a generation of patriotic Ugandans as a chief ingredient for tackling corruption. The government has launched a substantial programme of patriotism training for schools, universities, and employees at state-run institutions; coordinated by the state administration (with the National Secretariat for Patriotism Clubs in the Office of the President), and promoted and implemented to a significant extent by the army,[11]. This patriotism campaign remains highly contested, critics claiming that the government cannot instil patriotism in this way, especially when officials are in the news daily for de-facto unpatriotic behaviour.

While scholars debate the effectiveness of fighting fraud and corruption through citizen engagement, there has been less academic discussion of their ethical implications and political effects. We argue that studying such anti-fraud programmes and 鈥榲irtue campaigns鈥� can tell us much about contemporary capitalism as a moral-economic project, order, and practice. Examining the social construction of virtue in the face of fraudulent behaviour by both powerful and subaltern actors can shed light on the role of morality in social negotiations about the distribution of economic benefit and harm across populations. It can also provide insights about the way honesty is demanded and mobilized by states and NGO/aid actors, and how matters of 鈥榞ood鈥� corporate and public governance are turned into questions about personal integrity. Furthermore, paying attention to the language and practices of anti-fraud campaigns can tell us a lot about the way in which market affairs, activities and practices 鈥� and the creation of wealth in particular 鈥� are moralised under neoliberalism. On the surface, they look much like other public campaigns, in that they promote a particular set of values and norms, and demand norm adherence amongst their target audience. What sets them apart is their discursive emphasis on moral excellence – that is, their demand that actors of different kinds (bureaucrats, citizens, corporations, policymakers etc.) not merely follow the rules, but develop a virtuous character as the basis for moral action in economic, political, and social life.

is Programme Director and Lecturer at Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. 

J枚rg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg. He is currently guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale), Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’.

Notes:

[1] ;

[2] ;

[3]

[4]

[5] ; ; .

[6] ;

[7] ; ; ; ; ; .

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11] ; ; ; .

鈥淎t its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives 鈥� it [is] a powerful collective experience鈥�.

Silvia Federici, 1984

News broke on the very last day of 2022 that members of the New School鈥檚 part-time faculty (PTF) union – ACT-UAW 7902 – had voted to ratify a new five-year contract, following what some are calling the longest adjunct strike in American history (Hamberg, 2022). A 鈥檛entative agreement鈥� was reached on December 10^th, after almost a month of strike action where more than 1,600 PTF members had taken to the picket line. Their existing contract had expired, and there was no sign of a satisfactory renewal. The dispute was multifaceted, but primarily concerned poor pay, uncompensated labour time, general job security and health insurance coverage.

The agreement solidified a historic pay increase (the largest PTF at the New School have ever received), as well as an enhanced offer for paid family leave, improved terms for annualisation, compensation for labor performed outside of the classroom and improvements in health care access (Hamberg, 2022). Whilst there is much to be celebrated in these gains, for the New School community this was a month-long struggle marked with uncertainty, tension, and growing hostility. The disconnect between the university鈥檚 administration and its community of faculty and students was made painfully, publicly evident. Observers couldn鈥檛 help but call hypocrisy on an institution founded on radical values employing 鈥渃orporate union-busting tactics 鈥� antithetical to [its] progressive heritage鈥� (Hamberg, 2022).

Much can be gleaned from this contained episode: the state of higher education following a period of its incessant marketisation; the power of organised labour to rally against exploitation; the role higher education specifically can play in a wider workers鈥� movement. This blog post will attempt to place the New School鈥檚 recent ACT-UAW 7902 strike in its wider context, that of an (inter)national worker movement, both within the higher education sector and beyond. By doing this, I will elicit some of the unique contributions academics, other university workers and students themselves can offer such a movement.

Strike! at the New School

From the beginning, it was evident that the striking PTF had majority-support from both their full-time counterparts and the student body 鈥� the strength of this solidarity was consistently made clear on the picket line outside the New School鈥檚 University Centre. In an interview with Jacobin, Oliver Kellhammer (PTF at Parsons School of Design and member of ACT-UAW Local 7902) said the New School employed 鈥溾�榩rofessors of practice鈥�,鈥� attributing a large part of the PTF鈥檚 victory to a 鈥減roletarian mindset鈥� amongst faculty (Muller, 2022). I think there is a lot of truth in this diagnosis. The New School is unquestionably a rare institution, one that encourages radical scholarly activity that disrupts the status quo and challenges oppressive power structures.

Over time, however, this emphasis has somewhat warped. Whilst the university鈥檚 founders set out to create an institution that was 鈥淸unshackled] intellectually by 鈥� financial interests,鈥� critics now claim its current administration simply uses this history as a convenient marketing ploy (Bardia, et al., 2020). A clear dissonance has emerged between a profit-driven administration and a radical set of students and faculty, conditions which proved fertile for conflict. Ever has it been so that profit arises from worker exploitation and uncompensated labour time, a truth The New School is more than cognisant of.

The strike itself was marked with disheartening attempts from the administration to quell the PTF鈥檚 efforts. During mediated negotiations, there were attempts to circumvent the strike by hiring 鈥榯emporary Progress Reviewers鈥� to grade students, highlighting the leverage striking faculty had at such a crucial point in the academic year. If this attempt was not enough, the administration announced at the beginning of December that they would 鈥渨ithhold pay and contributions to both insurance and retirement benefits for all striking employees鈥�, full-time, part-time, or student (Hamberg, 2022).

This dramatic escalation was met with retaliation across the board, and a doubling down of efforts to hold the picket line: half of the university鈥檚 divisions demanded a retraction of the university鈥檚 hardline approach; a boycott was called on all events held at the university; unfair labour practice charges were filed by the university鈥檚 worker unions; numerous colleges within the university called votes-of-no-confidence in the administration; and hundreds of students occupied the University Centre. It鈥檚 difficult to know exactly which of these developments pressured the university into reaching its tentative agreement on December 10^th. A combination of them all, to be sure, but a slow comprehension of the mounting reputational damage to The New School鈥檚 progressive 鈥榖rand鈥� undoubtedly played a key role.

To attribute the PTF鈥檚 victory to the numerous missteps and miscalculations of the administration alone would overlook the tireless, organised efforts of ACT-UAW Local 7902. The commitment generated from within the union was impressive 鈥� accounts indicate that the 鈥榦pen bargaining鈥� process (made possible through online meeting platforms) was crucial in keeping engagement high. In addition, an action-oriented network of working groups was established early on, enabling PTF to get directly involved with strike efforts from the get-go. There was also the sheer number of union members. Almost 90% of faculty at The New School are part-time, and as Azure D. Osborne-Lee (PTF in the College of Performing Arts, and member of ACT-UAW Local 7902) said in an interview with Jacobin: 鈥渙ppressive forces rely upon exhaustion鈥� (Muller, 2022). Members of the PTF union could tap in and out of activities across the board, embedding consistency and stamina into the union鈥檚 efforts.

The New School as a 鈥楴eoliberal University鈥� in an (Inter)National Context

As indicated above, there is a lot that makes the New School鈥檚 experience here unique. However, we must consider our episode in its wider context, recognising where it sits in relation to other higher education worker movements across the globe. On our picket lines, there were powerful expressions of solidarity with both (i) graduate student workers in the University of California (UC) system and (ii) members of the University and College Union (UCU) in the UK. What unites these efforts is a struggle against the 鈥榥eoliberal university.鈥�

This concept that broadly encapsulates the marketisation and financialisation of higher education. Exposing the sector to the unbridled forces of market competition has unsurprisingly resulted in precarisation, deterioration of working conditions and the perpetuation of inequalities. To even access university in the first place, most students are forced to take on increasing amounts of private debt. Degrees themselves become 鈥渃onsumer products that 鈥� signal an individual鈥檚 worth鈥� in the labour market. As the providers of such commodities, universities are subordinated to market forces, attempting to 鈥渟upply the commodity in highest demand.鈥� This ultimately risks seeing 鈥渇urther cuts to radical staff and departments across the world in favour of more market-friendly degrees鈥� (Kesar and Kvangraven 2022).

Far from isolated, this trend has been global. In the last decade, countries such as and have pursued agendas of higher education neoliberalisation. Such attempts have, to varying degrees of success, been met with backlash from students. A uniform neoliberalisation of higher education across the globe impedes, too, on the ability of institutions to decolonise and diversify their curriculums in an emancipatory fashion, and thus should be resisted. In sum, these developments represent a rift between the intrinsic motivation of academic labour and the extrinsic motivation of the university as a 鈥榮ervice-provider business鈥�. As identifies, the latter exploits the existence of the former, with direct consequences for academic workers. In an attempt to cut costs, academic labour is often actively outsourced, casualised, or reorganised.

Casualisation comprises one of the 鈥楩our Fights鈥� of the UCU (alongside low wages, excessive workloads, and inequitable pay gaps). In recent years, the UCU鈥檚 movement has become more explicitly intersectional, 鈥渁ddressing [the] pay gaps between different categories鈥� of workers, with a focus on equality and discrimination. (Mills, 2019). Changes to the pension system motivated a wave of UCU strikes in 2018, and since then, the union has consistently been able to mobilise large portions of their members to take strike action. A record 150 universities participated in the latest wave of strikes, all of which points towards a notable contrast between the UK and the US academic labour movements: scale and sectoral strategy. The UCU has been able to coordinate multiple university shutdowns at a national level to maximise their leverage in negotiations. State-wide strikes in the US, like those seen with graduate student workers in the UC system, demonstrate the promise of wider, coordinated industrial action and will only serve to enhance academic workers鈥� positions further.

Disputes over healthcare access acts as another contrast between these movements. Access to healthcare services is not tied to employment in the UK as it so often is in the US. Sufficient access to healthcare under precarious part-time employment was a key dispute in the PTF鈥檚 negotiations with the New School. Whilst there were gains here to be sure, the university still found a way to significantly raise deductibles for PTF employees. Concessions here are something to celebrate regardless but crowded out gains on other important grievances, issues that the UCU movement in the UK potentially have more space to fight for. In his interview with Jacobin,Oliver Kellhammer said of the agreement 鈥渢here were some losses 鈥� [including] grievability of issues like discrimination and harassment鈥� (Muller, 2022).

The Role of Higher Education in the International Worker Movement

The broad, international academic labour movement should be viewed as a clear and unified battle against the 鈥榥eoliberal university鈥� and, by extension, neoliberalism itself. As Henry Snow (2022) puts it, whilst 鈥渢he specifics vary between institutions and disciplines, the broad characterization of academia in crisis applies across them.鈥� A successful higher education worker movement requires collaboration both between institutions and within them. The more university workers united in struggle, the less capable the university is of dismissing their demands (Snow, 2022).

Injustices suffered within higher education unsurprisingly have parallels in other sectors, reflecting a broader set of economic and social trends affecting workers everywhere. The UCU has made a concerted effort to 鈥淸tie] the issues affecting higher-education workers together with the broader processes of austerity and neoliberalisation in British society鈥� (Mills, 2019). For a chance at achieving real, systemic changes, worker struggles within higher education should be reframed as 鈥減art and parcel of the fight for broader economic justice鈥� (Snow, 2022). This can particularly be said of the UK, a country experiencing a surge of industrial action from rail, postal, university and government workers. Even the Royal College of Nursing (the largest nursing union in the world) historically voted to strike for the first time ever. Mick Lynch, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) Workers, spoke at a UCU picket line late last year: 鈥渢here鈥檚 a lot in common in all these debates,鈥� he said, 鈥渨e have been 鈥� casualised at work. People are starting to wake up to this super-exploitation and the callousness of employers and that is good for everyone, if we resist it鈥� (Williams, 2022). Such intra-sector solidarity should be more prevalent^[1].

It can also be said of the struggle in the US. The strike in the UC system has revealed the importance of 鈥渢he least compensated and most vulnerable academic employees鈥� to higher education. Such employees are expected to cope with excessive, uncompensated workloads, an injustice that only becomes more acute during times of high inflation. Despite their crucial importance to the functioning of the university system, graduate student workers in the UC system are scarcely paid enough to afford housing near their place of work. When the starting salary of a UC dean is eight times that of a teaching assistant, resistance feels all the more justified (Vann, 2022). This disparity is far from unique to higher education or the US, reflecting 鈥渢he continuity between repressive policies in higher education and those outside of it鈥� (Mills, 2019).

Within all of this, academics are uniquely placed to contribute to this wider, societal worker movement. They can coordinate collective action across multiple institutions and steer discourse and knowledge creation for social good. If universities transitioned towards worker-owned cooperative governance systems, this would remove the exploitative power of a managerial class within the sector. This sentiment was front and centre in The New School鈥檚 radical origins, which envisioned a co-operative community of scholars handling all institutional policy decisions. Now, in 2023, a resurgence in demand for such structures can be seen in : 鈥渨e also demand full financial transparency and the activation of a participatory process for the administration of the school.鈥�^[2] It is in this respect that higher education can champion radical alternatives to entrenched hierarchical systems. Looking into the longer-term, too, we must not overlook the importance of students themselves being exposed to labour organising, and should envision higher education as a supportive site for progressive prospective organisers to build skills and confidence before transferring their experiences to other key labour sectors. The impressive wave of undergraduate student worker unionisations across the US currently provides cause for optimistic hope.

The contained experience at the New School should serve as a radical display of worker struggle, solidarity, and success. Critical scholarly activity, the type practiced at The New School, is needed now more than ever: work that challenges the status quo rather than protects it, and channels theory into praxis, something tangible. This needs to be nurtured, encouraged, and championed if we are to achieve a fairer and more just future for all.

Bibliography

Bardia, Aman, Srishti Yadav, Kalpa Rajapaksha, and Akhil Sg. 2020. The New School Is in Crisis. Accessed January 2023. .

Hamberg, Miles. 2022. ‘We Were Stronger Than They Were Cruel’: How Part-Time Faculty Won Their Strike At The New School. Accessed December 2022. .

Kesar, Surbhi, and Ingrid Kvangraven. 2022. Galileo and Neoliberal Academia: A Critical Assessment of UK Higher Education. March 9. Accessed March 2023. .

Mills, Dana. 2019. We’re Striking to Save Britain’s Universities. Accessed December 2022. .

Muller, Charlie. 2022. How the New School鈥檚 Striking Faculty Forced Concessions From Their Administration. Accessed January 2023. .

Pickard, Jim. 2023. UK union leaders criticise strikes bill as 鈥榬eprehensible鈥�. Accessed January 2023. .

Snow, Henry. 2022. To Save American Universities, We Need to Go On Strike. Accessed December 2022. .

Vann, Michael G. 2022. The University of California Strike Is Approaching Crunch Time. Accessed December 2022. .

Williams, Tom. 2022. Employers trying to make workers poorer, Lynch tells UCU strikers. Accessed January 2023. .

Footnotes

[1] This will become increasingly important given the UK government鈥檚 latest attempts to curtail union power through anti-strike legislation which, if passed, would 鈥渋mpose minimum service levels on most of the public sector during strikes鈥� and 鈥溾�檖unish鈥� workers who had demanded decent pay and working conditions鈥� (Pickard, 2023).

[2] 鈥極ne New School鈥� was founded on December 12^th following the occupation of the University Centre and a vote of no confidence in the university鈥檚 administration.

Robert Noble is an MA student in the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research. He was present at The New School’s 2022 PTF strike and the UCU’s 2018 strike, when studying for his undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Manchester.

Photos: Matthew Spiegelman.

The trajectory of mainstream economics can be understood in terms of how the discipline historically responded to moments of crises by attempting to 鈥渢heoretically fix鈥� the understandings related to five core 鈥渜uestions鈥� of capitalist political economy 鈥� namely land, trade, labour, state, and legal-institutional framework. This involved legitimising improvements in land that led to the dispossession and the destruction of the commons, justifying free trade based on comparative advantage as opposed to mercantilist state intervention, reducing labour to a factor of production that was supposedly rewarded based on its marginal productivity and hence not being exploited, legitimising state intervention to stabilise capitalism and developing a legal-institutional framework to protect markets from popular democratic pressures. These 鈥渢heoretical fixes鈥� served to ideologically legitimise, preserve, and perpetuate the core content of capitalist social relations even as it corresponded with the modification of the surface-level appearances of capitalism.

The history of mainstream economics is closely tied to the history of capitalist development. However, the discipline of economics attempts to obscure this relationship, mostly by asserting its value-neutrality through a positivist approach. Despite criticisms, mainstream economics continues to retain its core postulates by reasserting the naturality and inevitability of capitalist social relations by dismissing questions of political economy. The outsized influence of economics in policymaking necessitates consistent critique and engagement with the assumptions and implications of mainstream economic theories and models. There is a wealth of literature that critiques different aspects of mainstream economics from different perspectives (see Chang 2015; Fine and Milonakis 2008; Kvangraven and Kesar 2021; Lee 2009; Mezzadri 2020; Reinert, Ghosh & Kattel 2016; Selwyn 2016). This essay contributes to this rich tradition of critique and argues that the trajectory of mainstream economics can be understood in terms of five core 鈥渜uestions鈥� 鈥� namely land, trade, labour, state, and legal-institutional framework.

While these are not mutually exclusive questions and economic thought did not evolve in a linear trajectory, I argue that the discipline of economics responded to moments of crises by attempting to 鈥渇ix鈥� the existing theoretical approaches that underpinned the prevalent understandings of capitalist political economy. These 鈥渢heoretical fixes鈥� served to ideologically legitimise, preserve, and perpetuate the core content of capitalist social relations even as it corresponded with the modification of the surface-level appearances of capitalism.

But since the logic of capital expands to all realms of society and leads to new contradictions that cannot be permanently overcome (Harvey 2014), new problems inevitably arise for economics as a discipline. Highlighting how these questions were fixed in mainstream economics provides a better perspective on how to challenge its supposed value-neutrality as well as its dominance in academia and policymaking. The purpose of this essay is not to provide a linear historical account of the evolution of economic thought, but to historicise economic theories by situating them in their political-economic context, which helps make better sense of why mainstream economics evolved the way it did.

The land question

Land played a central role in the capitalist transition and continues to remain integral to contemporary accumulation (D鈥機osta and Chakraborty 2017). The classical liberals wrestled with the question of how to organise land reserves as capital was getting globalised through colonialism. Locke 鈥渇ixed鈥� this question through his labour theory of property which argues that land gets improved and hence creates value upon the application of labour (鈥渁s much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.鈥� [Locke 1690, 1980: 21]).

Thus, Lockean theory posited that private ownership of land even if concentrated in the hands of a few is much better than the 鈥渨astelands鈥� that are left unattended or held under common ownership (Whitehead 2010). This justified not just capitalist landlordism in England but also settler-colonialism. North America with its vast reserves of land and natural resources epitomized the Lockean state of nature that needed improvement. In effect, this legitimised the dispossession and genocide of indigenous people (the primitive accumulation of capital) whose ways of living were not compatible with the emerging capitalist law of value. The Lockean theory of property rights underpins the modernisation paradigm that continue to structure mainstream development discourse 鈥� where the protection of private property rights at all costs is equated with developmental progress.

The trade question

Capitalist trade was fuelled by both market competition and colonialism, and classical political economists rose to the defence of the emerging industrial order. As the physiocrats grappled with the questions of value-creation by agricultural labour, Adam Smith advocated for a greater division of labour that he believed to have spurred productivity in the pin factories of his time. Smith defended free trade orchestrated by a nascent capitalist class as opposed to the excessive involvement of the mercantilist state and aristocratic privilege. Though Smith was apprehensive of the adverse effects of the division of labour on the human intellect and argued for the public provision of education for all (Thomas 2018), his idyllic account ignored both the violence of capitalist origins (Marx 1976 (1867): 873-77) and the necessity of centralised state intervention to create capitalist markets (Polanyi 2001 (1944): 146-47)

David Ricardo鈥檚 comparative advantage theory continues to have a much more decisive impact in structuring international macroeconomics, for example, through the Heckscher-Ohlin model. A country has a comparative advantage if it can produce a commodity at a lower cost than other countries 鈥� focusing on comparative costs thus leads to more gains from trade and hence, development. But this not only ignores how global development was structured by imperialism (Patnaik & Patnaik 2016) but is also at odds with how actually industrialised economies benefited from active state intervention. This is not just true of Ricardo鈥檚 own examples – English cloth and Portuguese wine were both outcomes of capital-state relationships (Peet and Hartwick 2015: 48-49) but late industrialisation was steered by the developmental state that defied comparative advantage and market signals (Chang in Lin & Chang 2009). 

The logic of comparative advantage continues to underpin the developmental idea that labour must be cheap in labour-surplus economies 鈥� this forms the basis of 鈥渟weatshop economics鈥� that justifies the deprivation faced by workers in labour-intensive sectors like garment production (Mezzadri 2020). Nevertheless, classical political economists who were trying to understand the emerging capitalist social formation wrestled with the questions of value and distribution, the social relations of production, and the tendencies of crisis and stagnation in capitalism. Smith and Ricardo advocated for a labour theory of value, and Marx insisted that we pay attention to the historical specificity of the emergence of the capitalist value form (see Chambers 2018). The question of labour becomes important in this context.

The labour question

Militant trade unions in alliance with a vibrant socialist movement highlighted how capitalist profit is built on the exploitation of immiserated workers. This compelled mainstream economists to address and theoretically fixthe question of labour through marginalist models. Mathematical formalism was used to delineate the market economy as a sphere insulated from larger socio-political questions: under neoclassical economics, the economy was all about the allocative efficiency of factors of production in contrast to classical political economy鈥檚 focus on classes and distribution. Allocative efficiency was to be achieved in correspondence with the marginal productivity theorem 鈥� where each factor received a return corresponding to their marginal contribution to production that was to be derived using differential calculus.[i]

The neoclassical model of production and distribution was riven with measurement problems as highlighted by the Cambridge capital controversy. Moreover, treating capital and labour as perfectly substitutable factors of production justified the existing distribution of returns as natural market outcomes 鈥� this effectively erased the prospects of accounting for class struggle in the economic model (Dobb 1973: 172). Additionally, the neoclassical model ignores how pre-existing social differentiation shapes market outcomes and thus cannot account for inequalities within the labour market. Moreover, if an equilibrium of allocative efficiency was achieved through the market (which itself was coordinated by utility maximising actors), then there is neither scope for regulatory intervention nor prospects for social change as it does not improve total utility (Clarke 1991: 150).

In effect, the marginalists in contrast to classicals refuted the validity of the labour theory of value (value instead corresponded with subjective utility) and dismissed exploitation (as returns to labour and capital were based on marginal productivity), but just like classicals, accepted capitalist social relations and market outcomes as a natural development. Economics got redefined as the study of preferences and utility maximisation of individuals (the reference point here was the 鈥渕ale breadwinner鈥�) given scarce resources and unlimited wants 鈥� while the social construction of these microeconomic variables was completely ignored. Mathematical formalism assumed that the real world was an aberration from the neoclassical model and that expanding the market would lead to general equilibrium. But this untrammelled faith in market self-regulation faced a crisis during the 1930s, which necessitated a state-led response.

The state question

While the market liberals argued for less intervention during the great depression, Keynesianism argued for state-led counter-cyclical deficit spending to spur aggregate demand in the economy.  Public expenditure will have a multiplier effect that will lead to a virtuous cycle reinvigorating private consumption and private investment. This was not a mainstream idea, but it became the dominant economic paradigm largely because the threat of socialism and the harms of fascism demanded that economists reinvent the idea of state intervention.

Thus, the Keynesian model鈥檚 greatest contribution is to legitimise the macroeconomic interventions of the capitalist state; this provided a theoretical fix to questions about both instability and inefficiencies of capitalism.[ii] Business cycles were to be tamed by state regulation and cyclical unemployment was to be addressed through public investment 鈥� Keynes was the answer to all apparent contradictions of capitalism. The post-war economic order helped realise the capitalist welfare state in the global north, but this did not overcome the internal social differentiations based on gender, race, and ethnicity (see Harvey 2014: 164-184). In fact, New-Deal era housing policies explicitly promoted segregation through redlining by extending mortgages only to white families thereby accentuating racial inequality (Rothstein 2021).  These issues of exclusion persisted in the international order as well – despite the prominence of the Latin American feminists, pan-Africanists like Du Bois, and environmentalism in transnational networks and the ILO鈥檚 Philadelphia Declaration, the Bretton Woods conference marginalised the concerns of gender, race and the environment (Helleiner 2022).

Keynesian models are intrinsically based on a commitment to the territorial logic of the nation-state and a class compromise within these borders. For Keynes, this meant a defence of the interests of the British state that was facing a crisis of hegemony during the Bretton Woods negotiations for a post-war global order. But this also meant – as Patnaik (2017) argues in her study on profit-inflation and Bengal famine – that even though Keynes was a liberal humanist, his policies served the interests of British imperialism and had disastrous effects in colonies. Moreover, North-Atlantic Keynesianism cannot be divorced from its connection with war-related spending (the warfare-welfare nexus) and the subsequent boom that led to the prison-industrial complex (Gilmore 1999). Nevertheless, the Keynesian imagination served as fodder for national-developmental projects in both advanced capitalist countries and postcolonial developing economies, but even the limited gains of a section of the working class from this class compromise were only a temporary achievement.

The legal-institutional question

As regulated capitalism collapsed due to a crisis of profitability in the 1970s and capital re-subordinated labour, a host of economic ideas justified the emerging neoliberal social order and discredited Keynesian-style government intervention.[iii] Milton Friedman posited that monetary policy was more instrumental in shaping inflation and business cycles, and hence public investment had to be reined in. Governments were expected to abandon full employment goals and implement austerity measures so that private investment does not get crowded out (for a critique of this argument, see Patnaik 2017).

James Buchanan argued that the government and bureaucrats cannot be trusted as they act to further their own interests and engage in rent-seeking (for a critical account of Buchanan鈥檚 influence on neoliberalism and democracy, see MacLean 2018). Supply-side interventions 鈥� most notably through tax deductions – became the preferred way to attract private investment. The Laffer Curve (named after Arthur Laffer, who is closely associated with Donald Trump) advocated for reducing taxes to optimise revenue collection, which was used to justify unreasonable corporate tax cuts. As capitalism financialised and informationalised, Eugene Fama posited through the efficient market hypothesis that stock prices are accurate representations of their fundamentals and that maximisation of the shareholder value of the firm was the best way to enhance societal well-being (Davis & Kim 2015).  

This motley crew of economic ideas broadly called for redefining state regulation to benefit capital, but also provided a theoretical fix to the question of democracy under global capitalism (see Brown 2015). Neoliberals like Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan were committed to protecting democratic rights broadly defined as the protection of the rule of law that safeguards individual liberties against state intervention. But they were apprehensive of expanding democracy beyond this definition and argued for placing constitutional limits on legislative authority so that popular pressure cannot upend the market order. This included basic reforms like minimum wage hikes, which mainstream economists propagated would cause unemployment – Buchanan said that arguing for the opposite is akin to physicists arguing that water runs uphill (The Wall Street Journal 1996).

As Slobodian (2018) argues, the neoliberals were anxious about the democratisation brought about by trade union action in the global north and decolonisation in the global south. But instead of resorting to naked market fundamentalism, they envisioned a world where markets were encased by a legal-institutional order that did not violate the rights of capital (Slobodian 2018).  The human rights of property owners were to be protected against the threat posed by the passions of the masses (Whyte 2019). Thus, the economic arguments for central bank independence and rules-based monetary policy, supply side interventions, subordinating the welfare state in the name of financial restraint, and financial market efficiency in principle laid the framework of a legal-institutional order designed to fix the threat that bottom-up democratic forces posed against capital. This has given rise to the 鈥渁nti-state state鈥� (Gilmore 2011) 鈥� where the repressive apparatus of the state has grown while welfare systems remain systematically underfunded.

Emerging questions

Despite the 2008 financial crisis and the ongoing Covid pandemic, neoliberal capitalism has proven to be surprisingly resilient. Mainstream economics has still retained its core postulates, even as it has expanded into studying irrational behaviour of individuals and incorporating Randomised Control Trials into studying poverty (for a critique, see Reddy 2012). Even models of 鈥渋mperfect competition鈥� gained relevance through comparisons with idealised perfect competition, thereby ignoring the real conflict inherent to capitalism (Shaikh 2016).

But a concatenation of different crises (what is now dubbed the polycrisis) is posing new challenges for economic thinking. For instance, environmental degeneration is seen as a market externality, for which the market-efficient solution is that environmental costs should be priced and traded among producers to incentivise the transition away from fossil fuels.  In contrast, there is a growing demand for a green new deal involving public investment in cleaner energies at a scale similar to what was done in the 20^th century for establishing fossil-fuel based infrastructure. But this necessitates a shift beyond the neoliberal world order.

The global capitalist slowdown has also posed political questions that economics can no longer ignore. The rise of global authoritarian capitalism has highlighted the disjuncture between neoliberal political philosophy (as professed) and neoliberal political economy (as practiced). This also highlights how the state-market binary is not useful to understand contemporary capitalism. While neoliberals argue for market-oriented reforms against government failures, interventionists argue for public regulation to safeguard against market failures. Both camps miss how the state and market are dialectically intertwined, and how state intervention can only mitigate but not eliminate the crises tendencies of capital. That these effects are compounded in the global south where industrialisation and formal employment is not the norm necessitates a paradigm shift beyond the core tenets of mainstream economics in academia and policy-thinking. The growing demand to decolonise and diversify economics holds immense promise in this regard (Kvangraven & Kesar 2021).

Concluding remarks

This essay emphasised that certain intellectual turning points in economics were theoretical fixes that corresponded with political-economic shifts in capitalism. 聽This involved legitimising improvements in land that led to the dispossession and the destruction of the commons, justifying free trade based on comparative advantage as opposed to mercantilist state intervention, reducing labour to a factor of production that was supposedly rewarded based on its marginal productivity and hence not being exploited, legitimising state intervention to stabilise capitalism and developing a legal-institutional framework to protect markets from popular democratic pressures. This is not to say that all mainstream economists were dishonest and corrupt, but that the disciplinary postulates as well as the knowledge produced through the reconstruction of the core neoclassical models have served as an ideological justification of capitalism in its various forms.

By disregarding historical particularities, obfuscating relations of exploitation and domination, and naturalising social inequalities inherent in the market economy, mainstream economics education bolsters false consciousness regarding the workings of the world. If the principles of economics aligns with the requirements of the dominant social order, the various challenges to it from inside and outside the economy will be restricted to the margins. A situated history of the evolution of economic thought that pays attention to the political-economic shifts in society can thus demystify the discipline鈥檚 self-proclaimed value-neutrality and show how deviation from its core postulates is imperative in the context of a stagnant economies, rising social inequalities, and a political and environmental crisis. This necessitates a comprehensive shift in economic thinking that recognises that knowledge is shaped by power relations and that the capitalist order is neither natural nor eternal.

References

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[i] The concept of marginal product has no basis in reality even at the firm-level 鈥� a unit of a particular factor of production cannot be increased while holding other units constant (Moseley 2015: 107)

[ii] In reality, state intervention is not an anathema to any capitalist market. Neoliberals use this to distinguish themselves from laissez-faire economists (see Friedman 1951).

[iii] The antecedents of neoliberal economic governance can be seen during the inter-war period 鈥� this included not just international economic institutions 鈥渕eddling鈥� in domestic affairs of nation-states. (Martin 2022), but also economists advocating for austerity, especially in fascist Italy (Mattei 2017). ]

Aabid Firdausi (aabidfms@gmail.com) is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He tweets at .

Acknowledgement: The author thanks Alex M Thomas and Upasana Goswami for their comments. A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the Department of Economics, University of Kerala.

Photo: London School of Economics and Political Science

鈥榠f God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir recreated them by removing their names, or by giving them another name鈥�.

Marcel Proust (II, 566)

An emerging consensus originated in the US has declared 2022 as the year of the , with a view to marking the beginning of an era of turbulence and unrest in the global economy.  Under this conceptualisation, recent events including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change catastrophes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise in energy and food prices are generally postulated as separate crises, which can have an effect on each other but nevertheless have separate origins.  This centrifugal analysis of events predicates on the decline of the uni-polar world order, as well as acknowledging the emergent structural weaknesses in the traditional western powers; all of which can be loosely interpreted as occurring in a period during which power is dispersing and perhaps as a consequence of this dispersion, the current drivers of crisis have multiplied, leading to a multitude of crises, in contrast to preceding historical instances.

In spite of the current use of the term, the origins of the Polycrisis date further and can be more contextualised. However, there is no doubt that it has now become an important neologism for conventional western media and policy institutes, especially adopted by Bretton Woods Institutions, as well as other leading investors.

Civil society has also used this term as a neat summary, however, theirs is a critical response and is not interchangeable with how powerful International Financial Institutions (IFIs), policy think-tanks and investors use the term.  In this sense, the instrumentalisation of this neologism, seems to have more value than its meaning, with the discernible possibility that any perceived political mileage of the Polycrisis, is a complete transformation away from its intellectual roots. Nonetheless, as an artefact, the intellectual roots and the political role of the Polycrisis merits an integrated analysis beyond its instrumentalisation. 

A remarkable feature of liberal thought is the tendency towards identification of social phenomena through the selective elevation of their key distinguishing features, which are abstract enough to form 鈥榮ystems鈥� and neutral enough to subsume the inherent contradictions of capitalist development. Pandemics, climate breakdown, wars and global deflationary pressures are not mere externalities of the capitalist system but intrinsic to its operations- long predicted by a diverse group of thinkers. That these events converge in time is a political outcome, subject to planetary limits, not abstract systemisation, as the Polycrisis seems to imply.  

Critical responses to the Polycrisis have pointed towards its disregard in accounting for the long and sustained crisis of the capitalist world order and a resort towards 鈥樷�� to conceptualise things as they appear to be,  rather than questioning what is occurring beneath mere appearances. Prima-facie accounts often seek to capture the zeitgeist in the endeavour to simplify things. However, there is a need to differentiate between simplification and reductionism. As a concept, the Polycrisis is simultaneously all-encompassing as well as abstract.

In an attempt to grasp both these aspects, this short blog starts with a focus on three messages of the Polycrisis: a) the qualitative nature of change, b) the drivers or causes of crises and c) the role of Bretton Woods Institutions in adopting the concept. In addition, the blog proposes an alternative way of understanding the contemporary crisis, which hinges on the decline of the western capitalist model, followed by some thoughts on multipolarity and geopolitics. 

a) Understanding what has changed

The multifaceted 鈥楶辞濒测肠谤颈蝉颈蝉鈥� and its disparate manifestations convince us of something, which is qualitatively different, compared to previous crises. The nature of the disruption is hard to understand; on the one hand, Polycrisis is about disparate crises haunting the world, whilst on the other, it remains inexplicable why a single European war should trigger a global disruption of such magnitude.  After all, if we are talking scale, since 2001 to date, the extremely expensive War on Terror ravaged entire countries, without any degree of comparable or even suggested global turbulence. For an Afghan, Yemeni or Haitian child aged 10 or so, the world has always been a continuum of so-called Polycrisis. Any turbulence in global capital and stock markets and commodity prices, would be a minor and irrelevant addendum to the ongoing dearth of access to life, in the majority of the non-Western world. 

b) Poly perpetrators?

A key feature of the current crisis, which remains unaddressed by the Polycrisis concept are the substantive drivers of the crisis. While the Polycrisis is keen to explore the multiplicity and complexity of the current global order, the implicit causes of the seemingly conjectural crises appear as nebulous, automated and self-perpetuating. For example, the discussion paper by ., describes a global Polycrisis as a situation when 鈥榗rises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity鈥檚 prospects.鈥�

This methodology is reminiscent of modelling, as in the natural sciences, such as in the discipline of physics. In fact, all definitions of the Polycrisis although focusing on systems, are seemingly bereft of any identifiable agency.

Citing causal entanglements in political decision making is a strange analysis, diminishing the role of the powerful and the hierarchy of geopolitics. In describing a situation, which is no longer under any implicit control, we remain not quite sure about any obvious poly-perpetrators.

Who are they and what is their precise role in all of this?  

c) The Bretton Woods hijacking the crisis?

The Bretton Woods Institutions have effectively adopted the Polycrisis as an explanatory lens for the contemporary situation. The labelling of the crisis as too complex and multifaceted aligns with their on-going gospel of ad-hoc solutionism to political problems, and the linear mantra of debt-ridden liquidity for vulnerable countries.

The unwavering acceleration of private-sector led solutionism, may well be described as the availing of . The coinage of the term Polycrisis unto itself had no substantial impact on the Bretton Woods Institutions鈥� conventional operations but rather, the term went solely to the further substantiation of their ongoing technocratic approach to poverty. The metanarrative of all official reports by these institutions builds on themes of complexity, multiple and uncontrollable drivers of impoverishments. This is also similar to a host of used by financial investors, facing this seemingly unsolvable Polycrisis.

Alternative hypothesis

An alternative hypothesis of the current crises is the possibility that declining uni-polar world order does not necessarily equate to an elimination of imperial power and that the drivers of the current crisis are an essential outcome thereof. This hypothesis would suggest that we start our analysis from the crisis of the Western capitalist order and understand the recent implications of its global export.

1. Dynamics of declining uni-polar world order 鈥揺ntrenching extraction.

The pandemic was revelationary in highlighting the structural weaknesses of key developed economies in the West; stimulus packages to ameliorate the domestic impact of the pandemic were either inadequate and/ or profiteering at the expense of populations. In the run-up to the emergence of the Polycrisis narrative, in nearly every instance, the domestic private sector of most developed economies has consistently been bailed out disproportionately, as opposed to their citizenries.  To remedy this decline, Western economies have attempted to crudely pastiche China鈥檚 Belt Road Initiative (BRI) and sought to bandwagon on the drive towards external infrastructure connectivity, as a solution to their economic woes; a remedy which was both too little and too late (See Table 1).

   Table 1: Stimulating the Private Sector Domestically and Globally- US, UK, EU.

While these various infrastructure projects seek to further subsidise opportunities for the Western domestic private-sector, they remain fully oblivious to the unwillingness or inability of Western developed economies to decisively address the monopolistic and monopsonistic mutations in the OECD rent-seeking banks and merchantry, which represent a structural malaise and economic malignance that very much has global consequences.

To summarise: in addition to the implementation of global connectivity projects, which subsidise the western private sector, the role of the corporate and financial sector also needs attention in driving of global inflation.

Two obvious examples on food and energy prices:

• On food prices and global hunger: The trend of rising food prices, precedes the Ukraine invasion and in fact remains unhinged from the basics of demand and supply, raising the simple question of what is driving prices?

As investigated by through freedom of information requests, and detailed by journalists at , the transformation of food into an asset-class is led by the concerted speculative practices of international banks. As countries in the South are slowly being engulfed by hunger, the profiteering investors originating in the Global North remain without accountability.

• On energy prices: The logical inference to be drawn from the Polycrisis is a case against poly-opportunists, where the vacuum resultant of the decline of traditional hegemons, is rapidly capacitated by the emergence of previously impassive, globally competitive, private-sector actors.

When the outcome of the prompt of a global energy crisis, is solely rampant profiteering and market abuses perpetrated a few energy companies, as identified even by the liberal bastion of President Biden in his vocal complaints about , the case for regulatory and particularly fiscal intervention very certainly crystallises, yet remains very far from forthcoming.

How does the Polycrisis account for this crisis of western capitalism which accelerates both domestic and global extraction?

2. The world in the making: On multipolarity and geopolitics  

From a global perspective we must also ponder why the emergence of multipolarity- (progressive or regressive) should equate to a Polycrisis?

An interesting development in the current US-China-Russia analysis, is the now compulsive suggestion that 鈥榞eopolitics鈥� is an all-encompassing and defining feature of contemporary politics. That the Global South has been the site of proxy-war throughout stands peripheral to this and so the Polycrisis posits war and peace, as an exclusively Western binary, which fails to acknowledge the states of perpetual crisis and war in many developing countries. This is important because wars entail sustaining the process of existing capitalist order as well as reorder.

Consider the selectivity and uni-polarity of the consensus on contemporary sanctions, which are immiserating ordinary people鈥檚 lives. The militarisation of finance may have taken a seemingly new and unique route with Biden鈥檚 misadventures in Ukraine but as the gross and perverse inequity of the attests, this militarisation  is , and even now remains an intrinsic part of US strategy in different regions such as and is in fact  

The rise in contemporary attempts to circumvent the dollar in different iterations 聽including and the implementation of long debated proposals for a is not simply a moment of crisis for many countries- but an opportunity. The recent discussion on the contours of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), beyond a mere and one which would inevitably be marked by a state of 聽speaks of a new world order which will remain in flux but also contains the possibility of monetary relief for developing countries through a . Whether we like it or not, a dispersal of power is not equivalent to chaos if it leads to opportunities for more levelling between states.

3. Roads which don鈥檛 lead to Davos

Janet Roitman鈥檚 book the , speculates on the multiplicities of crisis in a different way.  Importantly, it outlines the role of the problematization of what is described as a crisis, particularly in order to pre-empt intervention. This is a helpful approach in mapping the alignment of the Polycrisis with the Western multilateral response 鈥� a lending bonanza fuelled by high interest rates and the paucity of aid coupled with the ascendency of as an exclusive corporate hub for the policy making of poverty amelioration.  In a non-executive, non-treaty based Davos, as both the developed and non-developed world struggles to put food on the table, the , seems to posit it as a vacuous catchall to describe all that impeding the elite鈥檚 vociferous demand for further financialisation.

Undoubtedly the current crisis is caused by the transformational role of financial and digital capitalism and the imminence of climate-change led human extinction. However, these are not anomalies to capitalism but part of its design, of which the consequences and spill-overs are unevenly distributed across the World. For example, even with its global permeation, as financial capitalism bereaves the working classes in the developed North, it continues to deepen extraction in the Global South, both and passively. Moreover, the global is not devoid of the footprint of .聽 The consistency in the commodification of nature leading to the breaking-point of extinction, cannot rationally be separated from the general extractive activities of capital.

Unless the Polycrisis, seriously questions the drivers of power and finds ways of challenging them, it risks becoming yet another neoliberal policy buzzword.

 is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester in the UK. Her research focuses on comparative development, Industrial policy, corporations, economic geography and the changing landscape of development assistance. She tweets at .

Photo: Capitalism IS the Crisis May 25, 2013 March from Union Square to Washington Square New York, NY (Photo: Ed/Flickr)

If I had to describe three central characteristics of the Indian economy鈥攊ts three defining features in the neoliberal period鈥攖hey鈥檇 be i) , ii) growth in the absence of formal job-creation, and instead an , and iii) the in value added even as its share in employment remains sizeable. In June-July 2019, I did intensive fieldwork in Sangli, a village in in southern Haryana, to make sense of the ways in which these processes interact with agrarian change and play out for agrarian households, i.e. the contemporary Agrarian Question [1]. 

Sangli is in Haryana, where Green Revolution techniques (high yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and agricultural machinery like tractors and threshers) were adopted early on. It also happens to be close to the industrial belt that extends from the to its surrounding districts, where in the neoliberal era. This makes it an interesting place to study processes of generation and re-investment of agrarian surpluses, and to peer into the relationship between 鈥渕odernized鈥� agriculture and neoliberal industrial and urban growth that has dwarfed the rural economy.

Agriculture after Green Revolution

Agricultural production, embedded in Green Revolution techniques, is oriented towards the market. While the bulk of cultivated land is inherited through kinship relations, cultivators buy seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides from local shops, and sell their produce either in government procurement centers (mandis) or to local private traders [2]. Some parts of the cultivation process, such as land preparation, sowing, harvesting, and threshing, are wholly mechanized. State support plays a critical role through the provision of subsidized electricity (which allows for the use of motorized pump-sets for irrigation), lower prices for some fertilizers, and in the setting of the minimum support prices for key crops like wheat, mustard, pearl millet, etc. 

Labor Processes in Agriculture 

The institution of caste has historically shaped the rural economy and Sangli is no exception. For centuries, caste-based servitude (the jajmani system) tied individual landless avarna households (formerly untouchables) with savarna landowners or zamindars into relations of forced dependence. Though jajmani ties have broken down, agricultural labor hiring out continues to be the domain of avarna landless households. Apart from local avarna labor, landowning households also hire (and certainly prefer) migrant labor groups for harvesting and threshing operations on piece-rated contracts. Migrants come from nearby states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar, and often comprise whole families (including children) who work together in large groups, are paid by the acre, and therefore finish operations more quickly鈥攑recisely why landlords prefer them to local avarna laborers.

Despite the adoption of modernized techniques and the , high input costs and small farm sizes exert pressure on surplus margins in agriculture. The vast majority of cultivators combine unpaid household labor with hired labor on the farm to mitigate this pressure and boost cash surpluses. Using or E-Ratio, I find that half of the landowners in my sample rely primarily on unpaid family labor. Reliance on family labor further inhibits scale, especially if some household members are diversified in other lines of work. 

Pathways out of Agriculture

Virtually all landowners I spoke with were dissatisfied with returns from agriculture, especially given the dependence of surplus margins on intensive physical labor, and instead sought pathways into 鈥渟ervice鈥� (i.e. formal, often office-based) employment. This is noteworthy because Haryana is frequently presented as a with widespread adoption of modernized techniques and relatively well-functioning public procurement systems for several key crops. 

What I observed instead is that agricultural surpluses paved the way for diversification into non-agricultural activities for savarna landowning households. A large number of savarna landowners, 70% of my sample, earned the majority of their household incomes from non-agricultural sources鈥攆rom wage employment, petty businesses, or transfers. Indeed, the average per capita income for diversified landowning households was twice that of primarily agricultural households. 

Some better-off savarna landowners, particularly banias (or merchant castes), are able to deploy surpluses towards setting up local petty businesses/merchant capital ventures like grain trading, fertilizer and seed shops, kirana (or grocery) stores etc. These households are likely to withdraw from the use of family labor on the farm, and are among the most well-off in the village. Others, predominantly ahirs and brahmins, are able to secure coveted jobs in the public sector, whether in the army, the electricity department, the police, etc., while continuing to cultivate the family farm through a combination of family and hired labor. Once diversified, landowners cease consistent investments in agriculture. 

Using agricultural surpluses to 鈥榠nvest鈥� in education, from local private schools to postgraduate programs in nearby cities, as well as knowledge and social connections cemented over generations of access to public sector employment, savarna landowners dominate the pathways into secure, non-agricultural livelihoods, though not all make the shift successfully. Many are not able to land formal wage employment in the public sector or in offices and factories of the nearby industrial belt. Some respondents revealed that they tried their hand at the work in factories but returned to cultivation because it offered a better livelihood. Land ownership therefore serves as a failsafe against the most precarious and low-paid wage work.

Avarna households on the other hand, who have neither the investible surpluses from cultivation nor the social networks of upper-castes, are precluded from access to formal employment. Engaged primarily in precarious daily wage work in agriculture and construction, the few instances of self-employment are confined to petty commodity production with very small asset bases (as street hawkers, seamstresses, etc.). The limits to formal job creation are more tangible for avarna households. 

Summing Up

The , which engaged with the role of agrarian surpluses in a country鈥檚 trajectory of industrial development, may have been , but agrarian surpluses play a critical role in the realization of pathways out of agriculture. Caste relations, which have historically shaped access to resources and divisions of labor in the rural economy, also shape these trajectories, such that the extent of jobless growth is experienced differently by different caste groups. Savarna landowners seek livelihoods that offer an improvement over cultivation by deploying agrarian surpluses towards education or petty businesses. Landless avarna households are also compelled to diversify out of agricultural laboring but, in the absence of the support of generationally forged social networks or higher education credentials, are rarely able to secure formal employment as savarna landowners do. 

This overlap between segmentations along lines of caste, land ownership, and type of employment, or the 鈥渃o-constitution of caste and class relations鈥� is understood as Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche鈥檚 . Conjugated oppression expresses the ways in which caste, tribe, region, and gender shape how sections of the working class ally with dominant classes and castes to preserve their pre-existing privileges from those below them in the social hierarchy. These complex hierarchies, entailing chains and gradations of inequality and oppression, fragment the overall power of labor and rupture class solidarities.   

Srishti Yadav is an Instructor at the Department of Economics, University of Manitoba. She holds a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research. She tweets at .

This article draws from the author鈥檚 dissertation research conducted at The New School for Social Research, New York. The findings and argument presented here are a modified version of a journal article published online in the Journal of Agrarian Change: .

Endnotes

[1] Name changed to protect the anonymity of respondents.

[2] This is the general trend, though households continue to retain part of the crop (especially food grains such as wheat and pearl millet, as well as crop by-product) to meet domestic consumption requirements and for the upkeep of milch animals (which the majority of landowners keep).

Photo:  / Unsplash

It is official: we are getting ready for another round of industrial action in the UK higher education sector. For those who may be wondering what the current is all about, a short recap may help. Higher education UCU members are striking because of planned pensions cuts that risk pushing academic staff into 鈥榬etirement poverty鈥�; to fight against ever-growing labour casualisation in universities; and because of the growing inequalities of gender, race and class the UK higher education sector has nurtured in the last five decades. Colleagues at Goldsmith 鈥� to whom we shall extend all our support – are also fighting .

We 鈥� higher education workers and students – were on this picket before, so many times, fighting other policies deepening the process of commodification of education. We were on this picket fighting 鈥� which education workers are still experiencing. We were on this picket to fight against the . At SOAS, where I work, we were on this picket to , , against the on campus ground – an event which remains the darkest chapter of SOAS industrial relations and for which the university has not yet apologised in recognition of the harm caused to the and to all our community. We hope the school will acknowledge the need to do so, so that we can move forward, together.

We were at other demonstrations and on other picket  lines, protesting against austerity, in the , , against racism and in support of against . The picket really is a sort of archive, which can be consulted backward to reconstruct a history of attacks to our rights – at work, at home, or both.

And if we consult this archive, we can clearly see a pattern emerging in the last decades, a pattern which in fact connects neoliberal Britain with many other places in the world economy, which have also experienced processes of neoliberalisation. All the pickets and demonstrations, become a sort of tracing route; we can reconnect the dots spread across a broader canvas. These dots design a specific pattern; that of a systematic attack to life and life-making sectors, realms and spaces.

, starting from the 1980s, has promoted a process of systematic de-concentration of resources in public sectors, and particularly in so-called 鈥�socially reproductive sectors鈥�, that is those that regenerate us as people and as workers. This attack has been massively felt in the home, which has become a major battleground for processes of . The withdrawal of the state from welfare provisions, the rise and rise of co-production in services (i.e. the incorporation of citizens鈥� unpaid labour in public service delivery;聽 a practice further cheapening welfare) – 聽and processes of partial or full privatisation of service delivery in healthcare and education have . These gaps have been filled through to others. 黑料社区s have become net users of market-based domestic and care services. The in-sourcing of nannies, au-pairs, and elders carers, from a vast number of countries in the Global south and transition economies have remade the home as a site of production and employment generation, at extremely low costs.

On the other hand, , albeit of wageless labouring services, as women have shouldered life-making at zero costs for a very long time. Yet, their entry into paid labour markets have not been gender liberating, as it has reproduced the gendered division of labour by embedding it in a number of other divides, like the one between the Global North and the Global South. Middle class women have not learnt how to withdraw from unpaid reproductive labour. They have learnt how to outsource the reproductive question towards other women, often racialised and migrant women, and/or members of subaltern groups in the society in question. These transformations have been systematic in Britain and across the world economy.

If this sort of transformations has seen a process of privatisation of reproductive work such as domestic and care activities which has centred households as producers and consumers of housework services, a similar trend has hit , if on a larger scale. These sectors, such as health and education, have endured privatisation in ways that have also generated the massive . The NHS is a case in point here. Despite remaining technically publicly provided, the NHS has seen many of its services going through , and the massive entry of public private partnerships (PPPs). , and recruitment agencies have targeted nursing markets in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This has produced a process of reproductive brain drain from these regions, which has resulted in weakening their healthcare systems. At the same time, it has ensured a downward pressure on wages in nursing sectors in the UK. So this work, celebrated as essential 鈥� 鈥� has been regenerated as precarious, , and in fact it has helped dragging down wages for all nurses. To be clear, it is not migrant care labour which is dragging down wages. It is the processes of privatised outsourcing which turns this work into a cheap devalued service.  

Now, we know that . In fact, as COVID-19 hit, areas characterised by private health systems or privatised services have experienced astonishingly high death rates. . Privatised services come with a reordering of main objectives, away from areas considered less marketable. We learnt that with the paucity of ICU bed, didn鈥檛 we? Again, these trends can also be spotted ; a high growth rate economy, healthcare system characterised by PPPs have not been able to cope and eventually this turned into a high death toll. In Italy too, the rich north has experienced far more deaths than the under-developed south for similar reasons. Northern regions, despite their healthcare poles of excellence has been , as its semi-privatised model has shifted priorities away from emergency medicine.

Now let鈥檚 continue our analysis from our homes, onto our classrooms. The commodification of social reproduction mounted in the 1980s has been ferocious against our education systems. It has hit our nurseries, our schools, our universities. In fact, the same processes of privatisation of social reproduction have gained pace across the schooling and educational system. Today, these key spaces of socialisation have increasingly become attuned to the logics of profit-making. First, . In some segments of the educational system, then, private provision has taken centrestage. In nurseries and early years provisions, colleagues from the University of East London and UCL have highlighted the . These providers are often linked to transnational capital. So the nursery, of all places has become a (Penn and Mezzadri, 2022). Indeed, the financial grammar of mergers and acquisitions is the new (Simon et al, forthcoming). According to a forthcoming report, most formal childcare in the UK – over 80% of all places – is provided by the private sector, ranging from small private operators to multi-million-pound international businesses. 53% of all childcare places are provided by big companies. The for-profit childcare market in the UK is worth an estimated 拢5.5 billion pounds, of which 拢3.6 billion goes to big companies. The largest three chains, between them providing over 60,000 places, are owned by foreign investors, with financial head offices located in Singapore, France and the USA. Further changes in the sector seem likely, most notably increased penetration by large chains, and increased foreign investment (Simon et al, forthcoming). Similar trends take place in the .

These processes take place in a context of , and huge turnover of labour. As I left my child in his private nursery for almost two years, not knowing if he will find his usual keyworker, I soon realised the nursery was owned by the private insurance company down the road. I have no idea which broader financial circuit that agency is linked to. In these privatised spaces, children are , standardised as their care needs. Already from a very young age, ideas of developmental targets and compliance are mainstreamed as ideal value for parents (and these tiny little children) to internalise.

The move to the public schooling system 鈥� to public provision 鈥� once children turn three, provide some respite, but up to a point. In the context of the exercised by the UK government in these last decades, primary schools struggle to remain anchored to a caring narrative. The curriculum is based on an obsession with targets and categorisation. Kids as young as 5 are placed into different areas of achievement, from low to high, and if they are lucky this system may change daily. In some schools it is structural, and small children must struggle their way out of low achievement grouping 鈥� a sort of school-based version of the Hunger Games. A few weeks ago The Guardian featured an article titled . The study shows that primary school children who are placed in the bottom ability group in their class go on to show increased levels of hyperactivity and emotional problems throughout childhood and early adolescence. This is supposedly ground-breaking new research, but all parents know this. Now: these new findings, published in the journal, have prompted researchers to call for children in lower ability groups to be monitored closely by their teachers to ensure their wellbeing is not being compromised. So, the recommendation of the study is actually NOT to abolish this form of social segregation, which is often classed and racialised. It is instead for these kids to be 鈥榦thered鈥� further and 鈥榤onitored closely鈥�.

On the other hand, the abusive practices that monitoring and surveillance systems involve have also been widely discussed with reference to secondary education. Here, the massive use of detention as a tool to enforce discipline has also come under fire, pre-pandemic. An article appearing in The Guardian compared schools to prisons, and highlighted how the massive abuse of was perpetuating gaps in terms of race, class, and neurodiversity. Have you watched last year the series of short movies directed by Steve McQueen 鈥� Small Axe? You should, it is brilliant. One of the episodes, titled dwells on the racist and neurophobe shortcomings of the British schooling system. Although the characters in Education are fictional, the film is based on real-life events of the 1970s, when some London councils followed an unofficial policy of transferring disproportionate numbers of black children from mainstream education to schools for the so-called 鈥榚ducationally subnormal鈥�. The practice was exposed by educationalist  in his 1971 pamphlet where he explained how West Indian children were manufactured into unschoolable subjects by the so-called 鈥榥ormal鈥� schooling system. Thankfully, those practices are gone, yet patterns of exclusion from school remain highly racialised, gendered, and based on disabilities. This is particularly the case in , whereas richer neighbourhood can benefit from the hidden processes of privatisation of education, as they have access to better public schools, often located in streets with very expensive housing, whose value is maintained by access to this type of schooling, which in turn keeps real estate prices high, and so on and so forth.

The obsessions with targets and testing, in contexts of profoundly unequal social provisions, is a system that can be spotted also in many other countries. It dominates in the US, in South Korea, in China, and in India. In the US, as highlighted by the work of Cindi Katz, this system produced a characterisation of , depending on how the kids in question perform 鈥揳nd arguably 鈥榩roduce and consume鈥� (see Ferguson, 2017) – their childhood and youth, if along the lines deemed as successful by the monitoring and testing system or not. Of course, processes of childhood as accumulation return to the home, in ways in which parents foster their children as little investment projects for the future 鈥� as epitomised by practices chillingly summarised, Katz (2021) recently explained, by memoirs like 鈥楤attle Hymns of a Tiger Mother鈥�, by Amy Chua.

So, after coming for our homes, our hospitals and clinics, and our nurseries and primary and secondary classrooms, the commodification of social reproduction lands in our university settings. Here, it continues its work of divide and rule, in processes of . However, mostly, it manifests in the deepening of and in shaping the entry of young adults into relations of , against a background of for teaching staff. In fact, in many ways, universities represent a microcosm speaking to all the distinct processes of commodification of social reproduction unveiled so far. They are sites of global care chains, as cleaning and caring services are decentralised and outsourced to agencies, a process that the campaign fought across UK campuses, inspiring us all. It is a site of financial capital and privatised housing. One of the most haunting images of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on university life last year has been that of students at the University of hired by universities to keep them inside halls of residence. They should have not been there in the first place, but Universities, which have become landlords, lied to house hundreds of thousands of students and capture rent money. These rents and skyrocketing fees are the reasons why student debt has ballooned since the onset of neoliberalism.

Ultimately, exhausted by testing and surveillance as children, young adults finally arrive in the neoliberal university as expert consumers of largely privatised or at the very least individualised educational 鈥榩roducts鈥�, overexposed to what Paulo Freire criticised as the . There they are ready to become financial subject 鈥� subjects of debt and processes of indebtedness. In their book NiUnaMenos theorists and activists Veronica Gago and Luci Caballero spell out the linkages between debt, social reproduction, and deeply rooted social and economic inequalities running across households and communities.

As students mount this debt, staff salaries and working conditions have been at the same time systematically eroded by the neoliberal universities. A massive producer of what – whose primary scope is often in fact management and control – the asphyxiating walls of the neoliberal universities are fabricated by processes of , and declining income share even for the so-called labour aristocracy of permanent academic workers, like myself. Or indeed .

As you can see, we are circling back to the reasons we are striking this academic year, which is where my reflections started. We have connected all dots, through the archive of the picket line, and we have rehearsed all the processes that have placed and will place us here, on the picket, today and tomorrow. In December, I felt extremely honoured and privileged to stand on this picket line, with so many comrades, colleagues and students 鈥� in fact delivering an early version of these same reflections as a teach-out. Across London, teach-outs have been marvellous, and hundreds of students attended. We do not strike to avoid teaching. We strike to demand social change, and to teach solidarity through collective struggles. The picket line becomes our classroom, so that it can be, in the words of the late , 鈥榯he most radical space of possibility in the academy鈥�. In this space we can teach that all struggles are connected, set against the processes of commodification of social reproduction and life we have endured. On our picket, on this archive of knowledge of past and present fights we wage and must continue waging, from the home to the classroom, against neoliberal attacks to our common , united we will always stand. Solidarity to us all, for the days that are coming.

 is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS.

References

Katz C. (2021) 鈥楢spiration Management: gender, Race, Class, and the Child as Waste鈥�. In Why Gender? Edited by Jude Browne. Cambridge University Press (pp. 170-193).

Simon A, Penn H, Shah A, Owen C, Lloyd E, Hollingworth K, Quy K (2022) Acquisitions, Mergers and Debt: the new language of childcare 鈥� Main Report. London: UCL Social Research Institute, University College London.

Ferguson S. (2017) 鈥楥hildren, Childhood and Capitalism: A Social Reproduction Perspective鈥�. In T. Bhattacharya (ed) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press (pp. 112鈥�130).

Penn H.聽and聽Mezzadri A. (2022) 鈥楴urture versus Capitalism: Why the child went missing from for-profit childcare鈥�. In 鈥楥OVID Reconfigurations鈥�: The Sociological Review Magazine.

Photo:

By Ishan Khurana and John Narayan

A number of commentators have recently suggested  or is in a . During the disruption of global commodity chains caused by the Covid 19-pandemic, free-market policies that have dominated the global economy for the past 40 years appear to have less purchase. Here, authors point to a reversion to a national form of capitalism and protectionism, the questioning of globalization and return of state intervention in the economy. A prime example is the Biden regime鈥檚 approach to the US economy, which has turned to deficit driven social spending, expansion of union rights and protectionist measures to public procurement. This hasn鈥檛 come out of nowhere 鈥� with the neo-liberal global economy being zombie-like since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The fracturing of the global economy along national lines may herald conflict and a new cold war between the US and China. However, the retreat of neo-liberalism also seems to offer a possible opening 鈥� . Here, a rejuvenated politics of the left may be able to avoid the pitfalls of and launch a new national form of progressive politics around welfare policies such as the Green New Deal and Universal Basic Income in locations such as the UK and US.

Neo-liberalism is in trouble, but missing from these debates about its demise is a discussion of neo-liberalism in the Global South and, thus, the reality of what the crisis of neo-liberalism means for all rather than simply those within the Global North. 

The erasure of the Global South in the 鈥榚nd of neo-liberalism鈥� discourse is curious. Neo-liberal processes in the Global North, such as deindustrialization, privatization and state retrenchment are dependent on dispossession, disarticulated Fordism and super exploitation and forced labour in the Global South. Neo-liberalism was part of a global economic counterrevolution, exported into the Global South through the IMF and the World Bank鈥檚 structural adjustment policies.

These programs enforced neo-liberal practices (austerity, privatization, liberalization) through loan conditionality and locked nations in the Global South into asymmetric and exploitative economic relations with economies and multinational corporations in the Global North. Moreover, neoliberal globalization replaced the  as attempts to equalize the global economy fell apart during the debt crisis of the 1980s.

Neo-liberalism and the regime of globalization it has underpinned for the last 40 years, then, is best seen as a . In their recent book Capitalism and Imperialism [1],  ,  for example, argue that capital accumulation in the Global North is shown to be historically dependent on an imperialist relationship that keeps petty producers and workers of the Global South in a spiral of income deflation 鈥� to ward off inflation and maintain the value of money in the North. The neo-liberal regime restored the income deflating mechanism of the colonial era 鈥� which had partly been disrupted by Third World dirigiste regimes in the 1960s and 1970s- through the power of international finance institutions and neo-liberal regulation to ward off the higher prices of raw materials and higher wages and purchasing power in the global south.

When viewed through the lens of imperialism, the end of neo-liberalism reads somewhat differently. Writers such as  point to the US recently giving weight to a potential TRIPS waiver at the WTO that would allow patents for Covid-19 to be temporarily suspended as proof of neo-liberalism鈥檚 coming demise. The reality is that a year on from the attempts by India and South Africa to achieve a patent waiver, multinational corporations, such as Pfizer, have been able to successfully lobby for patents to be maintained.

In the meantime, the Global North has begun providing booster shots for its population whilst many countries in the Global South, particularly on the African continent, . Further, countries such as South Africa and India have been key producers and exporters of vaccines for Northern corporations and populations. The global economy may be changing but the architecture of global governance is still founded on imperial interests.  

But we can push this view of the end of neo-liberalism in the Global South further through the prism of the Patnaik鈥檚 view of imperialism and income deflation. Here the current crisis of neo-liberalism centres on the fact that it does not have growth mechanisms other than asset-price bubbles. With the so-called return of the 鈥楰eynesianism鈥� in the guise of the Biden regime鈥檚 stimulus packages for the US, which come on the back of Trump鈥檚 own stimulus packages, Prabhat Patnaik  that the imperial tendency would be to control inflation in the Global North by imposing income deflation in the Global South:

鈥楽o we may end up having a situation where there is Keynesianism in the First World and austerity in the Third World. Now that is something which is again really going to really worsen the plight of the working people, peasants, workers and so on in the Third World. Actually makes matters much worse. That is something which is a fallout of, if you like, what the capitalist solution might actually lead to鈥� [2]

The power of international financial institutions such as the IMF during the Covid-19 pandemic suggests such a tightening of imperialism. As the Covid 19 pandemic took hold of the global economy, disrupting supply chains and throwing economies into reverse, nations in the Global South again turned to the IMF. As with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the IMF seemingly responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with arguments for stimulus on health and social expenditure. 

However, suggests that much like the fallout of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis the IMF has returned to recommending austerity and neo-liberal orthodoxy in the Global South once the pandemic subsides. Oxfam鈥檚 research discloses that 85% of the 107 loans negotiated in 2020-21 between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and 85 national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, indicate plans to undertake fiscal consolidation after the pandemic. It may very well be that the income deflation of the South is already taking shape alongside the 鈥榬eturn of the state鈥� in the Global North.

Reading the crisis of neo-liberalism through the lens of imperialism raises questions about the so-called end of neo-liberalism. There is no coincidence that those who will not receive Covid vaccinations until 2022/23 whilst rich nations offer third 鈥榖ooster鈥� vaccinations are in the Global South. But the imperial factor also raises the spectre that the return of the state in the Global North 鈥� and welfare ideas attached with this return such as Green New Deals and Universal Basic Income 鈥� may be tied to further immiseration of those in the South. 

The sustainability of the British welfare state currently relies upon imperial relations of production which, through cheap labour and resource extraction in the Global South, make consumer goods affordable with current levels of wages and welfare payments. Once again , we discuss the impact of an increase in supply price on the affordability and availability of key consumer goods, and the implications of the consequent depreciation in purchasing power at a fixed level of welfare payments. 

Within the UK economy, the primary source of income for most households is through the labour market (supplemented in the case of low pay through universal credit). For households that cannot access the labour market due to a lack of jobs, illness and disability or because of retirement, income is primarily in the form of state benefits (including state pension 鈥� though of course there are private pensions for some).

The adequacy of the amount of money paid out depends on the price of consumer goods as the role of these welfare payments is to ensure that the recipients can purchase necessary items and services on the market. A rise in the supply price of things like food, fuel, clothes, or transport threatens the effectiveness and viability of the welfare system to meet needs. 

Many of these goods reach the UK through global supply chains and are produced by workers in former colonies and neo-colonies under conditions of super-exploitation, commonly characterised by the prevalence of unfree labour, starvation wages, or work days lasting over 14hrs. And, as discussed earlier, the social relations in the Global South that provide the foundations for this super-exploitation were shaped through European colonialism, resisted during decolonisation, and have been violently reasserted through ongoing neoliberal interventions.

Such interventions have of course been resisted, one can point to the recently successful farmers鈥� protest in India against attempts to further entrench neoliberal practices in one of the world鈥檚 largest agriculture markets.  super-exploitation is well documented and rife in the supply chains that produce the goods sold to British consumers.

It is important to highlight this, not only because such imperial relations of super-exploitation lead to vast profits for the companies utilising such labour, but crucially because it is an essential feature in the global economic architecture responsible for the provision of cheap consumer goods in Global North at prices affordable for consumers and profitable for retailers.

Crucially, an increase in wages in the global south without a rise in productivity would inevitably lead to a rise in inflation in the imperial cores through an increase in the costs of production. Such an increase in inflation in the UK without an associated income rise implies a decline in real incomes for UK households and therefore a reduction in their purchasing power. Therefore, under conditions of rising inflation, adequate cash payment levels (e.g. pensions, disability payments, fuel allowances), minimum and living wage levels, as well as the costs of welfare services like the NHS would all have to see a rise. 

This includes any future cash transfer policies like Universal Basic Income that are often proposed by social democrats in Global North countries as a counter to the neoliberal order. Although such a policy can amount to desirable income redistribution within the national economy, if paid for through taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations, achieving the desired effect of raising living standards still relies on inflation being kept under control, and therefore (under the current systems of production) would rely on continued income deflation in the Global South.

It has also been proposed that such cash transfer policies could be funded through sovereign wealth funds that would pay out a Basic Income through returns on investments made. If composed in ways similar to existing sovereign wealth funds, such an implementation would further entrench the link between value extraction in the Global South by multinational companies and welfare in the North and would hardly represent a move away from neoliberal structures. 

Similarly, the popularity of policy proposals like the Green New Deal are also hailed as a sign that the neoliberal consensus is breaking down. However, as Max Ajl has outlined in his recent book , the green social democratic project鈥檚 promises (like a million electric cars) can only be kept through continued imperial extraction of critical materials. Therefore, making no change to the Global North鈥檚 dependence on resource extraction from the Global South and by extension the contemporary neoliberal structures that facilitate this extraction. Paraphrasing George H.W. Bush, from the perspective of commentators in the Global North, the American (or indeed European) way of life is not up for negotiation.

This is exemplified in the regime of bordering that has defined the neoliberal period and its role in maintaining a racialised access to the welfare state. As Nadine El Enany has outlined in her book the 1970s and 1980s (the decades post-decolonization commonly associated with the advent of neoliberalism) see the British state introducing immigration controls targeting racialized subjects and commonwealth citizens. This border regime now excludes migrants from welfare state 鈥� through short term visas and no recourse to public funds policies 鈥� whilst using their labour to fill shortages in the very welfare state they are now excluded from accessing.

Such controls on the flow of labour through bordering are part of the same architecture that requires unrestricted global flows of capital. While many newly independent Global South nations were subjected to IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs leading to imposed austerity and neoliberal policies, the ability for labour in these nations to move to the imperial core was heavily restricted. Although often neglected, we argue that the bordering practices of the neoliberal era are a central part of the existing neoliberal political economy. It is through both bordering the Global North and neoliberal interventions in the Global South that the imperial nations can maintain their welfare.

Commentary on contemporary political economy in the UK that ignores the relation between neoliberal restructuring in the periphery and the prosperity of the core can naturally lead to premature claims that a rise in welfare state spending in the imperial centres signals an end to neoliberalism. Therefore, to avoid such parochial Eurocentrism, we reiterate the need to situate analyses on national economies within an understanding of the global economic system and its imperial underpinnings.

Indeed, given the recent over neo-liberal policy in India the stage for the end of neoliberalism for all of the world appears ever closer. But it these agents of change, rather than the old white men in charge of western nation states, and their needs and desires that must be included in any future horizon we wish to head towards. Anything else, regardless of being or not being neo-liberal, is simply imperialism.

References

[1] Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2021) Capitalism and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present. Monthly Review Press.

[2] Lynn Fries and Prahbat Patnaik (2021) 鈥樷��&苍产蝉辫;Monthly Review Online

 is a Connected Sociologies Sociological Review Fellow working on the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project, a PhD student at UCL working on the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter experiment, and a co-organiser of Consented. He has previously worked as a Data Researcher at the think tank Autonomy.

 is a Lecturer in European and International Studies at King鈥檚 College London. His most recent research has focused on the understudied transnationalism of US and British Black Power and the political theory created by groups such as the Black Panther Party. He also sits on the Editorial Working Committee of Race and Class.

This article was first publised on .

Header Image Credit: Randeep Maddoke,