Marxism, Capitalism and Mercantilism (original) (raw)

Chapter 1: The capitalist mode of production

BRILL eBooks, 2018

Chapters 1-5 set out an increasingly concrete exposition of the capitalist economy: first its conditions of existence and next its manifestations. The same applies to Chapters 6-10 for the capitalist state. The reader may wish to read the book in this order. However, Chapter 6 equally provides the grounds of Chapter 1. As does Chapter 7 for Chapter 2, and so forth. The book has been written in such a way that the reader might also read the book in this zigzag order [1;6], [2;7] and so on. This is further amplified on in the General Introduction. The systematic core of the text makes up about half of the book. The rest consists of 'explications' , 'amplifications' and 'addenda' of/on the core text, variously serving the less advanced and the advanced reader in a field-these can be read according to the reader's requirements, or skipped without losing the main thread of the core text.

07-037 The Political Economy of Capitalism

Capitalism is often defined as an economic system where private actors are allowed to own and control the use of property in accord with their own interests, and where the invisible hand of the pricing mechanism coordinates supply and demand in markets in a way that is automatically in the best interests of society. Government, in this perspective, is often described as responsible for peace, justice, and tolerable taxes. This paper defines capitalism as a system of indirect governance for economic relationships, where all markets exist within institutional frameworks that are provided by political authorities, i.e. governments. In this second perspective capitalism is a three level system much like any organized sports. Markets occupy the first level, where the competition takes place; the institutional foundations that underpin those markets are the second; and the political authority that administers the system is the third. While markets do indeed coordinate supply and demand with the help of the invisible hand in a short term, quasi-static perspective, government coordinates the modernization of market frameworks in accord with changing circumstances, including changing perceptions of societal costs and benefits. In this broader perspective government has two distinct roles, one to administer the existing institutional frameworks, including the provision of infrastructure and the administration of laws and regulations, and the second to mobilize political power to bring about modernization of those frameworks as circumstances and/or societal priorities change. Thus, for a capitalist system to evolve in an effective developmental sense through time, it must have two hands and not one: an invisible hand that is implicit in the pricing mechanism and a visible hand that is explicitly managed by government through a legislature and a bureaucracy. Inevitably the visible hand has a strategy, no matter how implicit, short sighted or incoherent that strategy may be.

Research directions on states and markets

A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology, 2019

Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interesting during the years to come? What do these trends tell us about the nature of economic anthropology at a time when more and more of our scholarship is conducted within bureaucracies rather than local communities? In this chapter I attempt to answer both of these questions. I begin with a brief sketch of insights that result from treating states and markets as essentially different, albeit related, entities, drawing especially on recent work on the nature of neoliberal-ism and global inequality. The bulk of this chapter, however, will focus on those aspects of state and market institutions that show them to be largely collaborative, similar social formations. In doing so, I mean to suggest that future anthropologi-cal research should be more explicitly concerned with aspects that cut across the state-market division, including the study of financialisation and ritual. For each of the themes explored here, the methodological message is the same: economic anthropologists should continue their concern for disenfranchised social groups, continue to carry out research marked by long-term physical engagement and continue to develop concepts that can be applied across differences of time and space. This will allow us to provide analyses of states and markets that promise to be both distinctive to our discipline and relevant for society at large. States and markets as different entities For more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism. Drawing on a recent review by Tejaswini Ganti (2014: 91), we can distinguish at least four different meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, it refers to a model of development with specific roles for labour, capital and the state, and since capital tends to be privileged in this model some have described neoliberalism as a class-based project (Harvey 2005). Secondly, the term denotes historically-situated economic policies including fiscal prudence, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, precarious work regimes and privileging lenders over borrowers in times of debt default. Thirdly, it refers to treating notions linked to market exchange as central to interpreting and evaluating human action. Lastly, it denotes a mode of governance that fosters market-based values such

Rethinking Capitalist Development

2016

This article is based on a lecture delivered by the author to celebrate Kalyan Sanyal’s memory. It draws upon an email exchange between them on Sanyal’s book Rethinking Capitalist Development. It also dwells on the important issues that Sanyal raised with particular reference to India. I had known Kalyan Sanyal for some years and grown very fond of him, and his untimely demise was a great shock to me. At different points of time (he was much junior to me) he and I had both started our early career in economics in the area of international trade theory, but later we dabbled in other issues in economics. His book Rethinking Capitalist Development is quite a landmark in the relevant literature. A couple of years before his passing away, he and I had some long email exchanges on the theme of the book, spelling out where we agree and where we disagree. In this lecture to celebrate his memory I can try to pay my homage in the only academic way I know, by drawing upon that exchange and pro...