Everything Old is “Neo” Again

While critical political economy (CPE) has yet to play a prominent role in eco-social policy research, this paper argues that a deeper engagement with CPE and a better understanding of the global political economy can enhance eco-social policy debates. CPE can help us to see the contradictions in and impediments to integrating environmental and social policies, and particularly why both of these categories continue to be mediated and shaped by economic logics. In order to develop these arguments, we analyse recent international discourses on agricultural subsidies promoted by key policy actors such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. By examining agriculture as a nodal point between diverse scales and domains such as the local, global, environmental, social, and economic spheres, we explore how certain positions are prioritised over others. We argue that the discourse on ‘repurposing subsidies’ in global agricultural policy expresses a ‘new critical orthodoxy’ that recognises the need for transformation but fails to address the structural conditions of the global political economy responsible for environmental and social crises. Instead, the proposed solutions rely on existing institutions and capitalist logics to resolve current crises, even if the latter are underpinned by these logics. Our analysis underlines the need for eco-social policy scholarship to be cognizant of how environmental and social policy integration is always embedded within a particular global political economy that reproduces certain inequalities and is not a neutral policy terrain.

Tracing the themes of political economy in Nietzsche’s thought, this article has two main purposes. The first of these is to problematize some narratives such as eternal return, will to power, and revaluation of values, which are the crucial concepts of Nietzsche’s thought, in the critique of political economy. The second is to re-read Nietzsche’s themes of political economy in conjunction with the concept of the virtual political economy of life, to link Nietzsche’s ‘grand politics’ with the overshadowed concept of ‘grand economy’ by making the move that put Nietzsche’s hammer on the idols of the established grammar of political economy. All of these themes are part of an economy of power that goes against the grasp of economics and political economy by grammatical thought. I call this political economy the virtual political economy of life.

Reviewed by: On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy by Jukka Grunow David Camfield Jukka Grunow, On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Beginning in the 1860s and continuing into the final decade of the century, the working-class movement revived in Europe and spread in areas of the continent and European settler-colonial territories in which it had not previously emerged. Although the crushing of the Paris Commune, repressive legislation in Germany, and other attacks by state authorities and employers dealt the movement setbacks, and the long Great Depression of the late-19th century worsened the lives of many of those it sought to organize, proletarian organizers succeeded in uniting a significant minority of their expanding class into new parties, unions, and a range of community-based workers' organizations. This movement was ideologically heterogeneous. However, by the time most of its parties came together to form the Socialist International in 1889 the school of thought dubbed Marxism by its principal exponents was increasingly influential. The foremost of these theorists was Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), whose eminence after the death of Karl Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels in 1895 led some to call him "the Pope of Marxism." Kautsky played an important role in creating and popularizing what came to be [End Page 303] called Marxism (a name he deliberately used, in emulation of Darwinism) and in engaging in a battle of ideas against other theories within the Social Democratic Party in Germany and beyond. In debates within the Socialist International between the closing years of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I, he was the leading figure of the orthodox "centre," pitted against the avowedly reformist "revisionists" and later also against the revolutionary "left." It is this contribution to shaping the ideological dimension of the working-class movement of his time that makes Kautsky significant; unlike Marx, there is no reason why people interested in social and political thought for our times would turn to Kautsky. That said, Kautsky's hand in creating the "Marxism – a system that must not be equated with Marx's thought, from which it differed in fundamental ways – that was diffused through the Socialist International and, indirectly, through the Communist International and its dissident offshoots is insufficiently appreciated (although the 21st century scholarship of Lars Lih has highlighted Kautsky's influence on Lenin). In this light, the reappearance of Jukka Grunow's study of Kautsky's thought is noteworthy. Originally published in 1986 as a dissertation in sociology, it has been republished by Brill in a slightly different form, with an introduction that discusses more recent scholarship, as a volume of its Historical Materialism series (edited by editors of the journal of the same name). The book is organized in two parts: "Kautsky's Marxism" (some seven-tenths of the main body of the text) and "Marx's Marxism." Part One is focused on Kautsky's theory of capitalism, including imperialism, although it also contains chapters on Kautsky's politics and Lenin's polemics against them in 1917–1918. Part Two is made up of four chapters that discuss aspects of Marx's thought in relation to that of John Locke, Adam Smith, and other political economists, in dialogue with a number of German Marxist writers of the 1970s and early 1980s, with only occasional references to Kautsky. Grunow argues that Kautsky's "interpretation of Marx's Capital fails to pay attention to the specific character of Marx's theory as a critique of political economy." (288) This lead Kautsky to offer a theory of capitalism that criticized it for "violating the right of the worker to the products of her or his own labour," (24) which Marx did not. Kautsky misread the first volume of Capital as a theoretical account of the historical evolution from one mode of production, simple commodity production, to another, capitalism, and of capitalism's "developmental laws." (289) Unlike Marx, Kautsky argued that "the basic contradiction...

Subversive thought is none other than the cunning of reason when confronted with a social reality in which the poor and miserable are required to sustain the illusion of fictitious wealth. Yet, this subsidy is absolutely necessary in existing society, to prevent its implosion. The critique of political economy is a thoroughly subversive business. It rejects the appearance of economic reality as a natural thing, argues that economy has not independent existence, expounds economy as political economy, and rejects as conformist rebellion those anti-capitalist perspectives that derive their rationality from the existing conceptuality of society. Subversion focuses on human conditions. Its critical subject is society unaware of itself. This book develops Marx’s critique of political economy as negative theory of society. It does not conform to the patterns of the world and demands that society rids itself of all the muck of ages and founds itself anew.

This is a review article based on W. O. Henderson's two-volume Life of Friedrich Engels. After a brief biographical summary, Engels's contributions to political economy are examined, and it is suggested that these are much more important than has so far been recognized (e.g., by Schumpeter). In particular, Engels's paper "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" announced several of the basic and least invalid themes of Marxist political economy. Later Engels, when criticizing Utopian socialism, contributed a very remarkable account of the essential functions of the competitive price mechanism.

Jim Tully's “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond” provides an exemplar account of the modes of theoretical and dialogical engagement required for recovering non-Western thinkers and provincializing Western political thought. I argue that Tully's approach helps explain the provincialism of anticolonial political theory in matters of political economy even while it substantively fails to follow its own dictates. By provincialism I mean the lack of sustained attention to Third World Marxist thinkers and their critique of capitalist political economy, despite their centrality in the anticolonial tradition. To explain this oversight, I argue that post-Cold War Anglo-American political theory narrowed the engagements with anticolonial thinkers because of its own detachment from a critical political economy. This, I argue, diminished the ability of anticolonial political theory to place capitalist accumulation through the expropriation of nature and labor as central to the politics of colonialism and the unjust world that ensued after decolonization.

This paper focuses on the ‘blind spots in IPE’ recently addressed in related Special Issues of Review of International Political Economy and New Political Economy. It identifies a blind spot of law in IPE, tracing the problem to a blind spot in the discipline of international relations (IR) generated by tendencies in dominant theories to consider international law to be super-structural, epiphenomenal, and not worthy of political analysis, and to associations of international law with idealism. The analysis notes an inverse blind spot in international law (IL), wherein legal scholars tend to regard IL as autonomous of politics and the political economy of ‘who gets what, when, how’. These blind spots contribute to the neglect of how legal forms function to mystify the political economy of IL, thereby advancing transnational capitalism and inequality. The empirical focus is on transnational contract law, dispute settlement, and value and production chain contracting. These laws function as Capital’s law and central pillars of the transnational politico-legal order by reaching deep inside states to restructure domestic spheres according to new constitutionalism and the demands of transnational capital. Drawing on critical political economy, the paper develops a historical materialist analysis to denaturalize and demystify Capital’s law. This is a necessary move for scholars interested in the progressive and emancipatory potential of IL.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Class Identification in Review: Past Perspectives and Future Directions

Constructing theory through the critique of political economy, the central aspect of its critique of political economy is the critique of economic categories. In the text of The Poverty of Philosophy, the critique of Proudhon s economic categories reveals in depth the contradictions, subjectivity, and ideological falsehoods within his economic theories, and reveals the antagonistic nature of the economic categories of class society, placing the life of the categories in the changing structure of the productive forces and the relations of production, and laying the theoretical foundations for the establishment of economic science.

This paper draws on Critical Political Economy (CPE) to explore energy transitions in Mexico. It analyzes struggles over competing energy visions from a decolonial, spatial and post-development perspective. The article frames energy transformations as more than a move away from fossil fuels: They encompass a radical overhaul of universalized Eurocentric capitalist modernity that call the state’s role as both facilitator and driver of the energy transition into question. I examine two low-carbon infrastructure projects in the state of Yucatan, Mexico to build on Bridge and Gailing’s notion of new energy spaces as the sites, scales and spatialities through which broader questions of political economy and contemporary struggles are being worked out. CPE of the energy transition must ensure that low-carbon infrastructures are not deployed as new forms of extraction, but rather as the material basis of pluriversal transitions informed by affected communities and their territorial struggles. Both studies on the political economy of energy transitions and territorial struggles can benefit from an open dialogue about how socioecological transformations are imagined, designed and implemented.

Marx’s discussion of justice is accomplished through his critique of “political economy.” The premise of his argument is the elimination of private ownership; this is determined by his theoretical mission. The basic logic of Marx’s theory of justice is that the relations of distribution are to be interpreted not through political and legal concepts of fairness and justice, but through the relations of production, and the relations of production are to be interpreted through productive labor. Only by starting with the critique of political economy can we truly grasp the crux of the desert theory of justice and the true nature of the issue of modern justice. The concept of justice in liberalism and other contemporary Western political philosophies is a lower-order concept, whereas Marx’s concept of justice is a higher order concept with broader implications. Starting from “human society or socialized humanity,” this higher-order concept is founded on the organic social cooperation of “free men” and depicts the highest principle of justice possible for human society, a principle that is the result of the logical and historical self-sublation of all previous principles of justice throughout human history. In the course of building up the framework of contemporary China’s justice theory, Marxism should not only play the part of a critic but should also be responsible for providing normative theories for real life.

In the current Spanish conjuncture, characterized by political and economic crisis and the rapid impoverishment of the working classes, we have seen the emergence of moral discourses around indignation and the demand of dignity. While these moral exhortations have rightly been scrutinized with skepticism from Marxist positions for their lack of attention to political economic structures, this paper discusses whether we can find in them elements for what Gavin Smith calls a “revindicative politics,” able to transcend the frame of reference of the society of capital. Exploring the notion of dignity both in the Indignados movement and in my own ethnographic field site of Southern Catalonia—a region where claims to dignity have saturated the sphere of the political for decades—I suggest that the demand for dignity should be understood as an expression of what Ernst Bloch called “nonsynchronous contradictions,” being not entirely reducible to the contemporary workings of capitalist accumulation. Dignity points toward unsettled memories and unfulfilled pasts as well as to a rejection of servile relations and the desire to make sense of oneself outside of the morality of capital. Understanding this demand for dignity forces Marxist anthropologists to look at capital from the “margins,” challenging its centrality. In so doing it also invites us to refine and invigorate our critique of political economy.

Operations are where Activity Theory connects with the development of the psyche, as participation in actions entails operations which are internalized. Supported by Vygotsky s psychology at the lower end, this chapter provides a means of conceptualizing the formation of social practices and culture and their representation to the individual. The main issue is the conception of activities, what constitutes an activity, and what kind of society can be envisaged with this taxonomy of activities. The chapter examines the relation of Leontyevs Activity Theory to Marx s critique of political economy, but Leontyev seems to see an idealized version of the USSR as the norm, alongside of which bourgeois society is defective: poorly planned, and ridden with contradictions. It focuses on how Leontyev dealt with the issue of unit of analysis.Keywords: Activity Theory; Leontyev; Marx; political economy

This article evaluates Polanyi’s work from two complementary theoretical perspectives: moral economy and cultural political economy. Polanyi’s comparative historical analyses of substantive economies, their modes of distribution and the bases for their respective kinds of relative unity and stability, the rise of the market economy in and through its disembedding from more encompassing social relations, the social bases and motives for resistance to this disembedding, and its subsequent re-embedding in a market society are major theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of moral economies. Polanyi’s work can also be explored for insights that anticipate the emerging post-disciplinary approach of cultural political economy, which combines critical semiotic analysis and the critique of political economy. More importantly, cultural political economy provides new theoretical and methodological tools for elaborating Polanyi’s brilliant insights into moral economy.

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the emergence of “économie politique chrétienne”, with the aim of founding a new school of political economy, marked the French intellectual landscape. The name of J.-P.A. de Villeneuve-Bargemont is usually cited in this context. But, before Villeneuve-Bargemont, Charles de Coux had launched this approach powerfully. The present paper first states the circumstances of Coux's writings and their specific intellectual context. His project is then analysed, and his critique of political economy, his fundamental idea for an alternative approach, and his description of the logic of an industrial economy are discussed. Finally, the solutions he proposed to eradicate pauperism are examined. A brief statement of the significance of his work and legacy concludes.