State, Capital and World Economy: Bukharin's Marxism and the “Dependency/Class” Controversy in Canadian Political Economy

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kellogg

AbstractIn the late 1960s and early 1970s, “left-nationalist” dependency theories dominated Canadian political economy. However, Canada defied the predictions of dependency theory and developed all the class relations appropriate to advanced capitalist societies. The origins of Canadian industrial capitalism were not such that the country was locked into a staple-trap, notwithstanding the very real reliance of the economy on staple-export. In recent years, a number of political economists have offered an “orthodox” Marxist critique of dependency to account for these and other weaknesses in its overall framework. This article first summarizes the dependency arguments, then the arguments of its Marxist critics, and finally introduces a summary look at the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, a little-examined but nonetheless important theorist whose insights on the relationship between the state as a capitalist and the growing internationalization of economic life are key to a Marxist re-theorization of Canadian political economy.

1991 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Gidengil

AbstractPaul Kellogg has called on Canadian political economists to break decisively with dependency theory, arguing that Nikolai Bukharin's insights can provide the key to retheorizing Canada as an unqualifiedly advanced capitalist economy. This comment first questions Kellogg's assumption that left-nationalist dependency theorists were ascribing nationalist motivations to capital investment and then goes on to illustrate that the case for Carroll's internationalist thesis is not as strong as Kellogg supposes. Questions are raised about the appropriateness of Bukharin's emphasis on state capitalism and the nationalization of capitalist interests in the light of Canada's current strategy of market-led continentalism. Finally, the argument is made that capitalist laws of motion can provide only a starting point for understanding the political economy of Canada.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Carr

The creation of a class of strong native entrepreneurs has long been an aim of Irish industrial policy. Social science discussion of strategies stimulating Irish enterprise have tended to emanate from two broad theoretical viewpoints, modernisation theory and dependency theory,f which hold opposing views on the role the Stale can play in the promotion of business and enterprise. Considerations of the relationship between the State and an indigenous class of entrepreneurs have tended to centre on notions of ‘modernising’ and the ‘modernisation’ of society. This article shifts the focus away from a concentration on modernising to a consideration of the nature of modernity. The tendency to equate modernisation and modernity is liable to conceal or misrepresent the activities of certain economic actors, in particular State personnel. Using elements of the institutional analysis of modernity developed by Giddens (1991), the article examines the ‘selectivity function’ of Irish State personnel and their relationship with potential Irish entrepreneurs. This selectivity function can be construed as an attempt to establish an expert system to enable State personnel to assert some control over the enterprise culture juggernaut.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Maksum

Political economy and religious policies affect the relationship between sharia and financial authorities. Countries that make Islam as the official religion put Sharia authorities within the scope of the state. Malaysia is one of the countries that put Sharia authorities in the structure of state authority, although it is subject to independency. In the meantime, Indonesia combines the two models of relationship: 1) granting broader independence to sharia authority (the Indonesian Ulema Council) and 2) forming sharia board to deal with sharia finance, among others. The comparison of Indonesian, Malaysian, and the Middle Eastern countries’ system shows that the independence and the effectiveness of sharia economic fatwa application are found to attract each other. This, in turn, influences the supervision of Islamic financial institutions.  AbstrakPolitik ekonomi dan kebijakan agama memengaruhi hubungan antara otoritas syariah dan otoritas keuangan. Negara yang menjadikan Islam sebagai agama resmi menempatkan otoritas syariah dalam ruang lingkup negara. Malaysia adalah salah satu negara yang menempatkan otoritas Syariah dalam struktur otoritas negara, meskipun tetap independen. Sementara itu, Indonesia menggabungkan dua model hubungan: 1) memberikan independensi yang lebih luas kepada otoritas syariah (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) dan 2) membentuk dewan syariah untuk menangani hal yang berkaitan dengan keuangan syariah. Perbandingan sistem Indonesia, Malaysia, dan negara-negara Timur Tengah menunjukkan bahwa independensi dan efektivitas penerapan fatwa ekonomi syariah terbukti saling berhubungan satu sama lain. Ini, pada gilirannya, memengaruhi pengawasan lembaga keuangan Islam.


Author(s):  
Gökhan Bulut

This article is an attempt to reestablish the linkage of the political economy of communication with the field of social classes and class relations. Studies in the field of political economy of communication are mostly shaped within the scope of instrumentalist explanation: Social communication institutions such as communication and media are perceived as a very homogeneous structure and these institutions are directly considered as the apparatus of capital and capitalists. However, in this study, it is argued that in capitalist societies, communication, and media should be understood as a field and medium of class struggle loaded with contradictions. Another point is that the political economy of communication is mostly limited to media studies. However, in today's capitalist societies, the media is not the only structure and actor in which communication forms. In this study, communication practices in capitalist society are discussed in the context of class discussions and the relationship between class struggle, culture and communication is discussed.


Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham ◽  
A. Dirk Moses

This article describes the state of genocide studies, historicization, and causation, placing genocide into its historical context, and genocide in the world today. ‘Genocide’ is unfortunately ubiquitous, all too often literally in attempts at the destruction of human groups, but also rhetorically in the form of a word that is at once universally known and widely invoked. The comparative scholarship of genocide began with Raphael Lemkin and through the later Cold War period was continued by a small group of dedicated scholars. The discussion also opens the probing of the limits and the utility of the concept of genocide for historical understanding, and placing this crime back in its context that may often include mass non-genocidal violence. It also reflects on the debate about the relationship between individual acts of genocide and the wider political economy and norms of the worlds in which they occur.


1983 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rianne Mahon ◽  
Lynn Krieger Mytelka

In this article we address two questions pertinent to the debate on the relationship between industrial restructuring and the new protectionism. First, does the appearance of industry-specific trade barriers necessarily indicate an attempt to preserve those traditional sectors in which advanced capitalist states no longer enjoy a comparative advantage? Second, are all advanced capitalist states equally susceptible to protectionist pressures or will neomercantilist states, given their established capacity for sectoral intervention, find such pressures easier to resist than their liberal counterparts? After analyzing recent changes in textile technology and in the pattern of international competition in the textile industry, we examine the response of two states—the relatively liberal Canadian state and the neomercantilist French state—to this complex set of changes. The textile case indicates that it is a mistake to assume that states have but two options: protect or adjust. Links may be established between hightechnology and traditional industries that make it possible for inputs from the former to restore the competitive position of the latter. If such links are forged, then states may use trade barriers to allow producers time to adjust. French and Canadian textile policies reveal the conditions under which such states, although constrained by established policy networks, are nevertheless induced to respond in similar fashions to contemporary changes in the world economy.


1994 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Winters

This essay reviews three recent books on the political economy of finance in postcolonial Asia and Latin America and suggests a framework for examining the relationship between political power and varying patterns of control over investment resources. The stress is on the constraints different controllers of capital can impose on state leaders, the conditions under which policymakers can subvert these constraints, and how conflicts within the state over the trajectory of policy are mediated by who (or what) supplies critical investment resources and the institutional channels through which the resources flow.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 255-274
Author(s):  
Jane Garnett

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 219-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Ruccio

Abstract In this review, I argue that Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is necessary reading for anyone interested in thinking through the possibilities of creating noncapitalist ways of organising economic and social life in the world today. However, I also raise questions about Wright’s deterministic interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, his relative neglect of class-analysis, and his non-Gramscian conception of the relationship between the state, economy, and civil society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Taylor

The international political economy is increasingly underpinned by transnationalizing social and class forces that exercise their interests utilizing nation-states and institutions. Whereas the previous “world economy” was typified by interactions between distinct national economies, in the current “global economy,” service and production chains are ever more transnationalizing. In some readings, the notion of a “transnational state” has been advanced, with the state having broken out of its national limitations and become transnationalized. The transnational state thesis, however, is a concept too far. It denies the critical role played by the state in the internationalization process. Utilizing Poulantzas’ notion of an interior bourgeoisie, an alternative framework is offered that gives us an insight into the ongoing transnationalizing processes that mark the current contemporary stage of capitalism.


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