Beyond the Mutual Constitution of States and Markets:On the Governance of Alienation

International Political Economy (IPE) textbooks tend to present the concept of a clear state-market dichotomy as the disciplinary mainstream. Yet we argue that a critical consensus has emerged around the mutual constitution of states and markets. Underpinning this is the Polanyian thesis that economic activities are always politically embedded. However, we claim that this notion of state-market mutual constitution is inadequate to grasp the peculiarities of the capitalist political economy. While capitalist market relations are underpinned by states, they take on an autonomous, dominating logic that limits states’ agency. Concretely, by reproducing international monetary relations, states accidentally contribute to the establishment of world labour productivity averages that force them to boost national competitiveness in order to keep pace with world market standards. In place of the notion of mutual constitution, then, we offer Marx’s concept of alienation as a theory of a form of social relations that have escaped the control of the institutions that produce them. The challenge of state governance – reflected in the canon of liberal thought – is to reconcile the impersonal imperatives of world market relations with the creation of a legitimate national political project, which we term the politics of governing alienation

The politics of deindustrialisation in France (1974-1984): the case of the textiles & clothing, steel and automobile industries

This thesis proposes an original understanding of deindustrialisation which it defines as a double-sided phenomenon that involves both industrial modernisation and contraction and as a process that is actively shaped by the state. The thesis’ central argument is that deindustrialisation can be understood as a form of industrial statecraft whereby state managers endorse a selective disengagement from certain manufacturing activities in order to rationalise the country’s industry and enhance its overall commercial performance. Drawing from an Open Marxist perspective this thesis contends that states, as the political form of capitalist social relations, are an integral instant of the process of capital valorisation and as a result are constrained by the necessity to guarantee the conditions for profitable accumulation within their borders and the national economy’s competitive insertion within the global market. To substantiate these claims, this thesis offers empirical evidence from the French national archives which traces the process of industrial policy-making between 1974 and 1984 towards three sectors: textiles & clothing, steel and automobiles. In France, faced with a global crisis of overaccumulation that domestically translated into a growing trade deficit, the consecutive governments of the decade under examination sought to selectively devalue the superfluous industrial capital that impeded the competitiveness of domestic industry on the world stage. In each of these sectors, government officials were faced with a policy quandary as the planned closures and ensuing unemployment that accompanied selective disengagement threatened to ignite widespread labour contestation. Thus, selective disengagement was carried out through diverse strategies that involved to different degrees the politicisation and/or depoliticisation of industrial policy. Such strategies sought to palliate the consequences of deindustrialisation and/or transfer the responsibilities over industrial adjustment to non-state spheres in order to ensure the conformity of domestic class relations with the general objectives of selective disengagement

The politics of deindustrialisation : the experience of the textiles and clothing sector (1974-1984)

Deindustrialisation is taking an increasingly prominent place in public French discourses and has raised the question of the state’s capacity to spur the country’s industrial rejuvenation. This article views with scepticism the possibility for a state-led reindustrialisation as it finds that deindustrialisation has historically constituted an industrial strategy endorsed by French policy-makers themselves. More precisely, this article argues that deindustrialisation is an industrial strategy that involves a state-sponsored disengagement from specific manufacturing activities in order to rationalise the sector and render it apt to confront international competition. This strategy, as it is argued, is conditioned by two main factors: the scarcity of resources that can potentially be distributed to industrial firms and secondly the resistance of workers and businesses in declining sectors that threaten the political legitimacy of governments. To illustrate this claim the article proposes an examination of the Ministry of Industry’s archives between 1974 and 1984 in order to trace the process industrial policy-making enacted towards the Textiles and Clothing Sector. It is found that the consecutive governments of the decade under examination pursued a targeted deindustrialisation of the sector while simultaneously devising strategies aimed at minimising the political costs of this policy preference on the governing authorities

The politics of deindustrialisation:the experience of the textiles and clothing sector (1974–1984)

Deindustrialisation is taking an increasingly prominent place in public French discourses and has raised the question of the state’s capacity to spur the country’s industrial rejuvenation. This article views with scepticism the possibility for a state-led reindustrialisation as it finds that deindustrialisation has historically constituted an industrial strategy endorsed by French policy makers themselves. More precisely, this article argues that deindustrialisation is an industrial strategy that involves a state-sponsored disengagement from specific manufacturing activities in order to rationalise the sector and render it apt to confront international competition. This strategy, as it is argued, is conditioned by two main factors: the scarcity of resources that can potentially be distributed to industrial firms and secondly the resistance of workers and businesses in declining sectors that threaten the political legitimacy of governments. To illustrate this claim, the article proposes an examination of the Ministry of Industry’s archives between 1974 and 1984 in order to trace the process industrial policy making enacted towards the textiles and clothing sector. It is found that the consecutive governments of the decade under examination pursued a targeted deindustrialisation of the sector while simultaneously devising strategies aimed at minimising the political costs of this policy preference on the governing authorities

From the post-industrial prophecy to the de-industrial nightmare:Stagnation, the manufacturing fetish and the limits of capitalist wealth

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory