Marxism in foreign policy

The problematic implications of the long absence of a dedicated encounter between Marxism and FPA (foreign policy analysis) are discussed. This absence has been marked by a series of different starting points and theoretical preferences between both intellectual projects. A paradigmatic turn for the incorporation of FPA and international politics into a revised Marxist research program is needed. Whereas FPA originated within a United States–centric Cold War context, growing out of the subfield of “comparative foreign policy,” which initially pursued a positivistic methodology, Marxism’s European theoretical legacy afforded neither international relations nor foreign policy analysis any systematic place since its inception in the 19th century. Recurring rapprochements were qualified successes due to Marxism’s tendency to relapse into structuralist versions of grand theorizing. While these could speak to general theories of international relations in the field of IR (international relations) from the late 20th century onward, FPA fell again and again through the cracks of this grand analytical register. Marxist FPA has only very recently been recognized as a serious research program, notably within the two traditions of neo-Gramscian international political economy (IPE) and Marxist historical sociology. With this move, Marxism has started to identify a problematique and produced a nascent literature that should bear fruit in the future

Rethinking early Cold War United States foreign policy: the road to militarisation

This thesis rethinks the foundations of US foreign policy determination in the early Cold War period. In opposition to approaches in IR which privilege an ‘external’ realm of causation, it focuses on the domestic bases for foreign policy formation. Having started by reviewing historiographical debates on US foreign policy and US foreign economic policy, the thesis moves on to critique some of the existing ways the US foreign policy has been theorised in IR. The thesis then develops a theoretical and conceptual stance, drawing on a range of different literatures. Within IR, it places itself within the tradition of Marxist Historical Sociology. At the level of macro-history, this places the reconstruction of US foreign policy within broader world historical process of the development of capitalism within the political form of the nation-state and state system, and ongoing spatialisation strategies that states form in order to manage capitalist spatial politics. This macro perspective is conjoined to a ‘disjunctive’ theory of the state, which is developed successively through different stages of analysis. The goal is to develop a political economy approach to the study of foreign policy formation and especially the conduct of warfare. The next three chapters constitute an historical reconstruction of the path towards the Cold War militarisation of US foreign policy. The thesis begins by fleshing out some of the theoretical issues discussed earlier in relation to the specificity of US state development. It then shows how developments from the 19th century up to World War II were underpinned by societal conflicts which saw the rise of the New Deal as a challenger to the existing prerogatives of business in America. This challenge saw the development of state capacities to intervene in the economy, and set in place the possibilities of a welfare statist form of governance. However, the coming of WWII and the politics of economic mobilisation for the war changed the context within which these developments unfolded. An alliance of industrial and business interests during the war ensured that the New Deal state was converted into a powerful ‘warfare’ state. The thesis then moves on to show how after the war, the world-historical moment of US hegemony had its counterpart on the domestic scene in the resurgence of conflict between nationalist and internationalist political and business interests in the US. The period between 1945 and 1950 is then re-read against the background of successive stages of development of this conflict as it affected the development of US policies towards the world. As the US tried to develop a coherent spatial strategy for reconstructing the global capitalist order, this domestic situation determined and shaped things in unexpected ways. Contrary to perspectives which isolate US plans for a multilateral trading order and the geopolitics of the Cold War, I show how the contradictions of the former largely created the latter. Much IR theory takes it for granted that it was Marshall Plan aid that did the work of reconstructing Europe after the war. However, I show that this assumption obscures the failure of the Marshall Plan, and its eventual replacement by forms of economic aid that were channelled through military spending. These forms of aid required substantial military spending programs. Thus the price to be paid for the reconstruction of Europe after the war was the amplification of the World War II military-industrial alliance in the US. This then fed back into US domestic developments, as a powerful self-sustaining and expansionary element of the American political economy changed the institutional parameters under which war-preparations were formed. This altered the bases of US military strategy and overall foreign policy, a development which was starkly revealed in the conduct of the Vietnam War. The thesis concludes with some reflections on how its historical and theoretical approach has ramifications for how we think of US foreign policy in the 20th century

Managers, not markets

Neoliberal policy owes less to the ideology of free-markets than it does the planning techniques born in Cold War America

Keynes on bank credit and labour market from the Treatise on Money to the General Theory

ITIl saggio si propone di fonire una ricostruzione analitica della teoria monetaria keynesiana così come esposta nel Trattato sulla moneta del 1930. Si verificano, a tal fine, elementi di affinità con la teoria monetaria neoclassica del periodo e soprattutto rilevanti elementi di “eterodossia” rispetto alle tesi dominanti in quel periodo. In particolare si conferma che, anche prima della Teoria Generale, Keynes sottolineava la superiore efficacia delle politiche fiscali rispetto alle politiche monetarie al fine di accrescere l’occupazione.ENThe idea that the banking system creates money ex nihilo, so that “loans make deposits”, can be regarded as a key concept of Keynes’s theory of money and banking, and it is a cornerstone of the contemporary monetary theory of production. Starting from this assumption, this paper aims at providing a critical reconstruction of Keynes’s view on the links existing between public expenditure, interest rate, wages and employment. The paper will mainly focus on Keynes’s Treatise on Money, on the basis of a “continuist” interpretation of Keynes’s thought

Differential accumulation and the political economy of power

No description supplie

The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism

ABSTRACTManagerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been written by scholars of neoliberalism about the actual relationship between managerialism and neoliberalism. Usually subsumed under a functional reading of neoliberalism, managerialism has too often been understood simply as a means for neoliberal ends (i.e. to promote market rule or competition). This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds that it conflates practices that stem from two different historical lineages. As we show, managerial governance not only has a very different history than neoliberal theory, but it also rests on different principles. Its development can be traced back to the US defence sector in the 1950s and the pivotal role of the RAND Corporation. On the basis of this historical perspective, we argue for the need to analyse managerialism on its own terms and make the case for considering the rise of managerial science as a paradigmatic shift in governance. In doing so, we show how managerial governance represented a radical rupture from previous management practices and show how it profoundly reshaped how we have come to understand governance