Critiques of growth in classical political economy: Mill's stationary state and a Marxian response

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in New Political Economy, 18(3), 431 - 457, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13563467.2012.709839.In recent political-economic theories of ‘nature’, Mill and Marx/Engels form important reference points. Ecological economists see Mill's ‘stationary state’ as seminal, while Marxists have ‘brought capitalism back in’ to debates on growth and climate change, sparking a Marxological renaissance that has overturned our understanding of Marx/Engels' opus. This article explores aspects of Mill's and Marx/Engels' work and contemporary reception. It identifies a resemblance between their historical dialectics. Marx's communism is driven by logics of ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ (including the ‘tendency of profit rates to fall’). In Mill's dialectic a ‘thesis’, material progress, calls forth its ‘antithesis’, diminishing returns. The inevitable ‘Aufhebung’ is a stationary state of wealth and population; Mill mentions countervailing tendencies but fails to consider their capacity to postpone utopia's arrival. Today, Mill's schema lives on in ecological economics, shorn of determinism but with its market advocacy intact. It appears to contrast with the ‘productive forces expansion’ espoused by Marx/Engels. They stand accused of ‘Promethean arrogance’, ignoring ‘natural limits’ and ‘gambling on abundance’. But I find these criticisms to be ill-judged, and propose an alternative reading, arguing that their work contains a critique of the ‘growth paradigm’, and that their ‘cornucopian’ ends do not sanction ‘Promethean’ means

Karl Polanyi and Oszkar Jászi: Liberal socialism, the aster revolution and the Tanácsköztársaság

For the abstract, please see the attached PDF

Karl Polanyi’s the great transformation: Perverse effects, protectionism and gemeinschaft

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi’s journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi’s basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great Transformation is Gemeinschaft, understood dynamically, while the market society is Gesellschaft. It examines the two central mechanisms by which, in Polanyi’s understanding, Gesellschaft broke down in the mid-twentieth century: the ‘clash between democracy and capitalism,’ and a doctrine of ‘perverse effects’ whereby political intervention in markets impairs profitability and saps the vitality of the market system

Polanyian meditations on economy and society: a review of ‘Market Society: The Great Transformation Today’

When one considers anthropology’s recent encounter with ‘globalisation’ -- whether understood as a “totalizing” discourse (Tsing 2000), as the dialectical antinomy of localization, as expanding constellations of diasporas and transnational social spaces” (Basch, Glick-Schiller & Szanton 1994), or as webs of legal and illegal trade (Nordstrom 2007) -- it can be profitable to recall the precursors. By this I mean anthropologists who consistently brought a historical-theoretical concern with global processes to bear upon local ethnography, and vice versa. Those that are name-checked in this connection tend to include Marxian theorists such as Eric Wolf, Michael Taussig, Sidney Mintz, and Maurice Godelier, but another important figure was Karl Polanyi

"Like wildfire" The east German rising of June 1953

Before the archives of the East German state were opened in the early 1990s the rising of June 1953 had already been well documented, largely on the basis of eyewitness reports and the East German press. It was thought that up to 372,000 workers took strike action, and that many of these participated, along with several hundred thousand others, in marches, rallies, occupations and other forms of direct action. Much was known about the sequence of events, the demands voiced, and about some of the individuals involved. As the first of several mass uprisings against Stalinist regimes, but doubtless also due to the breathtaking speed with which a strike at a Berlin building site spread to other workplaces and thence to streets and public squares nationwide, it attracted a good deal of attention from historians. An abundance of books, articles and pamphlets followed

“On the menu or at the table”: Corporations and climate change

“Another World Is Possible!” announces a placard held by a demonstrator on an unspecified global justice movement protest. The photograph is the background graphic of an advert. Above it the Shell logo. The advert is for a conference sponsored by the oil giant, entitled “Climate Change: Is Business Doing Enough?” Not so long ago Shell denied climate change altogether. In 1989 it set up the Global Climate Coalition along with several dozen other fossil fuel, vehicle and chemical companies. The avowed aims were to sow doubt about scientific claims concerning global warming and to forestall political efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The coalition invested heavily in public relations campaigns warning that efforts to reduce emissions by restricting the burning of fossil fuels were misguided and would cause economic disaster. Its efforts helped to put policy making on climate change on hold for years

A short autumn of utopia: The East German revolution of 1989

Readers of this journal are unlikely to be participating in the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the “transition to capitalism” in Central and Eastern Europe and it’s easy to see why. The expansion of NATO shows that its supposedly defensive purpose—to contain the Soviet Union—was a lie all along. The civic freedoms for which Eastern Europeans took to the streets are in a sickly condition in West and East alike. One review of The Lives of Others, a film centred on the surveillance of dissidents by East Germany’s secret service (the Stasi), remarked upon its “relevance to a world where fundamental civil liberties are increasingly at risk of being undermined”. Anti-globalisation protesters in the East German seaside resort of Heiligendamm two years ago could be forgiven for thinking that little had changed since 1989 as they gazed up at the steel wall around the G7 summit and heard the spurious reasons given by police for making arrests

Marketless trading in Hammurabi’s time: A re-appraisal

In this article I revisit Karl Polanyi’s writings on ancient Mesopotamia. I begin by situating them in the context of his general approach to trade, markets and money in the ancient world. Next, I reconstruct his major theses on Mesopotamia, drawing upon his published works as well as unpublished documents in the Karl Polanyi and Michael Polanyi archives. Finally, I provide a critical assessment of the merits and demerits of his contribution, with reference to Assyriological research published in the decades that have elapsed since his death in 1964