Bibliography for the Global Political Economy

Source:

Original title: A Commons Bibliography for the Critique of Global Political Economy and the Peer Production of the Culture of the Future

Proposed by Örsan Şenalp

Text part is being progressed as separate article here: The Bogdanovite Turn: Call for a Tektological Rethinking of Modern Marxian Critique of Global Political Economy from an Organizational Point of View

A Mapping Project: Emergence of Transnational Managerial Class: From Imperialism to Cyber Imperialism, the Current Highest Probably the Last Stage of Capitalism

Argument for Rebuilding a Global Critique of Global Political Economy of Dying / Changing Capitalism

The third generation Marxian critique of global political economy, of capitalism and imperialism, had been developed during the second half of the 20th century outside the party lines of official Marxist orthodoxy and within the framework of Western academic discussions. It has been following traditions laid down by the Western Critical Marxists, Frankfurt School, Dependency critique of Development and Modernization theories, Analles School of History, and Althusser’s, Anderson’s, and other’s readings of Gramsci between the 1950s and 70s. Synthesizing these lines of thoughts with the Systems Analytic approach of Ilya Prigogine, a follower of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory, Immanuel Wallerstein delivered the first volume of his magnum opus the Modern World System in 1974. Wallerstein and his fellows provided the most profound and comprehensive historical study of the development of capitalism and imperialism to that day and their work inevitably influenced existing debates and theories arriving after that. French Regulation school was another circle providing the alternative approach, at the time, that can be seen as a weak version of systems analysis applied to capitalist regulation, accumulation, and the state. A decade later, drawing on Regulation school, Palloix, and Poulantsaz, and applying the key concepts developed by Gramsci to the analysis of internationalization of capitalism Robert W. Cox, Kees Van Der Pijl, and their fellows provided a synthetic critique of World System Analysis, paving a way to the development of Neo-Gramscian Critical IPE/GPE. There has also been important Open-, Neo-, Political-Marxist, Trotskyite critiques being developed in the parallel: like those of Harvey’s, Gowan’s, Panitch and Gindin’s, Braverman’s, Petras’, Wood’s, Robinson’s, Callinicos’, and others. The other path opened by the subjectivist and ‘cultural turn’, which meant abandonment of ‘economy political critique’ in favour of cultural critique, too developed important post-structuralist and post-Marxist theories like those of: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s, Derrida, Gorz, Debord, Laclau and Mouffe, Castells, Dickens, Boutang, Bifo, Halloway, Hardt and Negri, Zizek, amongst others informed a broader spectrum of autonomist-Marxist Cognitive / Informational / Digital / Networked Capitalism theories. Globally speaking, all these strands present today comprehensive and complementary spectrum of contemporary studies on the rise, arrival, survival, expansion, transformation and possible demise of the capitalist world order. During last decades dominated by the ‘subjectivist’-post-modernist ‘cultural’ analyses -overlapped with the neo-liberal globalization offensive- we believe all these strands have contributed, without a systemic and conscious organization, to the holistic theorization of the dominating transnational, financial, informational, and cultural aspects of evolving and -almost- all-encompassing capitalism.

The present project departs from the problematic of an obvious gap, caused by a lost paradigm located in the early 20th century that is the legacy of Russian Critical Marxism. While there is a continuum between the third generation and the above mentioned contemporary debates (the fourth generation), there is a striking and critical time lapse, and missing link between the second and third generation theories that critiqued global political economy of capitalism. We argue that such a paradigm lost has caused a major ‘epistemological rapture’ -as Althusser uses the term, between these two generations; the latter arriving almost 40-50 years after the work of second-generation theorists’ like Kautsky, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky, Sultan-Galiev and others. Critical of and distant from both the official and doctrinaire reproduction of verities of State Monopoly Capitalism theories of communist and socialist parties -which partly influenced the Regulation school’s work- the Western strand of Critical Marxian analyses of capitalist world economy, therefore, lagged behind the ruling ideologies -of socialization of labor that manufactured the consent. Ironically it was Althusser’s offense at Bogdanov, in the preface to For Marx (1969) and later in his intro to Lecourt’s analysis of Lysenko case (1977), gave way to a rapture and to the rise of ‘the Cultural Turn’, turning into post-modern nihilism in the offset of the most notorious and totalizing offensive of ruling class forces; neoliberal globalization, that has disempowered labouring classes globally. In the second half of the century, through the post- and cold-war following the capitalist golden age, almost entire spectrum of Marxian thinking had been influenced by Gramsci’s rediscovered Prison Notebooks (Gramscian turn) on the one hand and by the reconstruction of the Western Academia by structuralism and systems analysis on the other. The fact that Alexander Bogdanov preceded not only Gramsci and Western Critical Marxists, with his formulations on culture, ideology, hegemony, and with his strong criticism of the economistic Marxism of orthodoxy, but also the general systems thinking and structuralism as a new paradigm, makes his legacy extremely relevant for the entire Western Marxism. As a result, this requires us to profoundly rethink and re-construct modern Western-Marxian thinking, as a whole.

Bogdanov was one of the most important political figures in the history of Russian Revolution and seen as ‘the Marxist philosopher’ who developed the most elaborate critic of not only orthodoxy and its economistic readings of Marx, but also Materialism and Dialectics as developed by Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen. His magnum opus Tektology is accepted as the forerunner of the General Systems Theory of Bertalanffy's (GST), Cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, and Managerial Cybernetics / Operational Research of Stafford Beer. Bogdanov is recognized as one of the most, if not the most, important Marxist philosophers, scientists, and communist leaders of the Bolshevik RSDLP and his work did influence almost entire generation of the revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia at the time. He influenced Bukharin’s and Lenin’s work in general, and on capitalism and imperialism in particular. However, first as a result of his long-lasting, stubborn, and complicated quarrel with Lenin and ‘his revolution’, and then with Althusser’s structuralist critique of young Marx, Hegelian roots of Marxism –which based on an attack at Bogdanov and Proletkult without actually reading him - Bogdanov remained virtually absent for the third and contemporary generations of Marxian critique of political economy. As a result, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, the Western Marxism, in general, gained virtually nothing from Bogdanov and his Tektology since the Russian revolution. As of the rediscovery of Bogdanov in the 1980s and 90s, and translation of his major work into English language, studies on Bogdanov’s life and work became an industry in its own right. In his review of the two major contributions coming out in 1998, both by Biggart et. al., David Rowley was writing: “Thanks to the work of Biggart, Gloveli, and Yassour, we can expect a revolution in the field of Bogdanov-studies. Scholars are prepared as never before seriously to seek answers to the question: How Important Was Alexander Bogdanov?” However, in a brilliant trilogy, Kenneth M. Stokes (1994, 1995, 1999) by contextualizing Bogdanov and his Tektology as the Paradigm Lost, and by arguing the importance of this lost paradigm for reformation of a holistic re-critique of the cultural and the political economy of globalization -in form of his Meta-theoretical Discourse- was already breaking a revolutionary ground for Bogdanov-studies, some five years prior to appearance of Rowley’s review. Stokes’ work was marking a ‘Bogdanovite moment’ that delivers a concrete vision for filling the huge gap playing an important negative role in the historical, meta-philosophical, and meta-methodological stagnation of the Marxist critique of capitalism and imperialism, for so long. The present project, therefore aims at, to build a comradely and collaborative work to re-organize the links between many strands of modern Marxian critique, reformist-revisionist-revolutionary, from a Tektological point of view, and made it available to the oppressed classes and workers. We believe that the social-historical re-construction and documentation of the last paradigm remains as an urgent, historical, theoretical, and practical necessity in the current conjuncture. And it seems best way of the reviving such paradigm lost would be the renewal and updating of its vision of ProletKult and Tektology: aiming to build the science, culture, art, politics, and economy of the future today.

Call for Comradely and Collaborative Re-Organising the Critical Knowledge Accumulated on Global Political Economy, from a Tektological Point of View

Since the previous global crisis, which did trigger the launch of global neoliberal restructuring known as globalization in the late 60s, there have been major contributions of critical analyses on the expansion and transformation of the capitalist mode of production and the formation of the world market. Much of the insights were developed by critical political economists from the West and the Center of the world. Taken on the first and second generation classical work of those like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir I. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Karl Polanyi, Antonio Gramsci, third and fourth generation classics came out in this period. Althusser, Foucault, Lefebvre, Balibar, De Bord, Deleuze, Miliband, Poulantzas, Palloix, Murray, Hymer, Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, Baran, Sweezy, Braverman, Tronti, Negri, Virno, Cox, Van der Pijl, Waterman among many others have re-worked the theories of the state, classes, civil society, culture, production, labour, capital, power, ideology, agency, amongst others. They had added new insights to make a common sense of the nature of ever-changing world historical structures, agencies initiating the change, as well as possibilities and limits for a radical emancipatory change. In the Post-War era, both Gramsci and Polanyi had been rediscovered and their work stimulated, especially by Poulantzas’ work, the development of varying analyses of the transnational dimension of the changing character of capitalism.

This third and fourth generation critiques of political economy and their students have spent precious attention on the emergence of the TNCs, internationalization of the capital, the state, and the classes on the one hand, and the increasingly dominating role of information, knowledge, ideology and hence cultural dimension that underlies the current shifts in the world of production, and labour in relation to the dynamic structural forces currently at work. Amongst the third generation theorists, Robert W. Cox was one of those who managed successfully synthesizing the insights taken from first and second generation theories with those who have seen as the founders of the Western Critical Marxism. He did renew and applied Gramsci's concepts and the way of his thinking on power and counter-power so that it becomes possible to develop a transnational and trans-level systematic critique of political economy from the level of production, to the state, and to the inter-state system-level and from there back to the production. After serving at ILO for a long time as a labor expert, Cox became an academic at the Colombia University and delivered his seminal articles through which he introduced the ‘Gramscian Turn’ to the International Relations discipline. His first articles published in Millennium Journal of International Studies in the early 80s, paving a way for the emergence of Neo-Gramscian critical international political economy as a sub-discipline. While he attempted to recover the artificial gap built between alienated and 'disciplined' fields of scientific inquiry, Cox successfully translated basic concepts of Gramsci; like hegemony, historic bloc, passive revolution and so on, to the world level analysis. This innovation broke a ground in Realism-Liberalism dominated mainstream IR. With his book, the Production, Power and World Orders: Social Forces in the Making of History came out in 1987, Cox developed his original concepts as state-society complex, internationalization of production, internationalization of state, and international class formation, based on empirical facts. The implementation of historical materialist method to the analysis of transnational relations in this book has been a great contribution to the major debates especially on the state, the capital, and labor, as well as later debates as globalization and global governance. Since then the work of Cox has been taken up and developed by his students and close followers such as Stephan Gill, Mark Rupert, and others. As an outcome of the work of another research group based in Amsterdam -formed by Ries Bode, Meindert Fennema, Kees van der Pijl, Henk Overbeek, Otto Holman- a stream of theoretical and research innovation focusing on transnational capital and class formation, developed new tools and insights that could help to bridge the divided islands of subjectivist and structuralist Marxian critique; one focusing on culture and subject and the other on the dead structures forming a world-system. These two strands are known today as Neo-Gramscian critical global or international political economy within the Western Academia. As those other innovative theoretical strands we will mention, Amsterdam school too based their analysis on the critique of the earlier and current theories of Post-Fordism inspired by the work of Regulation School (Aglietta, Boyer, Lipietz, Jessop, and others). As if responding at Murray's warning, one of the objectives of the Neo-Gramscian theory was analyzing state-society as a complex and dynamic unity of classes; class struggles, compromises, and class formation processes; seen as connected to the more complex world historical structures. In doing so, they developed what is called transnational historical materialist methodology, which recognizes the dialectical relationship between the agency and structure, and develops a perspective on internationalization or transnationalisation of production after criticizing the limitations of methodological nationalism of the Regulation School and regulationist analysis of the state.

There have been many other key analytical innovations made by critical social and cultural theorists, neo-, open-, political-Marxist, post-modernist, post-structuralist, as well as post-Marxist theorists, thinkers, and researchers associated with political strands; amongst others Trotskyism, Situationism, Autonomism, Workerism, Anarchism, Feminism, and Eco-socialism. Work of Habermas, Chomsky, Touraine, Zizek, Castells, Gorz, Hist, Thompson, Tronti, Virno, Negri, Bifo, etc. Amongst these strands, which includes the Regulationists and their critics, there emerged other innovative inquiry towards the subjectivity and agency. While post-structuralist culture analyst, Autonomist and Workerist, perspectives left out critical study of political economy, relations of production, as well as its relation to capital-state-and society -hence the class dimension- they did develop many creative and insightful analyses that shed lights on class formation processes, on ideology, manipulation, and control, thus power relations at the molecular level. So while in general the role of collective identities, gender, ethnicity, etc. is analyzed against the backdrop of the complex system of social-individual, some others have developed theories of social space and time (based on the work of those like Lefebvre, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari), communication theories developed tools to analyze key processes constituting formation of social structures and classes by bridging inner- and intrarelationships between reflective-social organisms as part of net of social relationships at the meso-level (Habermas, Debord, and others). Then there were those theories that further developed insights through studying the fields of technology, science, environment, on which one could develop a broader repository that allows us to make a better sense of the forces and relations of production, especially on the impact of communication, information and transportation technologies and networks, in a global context. For instance, Manuel Castell's, Ulrich Beck's, and Peter Dicken's works on the ICTs and the network effect is broken ground in the 90s in this letter sense; as well as the work of Autonomist and Workerists Marxists. Hardt and Negri's magnum opus Empire trilogy; sparked an important debate and exchange, in parallel to the worsening crises and emerging new imperial wars. As the Multitude and the Commonwealth followed up the Empire, such exchange and critics got intensified. In a sense Empire trilogy constituted a controversial and comprehensive re-union of post-structural cultural analysis including a 'global political economy' critique; studying the changes currently taking place at the production level it successfully identified the potential and actual changes in the productive forces, as well as the tendency towards rising networked power structures at state and world order levels. In this sense, the work of Hardt and Negri was producing a sublime analysis similar to that of Cox' yet without being informed by the accumulated work in the field now called the critical global political economy. Because of the controversies emerged around the post-modern influences in the Empire trilogy the research and the theory at the critical global political economy front remained immune to the innovation and insights coming from this latter strand. In a sense, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth were turning point from Autonomy and Workerism to Post-Autonomy and Post-Workerism, because of its re-engagement with the State, the Capital, and the Classes. Thus, it was also a post-post-structuralist work. However, Empire and the emerging new perspectives, debates and research around it, has included very limited empirical analysis of the relationship between its original approaches on networked subjectivity, the commons, peer production, so on and the categories of the theories of transnationalization (of production, capital, state and class formation processes), and more importantly on the inter and intra-class struggles re-emerging in the 90s. The ‘Empire’ however has accelerated the theorization of networked collaborative social relationships, peer production, and commons thinking and practice, which bears major importance for the emancipatory collective action. This theorization there, sheds more lights, also based on the critique of the Post-Fordism, by focusing on the informationalization and cognitive aspects of the change in the late 20th and early 21st-century capitalism. It provides insights on how informatics has been transforming the key relationships in the capitalist mode of production and triggering its terminal crises, from the patterns of production to ownership, from distribution to consumption. Which provides a deeper understanding about how to make sense of the class formation and struggle processes for labor in broader society and social struggles level, for instance of the role of informatics and cybernetics both as the base of increasing structural power of the ruling classes. Also about how emerging mode of informational production, provided material, ideational and institutional foundation of the global financial architecture, being entangled with transnational modular commodity-production networks built on ICTs how other modes of production that are existing in agriculture, trade, industry, and services at regional, national and local levels across the world are being incorporated in a new labor division and hierarchy. However empirically and theoretically thin understanding of the transformation of social classes, states, and inter-state system, in this front, or a historical and materialist understanding of transnational social relations, and global systemic change creates an important gap.

Therefore, critical global political economy theory started with Cox, Gill and Van der Pijl, and developed by people like Overbeek, Holman, Carroll, Van Apeldoorn, Harris, Robinson, on the one hand and informational cognitive capitalism theories catalyzed by the work of Negri, Bifo, Castells and taken up by the most recent generation of thinkers like Lazzarato, Boutang, de Angelis, Lovink, Nossiter, Huws, Bauwens, Terranova, Pasquinelli, Kleiner, Fusch, Rigi among many others, would benefit from a fruitful exchange. Potentially a p2p-commons update on the understanding of the 'transnationalization of production', which as process overlaps with the informatization of economy, networkisation of societies, and neoliberal globalization offensive, and vice versa; a global political economy upgrade for the latter theories, in our opinion, is urgently needed. Such an exchange would provide much more clear understanding over the complexity of global power structures, states, classes, the power and weaknesses of partnerships and alliances between capital and the state elite which creates divisions & scarcities among masses, using the structural power they hols, to rule and take advantage of the human societies. Such clear understanding would help to level the field at least for a bit, opening up broader possibilities to build up more efficient alternatives, creative and assertive counter strategies that would eventually mobilize more people to take initiative of their own lives, diminish all sort of alienation in and between their societies, and favor themselves and other peoples globally.

Departing from the above we are inviting peer producers and commoners alike to join us to peer produce a commons knowledge resource that will include textbooks, articles, audio, video and other sorts of digital material that will help us to address and broaden the needed dialogue between critical social theories on p2p, commons and global political economy on the other, and the political and cultural praxis towards emancipatory commons transitions that will allow humanity to go beyond the vision promised by capitalism, while avoiding the worse like fascism and wars to dominate the planet and destroy more lives. Believing that it became by now clear that the humanity is passing through yet another world-historical passage of which one side is dark and fearful: Deepening systemic crises, serious threats of regional and global wars, normalization of extreme right and religious fundamentalism, as well as natural and human disasters, all caused by the current mode of production. Yet the other side is bright and hopeful: Where the emergence of the new become clear in the realities and practices of the p2p and the commons, which by now proven themselves as not only concepts but also practices that they are bearing 'the seeds of the new' potential forms to constitute, what Marx referred to as the 'associated mode of production' -more then one and a half century ago; while they also promise possibility for creation of what Kropotkin and Buchkin thought as 'communal mutual aid society' -in the previous century, yet to be created and consolidated collectively by painful efforts and struggle. Therefore encouraging all those who are interested and can contribute in this special collaborative project through which we want to develop a structured and systematic pool of pedagogical material as a base for free access self- and floss- high level remote emancipatory education activities organized by anyone who wishes. In order to make an entry please register to the P2P-Foundation's wiki page and make sure that your entries come under the relevant section, and you applied a similar format used for the materials placed on the wiki before you. Let's join efforts and enrich this pool of emancipatory knowledge and analyses, that can be useful for understanding and the changing the word through commons assertive and constructive actions for a fair, just, peaceful and beautiful world where life, equality, freedom, and joy can flourish and thrive for a commons humanity. For any questions and support, you can send an email at: info [at] networkedlabour [dot] net