Bibliography for the Global Political Economy

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Original title: P2P, the Commons, and Tektological Critique of Global Political Economy

Proposed and Initiated by Örsan Şenalp (Peer-Production-In-Progress)

Accompanying Co-Mapping Project: Tektology of the Emergent Transnational Managerial Class and the Demise of Capitalist World System: 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 20st century outside the party lines of official Marxist orthodoxy and within the framework of Western academic discussions. It has been following the lines drawn by the Critical Marxism, Frankfurt School, Dependency critic of Development and Modernization theories, as well as the contributions by Analles School of History and Althusser’s, Anderson’s, and other’s readings of Gramsci between the 1950s and 70s. Synthesising 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’s and his fellows’ work provided the most profound and comprehensive historical study of the development of capitalism and imperialism to that day. Their work inevitably influenced existing debates, especially on the verge of ‘cultural turn’, and theories arriving after that. French Regulation school was another circle providing the alternative approach, at the time, a weak version of systems analysis of capitalist regulation, accumulation, and the state. A decade later, drawing on Regulation school’s as well as Poulantsaz’ work and applying the key concepts developed by Gramsci to the analysis of internationalization of capitalism, the work of Robert Cox and Kees Van Der Pijl, and their fellows provided a synthetic critique of World System Analysis and paved way to the development of Neo-Gramscian Critical IPE/GPE. There has also been important Open-, Neo-, Political- and PostMarxist and even Post-Structuralist theories being developed in parallel, following the subjectivist and ‘cultural turn’ that meant the abandonment of ‘economy political critique’ in favour of cultural critique; for instance the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s, Debord, Laclau and Mouffe, Castells, Hardt and Negri informed a broader spectrum of autonomist-Marxist Cognitive / Informational / Digital / Networked Capitalism theories. Globally speaking, all these strands presents comprehensive and complementary spectrum of contemporary studies on the rise, arrival, survival, expansion, transformation and possible demise of the capitalist world order. Marking a reunification of Marxist critique, after decades of domination of ‘subjectivist’-postmodernist ‘cultural’ analysis overlapping with the neo-liberal globalization offensive, we believe all of these strands has been contributing in the holistic theorisation 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, 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 an apparent and critical time lapse and missing link between the second and third generation theories that critique global political economy of capitalism. We argue that such a paradigm lost caused a major gap and ‘epistemological rapture’ as Althusser would say it borrowing the term from Gaston Bachelard, 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, and with Althusser’s offense to Bogdnaov in the preface to For Marx, not only coincided with but also gave way to a rapture, giving way to the rise of ‘the Cultural Turn’ and post-modern nihilism in the offset of the most notorious and totalizing offensive of ruling class forces; neoliberal globalization. While in the second half of the century, 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; makes the Paradigm Lost extremely relevant for entire Marxism. The fact that Alexander Bogdanov pioneered not only Gramsci and ‘Western Marxism’, with his formulations on culture, ideology, hegemony, and with his strong criticism of the economistic Marxism of orthodoxy, but also general systems thinking and structuralism as a new paradigm, requires a profound reconstruction of 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, Operational Research of Ross Ashby, as well as structuralism developed in the 1920s and 30s. 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 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, and of Bogdanov and Proletkult –without actually reading him- his work become 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 count not gained virtually anything from Bogdanov and his Tektology since the Russian revolution. Yet since until the rediscovery of Bogdanov in 1980s and 90s, studies on his life and work became an industry in its own right. Kenneth M. Stokes in his 1992, 1994, 1996 books contextualized Bogdanov and Tektology, as a Paradigm Lost, and provided an holistic re-critique of the cultural and the political economy of globalization in form of a Meta-theoretical Discourse. Stokes’ work brakes a ground by marking a ‘Bogdanovite moment’ that promises a vision to fill the gap that played an important negative role in the historical, meta-philosophical, and meta-methodological stagnation of the Marxist critique of capitalism and imperialism in broadest sense. The proposed project aims for building a comradely and collaborative work to rethink modern Marxian critique, in its entirety, from a Tektological point of view. Following Stokes’ argument, we identify which elements of Tektology, the universal science of organisation, can be utilized and how when critically reorganizing the collective knowledge provided by the modern Marxian analyses in order to construct an holistic critique of political, economic, foreign, cultural, ideological, esthetical, sociopsychological, and other aspects of global capitalism as a world system. This, we believe, remains as an urgent, historical, theoretical, and practical necessity in the current conjuncture.

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 globalisation in the late 60s, there has 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 forth generation classics came out in this period. Althusser, Foucoult, Lefebvre, Balibar, De Bord, Deleuze, Miliband, Poulantzas, Palloix, Murray, Hymer, Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, Baran, Sweezy, Breverman, Tronti, Negri, Verno, 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 fourth generation, and their students, have spent precious attention on the TNCs, internationalization of the capital, the state and the classes on the one hand, and the increasingly dominating role of information and knowledge in 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 successfully synthesized insights taken from first, second and third generation theories. He renewed and applied Gramsci and Poulantzas’ concepts and ways of thinking on power and counter-power, so that it become possible to developed a transnational and trans-level systematic critique of political economy from the level of production to inter-state system. After serving long time as an ILO expert, Cox became academic at Colombia University and delivered his seminal articles through which the introduced the ‘Gramscian Turn’ in social theory, to the International Relations discipline. His first articles published, in Millennium Journal of International Studies in the early 80s, paved a way for the emergence of critical globalization of political economy as an attempt to recover the gap between artificially alienated and disciplined fields of scientific inquiry. Cox successfully translated basic concepts of Gramsci, like hegemony, historic bloc, passive revolution, so on to the world level. This innovation broke a ground not only in Realism-Liberlism 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 labour, as well as later debates as globalization and global governance. Since then the work of Cox and his close followers as Stephan Gill and Mark Rupert, as well as theoretical and research innovations by Kees van der Pijl, Henk Overbeek, Otto Holman in Europe, has bridged the separate islands of IR to the debates and research in other fields of social sciences. This strand is known today as Neo-Gramscian critical global or international political economy. As those other innovations we will mention below this strand too based their analysis on the critique of the earlier and current theories of Post-Fordism, inspired by regulation school Aglietta, Boyer, Lipietz, Jessop. While doing so, they did respond Robin Murrey's critique of isolating of inquiry by either focusing on the state or the capital, as Palloix and others did when looking at the accumulation of capital or MNCs, and in the famous State Debate sparked by exchanges between Poulantzas and Miliband. As if responding at Murray's warning, one of the objectives of the Neo-Gramsican theory was analyzing state-society as complex and dynamic unity of class struggles and formation processes, taken as connected parts of more complex world historical structures. In doing so, they developed what is called transnational historical materialist methodology, which takes the dialectics of the agency-structure serious and develops a perspective on internationalization or transnationalisation of production after criticizing the methodological nationalism of the Regulation theory and regulationist analysis of Post-fordism.

There have been many other key analyses and analytical innovations have made by critical social theorists, neo-, open-, political- Marxist, post-modernist, post-structuralist, as well as post-Marxist theorists, thinkers, and researchers associated with political strands amongst others Trostkysm, Situationism, Autonomism, Workerism, Anarchism, Feminism, and Eco-socialism. Work of Habermas, Chomsky, Touraine, Zizek, Castells, Gorz, Hist, Thompson, Tronti, Verno, 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- or non- structuralist, Anarchist, Autonomist and Workerist, perspectives left out the critical study of political economy of prodiction, in its relation to capital-state-society, hence the class dimensions, they did developed creative and insightful analyses that can shed light on the class formation processes at the molecular level, such as ideology, manuplation and control. So while the commons understanding on role of collective identities, gender, ethnicity, etc. out plays in the complex system of social-individual, others have developed theories and research on social-space and time, like Lefebvre and De Bord, communication theorists where, how, and through which molecular processes constituting formation of social structures and classes, out plays and bridge the inner- and intra- relationships between reflective-social organisms as part of net of social relationships at the mezzo level. Then there were those further developed insights with findings in the fields of technology, science, environment, and we could have develop a broad commons reperatuar that would allow us to make better sense of the forces and relations of production, especially on the impact of communication, information and transportation technologies and networks. For instance Castell's, Beck's, and Dickens' works on the ICTs and the network effect broke a ground in the 90s as well as those of Autonomist and Workerists. Hardt and Negri delivered their magnum opus ‘the Empire’, just before 9/11, and debate and exchange sparked out of closed circles, in parallel to worsening crises and emerging new wars. Empire was followed by the Multitude and the Commonwealth, exchange intensified. In our view Empire constituted controversial and comprehensive post-disciplinary and post-structural 'global political economy' analysis, and when studying the changes currently taking place at the production level, successfully identified the potential and actual power of the emerging new productive forces, as well as the future tendencies, towards rising of networked power relationships within the production processes and beyond, over power structures at state and world order levels. In this sense the work of Hardt and Negri was producing an analysis similar to that of Cox', yet without being informed by the accumulated work in the field now called critical global political economy. Probably because of the controversies emerged around the post-modernity of the Empire, 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 was turning point from Autonomy, and Workerism, to Post-Autonomy and Post-Workerism, because of ts re-engagement with the State, the Capital and the Ruling.. Classes. Thus, it was also post-post-structuralism. However, Empire and the 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 catagories 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 theorisation of networked collaborative social relationships, peer production, and commons thinking and practice, which bears major importance for the emancipatory collective action. This theorisation there, sheds more lights, also based on the critique of the Post-Fordism, by focusing on the informationalisation 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 mode of production, and triggering its terminal crises, from the patterns of production to ownership, from distribution to consumption. Which provides deeper understanding about how to make sense of the class formation and struggle processes for labour in broader society and social struggles level, for instance of the role of informatics and cybernetics both as 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 labour division and hierarchy. However empirically and theoretically thin understanding of the trans-formation 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 text books, 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 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 structured and systematic pool of pedagogical material as 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 comes 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 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