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

Abstract

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 governancereflected in the canon of liberal thoughtis 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.

A Critical History of Poverty Finance

“…Neoliberal views often treat the market as a kind of 'default setting' for human interaction. A number of recent Marxist critics have rightly cautioned against critiques of neoliberalism that fall into the same trap of fetishising 'the market' as a social form (Cahill 2020;Knafo 2020;Copley and Moraitis 2021). Markets are not a default setting on economic activity that can be 'disembedded' from (or re-embedded in) social regulation.…”

“…At the same time, as I've intimated above, and as I show in more detail in Chapters 4 to 7 below, much of neoliberal governance in practice consists precisely in trying to coax capital into doing things it's not particularly interested in doing. The continued resort to building markets is perhaps better understood as reflective of severe and abiding constraints on state action, particularly in peripheral countries, imposed by the disciplinary force of financial structures (see Alami 2018;Copley and Moraitis 2021). Critically, though, the 'fiscal crisis of the postcolonial state' is deep-rooted.…”

States, Money and the Persistence of Colonial Financial Hierarchies in British West Africa

“…Second, money is simultaneously ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ in scope. That is, there is a constant interplay between what Marx calls ‘world money’ and particular national moneys, in and through which hierarchical relationships between imperial powers and peripheral states, as well as the extractive development of land and labour in the colonized world, are articulated (see Alami, 2018a, 2018b; Copley and Moraitis, 2021; Koddenbrock, 2020; Sylla, 2021). I develop each point in turn in this section.…”

“…First, money is at once an important instrument of statecraft and a manifestation of capitalist claims over labour and nature. Thus, while monetary relations are an important basis of what Mann (1984) calls the ‘infrastructural power’ of the state, states also depend in basic, material terms on fostering continued capital accumulation (see Copley and Moraitis, 2021). Second, money is multi‐scalar, and relationships between ‘national’ and ‘world money’ enable and constrain state action in different ways, particularly for peripheral territories (see Alami et al., 2022).…”

The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development

“…Here it's worth emphasising the fundamentally slippery character of the 'market' itself. Recent contributions have rightly cautioned against critiques of neoliberalism that fetishise 'the market' as a social form (Cahill 2020, Copley and Moraitis 2020, Knafo 2020. 'Markets', as such, are neither neutral nor natural phenomena.…”