Making space for the new state capitalism, part I: Working with a troublesome category

Abstract

The theme issue ‘Making Space for the New State Capitalism’ brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers to be published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the first of these introductory commentaries, we highlight some of the potentially productive ambiguities that accompany the new state capitalism rubric. Subsequent introductory commentaries will consider the consequences of embracing relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development (along with the second group of papers); and the challenges and opportunities of thinking conjuncturally (with the third group of papers).

Making space for the new state capitalism, part II: Relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development

“…Some will see conceptual categories such as the state, capital, capitalism and uneven development as foundational elements to theorize state capitalism relationally, whereas others will likely find them unnecessarily totalizing. While such disagreements should make for constructive conversations in state capitalism studies, we note, however, that working with such abstractions may well be necessary, as argued in the first introductory essay to this theme issue ( Whiteside et al, 2023 ). Yet this still leaves plenty of room for mobilizing, problematizing and developing relevant conceptual categories in a range of ways.…”

“…Relationality is also a means to deconstruct some of the static and mutually exclusive geographical imaginaries that have informed previous writings on supposedly discrete national state capitalisms, and drawing connections between cases invites more fine-grained understandings of state-capitalist politics as connections that breed both conflict and collaboration. By virtue of its insistence on connection and interdependence, relationality prompts comparison and problematizes positionality, helping to negotiate the tension in state capitalism studies discussed in our previous introductory essay (see Whiteside et al, 2023 ) between site-specific inquiry and the need to establish broader lines of argumentation that feed back into substantive theorizing.…”

“…As a strength, mid-range and meso-level analysis illuminate locally specific, place-based processes and economic activities; however, limits arise when abstract-general forms of reasoning are eschewed (perhaps due to their association with structuralist theories). Moving between scales and levels of abstraction is precisely what is required here – not to reprioritize the general over the particular, or the macro over the micro, but instead to meet the call for linking contextualized inquiry with substantive theory-building, and negotiating the epistemological tension between the two, identified in the first Introduction to the theme issue ( Whiteside et al, 2023 ). Enhanced considerations of state-capitalist scales and their relations to processes of uneven development may well require a renewed interest in dialectical-relational modes of thinking that mobilize various levels and modalities of abstraction (cf.…”

“…In different ways, the contributions offered here reflect the theoretical proclivities, methodological inclinations and thematic preferences of geographical political economists sensitive to relational spatiotemporality and uneven development. Conceived as a flexible set of critical interrogations concerning the changing role of the state and the re-articulation of state-capital relations at the current historical juncture, rather than a fully formed concept or model, the problematic of ‘new’ state capitalism is taken up by geographical political economists in ways that enrich the field and push it in new and exciting directions (see Alami et al, 2022a ; Whiteside et al., 2023 ).…”

Wrestling with “the new” state capitalism

“…On this basis, it surely has to be acknowledged that the new state capitalism, both as an ascendant concept and as marker of socioinstitutional facts on the ground, signals a significant geohistorical moment (maybe not a new "era" as such, but a notable inflection point for sure), even if first-generation treatments of the phenomenon itself may have been somewhat wanting. Something is happening out there, some constellation of norm-disrupting developments that is happening across cases, contexts, and conjunctures; an unevenly developing process of contradictory transformation evidently at work, one is being tracked, narrated, and (mis)diagnosed in real time that raises questions that are not so easily dismissed or foreclosed (Alami and Dixon, 2023;Whiteside et al, 2023). Now, it is a truism, albeit one that seems periodically to be forgotten, that there can be no such thing as "non-state capitalism."…”