Uneven and Combined Development and the Capitalist States System

Abstract

The global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath have put states back at the centre of attention. State-led economic stimulus; the rise of increasingly interventionist forms of capitalism in the form of the BRICS; and the return of significant geopolitical tensions and conflagrations from the Caucasus, Ukraine, Syria and the broader MENA region, to the South and East China Seas; have decisively challenged the notion that states and geopolitics have been undermined by the pressures of global economic integration (Callinicos 2010;Klassen 2014;Nowak and Ekrem 2018). The levelling of global geoeconomic space conjectured by both neoliberals (cf. Wolf 2005; Bhagwati 2004) and some Marxists (cf. Hardt and Negri 2000; Robinson 2005) alike, has not materialised. The 'globalisation' of the 1990s and early 2000s instead revealed itself as a new phase in the world expansion and deepening of geographically differentiated and antagonistic capitalist social relations (Barrow 2005; Rosenberg 2005).As globalist ontologies have come under challenge, critical voices have again proposed (and celebrated already existing) state developmentalist alternatives to globalisation as more equitable and sustainable models of growth, especially for late developers (cf. Evans 2014). The implication is that the 'ideology' of neoliberalism, the 'vested interests' of (usually financial) capitalists, or a 'lack of institutional capacity' are to blame for

Gillian Hart in Beijing: Negotiating capitalist models at the World Bank–China nexus

“…Consequently, its problematization of institutional diversity and sociospatial complexity has helped to dislodge convergence narratives of post-socialist transition and subnational restructuring paths through cases in east and southeast Asia (Kenney-Lazar and Mark, 2021; Lim, 2019; Mulvad, 2015). A complementary “macro-constructivist” strand of geographical political economy employs Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development to position China's state-led late industrialization in dialectical tension with the U.S.-led liberal international capitalist order, with attendant emphasis on geopolitical and inter-societal interaction (Peck, 2021: 12; see Dunford et al, 2021; Rolf 2021).…”

“…Deng Xiaoping and the pro-reformist faction outmaneuvered the Gang of Four in succeeding Mao in the late 1970s, and, to avert food riots, upscaled finance minister Zhao Ziyang's “Sichuan model”—granting rural enterprises the ability to sell excess agricultural production at their own prices—to national policy under the “dual-track system”. The party then set its sights on reviving productivity in the urban industrial sector as a hedge against social discontent and incipient Soviet aggression on the continent (Rolf, 2021: 96–98; Vogel, 2011: 454). The pro-reformist faction sought expertise and capital through the World Bank to assist in a program of generalized industrial and macroeconomic restructuring.…”

Spatial scales of inflation and deflation

“…In turn, state banks recycled ‘good’ dollars into largely unprofitable SOEs deemed critical to Chinese economic statecraft via cheap loans and soft budget constraints (Shih, 2019). Because bank credit and the domestic money supply expanded largely in line with real dollar earnings predicated upon winning greater world market share (Rolf, 2021), unproductive credit provision to SOEs via patronage networks did not spark substantial inflation. Instead, the state owned industrial giants were gradually rationalised, corporatised and streamlined – if not fully in line with profit motives, then at least significantly so (Walter and Howie, 2012).…”

Doing economics differently

“…With an eye to pluralistic ways of knowing and intervening in a transforming economy, the book documents the fashioning of what Imogen Liu has called “an essentially institutionalist solution to the problem of market transition” (Liu et al, 2023: 2), not as a universal template, let alone some automatic process, but as a conjunctural accomplishment. Of course, the wider conjunctural circumstances—that is, world-historical conditions—were in many ways propitious (see Rolf, 2021; Rosenberg and Boyle, 2019), but still, there were no guarantees. And Weber delivers what may prove to be the definitive account of the sociopolitical dynamics of reform debates during the critical period between the initiation of China’s opening up in the late 1970s and the turning point that was Tiananmen.…”