Geopolitical Economy
After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire
Radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a multi-polar world emerges from the dust of the financial and economic crisis.
Radhika Desai offers a radical critique of the theories of US hegemony, globalisation and empire which dominate academic international political economy and international relations, revealing their ideological origins in successive failed US attempts at world dominance through the dollar.
Desai revitalizes revolutionary intellectual traditions which combine class and national perspectives on 'the relations of producing nations'. At a time of global upheavals and profound shifts in the distribution of world power, Geopolitical Economy forges a vivid and compelling account of the historical processes which are shaping the contemporary international order.
地缘政治经济：我们之后的霸权、全球化和帝国
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7868_geopolitical-economy-review-by-sudeep-regmi/?
Radhika Desai Pluto Press，伦敦，2013 年。328 页，每页 21.99 英镑
由 Sudeep Regmi 审核，
关于审稿人
Sudeep Regmi 是密苏里大学（堪萨斯城）经济学博士生。 他目前正在撰写一篇关于资本主义国家非正统政治经济学基础的论文。 (srqpf@mail.umkc.edu)
拉迪卡·德赛的《地缘政治经济学》的明确目标是消除三个神话：这些神话在世界主义的外衣下导致了一种关于资本主义进步的简单化和经济的概念，这个概念描绘了一个仅由市场推动和驱动的相互关联的世界。 沿着资本主义全球物质逻辑的单一强大国家的帝国野心。 这些同样的神话也被用来为上述帝国的霸权道歉。 我们在这里谈论这样一种观念，即全球化的洪流破坏了国家的存在和主权，使它们在涉及世界经济事务和严肃的政治经济分析时变得无效且完全无关紧要； 二十世纪是美国霸权的世纪，就像十九世纪是英国霸权野心的世纪一样； 战后的黄金时代是本来奉行孤立主义的美国不情愿但又无私地领导的结果，美国不得不接受仁慈的超级大国的角色，只是因为权力和责任被强加给它。
第一个神话——指导经济的是市场而不是国家——试图彻底使经济去政治化，并将国家视为资本主义进步的臣民而不是主体。 第二个神话——1914 年之前英国的帝国野心被 1945 年之后美国的帝国野心所取代——将世界历史视为霸权连续性的历史，至少从 16 世纪的意大利城邦和 17 世纪开始。 世纪荷兰 (9)。 第三个神话——两次世界大战期间的大萧条是无能为力的英国无法再对世界经济施加影响的结果，而孤立主义的美国只对建设一个更美好的世界而不建立一个帝国感兴趣（64 ），而战后的黄金时代是黄金支持的美元作为世界货币的霸权稳定的时代——描绘了一个无伤大雅的故事，根据德赛的说法，这个故事不是基于事实，而是基于模仿帝国的帝国野心。 美国本身（4）。
总的来说，这三个神话将世界经济解释为由市场统一，并由一个强大、仁慈但不情愿的霸主驱动。 德赛的主要论点是，这只不过是虚构的，而世界的真实历史——即多极世界的历史，其中国家之间的工业竞争转化为帝国竞争（43），产生了几个竞争国家， 资本主义的进步迫使落后国家实现飞跃并跳过一系列中间阶段（52）——这与这三个神话背道而驰。
民族国家的特征在“全球化时代”发生了变化，这是国际关系文献中常见且熟悉的主题。 回想一下“后福特主义国家”、“全球新秩序”或“国家国际化”等再熟悉不过的概念了。 所有这些叙述的共同点是国家和市场的对立，仿佛全球化使市场比国家更强大，而且市场对国家的这种力量代表着国家自主权、主权或相关性的减弱。 所有这些概念中最令人惊讶的是缺乏阶级分析以及市场和国家的具体化。 这些概念也没有承认市场和国家都是更广泛的社会关系的一部分。 德赛充分认识到这种全球化教条的不合理性，他不仅重新阅读了马克思和恩格斯，还重新阅读了亚当·斯密，充实了十八、十九世纪盛行的反自由贸易主题，但未能成功。 强行进入主流意识形态（36-43）。 她在第二章中对十九世纪自由贸易自由主义思想进行了广泛的研究，强化了她的主张，即马克思（和恩格斯）和斯密的共同仪式性引用，以及他们随后作为自由贸易和资本主义固有的世界主义支持者的解释， 毫无根据（19）。 相反，正如人们对她的期望，基于她之前就这个问题发表的几篇出版物，德赛做了一项令人钦佩的工作，展示了后来托洛茨基主义的不平衡和综合发展的概念是如何起源于马克思和耳朵的。
政治经济学家将世界秩序理解为生产国之间的关系（52）。 同样，她还指出了非马克思主义思想家的贡献，主要是凯恩斯和波兰尼，他们强调国家在国内层面（应该）发挥的核心作用，并批评自由贸易和金本位制，从而引入了敏锐的见解 地缘政治经济（不是全球化，而是民族国家的世界（20）），其中由国家来管理资本主义的矛盾。
不平衡和综合发展的论点是德赛在本书中的项目的核心。 因为这篇论文不仅推翻了美国霸权取代英国霸权的神话，而且还揭示了战后时期从来不存在美国霸权稳定的情况。 正如德赛指出的那样，只要世界其他大部分地区仍未实现工业化，英国作为第一个工业化国家的主导地位就不可避免。 但 1870 年之后也是不可重复的（265）。 非殖民化以及不平衡和综合发展的展开，结束了英国的主导地位，但这样做也确保了不再出现任何单一霸权。 诚然，二战后的美国在经济和军事上都是唯一的强国，但它无法成功效仿英国。 由于领土帝国不再可能，美帝国主义的野心必须削弱，以美元取代英镑成为世界货币。 此外，与19世纪英国殖民地在维持英镑地位、允许英国输出资本方面发挥着至关重要的作用不同，20世纪的去殖民化和竞争国家的崛起意味着没有一个国家的经济能够担当霸主的角色。 或者管理世界经济：输出资本只能为竞争者的发展提供资金（268）。
德赛在第五章中指出，霸权稳定理论及其不同版本只是在美国明显失去霸主地位之后才开始受到重视。 从这个意义上说，该理论更多的是对霸权需求的道歉，而不是二十世纪末二十一世纪初资本主义地缘政治经济的理论。 对于德赛来说，这个理论与事实相差甚远。 相反，她将布伦纳的长期繁荣和长期衰退的历史与不平衡和综合发展的理论结合起来，产生了另一种历史。
总而言之，本书力图对过去一个世纪资本主义的不平衡发展以及国家在管理其矛盾中的中心地位进行近乎完整的描述。 任何熟悉全球化新自由主义意识形态的人，或者熟悉包含对单一世界秩序的一次又一次道歉的大量国际关系文献的人都知道，德赛试图解决的三个神话中没有一个是不受挑战的。 然而，她在本书中的贡献是将它们联系在一起，穿插着对自由贸易帝国主义（正如她在第二章中所做的那样）、美国试图效仿英国霸权（第三章）、 战后的发展和布雷顿森林体系时代（第 4 章）、霸权稳定理论（第 5 章）、后布雷顿森林体系时期（第 6 章）、十九世纪全球化（第七章）和二十世纪建立 帝国（第8章）。 从这个意义上说，这本书的目的是成功的，并表明多极世界和主流意识形态之间存在明显而极端的矛盾。
必须指出这本书可以做得更好的三点。 德赛本人意识到，对于一本声称对资本主义地缘政治经济的多极时刻进行彻底研究的书来说，相对于其他竞争国家来说，对美国的关注过多。 更全面的研究必须对这些竞争国家相对于美国的发展进行详细研究。 人们注意到的第二点是，人们对布伦纳对全球动荡研究的贡献的接受程度不那么严格，也很少提及近几十年来发生的争论。 参与这些辩论肯定会给德赛的书提供更广泛的基础，更好地符合她在书中的目标。 第三点是，尽管德赛对新古典经济学和自由贸易意识形态的非马克思主义批评家（例如凯恩斯）持好感，但他几乎没有提到凯恩斯主义——或者更准确地说——后凯恩斯主义的论点。 国家在全球政治经济中的中心地位。 关于国家在所谓的“宪章主义”中的关键作用的最重要的一个论点是，货币理论不能与国家理论分开。 承认这一点将使德赛的书对主权国家在地缘政治中的作用进行更完整、更有力的描述大有帮助。
l 资本主义经济。 尽管如此，书中还是有很多令人钦佩的学术成果，我只能希望德赛和其他与她观点相同的人未来的工作能够更全面地解决这里提出的问题。
2014 年 3 月 3 日
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7868_geopolitical-economy-review-by-sudeep-regmi/?
Geopolitical Economy: After Us Hegemony, Globalization and Empire
Reviewed by Sudeep Regmi,
About the reviewer
Sudeep Regmi is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Missouri (Kansas City). He is currently writing a dissertation on the foundations of a heterodox political economy of the capitalist state. (srqpf@mail.umkc.edu)
The express aim of Radhika Desai’s Geopolitical Economy is to dispel three myths: myths that have, under a cloak of cosmopolitanism, led to a simplistic and economistic conception of the advancement of capitalism, one which portrays an interconnected world impelled by the market alone and driven by the imperial ambitions of a singular powerful state along capitalism’s global material logic. These are the same myths that have also served as an apology for the said empire’s hegemony. We are talking here about the notions that the juggernaut of globalization has undermined the existence and sovereignty of states, making them ineffectual and simply irrelevant when it comes to both world economic affairs, and to a serious political economic analysis; that the twentieth century is a century of US hegemony, just like the nineteenth century was defined by the hegemonic ambitions of the UK; and that the post-war golden age was the result of a reluctant yet altruistic leadership of an otherwise isolationist US, which had to accept the role of a benevolent superpower only because power and responsibility was thrust upon it.
The first myth – that it is the market and not states that direct the economy – has tried to thoroughly de-politicize the economic, and has treated states as subjected to rather than subjects of capitalism’s advancement. The second myth – that the imperial ambitions of the UK before 1914 were replaced by those of the US after 1945 – sees the history of the world as the history of continuity of hegemonies, starting at least with the sixteenth century Italian city states, and seventeenth century Holland (9). The third myth – that the inter-war period Great Depression was the result of the powerless UK being unable to exert its influence on the world economy any longer, and the isolationist US being interested only in building a better world without erecting an empire (64), and that the post-war golden age was the age of hegemonic stability of the gold-backed dollar as the world’s currency – paints an innocuous story that, according to Desai, was based less on facts and more on mimicking the imperial ambitions of the US itself (4).
Collectively, these three myths have interpreted the world economy as being unified by the market, and driven by one powerful and benevolent yet reluctant hegemon. Desai’s main contention is that this is nothing but fiction, and that the actual history of the world – that is, the history of a multipolar world in which industrial competition between states translated into imperial competition (43), giving rise to several contender states, and in which the advancement of capitalism forced backward countries to make leaps and skip a series of intermediate stages (52) – flies in the face of each of these three myths.
That the character of nation states has changed in the ‘era of globalization’ is a frequent and familiar theme in the International Relations literature. Recall the all-too-familiar notions of the ‘post-Fordist state’, or the ‘new global order’, or the ‘internationalization of the state’. Common to all these narratives is a counterposition of the state and the market, as if globalization renders the market more powerful than states, and as if this power of the market over the state represents the diminishing autonomy, sovereignty or relevance of states. The most astonishing thing about all these notions is the absence of class analysis, and the reification of both the market and the state. Nor is there in these notions any acknowledgement that markets and states are both parts of a wider set of social relations. Desai recognizes the implausibility of this globalization dogma fully, and goes back to re-read not only Marx and Engels, but also Adam Smith, fleshing out the anti-free trade themes that were prevalent even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but could not force their way into the dominant ideology (36-43). The extensive study of the nineteenth century liberal idea of free trade that she undertakes in Chapter 2 reinforces her claims that the common ritualistic quoting of both Marx (and Engels) and Smith, and their subsequent interpretation as proponents of free trade and capitalism’s inherent cosmopolitanism, is baseless (19). Rather, as one has come to expect of her, based on her several previous publications on the issue, Desai does an admirable job of showing how the later Trotskyist notion of uneven and combined development has its origins in Marx and earlier political economists’ understanding of the world-order as a relation between producing nations (52). In a similar vein, she also notes the contributions of non-Marxist thinkers, primarily Keynes and Polanyi, who stressed the central roles states (should) play at the domestic level, and who criticized free trade and the gold standard, thus introducing acute insights into the geopolitical economy (not that of globalization, but of a world of nation-states (20)), in which it is up to the states to manage capitalism’s contradictions.
The thesis of uneven and combined development is at the heart of Desai’s project in this book. For not only does this thesis dislodge the myth that US hegemony succeeded UK hegemony, but also that there never was such thing as a US hegemonic stability in the post-war period. As Desai notes, the dominance of the UK as the first industrialized country was inevitable as long as much of the rest of the world remained unindustrialized. But it was also unrepeatable after 1870 (265). Both decolonization, and the unfolding of uneven and combined development, brought an end to UK dominance, but in doing so also ensured that no single hegemon could emerge anymore. It is true that emerging from the Second World War the US was the only powerful state, both in an economic and a military sense, but it could not successfully emulate the UK. Since territorial empire was no longer possible, US imperial ambitions had to be whittled down to replacing sterling with the dollar as the world’s currency. Furthermore, unlike the nineteenth century, when British colonies played a crucial role in maintaining sterling’s role, and allowed the UK to export capital, the decolonized twentieth century and the rise of contender states meant that no national economy could take up the role of hegemon, or of managing the world economy: exporting capital could do nothing but finance contender development (268).
The Hegemonic Stability Theory and its different versions, Desai notes in Chapter 5, rose to prominence only after the US had clearly lost its supremacy. In that sense, the theory is more an apology for the need for a hegemon, than a theory of the geopolitical economy of capitalism in the later twentieth, and early twenty-first century. This theory, for Desai, is as far from the truth as it could possibly be. Instead, she combines Brenner’s history of the long boom and the long downturn with the uneven and combined development thesis to produce an alternative history.
All in all, this book seeks to be a near-complete account of the past century of uneven advancement of capitalism, and the centrality of states in managing its contradictions. Anyone familiar with the neoliberal ideology of globalization, or the voluminous International Relations literature that contains apology after apology for a single world-order, knows that none of the three myths that Desai seeks to tackle have gone unchallenged. However, her contribution in this book has been to tie them all together, interspersed with an extensive study of the finer details of free trade imperialism (as she does in Chapter 2), of US attempts to emulate UK hegemony (Chapter 3), of postwar developments and the Bretton Woods era (Chapter 4), of the Hegemonic Stability Theory (Chapter 5), of the post-Bretton Woods period (Chapter 6), of nineteenth century globalization (Chapter 7) and the twentieth century attempts at building an empire (Chapter 8). In this sense, the book succeeds in its aim, and shows that the multipolar world and dominant ideology are at clear and extreme odds with each other.
Three points on which the book could have done better must be noted. Desai herself realizes that for a book that claims to be a thorough study of the multipolar moment in the geopolitical economy of capitalism, there is a disproportionate focus on the US relative to other contender states. A fuller study would have to undertake a detailed study of the development of these contender states vis-à-vis the US. A second point one notices is the less critical acceptance of Brenner’s contribution to the study of global turbulence, and little mention of the debates that have followed in the recent decades. Engagement with these debates would certainly give Desai’s book a broader foundation that fits her aims in the book better. A third point is that even though Desai looks favorably on non-Marxist critics of neo-classical economics and free-trade ideology (for instance, Keynes), there is hardly any mention of the Keynesian – or better put – post-Keynesian thesis of the centrality of states in global political economy. The single most important thesis regarding the crucial function of states in what is also known as ‘Chartalism’ is that the theory of money cannot be separated from the theory of the state. Acknowledgement of this would have gone a long way towards making Desai’s book a more complete and stronger account of the role of sovereign states in the geopolitical economy of capitalism. Despite all this, there is a lot of admirable scholarship in the book, and I can only wish that future work, of both Desai and others who share her perspective, will address the issues that have been raised here more fully.
3 March 2014
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7868_geopolitical-economy-review-by-sudeep-regmi/
