What political economy approach for the 21st century?

In my latest open access article Confronting Multiple Global Crises: a political economy approach for the 21^st century, published in the journal Globalizations, I discuss the essential features of a political economy approach, which facilitates the conceptualisation of the internal relations between the current, multiple global crises including a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology.

 

Beyond Intersectional Political Economy

Adam D. Morton's and my latest article, entitled ‘The Dialectical Matrix of Class, Gender, Race’ published in Environment and Planning F, goes beyond intersectional studies on the themes of class, gender, and race to assert Marxist dialectics in the analysis of capitalist, patriarchal, and racial forms of oppression. Understanding the ways in which these forms are internally related is of utmost importance, considering heightened global tensions within the polycrisis reflected in the conditions characteristic of genocide in Gaza; or the wider global femicide; or the intensifying crisis of global capitalism.

Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender?

A sweep through key arguments about the abstracting logic of capital will yield a common emphasis, which is a stress on the “indifference” of capital to those it exploits. For sure this is evident in some of Marx’s own writings. Witness points in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts on how capital stands in an indifferent relationship to labour, with the latter existing as ‘liberated capital’. Or, equally, Marx’s more sophisticated point in Grundrisse that ‘since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance’ then ‘the labour which confronts it likewise subjectively has the same totality and abstraction in itself’.

 

More widely, though, this emphasis crops up in the writings of others, such as Moishe Postone, William Clare Roberts, or Martha Giménez. At first blush it may seem reasonable to contend at an abstract level that capitalism is “indifferent” to the social identities of the people it exploits. But does adhering to this form of abstraction result in a flawed theory of labour and social mediation under capitalism? As Doreen Massey reminds us, is there an abstracting logic here that fails to recognise that the world is not simply the product of the requirements of capital? Adam D. Morton and I pursue these questions (and more) in our latest article in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space through an engagement with debates in Marxist Feminist social reproduction theory.