風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
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.
地緣政治經濟：我們之後的霸權、全球化和帝國
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7868_geopolitical-economy-review-by-sudeep-regmi/?
Radhika Desai Pluto Press，倫敦，2013 年。328 頁，每頁 21.99 英鎊
由 Sudeep Regmi 審核，
關於審稿人
Sudeep Regmi 是密蘇裏大學（堪薩斯城）經濟學博士生。 他目前正在撰寫一篇關於資本主義國家非正統政治經濟學基礎的論文。 (srqpf@mail.umkc.edu)
拉迪卡·德賽的《地緣政治經濟學》的明確目標是消除三個神話：這些神話在世界主義的外衣下導致了一種關於資本主義進步的簡單化和經濟的概念，這個概念描繪了一個僅由市場推動和驅動的相互關聯的世界。 沿著資本主義全球物質邏輯的單一強大國家的帝國野心。 這些同樣的神話也被用來為上述帝國的霸權道歉。 我們在這裏談論這樣一種觀念，即全球化的洪流破壞了國家的存在和主權，使它們在涉及世界經濟事務和嚴肅的政治經濟分析時變得無效且完全無關緊要； 二十世紀是美國霸權的世紀，就像十九世紀是英國霸權野心的世紀一樣； 戰後的黃金時代是本來奉行孤立主義的美國不情願但又無私地領導的結果，美國不得不接受仁慈的超級大國的角色，隻是因為權力和責任被強加給它。
第一個神話——指導經濟的是市場而不是國家——試圖徹底使經濟去政治化，並將國家視為資本主義進步的臣民而不是主體。 第二個神話——1914 年之前英國的帝國野心被 1945 年之後美國的帝國野心所取代——將世界曆史視為霸權連續性的曆史，至少從 16 世紀的意大利城邦和 17 世紀開始。 世紀荷蘭 (9)。 第三個神話——兩次世界大戰期間的大蕭條是無能為力的英國無法再對世界經濟施加影響的結果，而孤立主義的美國隻對建設一個更美好的世界而不建立一個帝國感興趣（64 ），而戰後的黃金時代是黃金支持的美元作為世界貨幣的霸權穩定的時代——描繪了一個無傷大雅的故事，根據德賽的說法，這個故事不是基於事實，而是基於模仿帝國的帝國野心。 美國本身（4）。
總的來說，這三個神話將世界經濟解釋為由市場統一，並由一個強大、仁慈但不情願的霸主驅動。 德賽的主要論點是，這隻不過是虛構的，而世界的真實曆史——即多極世界的曆史，其中國家之間的工業競爭轉化為帝國競爭（43），產生了幾個競爭國家， 資本主義的進步迫使落後國家實現飛躍並跳過一係列中間階段（52）——這與這三個神話背道而馳。
民族國家的特征在“全球化時代”發生了變化，這是國際關係文獻中常見且熟悉的主題。 回想一下“後福特主義國家”、“全球新秩序”或“國家國際化”等再熟悉不過的概念了。 所有這些敘述的共同點是國家和市場的對立，仿佛全球化使市場比國家更強大，而且市場對國家的這種力量代表著國家自主權、主權或相關性的減弱。 所有這些概念中最令人驚訝的是缺乏階級分析以及市場和國家的具體化。 這些概念也沒有承認市場和國家都是更廣泛的社會關係的一部分。 德賽充分認識到這種全球化教條的不合理性，他不僅重新閱讀了馬克思和恩格斯，還重新閱讀了亞當·斯密，充實了十八、十九世紀盛行的反自由貿易主題，但未能成功。 強行進入主流意識形態（36-43）。 她在第二章中對十九世紀自由貿易自由主義思想進行了廣泛的研究，強化了她的主張，即馬克思（和恩格斯）和斯密的共同儀式性引用，以及他們隨後作為自由貿易和資本主義固有的世界主義支持者的解釋， 毫無根據（19）。 相反，正如人們對她的期望，基於她之前就這個問題發表的幾篇出版物，德賽做了一項令人欽佩的工作，展示了後來托洛茨基主義的不平衡和綜合發展的概念是如何起源於馬克思和耳朵的。
政治經濟學家將世界秩序理解為生產國之間的關係（52）。 同樣，她還指出了非馬克思主義思想家的貢獻，主要是凱恩斯和波蘭尼，他們強調國家在國內層麵（應該）發揮的核心作用，並批評自由貿易和金本位製，從而引入了敏銳的見解 地緣政治經濟（不是全球化，而是民族國家的世界（20）），其中由國家來管理資本主義的矛盾。
不平衡和綜合發展的論點是德賽在本書中的項目的核心。 因為這篇論文不僅推翻了美國霸權取代英國霸權的神話，而且還揭示了戰後時期從來不存在美國霸權穩定的情況。 正如德賽指出的那樣，隻要世界其他大部分地區仍未實現工業化，英國作為第一個工業化國家的主導地位就不可避免。 但 1870 年之後也是不可重複的（265）。 非殖民化以及不平衡和綜合發展的展開，結束了英國的主導地位，但這樣做也確保了不再出現任何單一霸權。 誠然，二戰後的美國在經濟和軍事上都是唯一的強國，但它無法成功效仿英國。 由於領土帝國不再可能，美帝國主義的野心必須削弱，以美元取代英鎊成為世界貨幣。 此外，與19世紀英國殖民地在維持英鎊地位、允許英國輸出資本方麵發揮著至關重要的作用不同，20世紀的去殖民化和競爭國家的崛起意味著沒有一個國家的經濟能夠擔當霸主的角色。 或者管理世界經濟：輸出資本隻能為競爭者的發展提供資金（268）。
德賽在第五章中指出，霸權穩定理論及其不同版本隻是在美國明顯失去霸主地位之後才開始受到重視。 從這個意義上說，該理論更多的是對霸權需求的道歉，而不是二十世紀末二十一世紀初資本主義地緣政治經濟的理論。 對於德賽來說，這個理論與事實相差甚遠。 相反，她將布倫納的長期繁榮和長期衰退的曆史與不平衡和綜合發展的理論結合起來，產生了另一種曆史。
總而言之，本書力圖對過去一個世紀資本主義的不平衡發展以及國家在管理其矛盾中的中心地位進行近乎完整的描述。 任何熟悉全球化新自由主義意識形態的人，或者熟悉包含對單一世界秩序的一次又一次道歉的大量國際關係文獻的人都知道，德賽試圖解決的三個神話中沒有一個是不受挑戰的。 然而，她在本書中的貢獻是將它們聯係在一起，穿插著對自由貿易帝國主義（正如她在第二章中所做的那樣）、美國試圖效仿英國霸權（第三章）、 戰後的發展和布雷頓森林體係時代（第 4 章）、霸權穩定理論（第 5 章）、後布雷頓森林體係時期（第 6 章）、十九世紀全球化（第七章）和二十世紀建立 帝國（第8章）。 從這個意義上說，這本書的目的是成功的，並表明多極世界和主流意識形態之間存在明顯而極端的矛盾。
必須指出這本書可以做得更好的三點。 德賽本人意識到，對於一本聲稱對資本主義地緣政治經濟的多極時刻進行徹底研究的書來說，相對於其他競爭國家來說，對美國的關注過多。 更全麵的研究必須對這些競爭國家相對於美國的發展進行詳細研究。 人們注意到的第二點是，人們對布倫納對全球動蕩研究的貢獻的接受程度不那麽嚴格，也很少提及近幾十年來發生的爭論。 參與這些辯論肯定會給德賽的書提供更廣泛的基礎，更好地符合她在書中的目標。 第三點是，盡管德賽對新古典經濟學和自由貿易意識形態的非馬克思主義批評家（例如凱恩斯）持好感，但他幾乎沒有提到凱恩斯主義——或者更準確地說——後凱恩斯主義的論點。 國家在全球政治經濟中的中心地位。 關於國家在所謂的“憲章主義”中的關鍵作用的最重要的一個論點是，貨幣理論不能與國家理論分開。 承認這一點將使德賽的書對主權國家在地緣政治中的作用進行更完整、更有力的描述大有幫助。
l 資本主義經濟。 盡管如此，書中還是有很多令人欽佩的學術成果，我隻能希望德賽和其他與她觀點相同的人未來的工作能夠更全麵地解決這裏提出的問題。
2014 年 3 月 3 日
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7868_geopolitical-economy-review-by-sudeep-regmi/
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/
