Editors: Aylin Topal, Gökhan Demir, Melih Yeşilbağ, M. Gürsan Şenalp, Sümercan Bozkurt
Reconsidering critical political economy within the context of crisis: Euro-zone crisis and conceptual crisis Abstract
Elif Uzgören
In tandem with global crisis, the Euro-zone crisis, rise of far-right political parties and exiting options from the EU such as Brexit have also determined discussions within European studies literature. Mainstream literature on European studies has failed to develop necessary analytical tools to explain crisis whereas critical political economy studies are considerably excluded from mainstream on grounds of Euro-scepticism. Yet, exclusion of critical political economy literature, which takes economics and politics as embedded processes, from main debates within European studies literature has weakened analytical basis to understand current contradictions of European integration, to explicate crisis and to develop strategies. This study aims to present critical political economy literature under four categories namely: Varieties of Capitalism, Regulation School, Open Marxism and Gramscian Historical Materialism. How does critical political economy literature criticize mainstream’s explanations regarding the crisis? How do they explicate Euro-zone crisis and its socio-economic structure which caused the crisis? What strategies do they put forward in resolving the crisis? The article shall argue that critical political economy literature contributes to analyze European integration within global structure, to uncover class politics behind integration rather than explicating integration as an automatic process and to problematize power relations.
Keywords: Euro-zone crisis, Political economy, European studies.
Globalization, European Integration and Enlargement
Lütfi Doğan
European integration is frequently evaluated as a union based on democratic norms and social values. These evaluations refer to a kind of rationality regarding the European integration. This article aims to question such a rationality and to discuss the formation of the European integration as a capital project and the transformation of it within the frame of globalization, integration, and enlargement. In the article, different approaches regarding the characteristic of the European integration are identified and it is determined that the European integration was emerged as an attempt for creating an integrated capitalism in Western Europe. Besides, it is asserted that the European integration was not disposed to enlarge at the beginning of its establishment, but has put the enlargement on the agenda in accordance with internationalization, centralization, and concentration of capital in global period.
Keywords: European integration, capitalism, globalization, enlargement.
Internationalization and State in Late Capitalisms: The Axis of China, Russia and Iran
Engin Sune
The impact of the world order, where the neoliberal form of capitalism has become dominant at the international level under the hegemony of the West, on the countries with different strategies of capitalist development is equivocal. In the process of internationalization of capital, understanding this impact necessitates to focus on the state structures of these countries and their forms of integration into the global capitalist system. This study, by concentrating on the concept of internationalization of the state as a ‘moment’ of globalization process, analyzes the effect of the international system, which is under the domination of a certain form of capitalism, on the transformation of the social structures in lately capitalized countries. The theoretical discussion is supported with empirical evidences through the analysis of the forms of capitalism in China, Russia and Iran and their location at the international capitalist division of labor. This analysis also raises the question of whether these social formations pose a threat to the global capitalist system. With this aim, the study reveals whether the sources of an alternative world order exist on the Eurasian axis by examining the dialectical relationship of the political/ economic structures imposed by the global capitalist system with the ones in China, Russia and Iran.
Keywords: Globalization, Internationalization of State, Neoliberalism, China, Russia, Iran.
Hegemonic Cycles of the World System and China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative
Yunus Emre Mahir
This study aims to analyze the China’s One Belt One Road initiative in connection with the hegemonic cycles of the capitalist world system, including the political and economic dynamics of China’s capitalist transformation. For this purpose, the theses of the hegemonic cycle developed by Giovanni Arrighi and Kojin Karatani were employed. If we follow the explanation model of Arrighi, this initiative could be considered as the precursor of a Chinabased more egalitarian and possibly non-capitalist new hegemonic regime. If we take the Karatani’s thesis, this initiative can be seen as a sign of the transition to the mercantilistimperialist phase of the world history wherein a hegemonic state does not exist. According to this thesis, the US-centered hegemonic regime, which is based on the international free movement of capital and the political sovereignty of nation-states, has practically disappeared. Under these conditions the mercantilist economic policies are becoming widespread and at the same time imperialistically characterized regional blocs formed by the nation-states are arising. China’s One Belt One Road initiative aims to contribute to the formation of such a regional political bloc and to the accumulation and profitability of the capital of the countries participating in this regional cooperation. While mercantilistimperialist policies are becoming widespread throughout from the core countries of the world-system to the others and the political movements in this line are coming into power, China just plays its role in the face of this systemic pressure. As a result, this initiative is not an attempt for a new hegemony, but rather a move for adaptation to a world system in which there is no hegemony, and a new one will probably not be established.
Keywords: Hegemonic cycle, Future of capitalism, Imperialism, One Belt One Road.
The Capitalist-Imperialist World System and China: A Long March or an Obstacle Race from the Periphery to the Core?
Onurcan Ülker
China has been going through a gradual but steady capitalist restoration process justified on the basis of a borderline fetishistic adoration for the development of productive forces since the late 1970s. Until 2008 crisis, export-oriented growth strategy remained at the center of the Chinese model of capital accumulation adopted by the ‘reformist’ leaders of the post-socialist era. However, after 2008, decrease in global demand for Chinese manufactured goods and the slowdown in Chinese economic growth compelled the CPC to take a new path without stepping back from the so-called ‘reform and openingup’. Since then, ‘go abroad’ strategy, which was formulated by the Chinese government as early as the late 1990s, has become the backbone of the capital accumulation ‘with Chinese characteristics’. The volume of FDI being attracted into China is still huge, yet China has also become the world’s second largest net capital exporter in recent years. Chinese influence over the raw-material-rich Global South nations has consistently been growing, and China has been pursuing a more active foreign policy. These recent developments also trigger debates on the character of China’s massive export of capital and the role of China in the contemporary capitalist-imperialist world system among Marxist circles in and out of China. The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical evaluation of different arguments raised in these debates in the light of an analysis of structural constraints that might hamper ‘the rise of China’ from a poor, agrarian, peripheral economy into a capitalist (and for some, even ‘imperialist’) superpower.
Keywords: Capitalist-imperialist world system, rise of China, Communist Party of China (CPC), marketization, export of capital.
Turkey’s Sub-imperialist Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East and North Africa in the AKP Era
Gönenç Uysal
The mainstream scholars have explained the enhancement of political and economic relations between Turkey and the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) with references to the AKP’s “proactive” foreign policy. On the contrary to the mainstream approaches which conceptualise state above labour-capital and capital-contradictions and accept the apparent demarcation between the national and international spheres as an inherent separation, this paper borrows its theoretical framework from Marxism. In this way, it historicizes state and its foreign policy, and conceptualizes them in relation to class antagonisms in the world capitalist system. It particularly borrows from the theory of uneven and combined development in order to explore foreign policy at the nexus of economic contradictions among various internal and foreign capitals and geopolitical competition among imperialist and peripheral countries. It examines the AKP’s foreign policy vis-à-vis the MENA as a particular sociohistorical form of sub-imperialism that is characterized with and reproduces economic competition and geopolitical rivalries among Turkey and Western and Gulf states.
Keywords: Turkey, Middle East and Northern Africa, Foreign Policy, Marxism, Capital.
Situating the Syrian Refugee Workers in Turkey: Spatial Fix, Capital and the State
Cenk Saraçoğlu – Daniele Belanger
Considering their long-term stay in Turkey without a refugee or citizenship status and their incorporation into the Turkish informal labour market extensively, the Syrian refugees need to be treated and examined not only as refugees but also as displaced temporary migrant workers. Such a shift in the discussions would help us to investigate how the Syrian refugees functioned for the Turkish capital as the tools of a “spatial fix” necessary for overcoming the domestic limits to profit maximization and capital accumulation. David Harvey’s concept of spatial fix is utilized by a few migration scholars who treated the temporary foreign migrant workers as a means to overcome potential “domestic” barriers to capital accumulation. In the case of Syrian refugees, spatial fix operates through valuing the labour-power of the Syrians according not to the socially necessary labour-time to reproduce the labour power of a Turkish national but to an image of a war exile that needs and be content with mere survival in a foreign country. Under such circumstances the rights granted by temporary protection such as health coverage becomes also functional in the reproduction of a non-national labour force, by means of which Turkish capital transcends the spatial limits to accumulation. The article will build on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in İzmir between 2016 and 2918 and the findings of and inferences from this fieldwork will help us to demonstrate the mechanisms through which the informal employment of Syrian refugees serves as a spatial fix for the capital owners in Turkey.
Keywords: Syrian refugees, spatial fix, displacement, labour, reproduction, temporary protection.
Book Review
Unnamed Empire and the “Relative Autonomy” Problem
M. Gürsan Şenalp
Panitch, L. and S. Gindin (2019) Küresel Kapitalizmin Oluşturulması: Amerikan İmparatorluğunun Siyasal İktisadı [The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire], trans.: Ü. Şenesen, İstanbul: Yordam Kitap, 430 sf.
