Quick notes on Radhika Desai's Geopolitical Economy

 

Radhika Desai

These are meant to be productive points. I think Desai’s work is the most important work being done today within Marxism, along with Banaji’s.

 

- Income per capita is not a regular measure of income, since there are demographic distortions according to the size of population. Nobody receives income per capita, it's just as illusory as a PPP measure (we'll get to this incommensurability later below on this same text), in the sense of not being empirical, nor the actual income received by society, nor the actual income received by anyone at all. If you used quintilles or deciles, it would still be a much better measure for income for the internal analysis of a society. To do comparative work between different societies and nation-states internationally, it's even more distorting. It's not only growth rates, it's also the mass of income which is getting the Triad to be surpassed by non-Triad countries and regions, as you can see here, where clearly not only are growth rates bigger for low income countries, but the mass as well is bigger in East Asia and the Pacific than in Europe or North America, since about almost a decade already:

-        If the criticism raised by geopolitical economists on National Accounts is true (which I think it is), and National Accounts treat the world market as homogeneous and universal, when there are multiple conflicting national generations and appropriations of value, then the world market, the international and the external, are not a vector sum of nations. The world market, the international and the external would be a completely different phenomenon qualitatively speaking, where compositions of capitals (organic composition/value compositions) juxtapose each other in the world market, with no possibility of a common denominator to translate the actual differences in value generations and appropriation (which is what National Accounts pretend, that they are homogeneous in every country, that they’re all over the same for each nation, etc). A common example would be trade: exports from a “Third World” country to the Triad do not realize value for the Triad, since it’s an expenditure, or in other words, cost. The moment of selling the exports realizes the exploitation between the “Third World” merchants and their own workers and economy, their own exploitation rate and profit rate, their own compositions of capitals. When the Triad country sells those exports to their own society, they’re not realizing the low income country’s exploitation rate or profit rate: the ones exploited are the workers and the consumers of the Triad’s advanced economy. So exports are not a flow that goes from South to North: the flows go first to the low income country as profit and value, and as cost to the Triad country, and then the Triad country covers this costs, by reselling these exports inside their own economy, exploiting their own workers and consumers to cover for the costs, and to add a profit. Both the low income as the Triad country’s companies, are imperial partners in their exploitation of both low income and Triad workers and consumers. There’s no flow in one direction to connect them, but actually flows in multiple directions to all parties involved. The same happens with the measure for multinational intra-firm value added: it is assumed that since it’s internal to X or Y multinational company, the intra-firm value added flows only to that company. We have shown that’s not really the case (link and link).

 

-         Low income and backwards countries are not pre-capitalist. If the authors themselves mention the passage from primary sector production to industrialization, there’s no way a society could industrialize without being capitalist. Backwards countries have been under formal subsumption, instead of real subsumption. Backwards countries are abstractly capitalist, and not specifically capitalist. Historically, backwards countries have gone from economies dominated by formal subsumption against a reduced or non-existent real subsumtion, and have progressively entered real subsumption incrementally and through a multiplicitiy of paths and trajectories, advancing the penetration of capitalism. They’re not pre-capitalist at all, even less if you assume that the biggest change facing capitalism right now, is the industrialization of emergent and low income countries. This contradicts classical imperialism, and the agrarian-industrial divide. If GE really doesn’t believe in a ‘pure capitalism’, then there should be multiform, and aberrant forms of capitalist penetration, instead of focusing in the English pure form. This is implicitly still sustaining the pure capitalist form position.

 

-        Just like North bourgeoisie are South’s bourgeoisies imperial partners in exploiting each other’s proletariat and consumers, then there’s a dynamic beyond a vector sum of nations, which juxtaposes the exploitation rates and profit rates, plus compositions of capitals (organic/value) and socially necessary labours of different nations against each other. The use of income figures, like GE does, or the use of productivity, exploitation rates and profit rates figures, etc, are all signals to the developments of that juxtaposition itself, and that’s why even if they’re markers that are part of National Accounts, they still can be constructed or disaggregated to analyze this juxtaposition. Just like National Accounts are not homogeneous, there’s no common denominator for this juxtaposition and interaction, as has been shown (link). Assuming the cosmopolitan position, then, is not wrong, but is the actual description of the international and the external in clearly Marxist terms: there’s an exchange of value happening between the whole nations’ bourgeois internationally between themselves as an international class, and this interaction and flows institute and are related to the exploitation of their own workers and societies in synchronicity (we prefer the term synchronic to logic. Marx never used the word logic, this was inserted into Marxism by Rosdolsky’s reading of Marx. Marx used the words history and totality, actually, not historical and logical), and at the same time, in diachronicity and dysfunction (which takes us away from the world-systems paradigm as well), not only between nations, but between layers of international bourgeoise partners and other international bourgeois partners, as well as their more immediate interactions to their own exploited workers in each nation and internationally.