Capitalism

Question 1

What are the three criteria that Jurgen Kocka (2016) uses to define capitalism?

Answer 1

1. Individualised property rights and decisions
2. Coordination of different economic actors by means of market mechanisms
3. Economic centrality of capital

Question 2

In what four ways does John Clegg (2015) suggest antebellum slavery is capitalist?

Answer 2

It refers to the…

1. profit motive of slave owners
2. rapid and continuous productivity growth (2%/year)
3. commodification and collaterisation of slaves
4. commercial links that tied the nineteenth-century Atlantic world together

Question 3

How many pounds of cotton were produced in 1805 and 1860?

Answer 3

1805: 20 million pounds
1860: 2 billion pounds

Question 4

How does Marx (1847) term slaves?

Answer 4

Machines

Question 5

Alan Olmstead (2015) criticism of Edward Baptist

Answer 5

Baptist is flawed beyond repair; fails to acknowledge improved cotton varieties; is hostile to economists

Question 6

Edward Baptist (2014, 2016) background

Answer 6

1. Runaway slaves database
2. Agenda is to free African-American students from shame; argues that slaves built the entire modern world
3. Response to Economist article

Question 7

How does Clegg criticise Beckert and Baptist?

Answer 7

Authors misled by a cultural and psychological view of capitalist motivations

Question 8

How does Susan Carter et al. (2006) counter Baptist’s suggestion that after abolition, production and efficiency dropped and never again reached previous levels?

Answer 8

Five years after the Civil War, cotton production approached peak antebellum levels and in 1891, output was twice the highest ever level achieved in the pre-War period

Question 9

Which period does antebellum slavery refer to?

Answer 9

1807 (abolition of the transatlantic slave trade) to 1865 (end of the US civil war)

Question 10

What years did Immanuel Wallerstein write on World Systems Theory?

Answer 10

1974 and 1987

Question 11

How does Wallerstein’s World System Theory (1974 and 1987) characterise the world system?

Answer 11

1. As a set of mechanisms that redistribute surplus value from the periphery to the core
2. Maintains inequality between nations
3. Hinged on a capitalist economy

Question 12

What does Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) suggest the slave trade did?

Answer 12

Created a new kind of periphery

Question 13

On which committee does Thomas Piketty (2014) reside on?

Answer 13

Labour Party’s Economic Advisory Committee

Question 14

What does Piketty suggest about David Ricardo’s (1817) Scarcity Principle?

Answer 14

1. Meant that certain prices might rise to very high levels over many decades; could be enough to destabilise entire societies
2. Price system plays a key role in coordinating the activities of millions of individuals
3. It would be a serious mistake to neglect the importance of the scarcity principle for understanding the global distribution of wealth in the twenty-first century

Question 15

What are three tenets of John Maynard Keynes (1933)?

Answer 15

1. Government intervention can stabilise the economy and create employment
2. Free markets have no self-balancing mechanisms that lead to full employment; state intervention is necessary to moderate booms and busts
3. Creating employment has a spiral effect that creates wealth in separate areas (demand-side economics)

Question 16

David Nye (2013) and Ford

Answer 16

1. Ford was the only company with new production technology
2. Could simultaneously undersell competition, raise wages, and increase profits
3. Profit sharing $5 per day when usual pay was $2.50 per day

Question 17

How does Michel Foucault (1978-9) define neoliberalism?

Answer 17

A specific art of government that organises society according to the market rationale

Question 18

How does Terry Flew (2014) define neoliberalism?

Answer 18

Strongest definition of neoliberalism comes from the Marxist political economy: ideological project of a resurgent political right

Question 19

How does David Harvey (2005) criticise neoliberalisation?

Answer 19

1. Neoliberalisation has meant the financialisation of everything
2. Deepened hold of finance on all areas of the economy as well as over state apparatus and daily life
3. The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by the freedom of the market and trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking

Question 20

How does Karl Polanyi (1944) distinguish between different kinds of freedoms?

Answer 20

In a complex society there are two contradictory kinds of freedoms:

1. Bad freedoms (to exploit others, etc)
2. Good freedoms (of speech, association, etc)

Question 21

What were Friedrich Hayek’s (1944) views shaped by?

Answer 21

Rise of fascism and WW2

Question 22

What does Friedrich Hayek (1944) argue?

Answer 22

1. State intervention compromises liberty; ‘danger of tyranny’
2. Fascism and socialism have common roots
3. Centralised planning is undemocratic because it requires that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people; ‘individual would […] become a mere means’
4. Even the very poor have more freedom in an open society than a centrally planned one

Question 23

What does capitalism need to be progressive

Answer 23

State intervention

Question 24

James Peck and Adam Tickell (2007) arguments

Answer 24

1. Utopian rhetoric of neoliberalism focuses on the liberation of competitive markets and individual freedoms
2. Reality is they are defined by the tasks of dismantling those alien state and social forms that constituted their political inheritance
3. Early stage neoliberalism was a creature of the economic crisis; favoured strategies that heaped the burden of economic adjustment onto the working class; did not initiate generalised and sustainable economic development

Question 25

Piketty (2014) arguments on the history of inequality

Answer 25

1. Is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not 2. Karl Marx: Dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably leads to the concentration of wealth in fewer hands 3. In the absence of balancing pressures, capitalism gravitates towards increased inequality 4. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself; is it justified?

Question 26

How does E. P. Thompson (1963) define class?

Answer 26

Class is a relationship