Neoliberalism and Climate Policy in the United States:
From market fetishism to the developmental state



This book explores how Washington’s efforts to act on climate change have been translated under conditions of American neoliberalism, where the state struggles to find a stable and legitimate role in the economy, and where environmental and industrial policy are enormously contentious topics.

This original work conceptualizes US climate policy first and foremost as a question of innovation policy, with capital accumulation and market domination as its main drivers. It argues that US climate policy must be understood in the context of Washington’s broader efforts over the past four decades to dominate and monopolize novel high-tech markets, and its use of immense amounts of state power to achieve this end. From this perspective, many elements of US climate politics that seem confusing or contradictory actually appear to have an obvious and consistent logic.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of IPE, as well as individuals generally interested in gaining a stronger understanding of US climate politics and policy, and the role and influence of neoliberalism on contemporary economic governance.

Underwater ritual offerings in the Island of the Sun and the formation of the Tiwanaku state

Christophe Delaere, José M. Capriles, and Charles Stanish

PNAS April 23, 2019 116 (17) 8233-8238; 
first published April 1, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820749116

1. Contributed by Charles Stanish, February 27, 2019 (sent for review December 6, 2018; reviewed by John Janusek and Joyce Marcus)

•  PDF

Significance

Ritual and religion are significant factors in primary or archaic state formation. These beliefs and practices not only legitimize these new political organizations in their ability to control supernatural forces, but also incentivize intragroup cooperation by punishing freeloading and rewarding cooperative behavior. Recent archaeological excavations from an underwater ceremonial location near the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca have revealed the remarkable constituent elements of repetitive rituals practiced by the Tiwanaku state between the 8th and 10th centuries CE. Evidence of animal sacrifice and high-value offerings of vessels, gold, shells, and lapidary stones on a strategically located reef illustrates how power was consolidated in one of the earliest Andean states.

Abstract

Considerable debate surrounds the economic, political, and ideological systems that constitute primary state formation. Theoretical and empirical research emphasize the role of religion as a significant institution for promoting the consolidation and reproduction of archaic states. The Tiwanaku state developed in the Lake Titicaca Basin between the 5th and 12th centuries CE and extended its influence over much of the south-central Andes of South America. We report on recent discoveries from the first systematic underwater archaeological excavations in the Khoa Reef near the Island of the Sun, Bolivia. The depositional context and compositional properties of offerings consisting of ceramic feline incense burners, killed juvenile llamas, and sumptuary metal, shell, and lapidary ornaments allow us to reconstruct the structure and significance of cyclically repeated state rituals. Using new theoretical tools, we explain the role of these rituals in promoting the consolidation of the Tiwanaku polity.

CHAPTER 18

ABIEZER COPPE AND THE RANTERS 

ARIEL HESSAYON 

In 1652 Mary Adams of Tillingham, Essex apparently died by her own hand. According to a pamphlet entitled The Ranters Monster printed at London for George Horton (Figure 18.1), Adams claimed that she had been made pregnant by the Holy Ghost. Furthermore, she reportedly denied the Gospels’ teachings, wickedly declaring that Christ had not yet appeared in the flesh but that she was to give birth to the true Messiah. For these supposed blasphemies Adams was imprisoned. After a protracted labour of eight days, she gave birth on the ninth day to a stillborn, ugly, misshapen monster. This loathsome creature was said to have neither hands nor feet, but claws like a toad. Adams herself became consumed by disease, rotting away; her body disfigured by blotches, boils, and putrid scabs. To compound her sins she refused to repent and then committed the terrible crime of suicide by ripping open her bowels with a knife. The account in The Ranters Monster was reproduced in some contemporary newsbooks and subsequently in a broadside enumerating the great blasphemers of the times. It was, however, fictitious. While the pamphlet formed part of the genre of monstrous births, which tended to be interpreted as providential signs warning against private and public sin, it also served another function: as an admonition against the licentiousness of the Ranters and an affirmation of the dreadful divine punishments that awaited all such reprobates.

Gender,Production, and ‘the Transition to Capitalism’: Assessing the Historical Basis for a Unitary Materialist Theory

Gary Blank

York University

ABSTRACT: 

When socialist feminists discussed the potential and pitfalls of Marxism in the “domestic labour debate,” the specific relationship between patriarchy and capital emerged as a defining concern. While offering a trenchant critique of orthodox Marxism, the tenor of the debate was highly abstract and theoretical, and largely ignored the question of capitalism’s origins. Political Marxists, in contrast, have devoted fastidious attention to this question in their own attempt to renew historical materialism; but their dialogue has dedicated little attention to questions of gender, families, and social reproduction in the feminist sense. This paper makes an initial attempt at closing the analytical gap between these two historical materialist traditions. It departs from an unresolved theoretical impasse within the socialist feminist tradition: how to conceive of the imperatives of capital accumulation and class in a way that avoids both reductionism and dual-

ism. I argue that this tension stems principally from an inadequate historicization of capitalism. A critical assessment of Wally Seccombe historical work illustrates how political Marxism can be deployed to correct this deficiency, while also revealing the extent to which these concepts must be rethought in light of materialist feminist concerns. A synthesis of

the two traditions offers a more complete and effective account of the transition, while providing a basis for a unitary materialist theory.

KEYWORDS: Brenner debate, materialist feminism, political Marxism, primitive accumulation, social reproduction, socialist feminism, transition from feudalism to capitalism

Diggers, Levellers and Agrarian Capitalism Radical Political Thought in 17th Century English
Geoff Kennedy

This book situates the development of radical English political thought within the context of the specific nature of agrarian capitalism and the struggles that ensued around the nature of the state during the revolutionary decade of the 1640s. In the context of the emerging conceptions of the state and property—with attendant notions of accumulation, labor, and the common good—groups such as Levellers and Diggers developed distinctive forms of radical political thought not because they were progressive, forward thinkers, but because they were the most significant challengers of the newly-constituted forms of political and economic power.

Drawing on recent re-examinations of the nature of agrarian capitalism and modernity in the early modern period, Geoff Kennedy argues that any interpretation of the political theory of this period must relate to the changing nature of social property relations and state power. The radical nature of early modern English political thought is therefore cast in terms of its oppositional relationship to these novel forms of property and state power, rather than being conceived of as a formal break from discursive conventions.

'This impressive study takes on a major challenge. Geoff Kennedy not only offers a clear and persuasive account of political ideas in their historical context, but also engages in methodological debate with other historians of political thought and explores the controversies among scholars of this much contested period in English history. He manages to interweave these different strands with commendable clarity and in accessible prose, suitable to a wide audience from specialists to students and the intelligent general reader.'
Ellen Meiksins Wood - York University, Canada"

More Info: Lexington Books 2008

Chumbawamba - The Diggers' Song 

The Digger's Song - Leon Rosselson

World Turned Upside Down - Leon Rosselson

Great English singer songwriter, Leon Rosselson, sings his own tribute to The Diggers and to Thomas Paine.

Dick Gaughan - world turned upside down

dall' album Handful of Earth del 1981.

1. 
   
2. 
   

   2:33

   The world turned upside down - Billy Bragg

Attila The Stockbroker - March of the Levellers/The Diggers' Song

Levellers and ranters and diggers - Permanent Culture Now

https://www.permanentculturenow.com/a-common-peoples-history-of-the-uk-part-3-l...

Aug 25, 2012 - A common peoples history of the UK part 3: Levellers and ranters and diggers. ... In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and a small band of Diggers occupied a patch of waste land on St George's Hill in Surrey, to 'work together, eat bread together', in the belief that 'the Earth ought to be a common Treasury to all'.

A common peoples history of the UK part 3:Levellers and ranters and diggers. ... In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and a small band of Diggers occupied a patch of waste land on St George's Hill in Surrey, to 'work together, eat bread together', in the belief that 'the Earth ought to be a common Treasury to all'.Aug 25, 2012

The Ranters - Spartacus Educational
https://spartacus-educational.com › The English Civil War › History of Socialism
A detailed account of The Ranters that includes includes quotations and the ... Lilburne and the Levellers and described the Diggers as the "True Levellers".

The World Turned Upside Down - Levellers, Diggers,  Ranters, 14th April 2019

 Published on Apr 15, 2019

Attila the Stockbroker and John Rees celebrate the radical movements at the heart of the English Revolution, Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. Event in East Oxford Community Hall.

An afternoon of discussion, poetry and song to celebrate the legacy of the most radical movements of the 1640s. Co-hosted by Oxfordshire Refugee Solidarity (ORS), Oxford Momentum and Attila the Stockbroker to raise funds for the work of ORS supporting refugees and local charities in northern France.
Two very different commentators on the role of Levellers, Diggers and Ranters during and after the English Revolution.

ALSO SEE ATLANTIC HISTORY  REVIEWS OF THE MANY HEADED HYDRA 

THE_BRENNER_DEBATE._Agrarian_Class_Structure_
and_Economic_Development_in_Pre-Industrial_Europe

 BOOK PDF

Capitalism - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada PHD THESIS FULL PDF 

www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk4/etd/MQ89460.PDF

This article was published in ANTIPODE: A RADICAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY, 26,4,(1994):351-76.

ROBERT BRENNER IN THE TUNNEL OF TIME

J.M. BLAUT University of Illinois at Chicago

Euro-Marxism

Robert Brenner is a Marxist, a follower of one tradition in Marxism that is as diffusionist, as Eurocentric, as most conservative positions. I cannot here offer an explanation for this curious phenomenon: a tradition within one of the most egalitarian of all socio-political doctrines yet a tradition which, nonetheless, believes in the historical superiority (or priority) of one community of humans, Europeans, over another, non-Europeans. Eurocentric Marxists are not racist, nor even prejudiced, although most of them believe that Europeans have always been the leaders in the forward march of history; that Europe is the fountainhead of civilization, the main source of innovative social change. For these scholars, the origins of capitalism are European. Capitalism's further development consisted of an internally generated process of improvement within its classic homeland, the European world. The impact of capitalism on the rest of the world has been, on balance, progressive. Colonialism and (today) neocolonialism are not significant for capitalism, are rather a marginal process, a temporary aberration or diversion or side-show, not a vital need of the system as a whole, which evolves in response to internal laws of motion.

This is the accepted version of Anievas, Alexander and Nisancioglu, Kerem (2013) What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 42 (1), 78-102. Published version available from Sage at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829813497823Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/20673/

Robert Brenner on political accumulation and the transition to capitalism

Ricardo Duchesne*

University of New Brunswick, Saint John, P.O. Box 5050, Saint John, New Brunswick, E2L 4L5, Canada

Received 20 September 1998; accepted 23 July 1999

The Brenner Debate

The Dobb-Sweezy debate is often considered an intra-Marxist debate insofar as the questions and issues that were posed during it were mostly of interest to those already convinced of, or working within the Marxist theoretical tradition of historiography. The discussion charted below, “the Brenner Debate,” discusses many of the same issues, and its eponymous exponent Robert Brenner, argues indeed from a Marxist informed theoretical position. Nonetheless, the central issues in this debate were much more wide-ranging owing in part to the focus of the debate on long-term economic development in Europe. This pulled historians from various traditions into discussing the inherent orthodoxy of ‘the demographic approach’ for this problem. It is the strength of Brenner’s position, and its significance for historically informed theory that provided the groundwork for ‘Political Marxism’ (what was originally an epithet coined by Guy Bois in the contribution below, and later reclaimed in a positive sense by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1981)).

The "Brenner Thesis"

INTRODUCTION

I suppose most people who got their Marxist education in Marxist parties share certain basic assumptions about how First World economic and political hegemony over the so-called Third World has been achieved. It was a function of economic exploitation going back to the discovery of the New World and the several hundred years of advantage this gave the First World, as it expanded its control over countries to the East as well. Gold and silver mined by indigenous peoples, colonial plantations, disruption of local handicrafts in places like India all worked together to give nascent capitalist institutions in Europe the "supercharging" they needed to leapfrog over other countries where similar institutions were also gestating.

So I was surprised, if not shocked, to discover that Robert Brenner, a leader of the left-wing American group Solidarity, wrote a series of articles in the 1970s denying such connections. Brenner's critique was directed against a group of thinkers who, like Paul Sweezy, viewed themselves as operating in the Marxist tradition, and others, like Andre Gunder Frank, who rejected Marxism altogether. What they all had in common was a perspective that development in the core countries is a cause of underdevelopment in the so-called periphery. The prosperity and global power of nations like the United States was a function of the poverty and weakness of countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Angola.

But in Brenner's words (New Left Review, 104, 1977), these thinkers "move too quickly from the proposition that capitalism is bound up with, and supportive of, continuing underdevelopment in large parts of the world, to the conclusion not only that the rise of underdevelopment is inherent in the extension of the world division of labour through capitalist expansion, but also that the 'development of underdevelopment' is an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself."

I will argue that the 'development of underdevelopment' is indeed an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself, but before doing so it will be necessary to provide some historical background into Marxist thinking on these questions. Since Brenner claims to be defending classical Marxism against newfangled, neo-Smithian deviations, it would be useful to now review what Marx and Marxists have written.

The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism

www.unsa.edu.ar/histocat/haeconomica07/lecturas/lawcountries.pdf

by RP BRENNER - ‎2001 - ‎

Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, Netherlands agrarian ... standing debate on the transition to capitalism, with respect to earlier stages of.

In the most recent phase of the discussion on the historical conditions for economic development, or the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the town-dominated Low Countries have been neglected, because the focus has been to such a large extent on agrarian conditions and agrarian transformations. This article seeks to make use of the cases of the medieval and early modern Northern and Southern Netherlands, the most highly urbanized and commercialized regions in Europe, to show that the rise of towns and the expansion of exchange cannot in themselves bring about economic development, because they cannot bring about the requisite transformation of agrarian social-property relations. In the non-maritime Southern Netherlands, a peasant-based economy led to economic involution. In the maritime Northern Netherlands, the transformation of peasants into market-dependent farmers created the basis for economic development.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 2 No. 1, January 2002, pp. 88–95. Charles Post © Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2002.

SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution:Reflections on the Brenner Debate and its Sequel 
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
 The "Brenner Debate" launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about "agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe". Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and "commercial change" into the equation.1 Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original.Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.

 Comments on the Brenner–Wood Exchangeon the Low Countries 
CHARLES POST 

The exchange between Brenner and Wood on the Low Countries in the early modern period raises a number of theoretical and historical issues relating to the conditions for the emergence of capitalist social-property relations and their unique historical laws of motion. This contribution focuses on three issues raised in the Brenner–Wood exchange: the conditions under which rural household producers become subject to ‘market coercion’, the potential for ecological crisis to restructure agricultural production, and the relative role of foreign trade and the transformation of domestic, rural class relations to capitalist industrialization. Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, 

Is there anything to defend in Political Marxism?

By Neil Davidson

Issue #91: Features

At the conclusion of their article, “In Defense of Political Marxism” (International Socialist Review #90, July 2013), Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman note that: “Advocates of Political Marxism like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Charles Post share a tremendous amount with their critics like Jairus Banaji, Neil Davidson, and Ashley Smith in their common perspective on the necessity for revolutionary socialism from below.”¹ It is certainly true that members of Solidarity like Brenner and Post are revolutionaries who have made significant contributions to issues of central importance to the Left, many of which are perfectly compatible with the International Socialist tradition.² Others from the same organization, like John Eric Marot, have critically engaged with aspects of that tradition such as our attitude to the Left Opposition, but in comradely ways that helped to develop our collective understanding.³ 

One of the difficulties with Political Marxism, however, is its political indeterminacy. Not all proponents are revolutionaries: Wood inhabits a position close to that of Ralph Miliband and his successors on the editorial board of The Socialist Register, although she too has made important theoretical contributions, above all in relation to the nature of democracy under capitalism. Other Political Marxists, however, inhabit an almost exclusively scholastic universe in which ferocious declarations of adherence to what they take to be the Marxist method are completely detached from any socialist practice, resulting in a kind of academic sectarianism.

The uneven relationship of Political Marxists to socialist practice is not however the main problem with this theoretical tendency. If it was simply a provocative historical argument about the emergence of capitalism then it would have no necessary implications for contemporary politics—and several Political Marxists have produced historical works which contain important findings independent of how persuasive or otherwise one finds the Brenner Thesis, notably Brenner’s own Merchants and Revolution and Post’s The American Road to Capitalism.