We Make Our Own History by Cox Laurence

Author:Cox, Laurence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

This rate of growth, however, conceals highly uneven developmental trajectories. In agriculture, some progress was made in terms of promoting land reform and boosting food production, but as Friedmann (1982) and McMichael and Raynolds (1994) have pointed out, countries in the global South remained dependent on importing food from the global North.15 And the period between 1960 and 1980 was one of de-peasantisation as ‘both the rural population as a percentage of total population and the agricultural labour force as a percentage of total labour force declined in all regions of the Third World’ (Araghi 1995: 350). Similarly, import-substituting industrialisation yielded mixed results: East Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea witnessed the emergence of potent industrial sectors, while other regions – for example, Latin America and South Asia – witnessed an economic trajectory in which domestic capitalists could socialise their risks and losses and privately appropriate the gains of growth. ‘The end result’, Chibber summarises, ‘was that there was development and growth – but at enormous cost to the public’ (2004: 239; see also Chibber 2003, Evans 1995, Kohli 2004, Kiely 2007).

Forms of the State in Organised Capitalism

The re-embedding of accumulation could not have occurred without the emergence of forms of state characterised by modes of intervention and regulatory capacities that were shaped in important ways by the new equations of power that had been engendered by movement struggles from below in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the West, the liberal state gave way to the Keynesian welfare state – a form of state that worked along both an economic and a social axis to re-embed the dynamics of the market. In the economic realm, the Keynesian welfare state was characterised by a mode of intervention that sought to regulate business cycles by securing relatively stable ‘demand conditions’ through ‘an appropriate mix of fiscal and monetary policies’ (Harvey 1990: 135). The outcome of this was to secure both high profit rates for capital and full employment for labour. Furthermore, the state became a central arbiter between capital and labour through its mediation of wage bargaining and by reconciling income policies with other aspects of macroeconomic policy to ensure the maximisation of ‘output, welfare, and employment’ (Cox 1987: 222). In addition, the state took a more active role in the economy through public investment in sectors ‘vital to the growth of both mass production and mass consumption’ (Harvey 1990: 135), such as transport and public utilities (see also Glyn et al. 1991: 61).16

In the social realm, the Keynesian welfare state was characterised by the institutionalisation of access to social protection through the public provision of health care, housing, education, unemployment benefits and other transfers, and the introduction of public pension systems (ibid.: 59–61). Moreover, post-war welfare regimes were characterised by progressive taxation systems that redistributed income from capital to labour, which in turn reduced inequalities in market incomes and wealth holdings in western societies (Mann 2012: 281). The coming of the welfare state thus entailed an expansion of

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