Mohamed Obaidy — Toward an Economic Theory of Imperialism?

This is a good summary of the historical debate, and I suggest reading it. It's short. It's mostly about theories of the value of money as they relate to capitalism. "Imperialism" means economic imperialism in this context rather than political imperialism.

Developing Economics
Toward an Economic Theory of Imperialism?

Mohamed Obaidy

The Global Industrial Working Class — Alejandro Reuss interviews Immanuel Ness

Alejandro Reuss: You’ve written that there are more industrial workers in the world today than ever before. Can you explain how that growth has occurred and how it has reshaped the world’s industrial working class in recent decades?

Immanuel Ness: Yes, there are two major factors. The first is the deindustrialization of the traditional industries in North America and Western Europe—garment manufacturing, electronics, automobiles and other heavy industry—and the relocation of those industries in the global South—Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia, as well as to some extent Latin America. As a consequence, the latter regions have become major centers of production and export. And as part of that, the number of manufacturing workers there has grown dramatically.

The second factor is that, within industrializing countries like India, China, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, there has been a dramatic urbanization forced by the end of productive farming in rural areas. Many of the working peasants have been moving into urban centers where there are concentrations of industry. So while many in North America and Western Europe would say “the industrial working classes is virtually dead,” I would make the case that there are in fact more industrial workers on the planet today than anytime in human history.

Roughly speaking, the industrial working class has grown over the last 50 years from somewhere around 200 million to nearly a billion people. Of course, that doesn’t include other workers outside of manufacturing. The process has been unrelenting, and is bringing a number of Marxist arguments about capitalist globalization to fruition: Workers are engaged in very significant industrial struggles in places like New Delhi, Shenzhen, Cairo, and beyond....

I would argue that there are leading imperialist powers—the United States, especially—that engage in economic forms of imperialism and ensure that it takes place through military expansion and financialization.…

There is a form of financialization that starts from the early 20th century, when German banks were investing in Russia, and now we have this taking place on a global scale. And in many ways, it is contributing to a politicization of working-class people around the world.…

Worth reading in full. Is capitalism entering its final phase in Marxian terms as the world industrializes?

Triple Crisis
The Global Industrial Working Class

Alejandro Reuss interviews Immanuel Ness, professor of political science at Brooklyn College the City University of New York and the author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto Press, 2015)

David F. Ruccio — Imperialism, the highest stage of neoclassical economics

The basic idea (as presented on Wikipedia, by Edward P. Lazear [pdf], and in this interview with Becker himself) is that economics imperialism refers to an “economic analysis of seemingly non-economic aspects of life,” such as crime, law, the family, racial discrimination, tastes, religion, and war.*

Actually, that’s wrong. Economics imperialism is not the economic analysis of supposedly noneconomic behaviors and institutions; it’s the extension of neoclassical economics to those domains. Economics imperialism is, in this sense, the highest stage of neoclassical economics.

There are lots of different ways of making sense of the economic dimensions of our individual and social lives. What Becker and his followers set out to do was to analyze various aspects of individual decisionmaking and social institutions through the lens of neoclassical theory. This has meant reducing those decisions and institutions to individual, rational, self-interested calculations of costs and benefits, under conditions of scarcity, such as to arrive at efficient, equilibrium solutions.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Imperialism, the highest stage of neoclassical economics
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

This relates directly to C. P. Snow's critique of modernism in The Two Cultures, the two cultures being numerate and literate, the former emphasizing quantity and the later quality. Snow's point was that Western education had over-incentivized literacy over numeracy to the degree that educated people, many considered learned, had little grasp of science. On the other hand, a similar argument can be mounted from the other side, arguing for many of the issues of the day resulting from an overemphasis of quantity over quality.

This is the a fundamental area of contention between economic liberalism and social liberalism. neoclassical economics is based on economics liberalism. Conversely, much heterodox economics is based on social liberalism. The political theory associated with neoclassical economics is neoliberalism. (Austrian economics can be considered a subset of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism.) The aim is a market society in which outcomes are assumed to be the result of the play of natural forces, hence, most efficient.

The political theory underlying heterodox economics is participatory democracy whose aim is social liberalism and distributed prosperity. The aim is a welfare society oriented to the common good, hence, most effective socially.

The real challenge to economics imperialism—inside and outside the discipline of economics—is, as Louis Althusser put it, the idea of a process without a subject.