Hartmut Elsenhans - Böcker

Once among the fastest developing economies, growth has slowed or stalled in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. What policies can governments enact to jump-start the rise of these middle-income countries? Hartmut Elsenhans and Salvatore Babones argue that economic catch-up requires investment in the productivity of ordinary citizens.Diverging from the popular narrative of increased liberalization, this book argues specifically for direct government investment in human infrastructure; policies that increase wages and the bargaining power of labor; and the strategic use of exchange rates to encourage export-led growth. These measures raise up the majority and finance future productivity by driving broader consumption and fostering investment within national borders.Though strategies like full employment, mass education, and progressive taxation are not especially controversial, none of the BRICS have truly embraced them. Examining barriers to implementation, Elsenhans and Babones find that the main obstacle to such reforms is an absence of political will, stemming from closely guarded elite privilege under the current laws. BRICS or Bust? is a short, incisive read that underscores the need for demand-driven growth and why it has yet to be achieved.

The dominant neoliberal approach presents politics and political economy as nuisances which disturb the smooth operation of self-regulating markets. But political economy is not merely an academic issue – it is a class issue, and this book forcefully argues that political economy should return to a central position in the study of the social sciences.Offering nothing less than a reconciliation of Marxian, Keynesian and neoclassical economics, the work opens with a discussion of the key, interconnected economic concepts which help us to understand capitalism: price, income, profit, value, growth and crisis. Prices reflect income distribution and therefore class relations, and the chapters show that the very emergence of capitalism resulted from mass empowerment of the so-called "lower orders". Profit is always available if entrepreneurs spend on net investment and create incomes for additional labour; this, in turn, requires expanding demand, and so therefore profit depends on rising mass incomes. Conversely, underdevelopment is the result of the destitution and disempowerment of the masses. In the Global South today, it is clear that enormous riches go hand in hand with widespread misery and poverty because the market does not transform wealth into the kind of investment that might benefit all. This book argues that the new wealth triggered by productivity increases has enabled the rich to liberate themselves from the capitalist constraints of competition and waste their new wealth in the form of rents. The main threat today is, in fact, the globalisation of rent. The text makes a point for a progressive counter strategy: capitalist structures that empower labour need to be transferred to the Global South. This requires political and economic efforts towards empowering labour in the Global South.This book demonstrates the analytical power of political economy for all social scientists and will be invaluable reading for economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular.

The dominant neoliberal approach presents politics and political economy as nuisances which disturb the smooth operation of self-regulating markets. But political economy is not merely an academic issue – it is a class issue, and this book forcefully argues that political economy should return to a central position in the study of the social sciences.Offering nothing less than a reconciliation of Marxian, Keynesian and neoclassical economics, the work opens with a discussion of the key, interconnected economic concepts which help us to understand capitalism: price, income, profit, value, growth and crisis. Prices reflect income distribution and therefore class relations, and the chapters show that the very emergence of capitalism resulted from mass empowerment of the so-called "lower orders". Profit is always available if entrepreneurs spend on net investment and create incomes for additional labour; this, in turn, requires expanding demand, and so therefore profit depends on rising mass incomes. Conversely, underdevelopment is the result of the destitution and disempowerment of the masses. In the Global South today, it is clear that enormous riches go hand in hand with widespread misery and poverty because the market does not transform wealth into the kind of investment that might benefit all. This book argues that the new wealth triggered by productivity increases has enabled the rich to liberate themselves from the capitalist constraints of competition and waste their new wealth in the form of rents. The main threat today is, in fact, the globalisation of rent. The text makes a point for a progressive counter strategy: capitalist structures that empower labour need to be transferred to the Global South. This requires political and economic efforts towards empowering labour in the Global South.This book demonstrates the analytical power of political economy for all social scientists and will be invaluable reading for economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular.

This book assembles main contributions to an alternative explanation of globalisation and the political economic structures of the international system.As the result of capitalism, globalisation does not transfer basic capitalist structures from the Centre to the Periphery. Capitalism is based on rising mass incomes that create investment opportunities and, thus, the possibility of profit. A structurally homogeneous and ultraimperialist Centre dominates a deeply fissured Periphery of structurally heterogeneous societies and economies. Capitalism penetrates underdeveloped regions and deforms them through rent, which obstructs expanding internal mass markets while labour goes unempowered. Rent constitutes the basis for state operations and the role of emerging state classes. While globalisation disempowers labour in both the West and in the South, it has given new comparative advantage to the South. The shift from rent appropriation in the South via raw material exports to export-led manufacturing is based on devaluation below purchasing power parity and, hence, on a rent from agriculture that is based on the Green Revolution. Its impact is, however, not always sufficient to compensate for the loss of influence experienced by social reformist forces. A novel multipolar system based on the balance power has emerged. Mutliethnic empires are held together with large varieties of however always identitarian ideologies. This global system is composed of powers that are internally and externally opposed to peaceful change. Across the globe, there is an impending danger of globalisation of rent. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

This book assembles main contributions to an alternative explanation of globalisation and the political economic structures of the international system.As the result of capitalism, globalisation does not transfer basic capitalist structures from the Centre to the Periphery. Capitalism is based on rising mass incomes that create investment opportunities and, thus, the possibility of profit. A structurally homogeneous and ultraimperialist Centre dominates a deeply fissured Periphery of structurally heterogeneous societies and economies. Capitalism penetrates underdeveloped regions and deforms them through rent, which obstructs expanding internal mass markets while labour goes unempowered. Rent constitutes the basis for state operations and the role of emerging state classes. While globalisation disempowers labour in both the West and in the South, it has given new comparative advantage to the South. The shift from rent appropriation in the South via raw material exports to export-led manufacturing is based on devaluation below purchasing power parity and, hence, on a rent from agriculture that is based on the Green Revolution. Its impact is, however, not always sufficient to compensate for the loss of influence experienced by social reformist forces. A novel multipolar system based on the balance power has emerged. Mutliethnic empires are held together with large varieties of however always identitarian ideologies. This global system is composed of powers that are internally and externally opposed to peaceful change. Across the globe, there is an impending danger of globalisation of rent. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

Including contributions from leading scholars from Algeria, France, Germany, India and the United States this book traces the rise and turn to moderation of the New Cultural Identitarian Political Movements, often labelled in the West as fundamentalists. Arguing that culturally based ideologies are often the instruments, rather than the motivating force though which segments of a rising middle strata challenge entrenched elites the expert contributors trace the rise of these movements to changes in their respective countries’ political economy and class structures. This approach explains why, as a result of an ongoing contestation and recreation of bourgeois values, the more powerful of these movements then tend towards moderation. As Western countries realise the need to engage with the more moderate wings of fundamentalist political groups their rationale and aims become of increasing importance and so academics, decision-makers and business people interested in South Asia and the Muslim world will find this an invaluable account.