Economic and Political Sociology Workshop

Friday, February 5th 2-4pm

David Masondo - Vladimir Lenin and
Karl Kautsky and the agrarian question
in the South African historiography

Alavi and Shanin correctly point out that Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky have had an enduring impact on the theorization of the relationship between capitalism and peasant production (Alavi and Shanin: 1988, p. 1). This paper serves as a literature survey on why and how the South African peasant production was destroyed and/or conserve by colonial capitalism, and how Lenin and Kautsky’s theories influenced answers to these questions.

I will show that the radical political economy literature, which significantly drew its theoretical insights from Lenin and Kautsky texts, has placed a huge emphasis on the role of white colonial business acting through the state in destroying and conserving the peasant production to generate economic growth. That is to say, they contend that the peasant production had been structured and conditioned by the needs of capitalist economic growth.

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Friday, December 4th 2-4pm

Brian McCabe - Homeownership
and the Enactment of Citizenship
in Early Twentieth Century America

Over the last century, homeownership rates have climbed steadily in the United States. Motivated, in part, by the belief that civic benefits accrue to homeowners, federal policymakers have helped push these rates upwards through a vast array of tax expenditures subsidizing homeownership. But while political leaders oftentimes refer to citizenship benefits of homeownership, the historical origins of this association remain unclear. Why are homeowners thought to be better citizens than non–owners? When did homeownership emerge as an act of citizenship in the United States?

How has this association been reinforced over the course of the twentieth century? This essay attempts to unravel the historical linkage between homeownership and normative beliefs about American citizenship. It contextualizes the discussion in the rhetoric of nineteenth–century housing reformers who linked the American home with particular notions of morality and family life. In showing the distinctive place of the American home in the nation’s history, the chapter then argues that homeownership only emerged central to conceptualizations of the American home in the late– nineteenth and early–twentieth century. The sustained period of post–Civil War industrialization and urbanization drew countless rural Americans and new immigrants into American cities. Reformers and political leaders believed that homeownership would help quell the restlessness and disorder of urban life. At the same time, growing threats to the democratic, capitalist order from abroad led both political and business leaders to imagine homeownership as an antidote to radicalism. Under the twin threats of urbanization at home and radicalism abroad, political leaders began to extol the virtues of homeownership as the bedrock of civic responsibility, national engagement and American patriotism.

The arguments in this chapter rely largely on two major housing movements – the Own Your Own Home campaign and the Better Homes in America movement — to illustrate how the twin threats of radicalism abroad and urbanization at home turned the American home into a place for the enactment of citizenship and patriotism. Variously sponsored by private organizations, civic groups and government leaders, these campaigns capitalized on important ideas and rhetoric linking homeownership to citizenship, patriotism and nationalism. Building off of reform efforts from the nineteenth century, the campaigns reached beyond simply the design and architecture of the home. The tenure status of the American homes began to play a critical political function in American ideology.

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Friday, November 20 2-4pm

Jonathan Lassen - China’s
Post-1998 Developmental State

Scholars of China’s post-1978 economic reforms have virtually unanimously argued that the reforms of the past thirty years have been at the expense of the state. It has become a stylized fact that China’s economic growth – and in particular its industrial growth – has followed from China’s policies of decentralization and privatization. Most argue that the state has played a virtuous role in this process by allowing private actors greater freedom, fostering competition, and implementing these changes in a gradual fashion. In this dissertation, I contend that this narrative is convincing from the period from 1978-1998, but invalid since. I propose that since the late-1990s, China’s central government has attempted to forge a ‘developmental state,’ by recentralizing economic controls, expanding the state’s capacity to coordinate and discipline firms (both state and private), and establishing key bureaucratic agencies that can carry out economic interventions with the goal of rapid industrial growth. I will trace the outline of this project and evaluate its implementation. Special attention will be paid to post-1998 state-capital relations, in particular the state’s strategy to impose discipline on capital, and firms’ reaction to this discipline.

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Friday, November 6 2-4pm

Mike McCarthy - More to Lose Than
Your Chains: American Employment
Schemes and Working-Class Politics in
Comparative Perspective, 1870-1929

A striking feature of American political development, as compared to her counterparts in Europe and Australasia, is an industrial working class that never fully supported a working-class party. Portions voted for the United Labor parties in 1886, the labor-populist parties in 1894, the Socialist Labor Party in the late 1890s, the American Socialist Party in the early 1900s and the farmer-labor parties after World War I. But none of these parties were able to consolidate and expand a base of industrial working-class support. Yet, an additional point of clear divergence in the US prior to the New Deal was the relative absence of state-initiated social welfare policies that had already taken root in every other advancing capitalist country. Instead, firms provided social welfare provisions. Furthermore, private fringe-benefits remain an important aspect of America’s unique approach to welfare. Recently, private social benefits in the US represented more than 8.3 percent of GDP, whereas in ten other advanced capitalist countries they represented an average of less than 2.2 percent.

The proposed research will investigate two core research questions. First, does the unique role that firms in the US play as providers of social welfare help to explain the lack of industrial working-class support of a labor-based party in the US? Second, does variation in firms’ welfare provisions across municipalities account for variation in the degree of working-class support in the US?

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Friday, October 23 2-4pm

Jeff Goodwin and Gabriel Hetland: The Strange
Disappearance of Capitalism from Social
Movement Studies

Abstract: The dynamics of capitalism provided a number of important causal mechanisms in the groundbreaking studies of social movements by English-speaking scholars during the 1970s. However, more recent scholarship on movements and political conflict has, with very few exceptions, largely ignored the enabling and constraining effects of capitalism. Ironically, during a period in which global capitalism became ever more powerful, it also became increasingly invisible to academic experts on popular movements. This strange disappearance of capitalism from social movement studies is a result, we speculate, of the declining influence of Marxism in the social sciences during the 1980s and 1990s, among other factors. The neglect of capitalism might also be explained (and justified) by the fact that the “new” social movements that many scholars have come to study in recent years are not centrally concerned with economic, labor, or work-place issues and thus have nothing or little to do with capitalism. We argue, on the contrary, that even those movements that do not represent classes or make primarily economic demands are still powerfully shaped by capitalism. We illustrate this claim by examining the gay and lesbian (or LGBT) movement, enumerating the main ways in which capitalism has facilitated, shaped, and constrained this “post-materialist” movement.

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