Canadian Political Economy

1
Canadian Political Economy

• The term in review

2
Final exam

• Wednesday, April 16
• 900 am-12 noon
• Clearihue (CLE) C-112
• Closed book
• ID questions 30 percent (choice)
• Two essay questions 2 x 35 (choice)

3
Introduction

• CPE in a period of globalization
• Time and space as important themes in
  communication studies
• Time and space as relevant to organization of
  production, consumption, regulation
• The Québec Model in crisis
• Criticisms on egalitarianism diversification
• Criticisms from market efficiency and
  globalization
• Carroll and Coburn as one overview archetectonic
  origins neo-Gramscian recent past, etc.

4
Markets as institutions

• Commodity vs. gift vs. tributary exchanges
• Monopoly, oligopoly, competitive markets
• Role in fur trade
• Gift debt and the creation of relationships
• Women as the ultimate gift in forging alliances
• Innis concern about monopoly, rigidity
• Feminist critique about agency

5
Staples

• Raw material exports (staples)
• Broad conversation about staples in early 20th
  century
• Place of Canada in empire possibility of Canada
  emerging as normal advanced industrialized
  society
• Mackintosh vs. Innis on Canadas prospects and
  the implications of staples

6
Staples

• Inniss attention to institutions, physical
  attributes of staple, geography
• Limited focus on agency instrumental view of
  state
• A theory of rigidity fixed costs, unused
  capacity

7
Staples

• Mel Watkins as part of a second generation to
  take up Innis critical take
• Staples trap/staples dominance
• Linkages (or their lack) forward, backward,
  final demand
• Psychological factors mentality, capacity to be
  otherwise

8
Marxism (Class and Capital)

• Focus on staples as commodity fetishism
• Concealment of underlying production relations
  rather than exchange
• Contradiction (unity of opposites)
• Capital accumulation model
• The rate of profit, organic composition of
  capital, rate of exploitation
• Classes and class fractions in politics
  (capitalist/proletariat other classes)

9
Media and Communications

• Time and space compression as a central dynamic
  of capitalist accumulation and capitalist
  involvement in media
• Space-bias versus time-bias in media
• Affects formation of monopolies of knowledge,
  formation of knowledge-based elites
• McLuhan hot versus cool media
• Media as extensions of man

10
Feminist political economy

• Productive versus reproductive work
• Marxist reproduction schemes must balance
  production for capital equipment and production
  for final consumption
• Régulation as a problem in institutional
  stabilization of contradictions of capitalism
• Taylorism, Fordism, Post-Fordism (flexible
  accumulation)
• Feminist re-focus on non-capitalist (domestic and
  state) sites of reproductive labour

11
Feminist Political Economy

• Standard Employment Relation
• Core labour only becomes a general (unwarranted)
  assumption
• Who actually gets the work, and whose interests
  are reflected in the norms?
• Post-war Fordism expands core SER labour
• Long boom sustained by a link between
  productivity and commodity consumption growth
• Tension between decline in SER for men, influx of
  core women into paid work, influx of
  peripheral women into paid reproductive labour.

12
Feminist Political Economy

• Pay equity as attempt to break down gender
  boundary between SER and non-standard employment
  by upward pressure
• Child care as a problem in reorganizing
  reproductive labour in the face of increased
  female participation in workforce
• Disproportionate role of women entering
  contingent work

13
NAFTA and Globalization

• What went global? How global did it go?
• Re-organization of labour under post-Fordism
  North America emphasizes innovation, management
  and financial services
• Shift in what must cross borders
• targeted migration, intermediate rather than
  finished goods, short-term professional contracts

14
NAFTA and Globalization

• NAMU dilemma of US dollarization
• Why do we as Canadians have a common dollar that
  is not the US dollar?
• Importance of political rather than economic
  decisions
• Transaction costs and volatility reduced by
  common dollar (key cross-border activity)
• Cities hinterlands the real economic units?
• Regional differences exacerbated by common dollar
  (key different intra-border activities)

15
NAFTA and Globalization

• Free trade debates revitalize key themes in
  left-nationalist CPE
• Alternative national industrial strategy,
  building up national bourgeoisie, welfare state
  through a national sense of share identity
• (PS They lost)

16
Elites, Classes and the State

• What is the relationship between social divisions
  and the state?
• Elites power as a one-sided possession
• Classes power as a process, a relationship
• Institutional and instrumental theories of state
• Structural theories of state relative autonomy
• Neo-institutionalists and absolute autonomy of
  the state

17
Gramscian thinking

• Hegemony intellectual and moral leadership
  (civil society key central leadership key)
• Accommodate real interests of lower classes,
  without compromising essential leading class
  interests
• Articulating shared identities and interests
• Fordism link productivity and consumption gains
• Coercion and consent
• War of position/War of manoeuvre
• Historic bloc, hegemonic bloc
• National-popular movements

18
De-centring the State Social Movements

• A criticism of the centrality of state in
  Canadian Political Economy, free trade debate
• A critique of Gramscian-style counter-hegemony,
  with workers in leadership role
• Alternative critical social movements arising at
  all points against elite rule
• Allow all their own direction logical response
  to pervasiveness of capitalism and of the
  problems it generates at all scales

19
Albo

• A Gramscian response, beyond anti-free trade
  movement
• Multi-level, but counter-hegemonic in the sense
  of coordination of multiple projects
• Marxism better placed than left-nationalists to
  deal with the new problems raised by new social
  movements.

20
First Nations Relations and Immigration

• Parallels and differences
• Commonalities in being defined over against a
  white majority
• racialization (negative associations attached to
  surface appearance)
• Statistical material disadvantage, plus
  contribution of this to racialization
• Role of state racialized control of borders,
  construction of reserves

21
First Nations Relations and Immigration

• Socially generated racial hierarchies
• Model migrants vs. problem migrants
• Greens ideas about decolonization
• Primitive accumulation separation of workers
  from means of subsistence
• Wakefield policy National Policy BC entry into
  Confederation

22
Political Ecology

• Dalys Impossibility theorem
• Problem of growth in a finite context
• Adkin (like Albo) concerned about mutual learning
  CPE/ecology
• Productivism
• Consumption
• Distancing and deferral
• Centre vs. territory