New Marxism and the Problem of Subjectivity: Towards a Critical and Historical International Political Economy

Abstract

We all come to International Political Economy (IPE) from a particular perspective.¹ To adapt a well-known adage first coined by Robert W. Cox (1981/1996, p. 87), ‘political economy is always for someone, and for some purpose’. My entry point into IPE is through questions associated very broadly with world order: what can an understanding of ‘world order’ provide to our knowledge about the world; why is it important to ‘know’ this; what kind of world order do we have; how did it come to pass; what moves it; how does it help to distribute rewards and costs; and, crucially, is it changing and if so in what directions? For me, IPE became a useful way of asking these questions because its attention is both more broad-ranging than international politics — the discipline more usually associated with these kinds of questions — but also because it is more appropriately focused on those elements of order that, to me at least, demand attention. These include dealing conceptually and holistically with the state, the international system of states, the production and distribution of wealth, the many and manifold links between power, wealth and life chances, and ultimately with agency and its parameters, determinants and forms. Some render this last element as the ‘agent-structure’ problem, but I prefer to think of it slightly differently, as the problem of conceiving of the possibilities of agency within an already organized, patterned and therefore structured world.