‘Adaptive accumulation’ and US political economy

ABSTRACT

According to popular and academic understandings of political economy, the United States is characterised by the most open forms of free market production. From Marxist to institutionalist to liberal analyses, the US is said to exhibits a governance model in which state structures are minimally intrusive to capitalist civil society. There is a need for political economy that re-positions the US state as more than just a willing facilitator, lender-of-last-resort or minimal regulator of capitalist dynamics. This paper argues that ‘adaptive accumulation’ has normalised in the US context, wherein capital actively allies itself with public state objectives (and mechanisms) to seek new or enhanced profit streams, by transforming or rerouting public revenues, such that they afford private accumulation. The robust entry of capital in areas such as health, education and incarceration are highly notable, inasmuch as they harness public objectives for private but not-so-competitive ends. By shedding light on such domains, the paper contributes to our understanding of capital and its ongoing efforts to stay ahead of investment crises by actively shaping its operative environment – in this case, maintaining both the credibility and regularity of publicly inspired (and often financed) revenue streams while, ultimately, transforming their utilisation and purpose.

Keywords:

• Political economy
• US
• accumulation
• prisons
• education
• populism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rodney Loeppky is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, York University in Toronto, Canada. He teaches mainly in American Politics and the Politics of Health, and he is the author of Encoding Capital: The Political Economy of the Human Genome Project (Routledge) and Accumulation and Constraint: Biomedical Development and Advanced Industrial Health (Fernwood).

Notes

1 It is worth noting that accumulation by dispossession reawakened in political economic research the integral importance of state power in ‘aiding and abetting’ increased capital accumulation across a variety of circumstances. Rather than viewing neoliberalism through the lens of ideological fervour on the part of the state, Harvey redirected our attention to its complicity in a form of thievery or hijacking of non-capitalistic for instrumentalist, non-public objectives.