Episode 02. Marxist State Theory for De-Orientalizing State Capitalism with Ilias Alami

State capitalism is today a label  often applied to China, Russia or the Arab Gulf as a model threatening to displace Western liberal conceptions of insulated markets driven by fair competition and minimal state interventions. In this episode, I'm asking  Ilias Alami from Maastricht University to unpack the concept: Rejecting a Western liberal Orientalizing discourse, which locates state capitalism beyond the West, Ilias argues on the contrary that the concept can be useful for understanding a restructuring of the State in both advanced and emerging market economies. Ilias points to Marxist state theory as a rich tradition for contextualizing contemporary state capitalism as an answer to ongoing crises of capitalist accumulation.

You can follow Ilias online at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iliasalami

Academia: https://maastrichtuniversity.academia.edu/IliasAlami

Website: https://sites.google.com/tbs-education.org/ilias-alami/home

Blog: https://developingeconomics.org

Check out recent work by Ilias:

Alami, I. (2020). Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets. Facing the Liquidity Tsunami. London and New York: Routledge. https://tinyurl.com/9wd4f6a8 

Alami, I., & Dixon, A. D. (2019). State capitalism(s) redux? Theories, tensions, controversies. Competition & Change. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1024529419881949

Alami, I., & Dixon, A. D. (2020). The strange geographies of the “new” state capitalism. Political Geography, 82. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102237

Other references recommended by Ilias:

Sperber, N. (2019). State Capitalism and the State-Class Nexus. Science & Society, 83(3), 381-407. doi:https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.3.381

Karas, D. (2021). Financialization and State Capitalism in Hungary after the Global Financial Crisis. Competition & Change. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/10245294211003274

Wright, M., Wood, G., Musacchio, A., Okhmatovskiy, I., Grosman, A., & Doh, J. P. (2021). State Capitalism in International Context: Varieties and Variations. Journal of World Business, 56(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2020.101160