This paper explores the value of regulation school and social systems of accumulation approaches in expanding the understanding of the South African system of accumulation. It also seeks to highlight limitations with the theories and draw on the evolution of the South African economy to enrich these approaches and propose new directions for theoretical and country-level research.

As well as Hobson, classical Marxist theorists Hilferding, Luxemburg and Lenin all drew on the South African experience to theorise imperialism. The paper re-examines these theories of imperialism and capital accumulation in Britain, especially in respect of their theoretical impact on reading Marx’s Capital. It draws attention to the significance of Hilferding’s work on fictitious capital, extending Volume 3. It argues that although Luxemburg was mistaken in her contention that Volume 2 is in error, something of the spirit of her approach needs to be preserved in addressing value theory in the new social conditions. It argues that Lenin’s synthesis combining national oppression and exploitation internal to the capital relation is a more adequate framing, but one that needs further articulation by analysing the new form of the capital – labour relation.
The paper argues that:

a) the concept of ground rent as expressed in Capital Volume 3 needs revision to meet the new property relations in mining production, while the origin of ground rent as surplus value transformed to revenue still applied, the rent contributed to monopoly profits of capital rather than a separate landed interest;

b) the notion of continuing violent accumulation by dispossession needs to be reconceptualised, not as ongoing primitive accumulation but as imperialist accumulation combining enforced dispossession and proletarianisation;

c) under colonial capitalism the systematic payment of wages to oppressed African workers radically below hitherto accepted European wage levels changes the ontological status of this form of surplus value extraction, from episodic competition to the structural.
The paper will investigate alternative hypotheses that these changes can be ascribed to, and limited to, the specifics of the system of accumulation in South Africa, e.g. production of gold as the world money commodity, or whether they are better understood as fundamental and defining characteristics of imperialism, sharply present in South Africa and reproduced in other late colonial and neo-colonial systems of accumulation.

The paper will focus on the role of the ideology of Indian nationalism in shaping India’s accumulation strategy and on how the Indian centralist state articulates that ideology and has engineered the accumulation strategy which I characterise as state capitalist development strategy. The tools of central planning borrowed from Soviet strategy of industrialisation were refashioned to meet the strategic goals of Indian nationalism and capitalist development. Planning in this strategy of accumulation became both an instrument of nation building as well a tool for capitalist industrialisation. In the project of nation building, Indian federalism was viewed as a framework to reduce inter-regional inequalities for the purpose of weakening any urges for regional autonomy and secession. The Indian capitalist class actively collaborated with this state-directed policy to keep a unified and integrated national market for capital accumulation.

The global competition between US-led bloc and the USSR-led bloc in the Cold War period was creatively used by the Indian capitalist elite through the innovation of the political strategy of non-alignment. This strategy of non-aligned foreign policy not only created more space for negotiating strategic foreign investment in India, it also helped to sharpen the ideological appeal of Indian nationalism appearing to be autonomous and even anti-imperialist.

This strategy of accumulation reached a crisis point in the late 1980s in the wake of the fall of Soviet type regimes, the hegemonic march of neo-liberalism and the internal crisis of financing. This conjuncture led to a new economic policy in July 1991 broadly in the framework of neo-liberal restructuring of Indian capital accumulation strategy. The paper will explore the links between the pre-1991 accumulation strategy and the post-1991 strategy by examining the continuities and discontinuities between these two regimes of capital accumulation. In examining the continuities the increasing role of centralising Indian nationalism will be highlighted both in the internal management of Indian capitalism in dealing with regional and class challenges to the Indian nation state as well as in the support the Indian state provides to Indian businesses (in the public and private sector) in entering overseas markets. Through this analysis, the making of Indian sub-imperialism as a global player in world economy and politics would be explored. In the concluding section this sub-imperialist mode of accumulation would be examined in its ideological posturing, pretensions and presentations in which the central Indian state positions itself as the builder of a great Indian nation that is able to crush regional nationalist dissent inside and compete externally with the erstwhile global economic and political powers.

The literature on developmental state has tended to focus on the East Asian “miracles”. There, autonomy from society has been considered as the essential condition for an effective state intervention. Similarly, the failures of Latin America have been represented exclusively in terms of lack of those conditions considered as indispensable for an effective industrial policy. The Latin American ineffectiveness has been perceived to be caused by a state that is a terrain of conflict and contestation between different fractions of society and between domestic and transnational interests.

In this context, successes and failures of Argentina have also been interpreted as alternating ability of the Argentinean state to effectively implement an industrial policy. The success of the ISI is perceived in the literature as a product of the state autonomy during that period which was brought to a halt by the military coup and its neoliberal turn. The failure to achieve sustained levels of growth and eventually the crisis of the 2001-02 are perceived to be the result of a rollback of the state dictated by neoliberal policies.

First, this paper contributes to undermine the idea that successes and failures in Argentina have depended on alternating state autonomy. It does this by showing that there was a degree of continuity between the ISI and the 1990s. In both periods, the Argentinean state has implemented policies that have served the accumulation of capital of a restricted number of conglomerates. This paper argues that an analysis of how different interests manifest themselves through the state in an attempt to shape policy is essential to understand state intervention. By assuming state (lack of) autonomy in case of (failure) success in a dogmatic way, the developmental state literature has tended to avoid this sort of analysis even when admitting the presence of interests within society.

Second, the concept of system of accumulation used in this paper considers state intervention as the outcome of political and economic interaction between different interests. This interaction has been more or less conflicting and more or less subject to negotiation in different periods of time. In various ways, it has involved foreign interests and interests which are difficult to define in terms of the traditional domestic vs. foreign dichotomy, given the post-colonial links of much of the Argentinean capital with the old continent.

Third, this approach is particularly relevant in analysing the results that the evolving relation between the real and the financial spheres has taken in the course of the last few decades, since the 1960. It does so by analysing how the external debt, seen as a relation, has evolved during this period because of state intervention in terms of regulation, monetary policy, direct ownership of productive assets, overall insertion of the country in the international sphere and, last but not least, with its own indebtedness. It is argued that state policy has contributed to a shift in the system of accumulation from the ISI to a new system of accumulation of the 1990s of which the crisis of 2001 was just a stage.

From the SSA point of view, the objective of this paper is to acknowledge the capital accumulation and the crisis that came about after 1980’s in Turkey. It has been asserted that the institutional structure that supports the capital accumulation post 1980, consists of four components; “capital and state: capital domination”, “pressure on working class”, “order and stability: authoritarian political system” and “integration to world economy: stability and adjustment”. In other words, the combination of the components mentioned above, forms the post 1980 SSA of Turkey. This paper focuses on the process of capital accumulation and the crisis rather than the periodization of the capitalist development.

This paper focuses on the case study of the Argentine economy between 1950 and 2007 and debates the pertinence of different frameworks of analysis that try to explain the above mentioned development paths. After briefly dealing with neoclassical explanations (Gerchunoff and Llach 2003) it focuses on alternative accounts, of which those inspired in an eclectic blend of the regulation school and ECLAC structuralism are dominant (e.g. Basualdo 2008, Schwarzer 2003). These perspectives are criticized for their narrow perspective of development as a synonym of industrialization, the widespread assumption that agriculture is not a path to development and their use of “modes of accumulation” in a Weberian ideal-types fashion.

As it will stem from that debate, the concepts of deindustrialization and “dutch disease”, as well as “mode of financial accumulation” are unable to explain Argentine's current development path. Thus, an argument in favor of the concept of “Systems of accumulation” (Fine-Rustomjee 1994) is presented, together with a preliminary exploration of its relevance in this case study. In sum, the paper shows the shortcomings of dominant accounts and a way of overcoming them.

Based on the presentation of some stylized facts on how the country went through the global crisis, our presentation will link these factors by focusing on the “growth regime”, the dominant coordination mechanisms and the capital-labour nexus. The growth regime will be characterized by its weak autonomy due to its heavy reliance on the export of natural ressources. The prevalence of public/private networks as the dominant form of economic coordination is related to the weakness of property rights distribution legitimacy, to the strong interdependence between big private firms and political leaders as well as to the necessity to coordinate rent distribution and the absorption of external shocks. It is then shown that the adjustment to these shocks is mainly absorbed by workers through a dual flexibiliy of the capital labor nexus : an intra-firm flexibility within corporatist sectors and an extra-firm flexibility within liberalized sectors.

The theoretical process supporting such an analysis of the contemporary Russian capitalism will be made explicit through a discussion of the various perspectives on the Systems of Accumulation and by pointing out some departing points from the Varieties of Capitalism literature.