The geopolitical economy of the original condition

Abstract

Placed outside theory, the ‘original condition’ provides theory’s unquestioned foundation. For the discourses explicated as geoeconomics by Mallin and Sidaway, the points of departure include a capitalist economy on a world scale, and a set of states constituted around the pursuit of profit for private enterprises in turn understood as comprising the national economy. In this commentary I highlight how this version of the original condition has been assembled from discourses such as the political economy in the tale of Robinson Crusoe and the philosophy of a racialised homeland in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This interrogation offers an alternative genealogy to the study of the circulation of the term ‘geoeconomics’.

Arguments from the ‘original condition’ abstract, the better to direct deduction. For example, in 18th-century works of political economy, the individual producer was postulated as the original condition and deductions made therefrom. Marx (1875: 30) described political economists as indulging in ‘Robinsonades’; reasoning from the imagined circumstances of Robinson Crusoe. They posited an isolated worker, seemingly shorn of social relations, for whom the products of labour were readily seen as alternative uses of his own time. Marx’s point was that in taking this as a description of their own society, the political economists occluded its origins. In a capitalist economy, it took a particular work of imagination to see the earlier coercion of separating people from the chance of feeding themselves, so that the landless must approach the capitalist and beg for employment: ‘like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but — a tanning’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 280).

Marx (1976 [1867]: 170) noted that Defoe showed Crusoe making a record of his household accounts, committing ‘as a good Englishman, to keep a set of books’. Alongside the ahistorical treatment of the original condition, the conflation of household and state is the second moment of Robinsonade abstraction. The etymological root of ‘economics’ is Socrates’ ‘discourse[s] on estate management’, the Oeconomicus (Marchant, 1923: viii; capitalisation and emphasis removed). Coined in the early 17th century, political economy, in contrast, was about the management of the economy of the state (King, 1948). This set of abstractions, from household to state, can elide geography, ignore the earthly basis of the economy, and assume that there is a single and coherent national interest. As soon as political economy turns practical, however, ecology, class and geography creep back inside. Ecology returned because national power required the material basis of trees for naval ships and the management of royal forests showed an early concern with sustainable yields (Grober, 2007). Class returned in debates over luxury where political economists described a contradiction between producing and consuming classes (Jennings, 2007); and again in debates over protection, where they identified sectoral conflicts and queried whether some branches of production, such as food, were truly indispensable (Salvadori and Signorino, 2015). Geography was there again when sectoral interests were identified with particular regions. For example, in debates over luxury Cobbett (1830: 534) attacked London as a ‘Wen’ to which England sent its best food; and when a coherent free trade interest emerged in the 19th century, it was associated with the needs of industrialists and identified as the Manchester School (Griffin, 2009). A more serious abstraction in political economy was the frequent treatment of the state in isolation, and this brings us to the interplay of geopolitics and geoeconomics highlighted by Mallin and Sidaway (2024).

Despite the profusion of fruit and fowl, Crusoe’s island was ‘barren’, since uncultivated, and he was ‘King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and had a Right of Possession’ (Defoe, 1719: 61, 117). So argued early European colonists in North America, such as Cushman (1963 [1622]: 91), a Puritan: ‘This then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful: their land is spacious and void, and there are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts’. Positing an isolated settlement abstracts from the bloody chronicle of dispossession, while also conflating civilisation with sedentarism. Martin Heidegger presented something similar as a residue of the original condition secreted within language. He proposed that ‘[t]o be a human being [. . .] means to dwell’, which in turn means to ‘cherish and protect, [. . .] specifically to till the soil’ (Heidegger, 2001 [1954]: 147). His image of dwelling, of inhabiting, was based on making room in a forest and then, at the margin of the clearing, meeting a boundary where ‘something [else] begins its presencing’ (Heidegger, 2001 [1954]: 154; emphasis removed); that is the Other, the uncleared, the uncivilised. This, of course, is also the geographical imaginary of the Frontier (Turner, 1920 [1893]). This taking of land is essentially innocent and uncontested, a space (Raum): ‘something that is cleared and free’ (Heidegger, 2001 [1954]: 154).

The original condition of the isolated state is a most unsuitable point of departure for understanding society. The places and spaces of human habitation have ever been porous and, far from managing economies in isolation, statecraft developed from interacting and interdependent states, as around policies to secure grain in times of dearth, or borders in times of epidemic (Kearns, 2014). Nevertheless, the original condition of isolation is essential to the racist and chauvinist imperialism that Mallin and Sidaway detect in geoeconomics and geopolitics. Only in isolation can anything like cultural distinctiveness be posited, and, without this, the zero-sum struggle of imperialism lacks justification. This normative intent is mentioned by Mallin and Sidaway but its implications for their comparison of the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1990s invites explication, not only for these cases but also for others (Hughes, 2011).

When Mallin and Sidaway (2024) characterise German academic debate of the 1920s and 1930s as ‘caught between the ideas of the British political economists [. . .] and the anti-bourgeois tenets of social-revolutionaries’, because ‘[n]either appeared to serve the legitimisation of Germany’s commercial and imperial ambitions’ (p. 5), they beg a number of questions about the point of departure of an analysis, both their own and those of the geoeconomists and geopoliticians to whom they offer a genealogy. These geo- disciplines appear to focus upon international relations, but they often serve a national interest. Luttwak (1990), whose paternity of geoeconomics Mallin and Sidaway contest, describes the geo- as an invitation to a zero-sum game. With global conflict an irrelevance after the close of the Cold War, he observed that competition had shifted from the realm of military strategy (geopolitics) to a sort of geo-economics. He would not call this mercantilist because, he argued like a modern Pollyanna, the national goal was no longer the accumulation of gold but, rather, ‘the best possible employment for the largest proportion of the population’ (Luttwak, 1990: 20). Assumptions about the national interest underlie, or precede, much geopolitical and geoeconomics discourse. Mallin and Sidaway (2024) conclude that the common ground of geoeconomics is the calculation of national economic advantage in a competitive world economy. Geopolitics and geoeconomics are imperialist strategies.

Smith (2003) described a transition from the direct colonialism promoted by Halford Mackinder to the indirect colonial control advocated by Isaiah Bowman, a shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics. The distinction can be overdrawn, since there is plenty of covert interference even without direct colonial rule, and the US imperial interest might be described as loosening the colonial grip of European rivals so that it might have the better access to establish asymmetries on its own terms (Westad, 2011). In 1961 a departing president alerted US citizens to the convergence of military and economic power in a society that spent ‘on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations’ (Eisenhower, 1961: 1038). It is certainly true that tariffs, boycotts and blockades loom large in the promotion of US strategic interests overseas (Ruys and Ryngaert, 2020), but so do arms sales abroad (Thrall et al., 2020) and defence spending at home (Thorpe, 2020), as well as the threat of destabilising foreign regimes where US companies’ interests are affected (Hopewell, 2021). There is also geopolitics of money itself. Currently 61% of all global currency holdings are in dollars (Iancu et al., 2022), which is of immense benefit to the US national accounts by substituting for taxation (Aliber, 2023), and which has been sustained by threats and diplomacy (Bastos and Young, 2022), particularly with oil sold almost exclusively in dollars (Smith, 2022). Unlike Luttwak, I do not see much concern with full employment in any of this. Rather, these are strategies to serve the sectoral interest of US capital, not labour.

Although we might attempt progressive alternatives (Kearns, 2009: ch.9), geopolitics and geoeconomics often assume as their ‘original condition’ a global capitalist system, posit a coherent national interest in global capital accumulation, and develop strategies to preserve that system while pursuing advantage for national capital. In this, the German geopoliticians and geoeconomists were not so much ‘caught’ between British free trade and socialist revolution, as they simply set them aside. Nevertheless, the political and social forces were not so easily conjured away, and the boundary conditions of their analyses were actually secured by using emergency powers to supress domestic communism (Trommler, 1992), cultivating state legitimacy around race and empire (Kakel, 2019), and subsuming social democracy within corporatist state institutions (Neumann, 1944). These indeed are times to revisit the boundary conditions of geopolitics and geoeconomics and ask again at what price the defence of Empire is pursued, not primarily in terms of intellectual coherence, but rather in terms of blood and immiseration.