Magnus Ryner

Renegotiating the Swedish Social Democratic Settlement: From Pension Fund Socialism to Neoliberalization:

Steering a middle course between the strong neoliberalization thesis and arguments that deny that neoliberalization has occurred, this article accounts for the complex and hybridic shift in Sweden from pension reform through share ownership as a socialist strategy to an as-of-yet incomplete and contradictory neoliberal process. Noting the broader significance of Sweden for the international debate over pension reform, the article unpacks the concept of “mass investment culture” to discern the significant headway toward neoliberalization in Swedish pension savings and provision while still noting profound sources of crisis tendencies.

Europe's ordoliberal iron cage: critical political economy, the euro area crisis and its management

ABSTRACT Orthodox integration scholarship failed to identify the factors leading to the euro area (EA) economic and financial crisis because of weaknesses that Horkheimer identified in ‘traditional’ theory: disciplinary splits and a tendency to idealize from particular instrumental perspectives. By contrast, critical political economy offered a plausible and coherent elucidation of the emergent properties and limits of finance-led capitalism and their concrete manifestation in the EA. This contribution both reviews state-of-the-art critical political economy research on the EA crisis and makes a distinct contribution to it. In addressing the puzzle of why not only the Economic and Monetary Union persists despite morbid symptoms but why crisis management is extending and deepening a discredited finance-led capitalism, the contribution synthesizes theories of transnational class formation and inter-state relations, and proposes that Europe is caught in an ordoliberal iron cage.

Financial Crisis, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in the Production of Knowledge about the EU:

Although the financial/Eurozone crisis has profound effects on the EU, European integration scholarship failed to even recognise that there might be a problem. This article argues that this is due to the highly orthodox nature of European integration scholarship and the blind-spots that inhere in its instrumentalist basic code. It makes the case for a heterodox recasting of the production of knowledge about the EU, and argues that post-Keynesian, post-Marxist and neo-Weberian political economy can make significant contributions in that regard.

The (International) Political Economy of Falling Wage Shares: Situating Working-Class Agency

This paper relates the financial and monetary dimensions of the contemporary economic crisis to working-class agency via a central concern of classical political economy: the distribution of surplus between the chief factors of production. The fall in the wage share of value added is now accepted as a stylised fact in the empirical economic literature. This paper argues that the punctuated pattern of the development validates the regulation theoretical narrative of an epochal shift from Fordism to finance-led accumulation. Furthermore, synthesising econometric studies supports a class-centred explanation. In the last instance, the falling wage share is due to successful transnational class rule in the form of a neoliberal hegemonic paradigm. Crucially, such class rule restructured the environment of trade unions, rendering increasingly ineffective its relational power resources. The paper concludes by considering the contradictory implications for organised labour of the current financial crisis. On the one hand, the financial crisis offers an opportunity to link its particular interests to the general interest of macroeconomic management since low wage share inhibits growth rates. But how might trade unions assert a higher wage share in the face of the structural power of (financial) capital?

US power and the crisis of social democracy in Europe's second project of integration

This article draws on the work of Poulantzas to argue that European social democracy is in crisis because European integration since the 1980s has been articulated within a relationship of structural subordination to US-led globalised financial capital, to which European capital has itself increasingly gravitated. This has also been the determining parameter of the state-as-social-relation, and contradicts the post-war welfare settlement. Against this backdrop, Europe has struggled to rearticulate a new social compromise and politics of social mediation. The attendant crisis of legitimisation has primarily benefited right-wing populism, which does not augur well for the health of Europes synthesis of capitalism with democracy.

Regulation Theory and the Political Economy of the European Union

European integration theory considers to what extent the EU can realize a telos where American pluralism is the template. Not without merits, but considering the financial and eurozone crises fatally, such perspectives elide power relations and attendant contradictions and irrationalities that are constitutive of transatlantic integration itself. Regulation theory, which synthesizes the reformist ethos of Europes postwar statist tradition and Marxism, and which has produced a considerable body of analysis of the EU published at the margins of EU scholarship, offers a compelling alternative that potentially overcomes these shortcomings. This article critically assesses how regulation theory has interpreted the single market, financial liberalization and EMU as a suppression of alternatives to neoliberal post-Fordism, or finance-led accumulation, in Europe. It argues that understanding the EUs current conjuncture of eurozone crisis management requires a neo-Gramscian extension of regulation theory, stressing transnational patterns of capitalist accumulation and power relations.

Third Way decomposition and the rightward shift in Finnish and Swedish politics

Recent elections in Sweden and Finland are of note for contemporary politics. They confirm that the rightward shift in Nordic politics is not confined to Norway and Denmark but forms a more general trend. This includes increased appeal of both mainstream conservatives and populist radical right forces. This article contextualises this phenomenon within broader European developments. In accounting for the shift in question, the article stresses the cumulative effects of choices made by erstwhile centre-left hegemonic agents, most notably the consequences of the so-called Third Way. This perspective has the merit of providing a way for holding politicians accountable, and it avoids the fatalism entailed in invoking ‘inevitable’ structural developments.

Neoliberal European Governance and the Politics of Welfare State Retrenchment: A Critique of the New Malthusians

The history of European integration contains its share of social scientific theories, which although they have proven to be spurious have enjoyed significant prominence because of the politico-ideological functions that they have served. Although already the Empty Chair Crisis of 1965 put into severe doubt the postulated mechanisms of neo-functionalism, this evolutionary theory has remained a compulsory reference point for students of European integration. Undoubtedly this has something to do with the raison d’etre it gives the EU’s supranational institutions and the positive spin it gave to the corporate-liberal Atlanticist Grand Design that united the US State Department, intellectuals like Jean Monnet and attendant social forces in the 1950s (Milward and Sorensen, 1994; Van der Pijl, 1996). A more recent example is the neo-classical liberal economics of the Cecchini Report (European Commission, 1988), with its euphoric predictions about the cumulative static and dynamic effects of the completion of ‘Europe 1992’. Despite these predictions being far off the mark, neoliberal economics has provided the rationale not only for the Single Market, but also for its disciplinary structuring in financial and monetary arrangements through the European Monetary System (EMS), the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the reform of European financial services (Gill, 1998; Bieling, 2003a).

Is the SGP Crisis also the Crisis of the EU? Assessing the EMU from a Structural, Transatlantic Perspective

Combining economic and political science perspectives, this timely and important book describes and analyses the circumstances and events leading to the demise and subsequent reform of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP).

Welfare Capitalism in Post-Industrial Times: Trilemma or Power Over Rents?

ABSTRACT The structure of ‘post-industrial’ economies is widely held to be problematic for welfare capitalism, because of inherent limits to productivity growth in services compared to manufacturing. The so-called post-industrial trilemma is suggested to allow only two of relative earnings equality, high levels of employment and fiscal balance, and has resulted in the widespread policy belief that greater earnings inequality and welfare state retrenchment are unavoidable. This article challenges the micro foundations of this understanding, that the production of economic value is technologically determined by the physical properties inherent in goods and services. In contrast, we argue theoretically, and demonstrate empirically, that production, allocation and distribution are contingent processes better conceived in terms of ‘power over rents’ with associated externalities between sectors. Our analysis suggests that the post-industrial trilemma thesis may have unduly distracted research from the potential for redistributive politics to achieve sustainable levels of productivity growth, fiscal balance and higher levels of earnings equality.