Book Review: Capitalism,Institutions and Social Orders,by Pedro M Rey-Araújo

That post-Marxist discourse theorists working in the tradition of Ernesto Laclau would benefit from a greater engagement with political economy has been long recognised by both its critics and supporters. The challenge, however, has been rarely taken on by poststructuralist discourse theory (PDT) scholars. Instead, PDT has remained focused on ‘soft’ topics of socio-political analysis such as political identities, social movements or ideological critique.

This pending task for post-Marxism is the research gap that Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders, by Pedro Rey-Araujo (2020), seeks to address. To do that, Rey-Araujo articulates Laclau’s post-Marxism with the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) Theory, a neo-Marxian approach to economics particularly concerned with the study of the institutional requirements of specific models of capitalism. The resulting theoretical articulation improves both SSA and PDT’s analytical grips: while SSA benefits from the analytical grammar provided by PDT to theorise the discursive struggles through which particular social structures of accumulation are built and challenged, PDT equally benefits from a conceptual toolkit better equipped to explain the role that economic dynamics play within capitalist societies.

The second part of the book applies this new analytical framework to chart capitalist development in Spain in the last four decades (1982–2019). Rey-Araujo’s comprehensive analysis reviews the ‘usual suspects’ in critical analyses of contemporary Spanish capitalism: the massive real-state bubble upon which was built the pre-2008 growth model, the de-industrialisation and financialisaton processes that transformed Spain since its integration in the European Union, or the extreme dualisation of its labour market. However, beyond these crucial but widely studied elements, the book offers novel insights in at least three other key aspects of the recent Spanish political economy evolution.

First, particular attention is paid to the socio-economic role that the Spanish family as a social institution played during both the expansion and the crisis phases of Spanish capitalism. By heavily relying on both women’s domestic exploitation, as well as on strong inter-generational intra-familial transfers, sharp internal contradictions underlying the Spanish SSA were prevented from emerging during the pre-crisis years. As such, Rey-Araujo shows how key pillars of Spain’s pre-2008 growth model, such as stagnant real wages, the weak development of its welfare state or the ‘housing problem’, were to a large extent tamed by the ‘social clearinghouse’ role played by the Spanish family. And indeed, one of the main lines of conflict in post-crisis Spanish, namely increasingly massive feminist militancy, can only be understood in the background of this contradiction. In this sense, if there are many and excellent studies on family policy and the domestic division of labour in Spain, there are fewer that try to look in a systematic manner at the relationships between subjective identities, relations of production, families and the State.

Second, one of the book’s key interpretative hypotheses with regard to the organic nature of the economic crisis in Spain concerns the endogenous link stressed by the author between the features of the Spanish model of development – which is defined as a Mediterranean variant of a Liberal (as opposed to Regulated) SSA – in its expansion phase, and the kind of social disruption that emerged in its decay phase. According to Rey-Araujo, Liberal SSAs, given the weak systemic integration of labour upon which they built their accumulation dynamics in periods of expansion, tends to unleash ‘populist situations’ in their moments of crisis. The book nicely illustrates this argument with the Spanish experience, and thus, advances a hypothesis which warrants to be further explored by other case studies.

Third, the book offers novel insights on the post-crisis (i.e. post-2014) evolution of Spanish capitalism, a topic which, in contrast to the crisis period, has been relatively less studied so far. The book’s main conclusions in this regard point towards two paradigm-reinforcing shifts of Spanish capitalism in the post-crisis context: on one hand, an enhanced dominance of foreign capital; on the other hand, a deepened ‘low-road’ pattern of productive specialisation which is entrenching Spain’s peripheral positions in European capitalism.

Unfortunately, the author does not offer any account to explain such a post-crisis reinforcement of the pre-crisis growth model, a development particularly puzzling in the light of the massive wave of social protests as well as electoral upheaval that has afflicted Spain since 2010. This absence is related to the key criticism of the book I would like to emphasise, namely that strategic political agency is largely absent in important segments of the book. Being the product of the articulation between a post-structuralist and ‘left-structuralist’ (Gordon, 1994) research traditions, one cannot be surprised by finding a greater focus on structural dynamics in Rey-Araujo’s explanation. However, at some points, the explanation slips towards an annoying functionalist explanatory logic, appearing capitalism’s needs and contradictions fully determining actors’ agencies.

A second weakness of the book, or rather a suggestion for further research, concerns the limited theoretical horizons of the book. Rey-Araujo’s analytical framework will be of interest to not only Marxists and post-Marxists, but also to new institutionalists and comparative political economists, given Rey-Araujo’s focus on how particular national capitalist trajectories are built on an ensemble national institutional processes that ensure the pair of ‘accumulation and recognition’. However, the author seems to ignore this potentiality, limiting his theoretical reflection to the comparison between PDT and SSA. Consequently, while the author makes a clear argument with regard to the increased analytical traction of the resulting articulation between these two research traditions, he does not explain how such analytical framework relates to other familiar attempts in critical political economy aimed to study capitalist accumulation in its socio-political context, such as Cultural Political Economy, the Growth Models perspective or French Regulation Theory. As a result, the reader is left with the sensation of not knowing in which ways Rey-Araujo’s social orders framework is different from them, and why (or when) should it be preferred over them.

However, that being said, the book is a key contribution on both the SSA and PDT scholarships as well as on the political economy of contemporary Spain. Rey-Araujo has written an excellent book which will influence future research in these fields.