Introduction

Economies are not monoliths but diverse mixtures of varying economic forms. To understand and evaluate economic phenomena, then, we need to be able to describe and analyse these varying forms and the ways in which they operate, both independently and in conjunction with each other. This chapter develops a framework for analysing economic form that is tied neither to ideological preconceptions about markets nor to a teleological narrative of epochs dominated by single modes of production. Instead, in the central theoretical innovation of the book, it introduces the concept of appropriative practices, and argues that we can understand different economic forms more productively as complexes of appropriative practices.

In describing these practices as appropriative I focus attention from the outset on the ways in which they produce a variety of different benefits – and indeed negative consequences, which I shall call harms – for those who participate in them. This is the ultimate focus of all political economy: who (or which groups or types of people) gets what from our economic system, why does it turn out this way, how should we evaluate these appropriations and indeed how could they be improved? This is necessarily a political and a moral debate but one that must be based on a sound understanding of the causal structures involved.

The framework accommodates diversity by recognising not only that there is a broad range of appropriative practices, but also that appropriative practices may be combined with each other in a variety of different complexes, and that the same practice may contribute to different economic forms when it forms a part of different complexes. It is these complexes of practices, I argue, that are distinctive economic forms, with different systemic consequences. Strictly speaking, though, it is not practices or complexes that act causally; these practices have to be combined with people and things to form social structures like households, firms, states and other forms of collective to give us the entities that interact to produce economic phenomena. In the contemporary world many of these structures coexist, compete and interact to generate an economic system that does not behave like either the Marxist model of capitalism or the mainstream economic model of a market economy.