International Political Economy of Labour and Gramsci’s methodology of the subaltern

Abstract

Gramscian International Political Economy scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital’s power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various autonomist Marxists have recently sought to ‘voice labour’ by proposing a disruption-oriented International Political Economy. However, this article argues that such an approach mirrors domination-oriented International Political Economy approaches by overemphasising labour’s disruptive potentiality and by paying little attention to the historical limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, Gramsci’s ‘Methodology of the Subaltern’ is reviewed in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, this article shows that it is possible for International Political Economy scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour and thereby to better account for the emancipatory potentiality of working-class strategies in specific contexts.