Laissez-Faire, State Capitalism, and the Making of International Organizations: The Dynamics of a Struggle From Capital, Class, and Political Economy

This chapter offers three historical accounts from the post-World War II flows of manufactured products and raw materials, but also the machinery of such flows, i.e., marine transport, focusing on the role that four international organisations played in these processes. The three histories are: liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials, and the mass logging of tropical forests. The chapter argues that these three histories, but also the broader history of international organisations since the mid-nineteenth century, embeds impersonal struggles between two modes of organizing capitalist social relations: laissez-faire and state capitalism. While the former is grounded in de-territorialised capitalist expansion, the latter is geared towards territorially confined regimes of accumulation – itself a reaction to the peripheralising effects of laissez-faire capitalism.