JSPE 73rd Annual Conference 

　The Japan Society of Political Economy celebrated its 60th anniversary six years ago. Over the six decades, the JSPE has endeavored to expand the scope of explorations, from the basic theory of capitalism to the analysis of contemporary capitalism. The JSPE has committed to a critical standpoint against capitalism and mainstream economics and directed its theoretical investigations toward elucidating various issues of capitalism. Nowadays, Marxian economics and the other schools in the heterodox political economy attempt to exert ever more influence in building analytical frameworks to address real-world issues of contemporary capitalism, such as the financial crisis, globalization, and the analysis of class and inequality. 

　One of the defining features of post-war capitalism is the welfare state. Although it has been criticized as a temporary remedy for problems of capitalism, the welfare state has developed on the basis of consensus-building in popular democracy and has contributed to economic growth. Although there was a swing back to neoliberalism, it is fair to say that liberal social democracy, as the political and economic ideals underpinning the welfare state, has gained some degree of widespread support until recently. The welfare state has been sustained by the fact that all classes of people have had a certain understanding of liberal ideals, and that the social policies of preserving and training the workforce, fiscal discipline, moderate monetary policy and other policies under the welfare state have supported postwar capitalism. These liberal arguments were also preached with the intention that they represented interests of the classes suffered by exploitation and marginalization under capitalism.

　With the advance of globalization and changes in industrial structure after the collapse of the Cold War, domestic inequalities in the developed countries have widened and become entrenched, and in this situation, a social democratic response would be expected. Today, however, such liberal policies have lost the support of the working class and the economically weak people who were supposed to benefit from them, and populism is spreading as a mass political movement and ideology that tends to incite antipathy toward vested interests and elites as well as exclusionism. With the rise of populism, which preaches that the axis of political opposition is not “left” or “right” but “up” or “down,” not only established political parties but also trade unions and welfare policies are seen as vested interests, and the retreat of liberal political forces is observed in Japan, Europe and the United States. In addition to the typical populism advocating exclusionism and a reduction of the ratio of taxes and social security premiums to gross national income, recently several other trends, so-called left-wing populism, emerged. Underlying both left and right-wing populism is a widespread distrust of the traditional left, and therein lies the dilemma for the left.

　Will the rise of populism undermine the foundations of the welfare state and contemporary capitalism? And what contradictions in contemporary capitalism are behind the rise of populism? Or is the welfare state an inward-looking logic that cannot survive but lead to populism because it must be accompanied by the “Harvey Road premise”?

　We invite you to deepen the discussion on the relationship between contemporary capitalism and populism by mobilizing the knowledge of the Japan Society of Political Economy, which has been promoting the elucidation of capitalism, and by examining the current state of the welfare state in the 21st century as an auxiliary line of inquiry.