ABSTRACT
Let us retrace the steps taken in the argument of this book as a prelude to our exploration in this chapter of the world economic phenomenon dubbed globalization. As we note in Chapter 1, Marxists have been fixated over the years on the anarchic modalities of operation and crises tendencies of capitalism while paying scant attention to the fundamental principles of economy by which capital is able to guarantee the material economic reproducibility of a human society in the first place. The reconstruction of Marx’s Capital as the TPCS, discussed in Chapter 2, remedies the above situation. It does this by offering a synthetic definition of capital based upon the dialectical immanence and deep logical inner relations among all the categories of capital as these enter into the reproduction of a reified commodity economic society par excellence – a bourgeois utopia – governed by the abstract, impersonal, law of value. What I refer to as the constant of capital, in my elaboration of the TPCS, reflects the organic interconnections among key categories of capital causative of the equilibrium allocation of social resources achieved in the prosperity phase of the business cycle. The tending toward equilibrium or phase of average activity (as Marx himself put it) across capitalist business cycles secures the economic reproducibility of capital under the constraints of its social class relations of production. This analysis of what in its most fundamental incarnation capital is and of how an upside down society marked by economic relations among things manages to reproduce its economic life acts as a touchstone for all determinations about the existence, transmutation or perduring of capitalism in history. It was precisely a laying bare of the inner program of value augmentation and simultaneous economic reproduction of a human society as a by-product, which capital in all its innate cunning seeks to shroud, that consumed Marx as he strove to complete Capital with his life’s final breaths. Marx’s synthetic dialectical theorizing in Capital of the peculiar ontological object he discerned in capital must therefore be upheld as a warning, not only as Marx believed to his own contemporaries but to those today who seek to produce knowledge of what is dubbed globalization in terms of apprehensions of capitalism predicated upon simple checklists of economic forms such as wages, profits, markets and private property. Our extended investigation into periodizing capitalism in Chapter 3 spotlights the tensions existing in Marxian political economy in its dealing with what were
understood to be the logical tendencies of capital as these are confronted by the historical transmutability of capitalism. Part of the problem stems from the received conception of Marxism as a meta-theory of HM. If the study of capitalism is but a sub-theory of HM and recruited to serve the conventional HM research interest in historical directionality and a socialist historical outcome then, as with the basic theory of capital, so with analysis of its stages, theory is predisposed to occlude questions of capital’s material economic reproducibility. RT/SSA writings on post-WWII accumulation are largely silent on the problematic relationship between HM and the political economic study of capitalism in Marxist theory. Yet their research agenda held out the promise of moving beyond teleological approaches to capital while treating complex issues of the economic reproducibility of capitalism in the context of its historical transformation. Unfortunately RT/SSA work miscarries on several fronts, largely related to the paucity of attention it devotes to questions of the role Marx’s project in Capital plays in theorizing the inner logic of capital. This gap, compounded by a further lack of concern with thorny epistemological issues in the study of such a unique ontological object, vitiates its originating call for “levels” of theory. Further, absent theorizing of what in its most fundamental incarnation capital is, the selection of an organizing principle for stage theorization is rendered an imprecise ad hoc procedure. In the end, even though RT/SSA upholds their approach as abandoning teleology, under conditions where the demise of a stage in their framework is not followed by socialism, the implicit assumption is that what remains is capitalism of some sort. It is instructive that it is following not only shifting tides of global competitiveness away from the US to Japan, Germany, and seemingly back to the US, treated in the MOC debate, that the conceptual slippage in RT/SSA1 from periodizing capitalism to MOC occurs but in the global context of the demise of Soviet style socialism with the unraveling of the Soviet Union (USSR) in the early 1990s. From the perspective of MOC, with the disappearance of socialism as a historical competitor, given that what remains are varieties of capitalism, we should discern which of these is the best, and learn to live with it. However, as I also note in the Introduction to this book, while Marx believed capitalism would be toppled by working class struggle, his work does not maintain that capitalism will be forever until its revolutionary overthrow. The fact is, as an historically constituted mode of production, capitalism comes into existence at a given level of development of human material wants and productive technologies and, as all previous modes of economy, passes from history as its ability to manage human material affairs is exhausted; and when new sets of human wants and the material means for their attainment emerge on the horizon. Marx’s project in Capital captures the fundamental modus operandi by which capital satisfies human wants for mass produced use values, the efficient standardized production of which is made possible by available industrial technologies. The fundamental presupposition of Capital predicated upon the contradiction between value and use value at the center of its dialectical architecture is that the use value space of society is amenable to value augmentation.
