ABSTRACT
If apprehending capital in its most fundamental incarnation to produce a definition of what capitalism is demands the sort of synthetic theoretical exposition Marx initiated in Capital, and which Japanese political economists Uno and Sekine subsequently reconstructed and refined as the TPCS, the next step in making the promised case of this volume for the passing of capitalism from history is the generating of a conceptual framework to optimally capture the world historic transmutations of capitalism; something which in turn will contribute to our apprehension of capital’s limits. This in a nutshell is the research agenda of periodizing capitalism and analysis of its world historic stages. As with the impotency of neoclassical economics in regards to apprehending the deep logical structure of capital or elaborating upon the historicity of capital as a mode of human material reproduction, so neoclassical economics has little to contribute to the focus upon periodizing capitalism. The narrow concentration of neoclassical economics upon distribution or allocation of resources, part and parcel of its switching the very course of economic theory away from issues of how wealth is in fact produced, as well as that of its penchant for formalistic mathematical modeling (both pathologies of economic thinking noted in Chapter 1), precludes neoclassical economics from even asking the relevant questions of periodization which this chapter seeks to address. Periodizing capitalism as a research territory examines trajectories of capitalist development and strives to differentiate among modalities of accumulation marking capitalist history. Neoclassical economics simply takes as given the existence of “developed” capitalist economies (wherein the production of material wealth is supposedly a fait accompli) and purports to model the trans-historical features of economic distribution it believes characterize them. Indeed, if mainstream economics broadly conceived has had any impact in the area of concern to this chapter it derives solely from the work of economic and business historians.1 Writings of the foregoing take up what in mainstream economic parlance today are dubbed “heterodox” concerns over how to grasp economic change, as opposed to “orthodox” neoclassical economics which claims modeling of “perfect competition” adequately reflects those pertinent features of contemporary economic life both necessary and sufficient for policy making. Nevertheless, as will be touched on below, to the extent there exists continued adherence of
such heterodox tendencies to neoclassical economics as the “basic theory” of markets, the ability of these schools to grapple with the complex empirical and epistemological issues at the crux of the periodization endeavor will be perpetually thwarted. And, from the perspective of this volume, it is precisely these issues which emerge as vital for making any determinations of the passing of capital from history. For the differentiation of trajectories of capitalist development and modalities of accumulation at the heart of the periodization research agenda is not just an exercise in acknowledging and describing novel features of economy which characterize periods of capitalist history. Rather, if the research domain of periodizing capitalism is to be honed into a robust framework helping us make sense of the complex world we live in it must include answers to the following questions in its analysis: How do the novel modalities of accumulation or economic reproduction purportedly characterizing a stage contribute to the fundamental economic reproducibility of capitalism as a human society? Do the particular economic transmutations of a period of economic history embody capitalist substance? What do stage theoretic analysis in general and analysis of specific stages of capitalism in particular teach us about limits to the transformability of capitalism? What is the relationship between periodizing capitalism and the basic theory of the capitalist economy (the TPCS as I have set it out here)? And, finally, how do we begin to construct a theory that periodizes capitalism? Within the modern tradition of economics as a whole, the greatest headway in addressing questions of the periodization of capitalism in a fashion which contributes to understanding the world economic trajectory of globalization is being made by the Marxian animated tradition of critical political economy. Of course, the periodization of capitalism and theorizing of its stages of development is a research agenda with which Marx himself did not explicitly engage, passing away as he did prior to the momentous changes shaking the capitalist world at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Though, as touched upon in Chapter 2, and will be returned to in discussion below, there does exist in Marx’s Capital an implicit template for the periodizing of capitalism as part of the broad project of the political economic study of capitalism. Nevertheless, given the highly fragmentary and incomplete structure of Marx’s economic writing, the rather oblique cues he left as to how, from the dialectical perspective of Capital, stage theoretic work should proceed have been largely passed over. In fact, it was actually not Marx’s economic ideas per se which would shape the next generation of followers’ formative thinking on periodizing capitalism, but HM (itself conceived as an overarching theory of historical directionality confirming a socialist historical outcome and within which the project of Capital was ensconced as a sub-theory). As touched upon in Chapter 2, beginning with the immensely influential writings of Kautsky, Marx’s followers worked off the proposition that the economic theory of Capital was intended as a confirmation of purported “laws” of history captured in HM. Thus the task of grasping the momentous socio-economic changes at the turn-of-thecentury was linked to the teleological question of the transition to socialism as per the claims of HM.
