ABSTRACT
The term contemporary capitalism has, however, no particular bounded conceptual foundation. It is a notion often intertwined with the more sharply delimited theoretical debate within Marxism about the ‘periodisation’ of capitalism. In terms of the patterns of social reproduction aspect, it is often claimed that contemporary capitalism has fundamentally altered the economic dynamics of accumulation and the form of the capitalist state. Development in capitalist societies takes the general form of accumulated money-capital being continually reinvested in expanding means of production and the purchase of labour power for the purpose of increasing the amount of value accumulated as money. The classic text which began to raise the question of emergent features of capitalism shifting the form of capitalist development was Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital , itself a response to Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist argument that the socialisation of capitalism meant that the law of value no longer held and capitalism was simply evolving into socialism.
