ABSTRACT
Marx never deals directly with the question of levels of analysis in political economy. Nor, given his historical vantage point, did he confront the difficult problem of how to address matters of qualitative transmutations of capitalism from the theoretical perspective of Capital. Nevertheless, embedded in Marx’s economic writings are important cues as to how the foregoing are potentially to be treated. Further, Marx’s grasp of the unique ontological structure of capital and his formative theorizing on that basis of the inner logic and laws of capital lay a material or scientific foundation for constructing other levels of theory necessary to produce complete knowledge of capitalism. It was work, from the 1920s, of Japanese Marxian economist Kozo Uno, which took up Marx’s vital initial considerations and combined them with critical examination of writings of formative theorists of imperialism, to ultimately refine Marxian political economy in terms of three levels of analysis. These are the theory of a purely capitalist society, elaborated upon extensively in Chapter 6, a stage theory of capitalist development and empirical-historical analysis of capitalism. This chapter discusses how these work in concert to produce political economic knowledge of capital as a deep generative force shaping human existence in the open system of history.
