Marx's Legacy,Régulation Theory and Contemporary Capitalism

ABSTRACT

The 2008 financial crisis has challenged the merits of standard economic theories and sparked surprising references to Marxist analyses. A monetary economy is prone to crises, the interaction of competition with capital–labour relations launches relentless accumulation and over-accumulation crises exacerbate the built-in contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, until now, these imbalances have not unfolded into its rapid and complete collapse. From the social and political struggles of labour and citizens, the 1929 crisis and finally the Second World War, new configurations emerge for the wage–labour nexus, the form of competition and the monetary and credit regime. These delineate an unprecedented accumulation regime, Fordism. In turn, Fordism enters a structural crisis and a dramatic change in institutionalized compromises favours a still different accumulation regime (finance-led) that evolved from one speculative boom to another till the 2008 American financial collapse. Thus the mobilization of Marx's foundational hypotheses by Régulation theory allows a better understanding than most alternative theories of major contemporary stylized facts: productivity slow-down and social polarization in mature economies, tensions between capitalism and democracy, new industrial capitalisms and limits to globalization.     

PROFIT MARGINS INQUIRY: Note on alternative hypotheses as to the determination of Profit Margins

This paper surveys the various accounts offered by Marxian economists for the ending of the long postwar boom. All focus on the decline in profitability, but they offer different expalanations. Three principal categories of crisis theory are distinguished: underconsumption; Marx's ‘Volume III’ falling rate of profit analysis; and several versions of overaccumulation theory, in particular the French regulation school and the North American discussion of the social structure of accumulation. A separate section deals with the relationship between the capitalist state and the crisis. Some general conclusions are drawn concerning the current nature of Marxian economic theory.     

MARX@200

ABSTRACT

The article begins by outlining the philosophic anthropology that Marx derived from his reading of Hegel. We continue by arguing that this formed the basis of his materialist conception of history and his analysis of the political economy of the capitalist mode of production, with particular reference being made to Marx’s theory of value and his account of the economic contradictions of the capitalist system. We then discuss his views on the nature of post-capitalist society, concluding with a critical but broadly positive account of the relevance of his ideas to modern capitalism. Marx, we suggest, should not be regarded as a purely 19th-century thinker, as some recent biographers have maintained.     

On equilibrium prices in continuous time

State prices are the fundamental building block for dynamic asset pricing models. We provide here a general continuous-time setup that allows to derive non-trivial structural properties for state-prices from economic fundamentals. To this end, we combine general equilibrium theory and théorie générale of stochastic processes to characterize state prices that lead to continuous price systems on the consumption set. We also show that equilibria with such state prices exist.     

‘Adaptive accumulation’ and US political economy

According to popular and academic understandings of political economy, the United States is characterised by the most open forms of free market production. From Marxist to institutionalist to liberal analyses, the US is said to exhibits a governance model in which state structures are minimally intrusive to capitalist civil society. There is a need for political economy that re-positions the US state as more than just a willing facilitator, lender-of-last-resort or minimal regulator of capitalist dynamics. This paper argues that ‘adaptive accumulation’ has normalised in the US context, wherein capital actively allies itself with public state objectives (and mechanisms) to seek new or enhanced profit streams, by transforming or rerouting public revenues, such that they afford private accumulation. The robust entry of capital in areas such as health, education and incarceration are highly notable, inasmuch as they harness public objectives for private but not-so-competitive ends. By shedding light on such domains, the paper contributes to our understanding of capital and its ongoing efforts to stay ahead of investment crises by actively shaping its operative environment – in this case, maintaining both the credibility and regularity of publicly inspired (and often financed) revenue streams while, ultimately, transforming their utilisation and purpose.     

Some Empirical Indications of the Relationship Between Environmental Quality and Economic Development

The paper examines the relation between countries' state of the environment (defined as acceptable, marginal or unacceptable, according to values of ambient accumulation of pollutants) and stage of economic development (defined as low, middle and high income), using the concentration of sulphur dioxide in urban areas and dissolved oxygen in rivers. Univariate and ordered probit models are estimated for air and water quality. The results indicate that the probability of having acceptable environmental quality in a country increases with respect to the examined pollutants as the country moves to a higher state of economic development.     

Children’s environmental health,education, and economic development

Abstract This article aims at investigating the interplay between environmental quality, health, and economic development in a unified OLG framework. Human capital accumulation depends on the environment through its impact on children’s health and workers’ productivity. In turn, environmental quality dynamics rely upon human capital that determines maintenance efforts. This two‐way relationship generates a co‐evolution of human capital and environmental quality in the long run. Along the transition path, the dynamic interactions between economic and environmental spheres allow for replicating two different trajectories: some economies experiment an Environmental Kuznets Curve while some others are caught into the environmental poverty trap.     

Accounting for economic evolution: Fitness and the population method

The theme of this paper is the general population dynamics of evolutionary processes, and, in particular, a number of accounting concepts that are central to any understanding of evolutionary processes of the variation-cum-selection retention kind. A population perspective, for example, turns out to be crucial to the study of the competitive process in economic systems defined at the level of industries, sectors and markets. Business rivalry, underpinned by differential innovative activity, is the basis of the differential survival and growth of competing economic activities and the strategies deployed to create sustainable differences in competitive selection characteristics are at the core of the capitalist dynamic interpreted as an adaptive, evolutionary process. This kind of evolutionary argument is necessarily concerned with growth rate dynamics and the explanation of the diversity of growth rates across entities in a population. However, the following discussion does not provide any causal explanation of economic evolution in terms of the determinants of growth rate differences, rather it provides a bookkeeping scheme in which different causal theories may be set and compared. Growth dynamics and structural change are the two central features of variation/selection processes within populations and I explore them in terms of three themes: namely, Logistic Growth Accounting; Competition Accounting; and, the Price Theorem. The unifying theme that links all three is their relation to the population method in evolutionary theory.      

Contributors

After a quarter century of environmental regulation in this country, significant environmental threats remain. Why has the regulatory system failed to fully address our environmental problems?

The goal of this paper is to suggest that the roots of environmental problems, and the failure of environmental regulation, are deeply embedded in the processes that generate economic growth. The logic of the argument to be presented will take the following form: long-run economic growth relies on the creation of new industries and new forms of economic activity; these new forms of economic activity create new kinds of environmental problems; these new forms of economic activity constitute vested political interests that oppose environmental regulation. Each of the three main sections of the paper will provide theoretical and empirical justification for each component part of the basic argument.     

Property,Power, and Public Choice: An Inquiry into Law and Economics

This article briefly describes the evolution of the recent economic crisis based on different theories toward my own interpretation of it. The deregulation wave of the last decades has created new profit opportunities in various contexts — from labor flexibility to privatization and from financialization to globalization — so promoting a renewed process of capitalist accumulation after the stagflation of the 1970s. This has taken place at the cost of a wide-ranging increase in inequality and instability, thus bringing a cascade of crises, including the latest one of 2008.     

论《资本论》的研究对象、方法和分析范式

马克思在《资本论》第一卷序言中明确指出:"我要在本书研究的,是资本主义生产方式以及和它相适应的生产关系和交换关系。"这句话是关于《资本论》的研究对象的经典表述。我们可以将马克思这一经典表述解读为:作为资本主义经济形成的生产力基础的生产组织或劳动方式,以及和它相适应的生产关系和交换关系。在《资本论》中,马克思将历史唯物主义运用于资本主义经济形态的研究,发现了这种经济形态的特殊运动规律。这就是说,《资本论》的研究方法就是历史唯物主义。在《资本论》的宏大的理论体系的展开过程中,历史唯物主义的世界观这个根本的方法论原则,具体化为经济学分析的一系列规范:(1)从生产力与生产关系的矛盾运动中解释社会经济制度变迁;(2)以生产资料所有制为基础确定整个社会经济制度的性质;(3)在历史形成的社会经济结构的整体制约中分析人的经济行为;(4)依据经济关系来理解政治和法律的制度以及道德规范。     

The sufficiency strategy: Would rich-world frugality lower environmental impact?

One alleged weapon against unsustainable environmental impact is for the wealthy to consume less. This sufficiency strategy is to complement the efficiency strategy of lowering ratios of resource inputs to economic outputs; the former would reduce the affluence factor in I = PAT, the latter the technology factor. That the latter strategy suffers from a consumption rebound is widely recognized. This paper identifies a similar rebound when the affluence factor is autonomously lowered: The lower initial demand lowers prices, which in turn stimulates new demand by others. The strategy moreover addresses only the rich, raising questions of its theoretical maximum efficacy. Its proponents usually conflate frugality with the North-South dichotomy and intragenerational with intergenerational equity. Moreover, there are difficulties with the supporting arguments that frugality is good for one’s own sake as well as for the environment, and that the rich should ‘lead the way’ to living more lightly. Personal behaviour change is furthermore not a substitute for international political efforts. Finally, since all changes in right-side factors of the I = PAT equation change other right-side factors, such indirect attacks on impact should be abandoned in favor of supply and emissions quotas.     

论“生产方式”

"生产方式"一词在马克思经济学著作中的基本用法有两种:第一,指社会生产的类型或型式,第二,指社会生产的劳动方式。在讨论《资本论》研究对象时对"生产方式"一词的理解争论极大。根据马克思"生产力———生产方式———生产关系"的一贯分析原理并结合《资本论》第一卷的实际内容,"资本主义生产方式"似应理解为"资本主义劳动方式"。"劳动方式"是生产力与生产关系矛盾运动的中介体。特定的劳动方式以一定的生产力为基础,同时受到特定生产关系的制约,具有显著的社会历史特征。马克思在《资本论》研究对象中首先强调"资本主义生产方式",意味着他在研究资本主义经济时将直接生产过程中经济关系的考察放在了基础位置,把对资本主义生产方式的批判置于首位。我们应以《资本论》为范例,把劳动过程和劳动方式纳入政治经济学的研究对象。     

The convergence of economic systems and the M-form

This paper draws together two areas of economic theory: Williamson's transactional analysis of the capitalist corporation, and the role of technology in comparative economic systems. It considers the M-form as an organizational innovation under capitalism, central planning and self-management, and comes to the conclusion that this new technology does not seem to have promoted the convergence of economic systems. Rather, the M-form's experience suggests that new technology has an impact consistent with Ambivalence theory, which sees new technologies as being adapted to suit the status quo.     

History,Space and Nature: Building Theory from the Exception

Uneven Development endeavours to derive a theory of uneven geographical development by putting in motion a ‘historical dialogue’ between Marx's critical theorisation of capitalism and the geograhical reality of capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, and by theorising the relations between material nature and the spatial dynamics of capitalist accumulation. The result, however, is a theory of uneven development predicated on a logical rather than a historical conception of capitalism, which furthermore supersedes the question of the production of nature in conceptualising the spatial dynamics of (contemporary) capitalism. This article argues for a re-theorisation of uneven geographical development that considers the production of nature, namely extractive industry, as a point of departure in theorising the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalist accumulation, focusing briefly on the concentration and centralisation of capital.     

Africa: On the Rise,but to Where?

Africa's hitherto negative image is now being rapidly replaced by a new persona: ‘Africa on the rise’. Developed mainly from Africa's growth experience, this re-imaging of Africa has generated considerable interest even among Africanists concerned that the continent has often been the target of crisis jokes. Even more notably, the rebranding of Africa has gained traction in corridors of power and centres of finance. For this latter group, however, the narrative signals more than a cultural repackaging. It is about confirming that Africa is ripe and ready to host investment and to open up markets in areas where they did not exist or existed but were not capitalist in form. Either way, however, the ‘Africa on the rise’ narrative achieves a major political and economic goal. Neglecting ethical questions about sustainable jobs, inequality and ecological crisis, while extolling the virtues of capital accumulation, it extends a particular neoliberal ideology which favours people with market power, not the majority with precarious positions or their relationship with nature.     

Dynamics of the North-South welfare gap and global sustainability

The vast heterogeneity among nations in terms of economic and demographic characteristics is evident, despite being overlooked in some global studies. In this heterogeneity, it is possible to identify some distinct aggregate classes differing at some very fundamental level: developing (South) nations and developed (North) nations may have very different, asymmetric problems, goals and structures. This study investigates these two distinct groups of socio-economic systems, as they interact in a context of global sustainability. We identify population, economic growth, welfare gap, energy supply and pollution as key issues and analyze them using a systems perspective. A dynamic feedback model, which discriminates the two groups of nations, is constructed to study the dynamics of variables related to the above key issues. The model is tested using extensive data between the years 1980-2005. According to the reference behavior covering the period 1980-2050, it is not viable to close the welfare gap between North and South, given the current prevailing non-renewable-resource-based growth system. A non-renewable-resource-based system adopted by the economic system of growing South would take the global system even closer to its limits. It is observed that indicators like reserve-to-demand ratio fail to provide reliable signals for a timely transition to alternative resources, and a very serious economic recession due to resource scarcity is likely to develop in the next couple of decades. By coupling the demographic and economic dynamics, it is shown that an economic slowdown due to a resource scarcity may have a dramatic widening effect on the already existing welfare gap. Scenario and policy experiments verify the widely accepted importance of stabilizing the population growth in South, transition to alternative energy resources, and investment support to the South in this transition simultaneously in order to reduce the welfare gap between the two blocks. It is observed that enthusiastic targets for an energy transition may have a serious negative impact on the welfare level experienced in South, whereas an energy transition in South supported by North seems to have the most desirable outcome regarding the welfare gap.     

Marx,Finance and Political Economy

ABSTRACT

Shortly after the publication of Volume I of Capital, the financial requirements of capitalist enterprise forced the financial innovation of bond and stock finance for joint stock companies. Marx intended to re-write Capital in order to incorporate this change. He did not achieve this. The economic analysis of capitalism with long-term finance was undertaken by Hilferding in his Finance Capital. Thereafter, a strand of economic analysis of production and distribution emerged in the work of the Austro-Marxists, Veblen, Keynes, Kalecki, Steindl and Sweezy, and the Italian Kaleckians, Joseph Halevi and Riccardo Bellofiore, which incorporated the change made to the structure and dynamics of capitalism by long-term finance. However, this shift in capitalist financing has largely been ignored in economic theory, while much of the heterodox analysis that seeks to challenge the role of finance in contemporary capitalism has not integrated finance consistently. The change from the classic capitalism to finance capital raises important questions about the meaning and relevance of Marx’s work today.     

基于分工和报酬递增的经济增长理论演进

文章对分工、报酬递增和经济增长相关理论的演进进行了梳理和总结.古典经济增长理论奠定了思想基础.其中,斯密理论是通过拓展新的分工实现内生和自我持续增长理论的基础;马克思关于分工形式的划分推进了对于报酬递增机制的认识;杨格开创了分工、报酬递增和经济增长的动态分析思路.内生增长理论以技术进步、知识资本和人力资本积累促进经济增长为核心,将分工和技术进步、知识积累紧密联系起来,以分工为重要分析框架论证报酬递增和长期经济增长的实现,吸收和发展了分工理论.内生增长理论和相关模型分别依循由古典经济学开创的两种分工观进行分析,对分工、报酬递增和经济 增长的相关理论和模型进行了重要扩展和充实.