当代资本主义的新变化与资本主义生产方式的部分质变——兼与徐崇温先生商榷

当代资本主义的新变化既不是资本主义本质的根本改变，也不只是资本主义统治与剥削的手段、形式和斗争策略的改变，而是资本主义社会经济结构的部分质变。当代资本主义生产方式的积极扬弃，已经跨越了资本主义生产方式的临界点，超越了资本主义生产方式的界限，包含某些社会主义因素，逐渐向社会主义和平发展。因此，绝对不能抱着教条主义的态度，简单地用机械的、绝对的和主观的方法，而应当用辨证方法和历史唯物主义的科学方法来认识当代资本主义的新变化，根据新的历史条件来创造性地发展马克思主义理论，实现马克思主义理论的与时俱进和创新发展。     

Marx and Ricardo on machinery: a critical note

This article critically discusses the important and relevant—not to mention controversial— views of Ricardo and Marx on the impact of machinery on labor productivity, the organization of production and the wages and employment prospects of the working class during the capitalism of their day. First, the article turns to Ricardo’s assessment of the introduction of machinery and its likely effects on the laborer and the rate of profit and accumulation—one which went through a substantial revision (and reversal) between the first and third editions of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Then, we discuss Marx’s own critical analysis of the historical development of machinery and its impact on the labor process, the so-called “compensation principle,” and how the rising organic composition of capital ostensibly generates a “redundant or surplus-population” during the course of capitalist development. We highlight Marx’s intellectual debt to Ricardo, John Barton (and George Ramsay) insofar as his theory of technological unemployment is concerned. Lastly, the article summarizes the views of Ricardo and Marx and offers some concluding remarks.     

State expenditure from a Marxist perspective

An overview of a Marxist approach to the theory of State expenditure is presented. This theory locates the problem of State expenditure in relation to the development of capitalism, without falling into reductionist or functionalist formulations. Military spending, education, and welfare and unemployment compensation are used as examples. The uneven development of capital and the growing problem of capitalist crisis offer an explanation of the recent growth of State expenditures in advanced capitalist countries. The neoclassical account of public spending overlooks links between State spending and capitalist production that the Marxist approach illuminates.     

Chinese Capitalism and the Maritime Silk Road: A World-Systems Perspective

As China tries to catch up from a semi-peripheral status in the hierarchy of a capitalist world-system, three decades of fast economic growth have recently shown serious signs of capital glut, overproduction and decreasing returns to capital, indicating the beginning of a phase of contraction and stagnation in the long-cycles of capitalist accumulation. The combination of “capital logic” and “territorial logic” in Giovanni Arrighi’s framework gives both the Chinese state and Chinese capital strong incentives and pressure to actively engage in a “spatial fix” by reconfiguring its geographic vision in order to further capital accumulation and expansion on a larger spatial dimension, culminating in the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative, including the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI). The official promotion of the MSRI hopes to revitalise the historical precedents of the “Silk Road” so that the modern-day hyper-connectivity across Asia, Africa and Europe will facilitate the formation of a China-led reorganised world economy, operating under open and equal participation, possibly leading to common development for all countries involved. However, the nature and impact of such a grandiose initiative, especially its core mission of “connectivity”, is still highly contingent on the hybrid nature of Chinese capitalism in the world-system and how China engages capitalism at the global scale.     

经济学应该研究生产关系--兼评几种流行的关于经济学研究对象和方法的观点

经济学应该着重研究不同社会经济形态下生产关系的特殊运动形式。经济学必须研究具体的社会经济制度下生产关系的本质及其运动,不应把精力放在虚构某些抽象的、仿佛适用于一切社会的原则上,并把这些抽象原则作为研究的出发点。有经济学家公开宣扬,"人是自私的",说这是经济学的"结晶"、"精髓"。因此,经济学不需要去研究不同社会经济制度以及这些制度下人与人之间的经济关系,而只需要运用"人是自私的"这一原理来推断、分析各种经济问题。从实践上看,资产阶级学者从来都是利用"人的本性是自私的"这一命题来反对社会主义的。"保护个人财产,社会才能进步,经济才能发展"的说法,是一种反马克思主义的历史唯心主义的观点。     

Giovanni Arrighi: Systemic Cycles of Accumulation,Hegemonic Transitions,and the Rise of China

This article surveys and critically assesses the life work of Giovanni Arrighi, a renowned historical sociologist and world-systems scholar who passed away in 2009. In a trilogy of books published between 1994 and 2007 Arrighi develops the master concept of his theoretical legacy, systemic cycles of accumulation, and advances an original reading of the history and dynamics of world capitalism as a succession of hegemonic episodes, each one more expansive than the previous and culminating in crises and chaotic transitions. He anticipated the rise of a Chinese-led East Asia as the emergent twenty-first century centre of a reorganised world economy and society. Arrighi is faulted for failing to develop any theory of politics, the state and collective agency in his construct, for his lack of attention to social forces from below, and for his dismissal of recent theorising on globalization.     

The Limits of Organizational Change

The paper builds on the Marxist concept of exploitation to explore the meaning of the Post Keynesian notion of uncertainty. Uncertainty is mediated by institutions and is distributed unevenly among different social groups. As different historical social formations entail different institutional structures, the distribution and nature of uncertainty will also differ. The social configurations between class relations and uncertainty are analyzed for the capitalist, feudal and slave modes of production. It is demonstrated that modes of production do not only imply specific exploitative relations but also different relative distributions of uncertainty amongst classes. The joining of Marxian and Post Keynesian approaches allows for a richer understanding of exploitive relations and illuminates the full societal impact of uncertainty. It is shown that only in capitalism is the exploited class exposed to a substantial degree of economic uncertainty.     

Re-orienting the New (International) Political Economy

This commentary on Neil Smith's Uneven Development revisits his production of nature thesis and uses it as a jumping off point to explore how human bodies matter in contemporary capitalism. It argues that human bodies are increasingly subsumed within capitalism in ways that go beyond the roles of humans as labourers and purchasers of goods and services in a system of commodities producing commodities. Bodies are also treated as property, transportation and as conditions of production within circuits of capitalisms. Bodies also absorb the externalities and excesses of production and provide new spaces of accumulation in their degradation.     

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.     

Uneven Development and Grounded Comparative Institutional Advantage: Lessons from Sweden and Mondragon

In this paper we use the theory of grounded comparative institutional advantage to analyze the possibilities for progressive development in the face of the uneven development patterns endemic to neoliberal capitalist development. We demonstrate that efforts to promote institutional structures to spur regional development, such as Swedish efforts to create high wage jobs via education, training, and technology diffusion, and the Mondragon Cooperative’s efforts to create and preserve manufacturing jobs via education, technology development and cooperative organization, can be a countervailing power to the forces of capitalist uneven development, if the state becomes a major allocator of investment funds. To succeed in creating stable, progressively-oriented industries in a region within a capitalist economy, there must be cushions for firms against downturns and sectoral shifts, mechanisms for the creation of cutting edge technologies, and a commitment to reallocate investment to key industries. Otherwise the forces of uneven development, spatially and sectorally, will tend to prevail. While the models developed by Sweden and Mondragon hold promise, this approach requires a major political commitment to the region, and a willingness to embrace some of the vagaries of international capitalism.     

Political aspects of the capital controversies and capitalist crises

The Cambridge controversies about the theory of capital were ultimately underpinned by a clash between two different visions of capitalism, the neoclassical view, according to which distribution depends on the supply and demand curves of capital and labor, and the post Keynesian view, according to which distribution depends on political and institutional factors instead. I shall argue that the distinction between “meritocratic capitalism” and “patrimonial capitalism,” which underpins the discussions surrounding Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is also connected to those two different visions of capitalism, which were behind the Cambridge controversies. These two visions of capitalism have important implications for our understanding of political power over workers, and also to our understanding of political power over land and its natural resources. The role of land and natural resources was not discussed in the Cambridge controversies, but is addressed in Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities, and is implied in Piketty’s inclusion of land in his definition of capital, which brings in a geographical dimension to our understanding of capitalism and capitalist crises, as I shall argue.     

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.     

Hartmut Elsenhans,Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists

Hartmut Elsenhans's Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists presents an intriguing argument: capitalist elites have induced unsustainable capitalism to the disadvantage of labor and the system as a whole. The author proposes a fairly unconventional solution. He suggests that democratic socialism can be the necessary political complement to our capitalist system. By drawing on the socialist capacity to empower labor and increase mass consumption, we could achieve a more balanced and sustainable capitalism. The book is ideally suited for readers of Keynesian and post Keynesian analysis on contemporary capitalism and it fits in the discourse on problems of low income growth, declining demand, and investment opportunities in major world economies.     

国际金融危机背景下西方学者的资本主义危机理论及启示

资本主义危机理论一直是国外马克思主义学者关注的焦点。在资本主义发展的不同时期,他们对于资本主义危机的理解也有所不同。2008年金融危机的爆发,迫使一些西方学者摒弃以往传统的经济视角,转而寻求新的研究范式来解读资本主义的危机,这一时期备受关注的危机理论有:体制危机论,福利国家危机论和资本主义总体性危机论。总体来看,随着资本主义社会的发展,西方学者不再从单一视角出发研究资本主义危机,不再将资本主义危机单纯理解为经济危机,而是趋向多元化的理解。     

Capitalist Convergence? European (dis?)Integration and the Post-crash Restructuring of French and European Capitalisms

ABSTRACT

This article critiques and builds upon first-wave (Höpner and Schäfer 2010. A new phase of European integration: organised capitalisms in post-Ricardian Europe. West European Politics, 33 (2), 344–368) and second-wave (Johnston and Regan 2018. Introduction: is the European Union capable of integrating diverse models of capitalism? New Political Economy, 23 (2), 145–159) European Integration and comparative capitalisms literatures which posit convergence towards a single model of capitalism or growth. It utilises the case study of France to explore the impact of European integration and disintegration on national models of capitalism in the post-crisis era. The article focuses on the impact of integrative and disintegrative dynamics on France’s ‘state-industry-finance nexus’, putting forward three core claims. First, French capitalism is not accurately captured by the above frameworks and remains better characterised by the concept of post-dirigisme. Indeed, comparative capitalisms debates must move beyond a simple bifurcation of capitalist types. Second, European integrative pressures must be viewed as fragmented, differentiating, mediated by domestic state actors and producing capitalist variegation and hybridisation. Countering functionalist tendencies within this literature, it shows how different conceptions of state-market relations crucially mediate the relationship between national capitalisms and European integration. Finally, in the context of Brexit, the dynamics of European disintegration – an issue not discussed so far in these debates – is contributing to a variegated and multi-directional process of capitalist restructuring in post-crisis France.     

金融危机下的资本主义将何去何从

2008年全球金融危机爆发以来,世界主要资本主义国家出现了经济增长停滞、失业率畸高、贫富差距扩大等现象,经济与社会的困境引发了西方学术界对资本主义经济、社会,乃至政治发展模式的反思,企图通过反思找到引发危机的真正原因,并促进资本主义的自我调整和完善。一方面,我们应该看到,金融危机反映了资本主义制度致命的缺陷,其根源就在于资本主义基本矛盾,只要资本主义制度存在,危机的爆发将是不可避免的;另一方面,我们也应意识到,仅凭这一场危机就断言资本主义从此将退出历史舞台,恐怕还为时过早。     

Management and the representative firm revisited: the modern significance of Marshall's evolutionary economics

In an essay written in honour of Peter Swann, it is second nature to discuss some aspects of the economics of innovation, as that is the very challenging area of economic life where he has added so much to our understanding. I will attempt to do this by posing the problem of how innovation fits into the theory of value. Innovation research continues apace, but its broader systemic implications for how we understand the dynamics of capitalism are in danger of being overlooked. But two important economists, Schumpeter and Marshall, have seen the problem differently and built innovation into their theoretical schemes from the start. Marshall's theory of evolutionary change provides a natural focus for our discussion, and this is reflected in his treatment of management, in his use of the representative firm and in the variation-cum-selection dynamics of his open competitive process. We treat each of these topics and show how his evolutionary dynamics can be expressed in the Fisher/Price dynamics of evolutionary change. More generally, the key to economic development is the uneven nature of innovation and it is the uneven nature that gives economic transformation its evolutionary character. This, I suggest, is the proper legacy of Marshalls economics.     

The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy

Most intellectuals would be pleased to have one major debate named after them. The Marxist economic historian Robert Brenner has managed the remarkable feat of unleashing two significant intellectual controversies. The first, in the historical journal Past & Present during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was provoked by his interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. More recently, however, Brenner has switched his attention from the longue durée of European history to the economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In a massive journal-length article published in New Left Review in 1998 he offered a comparative analysis of the three major Western economies—the USA, Japan and Germany—from 1945 onwards, tracing the development of a protracted crisis of profitability that, Brenner contended, explained the ‘long downturn’ experienced by global capitalism since the early 1970s.     

The colonization of the future: An alternative view of financialization and its portents

Financialization is generally interpreted by heterodox economists to be a dysfunctional and thus historically transient outgrowth of contemporary capitalism: dysfunctional because it is seen to be driven by attempts to escape production and profit realization constraints in the real economy, transient because these attempts are seen to be ultimately futile. This article proposes the contrary argument that financialization is a functionally useful feature of contemporary capitalism that is entirely in keeping with the latter’s continuing development as a commodity system. Specifically, it will be argued that just as globalization represents the extension of the commodity principle along the axis of geographical space, financialization represents the extension of this same principle along the axis of time: the future is being colonized so as to make it take the overspill of the pressures on organizations operating in the present.     

Augusto Graziani and the Marx-Schumpeter-Keynes ‘Cycle of Money Capital’: A Personal Look at the Early Italian Circuitism from an Insider

ABSTRACT

The paper goes back to the origins of the theory of the monetary circuit in its Italian incarnation. Focus is on the evolution of Augusto Graziani's thinking between mid-1970s and mid-1980s, considering: (i) how Graziani connected (positively or polemically) with Keynesianism and Post-Keynesianism, both in its Cambridge and US incarnations; (ii) how Graziani interpreted the contributions of Keynes proposing a continuity between the Treatise on Money, the General Theory, and the articles on finance published after the 1936 book; (iii) how beneath the research programme of Italian circuitism (Graziani) we may recognise a peculiar Marxian inspiration, later on pursued for a while by some participants to the Seminar in Monetary Theory that Graziani coordinated in Naples (1981–85). Since the mid-1970s Graziani — who already had a profound knowledge of Neoclassical Theory; and who was deeply aware of the role of institutions — developed more and more his heretical stance into what we may label as a ‘structural Keynesian' approach, inserting Keynes’ views about finance to production and effective demand into a Schumpeterian vision of the capitalist process, and leading to Marxian conclusions about value and distribution. The early forays into circuitism by Graziani were not only critical towards the Neoclassical Synthesis, Monetarism, or New Classical Macroeconomics. They were also grounded in an intense confrontation with other contemporary heterodox currents. The outcome was the construction of an original scheme of thought which amounted to nothing less than a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production.