Abstract
The world-wide crisis of capitalism which has been gaining momentum since the early 1970’s has simultaneously elevated Marxism to a new status. The collapse of both neo-Marxist and Keynesian certainties that late capitalism possessed an almost infinite capacity to stave off a breakdown led social and economic theory to look once more to “classical” Marxist explanations of the crisis. Within academic circles there is no question that Marxist political economy, although by no means hegemonic, gains new adherents with each passing leading indicator showing a more or less chronic tendency in the western countries towards stagnation if not complete reversal of the almost thirty years of uninterrupted growth in most capitalist nations.
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Notes
See particularly, Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1947), especially “The Fundamental Concepts of Sociology,” pp. 87–156
Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1974).
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2 (Chicago: Charles Kerr Co., 1909), pp. 56–7.
John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1969).
Karl Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Science Editions, 1961).
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism — The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Selected Works, Vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1946).
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964).
See Rudolph Hilferding, Finanzkapital (1909)
and more recently, Michael Hudson, Super-Imperialism (1973)
Michael Barratt-Brown, After Imperialism (1964).
See Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
Stanley Aronowitz, “Left-Wing Communism: The reply to Lenin,” in The Unknown Dimension, ed. Dick Howard and Karl Klare (New York: Basic Books, 1972).
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 66.
Durost and Barton, Farming and Markets for Farm Goods (Washington: Committee for Economic Development, no. 15, 1960), p. 20
Andre Gorz, “Colonialism at Home and Abroad,” in Socialism and Revolution (New York: Anchor Books, 1970).
Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964).
“Reply to Critics,” Social Policy, 1:2 (Sept.–Oct., 1970).
Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964).
Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967)
Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)
F. H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y Desarrollo En America Latino (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977).
Roman Rosdolsky, Making of Marx’s “Capital” (London: Pluto Press, 1977)
Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes (Boston: Porter Seargant, 1969)
Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, trans. David Fernbach (London: New Left Books, 1979). I am using the term “capital-logic” in a somewhat broader sense than it is normally employed. The “school” refers to such economists as J. Hirsch, Paul Mattick and others who derive their entire social theory from the Marxian economic formulas. The work of Ernest Mandel and Michel Aglietta appears to be more broadly based, but my contention is that their position is commensurable with that of the capital-logicians.
See Stanley Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital,” Insurgent Sociologist (Winter 1979)
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Christian Palloix, “The Labor Process: From Fordism to Neo-Fordism,” in The Labor Process and Class Strategies, CSE Pamphlet no. 1 (London, 1976).
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)
David Noble, America by Design (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975). In this book, perhaps the most elaborate effort from the perspective of capital-logic to take account of the recent history of world capitalism, Mandel directly confronts the explanations offered by dependency theory while attempting to integrate the work of Amin, Frank and Emmanuel within a more or less classical Marxist position based on the categories of value and surplus value rather than exchange relations. Mandel works within the parameters of Marxist theory to refute both underconsumptionist and dependency notions.
Paul Mattick, “Les limites de l’intégration: l’homme unidimensionnel dans la société de classe,” in Intégration Capitaliste et Rupture Ouvrière (Paris: EDI, 1972).
The best discussion of the political consequences of the social wage is James O’Connor, Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971).
See James O’Connor, “Productive and Unproductive Labor,” Politics and Society, 5:3, for a discussion of this point in greater detail. The idea of disaccumulation was first advanced in this country by Martin Sklar in an article in Radical America (1969).
Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (New York: 1943).
See William Appleman Williams, Contour of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1961).
Gar Alpervitz, Atomic Diplomacy (New York, 1962)
D. F. Fleming, Origins of the Cold War (Boston, 1960)
Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 1964).
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 130–48.
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© 1990 Stanley Aronowitz
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Aronowitz, S. (1990). The End of Political Economy. In: The Crisis in Historical Materialism. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20696-4_8
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