Capitalism and the Dialectic

John R. Bell

Description

From the 1960s to the 1990s the ground-breaking Japanese economists Kozo Uno and Thomas Sekine developed a masterful reconfiguration of Marxist economics. The most well-known aspect of which is the levels of analysis approach to the study of capitalism.



Written in Japanese, the Uno-Sekine approach to Marx's work is little understood in West. John Bell seeks to correct this, explaining how problematic elements of Marxian Political Economy such as the law of value and the law of relative surplus population can be solved by using a more rigorous dialectical analysis.



Bell's clear and accessible synthesis provides economists with the tools to interrogate capitalism in a more powerful way than ever before.
Preface

1. Introduction to the Uno/Sekine Approach

PART I: THE DIALECTICAL THEORY OF PURE CAPITALISM

THE DOCTRINE OF CIRCULATION

2, Commodity, Value, Money and Capital Forms

THE DOCTRINE OF PRODUCTION

3, Capitalist Production

4. The Circulation and Reproduction of Capital

THE DOCTRINE OF DISTRIBUTION

5. The Theory of Profit

6. Business Cycles

7. Rent, Commercial Credit and Loan Capital

8. Interest-Bearing Capital Closes the Dialectic

PART II: CAPITALISM AND HISTORY

9. The Stages Theory of Capitalist Development

10. Conclusion: Capitalists Beyond Capitalism

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Economic Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Communism
• Political economy
• Socialism
• Post-Communism

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 07 septembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644334
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Capitalism and the Dialectic

CAPITALISM AND THE DIALECTIC

The UnoSekine Approach to Marxian Political Economy

John R. Bell

PLUTO PRESS www.plutobooks.com

First published 2009 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © John R. Bell 2009

The right of John R. Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Prefacevi

Introduction 1

PART I DIALECTICAL THEORY OF CAPITALISM: CIRCULATION 1 Commodity, Value, Money and Capital Forms 21

PART II DIALECTICAL THEORY OF CAPITALISM: PRODUCTION 2CapitalistProduction53 3 The Circulation and Reproduction of Capital 82

PART III DIALECTICAL THEORY OF CAPITALISM: DISTRIBUTION 4 The Theory of Prot 115 5 BusinessCycles 135 6 Rent, Commercial Credit and Loan Capital 149 7 Interest-Bearing Capital Closes the Dialectic 169

PART IV CAPITALISM AND HISTORY 8 The Stages Theory of Capitalist Development 9 Conclusion: Capitalists Beyond Capitalism

Notes223 Bibliography227 Index231

179 205

Preface

This work aims to provide social scientists and social philosophers in the English-speaking world with a one-volume introduction to the Japanese Uno approach to Marxian political economy and social science, pioneered by Kozo Uno (18971977) and substantially rened by Thomas T. Sekine. Moreover, it does so from a JapaneseCanadian perspective, given that Professor Sekine taught for many years at York University in Toronto, where, with the assistance of Professor Robert Albritton, he formed a small group of local professors and graduate students who shared an interest in exploring and developing the Uno approach. That group, which I joined at its inception, has continued to meet for three decades, though members have now dispersed to academic institutions around the world. The Uno approach is best known for its distinctivelevels of analysis approach to the study of the political economy of capitalism. Unoists claim that capitalism can only be comprehended by an approach that increases its theoretical grasp of that economic system by moving sequentially through three distinct levels of analysis: the dialectical theory of pure capitalism; the stages theory of capitalisms historical development; and empirical analyses, informed by these two theories. This book will focus on the rst two levels of analysis. The Introduction and the rst three parts of this book are devoted to outlining the rst or primary level of analysis within the Uno system: the dialectical theory of pure capitalism. As an Unoist, I maintain that Marxs Capitalwas the rst (and regrettably unnished) attempt to develop such a theory. Drawing on UnosPrinciples of Political Economy(1980) (this is Sekines English translation of the abridged 1964 edition) and more heavily on Thomas Sekines imposing two-volume masterpieces,The Dialectic of Capital(1984) andOutline of a Dialectic of Capital(1997), I demonstrate how Marxs theory of capitalism can be corrected and completed to provide a rigorous scientic account of the logic which capital employs in its attempt to autonomously and impersonally manage material economic life. My book may demand somewhat more of the reader than Unos text, which was itself a primer, but it makes far less demands upon the reader than Sekines masterful but somewhat daunting two-volume works, which are aimed at scholars who already have a good background in mathematical economics. I have eliminated much of the mathematics that is a feature of Sekines tour de force, but I have maintained enough to demonstrate that a more rigorous approach to reproducing the Hegelian-style dialectical logic that capital employed in its attempt to regulate economic life in British liberal capitalism will allow us to eliminate theoretical problems that have plagued Marxian economics from the beginning. Once capitalism is theorized in a more

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P R E FA C E v i i

rigorously dialectical fashion, thelaw of valueand thelaw of relative surplus populationwill be seen not only as defensible, but as indispensable to the full comprehension of capitalism and its logic, while the seemingly insoluble transformation problem will be overcome with relative ease. Indeed, it will be recognized that there are actually two transformations  a dialectical one and a mathematical one  that take place as we depart the doctrine of production and enter the doctrine of distribution, to employ Unoist terminology. The eighth chapter of the book outlines the stages theory of capitalisms historical development. In this chapter, I draw on Sekines as yet unpublished English translation ofTypes of Economic Policies(1971), Unos most fully elaborated contribution to the development of stages theory, and on Robert AlbrittonsA Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development(1991). The logic of capital can autonomously manage the production of the light cotton-type use values which were dominant in liberal Britain. Yet a range of other commodities are always required as well. Thus, the economic policies of the bourgeois state in the leading capitalist nation in each major historical period of capitalisms development (mercantilism, liberalism and imperialism) must be examined so as to determine why these policies were most successful in taming the resistance posed by the more intractable use values, thus making it possible for capital and its market to manage their production as well. I concur with Sekine in believing that our contemporary society is in a phase of ex-capitalist transition, because capital can no longer manage an economic life of such complexity, even with the support of bourgeois economic policies. Nevertheless, I maintain that the dialectical theory of pure capitalism and the stage theory of capitalist imperialism, together with thegeneral norms of suprahistoric(material or substantive)economic life(that is, the norms that any viable and sustainable economy must observe to survive over an extended period), which are necessarily demarcated from the laws specic to capitalism in the course of the development of the theory of pure capitalism, are very useful for ascertaining not only how far we have traveled from a viable capitalism, but also how far we would have to travel to establish a viable and ecologically sustainable socialism. These are topics I cover in my nal chapters. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Professors Sekine and Albritton, who have been sources of inspiration to me for over three decades, but I should also mention all who were members of the Toronto Uno group over the years. I wish to mention especially Nchamah Miller, Colin Duncan, Richard Westra and, nally, Stefanos Kourkoulakos, whose brilliance impresses us all. I would also like to thank fellow Unoists John Simoulidis and Joe Wheeler for their invaluable editorial assistance, endless patience and penetrating insight.

Introduction

MARX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL

Karl Marx realized that it was neither a trivial nor a simple task to attempt to determine what it was about the nature of capital and its society-wide competitive market that allowed it to reproduce real economic life successfully, including the material requirements of the two major classes, when the state adopted increasingly non-interventionist economic and social welfare policies, as it did in liberal Britain. It was Marx’s intuition that capitalism’s survival in the laissez-faire era could only mean that the competitive market must be operating according to a rigorous logic, indeed, a dialectical logic. The major task Marx set for himself inCapitalwas to uncover that logic in its entirety. It was a monumental undertaking that Marx was unable to complete. Nevertheless, Marx did not merely flirt with Hegelian terminology inCapital. Neither did his employment of Hegelian language, concepts and methodology compromise his scientific project therein. The structure and argument of Capitalare quite properly dialectical and should be more rigorously so, as they might well have been had Marx’s health not deteriorated, such that he was unable to refine, correct and complete that workduring his lifetime. While respecting Darwin and Newton, Marx recognized that it is not possible fully and accurately to comprehend capitalism’s laws of motion or inner logic by natural scientific methods. He tells us that ‘in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use’. Marx adds that the ‘force of abstraction’ must replace these; but that enigmatic comment is not particularly helpful when considered in isolation (1969,.)p8. Elsewhere however, Marx tells us that, as capitalism matures, it develops its own capacity for self-abstraction:

Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality and real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant … [T]his abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where … labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specifi c forms. (1973, p.104)

Thus, labour may be as old as humanity itself, but, before the modern concept of ‘abstract labour’ can be grounded objectively or scientifically, it is necessary that the development of the capitalist labour market, which achieves

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