History versus Theory: A Commentary on Marx’s Method in Capital

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Laws Of Motion ◽  
The Law ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Total Theory ◽  
Mode Of Production

Abstract The gap between Marx’s theoretical writings on political economy (for example, the three volumes of Capital) and his historical writings (such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France) arises out of certain limitations that Marx placed upon his political-economic enquiries. These limitations are outlined in the Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes between the universality of the metabolic relation to nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange, and the singularities of consumption. What an analysis of the content of Capital shows is that Marx largely confined his efforts to identifying the law-like character of production to the exclusion of all else. While this allowed him to identify certain laws of motion of capital within any form of the capitalist mode of production, it did not and could not constitute a total theory of a capitalist mode of production. A better understanding of what it is that Marx can do for us through his identification of the general laws of motion leads to a far better appreciation of what it is that we have to do for ourselves in order to make Marx’s theoretical findings applicable to particular conjunctural conditions, such as those that have arisen throughout the economic crisis that began in 2007.

Overlapping Architectures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick N. Labrador
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Community Center ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Communal Land ◽  
Industrial Plantation ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Mode Of Production

This chapter uses the Filipino Community Center as the primary analytical site to suggest that through the physical building itself, Filipinos discursively construct identity territorializations that map out a collective sense of place and a sense of self along political economic and ideological coordinates. The Filipino Community Center represents overlapping architectures, a type of historical and political economic layering whereby the contemporary late capitalist, transnational world anchored to a multiculturalist ideology is built on top of the industrial plantation-based agri-capitalist system dependent on the racialization of its workers, which itself is constructed on top of an indigenous, communal land rights-based mode of production. In other words, the Filipino Community Center depends on the so-called “sakada story,” a narrative of development that positions indigeneity (represented as the Hawaiian past), racialization (depicted as the exploitation of Asian and Hawaiian labor during the plantation era), and multiculturalism (portrayed as the contemporary period of liberal inclusion in which the various racial and ethnic groups share power) in a linear historical progression that corresponds with changes in Hawaiʻi's political economy and modes of production. In this way, the completion of the Filipino Community Center embodies a settler Filipino developmental narrative in which Waipahu (and by extension, Hawaiʻi) is constructed and claimed as a Filipino “home”.

scholarly journals The Differing Revolutionary Positions of Gramsci and Trotsky in Relation to Classical Marxism, the Peasantry, and the Majority World

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brittain
Keyword(s):  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Majority World ◽  
Permanent Revolution ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Mode Of Production

<p>While differing arguments are found within the discipline, the principal denominator uniting theories of Marxist revolution is that organized class-based struggle can consequentially result in a more equitable society, one which surpasses a capitalist mode of production. Augmenting Marx's work on the growing realities of the competitive capitalist system, Lenin highlighted that as capitalism expands it increasingly becomes a model not of competing capitalist producers but one of centralized economic monopolies within global society. With this political economic shift in global capitalism, Gramsci and Trotsky penned differing theoretical responses toward the importance of revolutionary tactics in an age of imperialism. It is in this vein that this article delves into the varied responses of permanent revolution and war of position/manoeuvre, while illustrating which theory most effectively demonstrates the capacity and emancipatory efforts of peoples located in countries outside of the imperial nations (i.e. the majority world).</p>

Black Republican

Men Is Cheap ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 11-43
Author(s):  
Brian P. Luskey
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Competitive Market ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Slave Emancipation ◽  
Financial Uncertainty ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Union Soldiers

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.

scholarly journals The discovery of surplus value: Karl Marx and Senior’s ‘last hour’

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Kenneth Smith
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
University Professor ◽  
Working Day ◽  
Capitalist Enterprise ◽  
Mode Of Production

This essay claims to discover the point at which Marx worked out his theory of surplus value sometime during the 10-year period between 1857 and the publication of Capital Vol. I in 1867. This, it is claimed, was due to his reading of a well-known pamphlet by an English Oxford University professor of political economy, Nassau W. Senior. Senior had claimed that capitalist manufacturers made all of their profit during the last hour of the then normal 12-hour working day. Marx knew that this was incorrect since, if Senior was right, the capitalists might just as well employ their workers for this 1 hour alone and not bother with the other 11 hours of the working day. The workers must then have been doing something else which was of value to the capitalists over and above merely producing their profit. This something else Marx realised was nothing less than the renewal of the worn out fabric of the capitalist enterprise and hence, along with this, the recreation year after year of the capitalists claims to be the legitimate owners of the enterprise. This essay then also claims to have identified two letters by Marx written just 11 months apart which might help to further date the discovery of surplus value, in the first of which, written in 1862, Marx gives Senior’s incorrect view of surplus value as profit and in the second of which, written in 1863, he gives his mature view of surplus value as profit plus the recreation of the capitalist mode of production itself. Having made this theoretical breakthrough by 1863, Marx finally stopped making notebooks and threw himself into the writing of Capital Vol. I in 1864, the year in which by chance Nassau Senior died.

The Rate of Profit and Crises in a Socialist Economy

1995 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore P. Lianos
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Economy ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Organic Composition ◽  
The Law ◽  
Rate Of Profit ◽  
Mode Of Production ◽  
Composition Of Capital

In a recent paper (1994) in this journal, Elias L. Khalil makes two claims. First, he contends, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is not unique to the capitalist mode of production but it is equally valid in a socialist economy. Second, a decline in the rate of profit in a socialist economy would engender crises as would be the case in a capitalist economy. Even more, he argues that crises would be necessary in any social form if there is a secular tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise.

scholarly journals The Crisis-Ridden Capitalist Mode of Production as Driving Force for Restructurations and Transformations in and of the Media Industry: Explanatory Theoretical Elements of a Critique of the Political Economy of the Media

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Manfred Knoche
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Structural Transformations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Media ◽  
Mode Of Production

The goal of this article is to explain long term restructurations and transformations of the media industry. In order to do so, the article uses theory elements of a critique of the political economy of the media. The paper is a contribution to the development of theoretical approaches that provide a theoretical analysis of the media in capitalism based on Karl Marx’s concepts. The capitalist mode of production is the primary driving force of media corporations‘ strategic action and of the media economy’s structural transformations. Factors that are of particular relevance in such structural transformations include profit orientation, capital accumulation, capitalist crises, state policies, behaviour of producers and consumers, private property, class relations, the antagonism between productive forces and relations of production, the antagonism of variable and constant capitalism, the antagonism of use-value and exchange-value, and competition. Competition, capital’s need to survive, and capitalism’s immanent crisis potentials force corporations try to create innovations such as new digital technologies. Informatisation, which includes the use of the computer as universal machine and the Internet, is the provisionally latest stage in the development of the productive forces that has affected media technologies and the media industry. The capital-driven structural digital transformation of the media industry has resulted in the convergence of production, distribution and consumption, the creation of a variety of non-tangible digital products, digital rationalisation and automation, and the universal real subsumption of labour under capital. These developments have also created the potential potentials for overcoming the capitalist character of the media economy and advancing decommodification based on the emergence of a universal digital media system.

scholarly journals The crisis-ridden capitalist mode of production as driving force for restructurations and transformations in and of the media industry : explanatory theoretical elements of a critique of the political economy of the media

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Knoche
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Structural Transformations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Media ◽  
Mode Of Production

The goal of this article is to explain long term restructurations and transformations of the media industry. In order to do so, the article uses theory elements of a critique of the political economy of the media. The paper is a contribution to the development of theoretical approaches that provide a theoretical analysis of the media in capitalism based on Karl Marxs concepts. The capitalist mode of production is the primary driving force of media corporations‘ strategic action and of the media economys structural transformations. Factors that are of particular relevance in such structural transformations include profit orientation, capital accumulation, capitalist crises, state policies, behaviour of producers and consumers, private property, class relations, the antagonism between productive forces and relations of production, the antagonism of variable and constant capitalism, the antagonism of use-value and exchange-value, and competition.

Introduction: Rereading Capital

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Clare Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
First Time ◽  
Mode Of Production

This book examines Karl Marx's critique of capitalism by rereading his Capital as political theory. It considers Capital's ambition to lay bare, for the first time, the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production and the political economy that analyzes it. It argues that, in Capital, Marx had a grand aspiration—to write the definitive analysis of what is wrong with the rule of capital—and that he modeled this aspiration on a grand literary framework: rewriting Dante's Inferno as a descent into the modern “social Hell” of the capitalist mode of production. The book also contends that Capital is best read as a critical reconstruction of and rejoinder to the other versions of socialism and popular radicalism that predominated in France and England in the 1860s and 1870s. This chapter provides an overview of the book's argument.

The Implication for Socialism of Marx's Theory of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias L. Khalil
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Ideal Form ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Law ◽  
Rate Of Profit ◽  
Mode Of Production

It is clear from the enormous literature on the subject that Karl Marx believed that his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is applicable only to the capitalist mode of production. Is there, however, really anything in the law which confines it specifically to capitalist production? This is an important question which is not asked in an explicit manner in the literature on Marx's economics. His most important law or tendency about the internal contradictions of capitalist production might turn out to be a characteristic of production per se—including socialist production in its ideal form.

Radical Islamism as a Mode of Production

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-108
Author(s):  
Masdar Hilmy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Current Theory ◽  
Production Theory ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Dominant Structure ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms ◽  
Epistemological Basis ◽  
Mode Of Production

This article attempts to provide a breakthrough which I call mode of production theory. This theory will be employed to analyze the contemporary phenomenon of radical Islamism. The mode of production theory is meant to bridge the two clashing theoretical paradigms in social sciences and humanities, i.e., Weberian and Marxian. Despite its bridging nature, the paper argues that the two cannot be merged within one single thread. This is because each paradigm has its own epistemological basis which is irreconcilable to one another. Mostly adapted from Marx’s theory, the current theory of the mode of production covers five interrelated aspects, namely social, political, economic, cultural, and symbolic structures. If Marx’s mode of production theory heavily relies on a material and economic basis, the theory used in this paper accommodates cultural and symbolic structures that are Weberian in nature. Although the two paradigms can operate together, the strength of structure (Marxian) overpowers the strength of culture (Weberian). This paper further argues that such cultural-based aspects as ideology, norms, and values play as mobilizing factors under a big schematic dominant structure in the rise and development of the radical Islamist groups.

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