From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Wed Jan 26 2005 - 17:16:25 EST
------------- Original Message --------- Subject: highest, last, latest, or no longer existing stage of capitalism? From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Date: Wed, January 26, 2005 5:05 pm ---------------------------------------- Delineating stages of capitalist development assumes that we can identify turning points or breaking points at which quantitative changes created qualitative changes in the operation of the social system. But that can be done in various ways, depending on the variables we are looking at. Probably the most useful way of looking at it is, in terms of the formation and development of a world market. The idea of imperialism as the "final stage" of capitalist development seems to have been based on the division of the whole world into spheres of political and economic influence between the capitalist powers. This idea became mixed with the idea, very popular in the first half of the 20th century, that the socialist transformation of society was imminent. But leaving aside ideological fictions about the impending doom of capitalism or the impending world socialist revolution, the historical truth is that imperialism was a characteristic of capitalism already in the mercantile era, i.e. in the 1600s and 1700s. That is obvious if you study e.g. Dutch history, Portuguese history, Spanish history and British history. All that has happened is that its forms have changed over time. Capital accumulation (or capitalist economic growth) is among other things predicated on market expansion, and the political corollary of market expansion was imperialism; this is also the thrust of Rosa Luxemburg's definition. Just as the economic base of nationalism was the unification of the home market, imperialism signifies the conquest and integration of world markets. In outlining the social reproduction of capital, Marx distinguished between the circuits of commodity capital (commerce), money capital (finance) and production capital (industry) - what multinational corporations have now achieved is the internationalisation of money capital (financialisation) and production capital (global production). This is discussed by Robert Went in his last book, but he refers only tentatively to "a new stage of capitalism". The term "late capitalism" was first used by Natalie Moszkowska in the 1940s and later adopted in German discussions. In using that term, Ernest Mandel for example implied a periodisation in terms of early bourgeois society, the heyday of bourgeois society, and late bourgeois society. Alongside this periodisation, is the delineation of merchant capitalism, freely competitive industrial capitalism, monopoly industrial capitalism, and then neocapitalism or late capitalism where the multinational corporation is dominant. This kind of periodisation is based on the dominant organisational forms of business activity. But the periodisation is not necessarily very accurate or relevant - it often seems more an attempt to knit together an orthodoxy based on perceptions of a tradition, together with the pretension that Marxists know in advance in which way history is moving. It often has more an ideological or doctrinal function than a scientific basis. I tend to think that if we can understand the nature of our own era, we are doing very well already. The delineation of "stages" or distinct epochs in the history of capitalism is really only as good as the research that underpins it. The problem is really that despite the mass of data and evidence, there have been rather few attempts by scholars to confront the empiria comprehensively and trace out the worldhistorical trends objectively, nor to extend Marx's theory with an analysis of foreign trade, the states system and demographic patterns. There are however many useful studies dealing with facets of the research. There are of course also plenty of speculative theories of globalisation and the "world system", but few of those have anything in common anymore with Marx's idea. I guess it is a difficult task and takes an enormous amount of work; few people are in a position to do it and you might well argue that the position of critical social scientists, qua funding, autonomy and research opportunities is increasingly precarious in consequence of the commercialisation of universities. Suppose though that you can identify stages in capitalist development, what then? What do you know then? Does it enable you to predict the future? Or does it only justify or help orient a political policy? Or is it a way of sustaining Marx's theorem about the finitude and historical transience of capitalism as a mode of production? Jurriaan
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