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Abstract
Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production. That analysis could illuminate how capitalism’s contradictions drive its imperialist expansionism and how and why resistance to it must, equally necessarily, take national forms. As a result, major currents of Marxism in the West either have paid attention to imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance but without Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production or have insisted that their (mistaken) conception of Marx’s analysis implies that capitalism has no necessary connection with imperialism. Neither tradition can actually develop Marxism to comprehend the actual historical record of revolutions since Marx’s time. Neither can inform new mobilisations against capitalism, whether in or outside its homelands. It is high time we return to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as value production and develop it.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank William Carroll, Alan Freeman, Jamie Lawson, Kees van der Pijl, Claude Serfati, Paul Zarembka and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions. Length limitations prevented me from taking all of them on board. However, they enriched the argument and deepened my understanding. Remaining faults are my responsibility. I would also like to thank Brendan Devlin for his meticulous help with the formatting and referencing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Williams, “Eighteenth Century Brumaire.”
2 Desai, “Value of History and the History of Value,” classified the main contradictions of capitalism. See also, Desai “Consumption Demand.”
3 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 171.
4 Desai, Geopolitical Economy, discusses Marx’s understanding of classes and nations.
5 Ibid.; Amin, Law of Worldwide Value; van der Pijl, Discipline of Western Supremacy.
6 No part of this paper suggests wholesale rejection of the writers criticised; they have much to teach. At issue is how neoclassical economics has skewed their work.
7 Freeman, Chick and Kayatekin, “Samuelson’s Ghosts,” 519.
8 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 174–5n.
9 On the prehistory of conceptions of value, see Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution; Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, 2nd ed.
10 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 96.
11 Ibid., 175n.
12 Ibid., 98.
13 Marx, Theories, Vol. II, 197–9. For how Marx resolved the antinomies of classical political economy, see Desai, “Political Economy.”
14 Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 9.
15 Meek, “Marginalism and Marxism,”; Blackburn, “Fin de Siècle.”
16 Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, 717.
17 Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire.
18 Keynes, General Theory of Employment, 32.
19 Regarding Marx and Keynes on Say’s Law, see Sardoni, “Keynes and Marx.”
20 Marx, Theories, Vol. III, 253.
21 For critiques of comparative advantage, see, inter alia, U. Patnaik, “Ricardo’s Fallacy”; Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich.
22 Marx, see Desai, Geopolitical Economy and ‘Marx, List and the Materiality of Nations’ and for Karl Polanyi’s astonishingly similar ideas, see Desai, “Commodified Money and Crustacean Nation.”
23 Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 267.
24 Sweezy, “Introduction.”
25 Hilferding, “Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx,” 156, 170.
26 Bukharin, Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 29–30.
27 Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, 2nd ed., 243.
28 Kindersley, First Russian Revisionists, 53–4.
29 Bukharin, Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 163.
30 For a fuller discussion, see Desai, “Consumption Demand in Marx.”
31 Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 615.
32 Mandel, “Introduction,” in Capital, Vol. III, 35–6; and Desai, “Consumption Demand.” For an empirical demonstration, see Freeman, “Profit Rate in the Presence of Financial Markets.”
33 According to Paul Sweezy, the first to do this. Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development, 159.
34 Luxemberg, Accumulation of Capital, 304.
35 Zarembka, “Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Accumulation of Capital,’” 5.
36 Zarembka, “Accumulation of Capital, Its Definition,” 218.
37 Mandel, “Introduction,” in Capital, Vol. II, 68.
38 Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia, 76ff.; Kellogg, Truth Behind Bars, ch. 5.
39 Zarembka, “Lenin as Economist of Production,” 289.
40 Hilferding, Finance Capital, 420n and 421n.
41 On the tiresome persistence of this, see Desai, “Consumption Demand in Marx.”
42 Hilferding, Finance Capital, 421–2.
43 Zarembka, “Lenin as Economist of Production.”
44 Howard and King, History of Marxian Economics, 316.
45 Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin.
46 Joll, Second International, 114.
47 Eley, Forging Democracy, 91, 112.
48 Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade.”
49 Desai, “From National Bourgeoisies to Rogues.”
50 Lenin, “Better Fewer but Better.”
51 Claudin, Communist Movement, 248, 265.
52 Riddell, To See the Dawn.
53 Barraclough, Introduction to Contemporary History.
54 Patnaik, “Whatever Happened,” 102–6.
55 Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development, 49, 51.
56 Ibid., 106.
57 Desai, “Keynes Redux,” argues that this was not what Keynes believed.
58 Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development, 362.
59 Sweezy, “Introduction,” xiv.
60 Ibid., xxii.
61 Ibid.
62 Patnaik, “Whatever Happened,” 103.
63 See particularly Steedman, Marx after Sraffa.
64 Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution, 257.
65 Brenner, “Origins of Capitalist Development,” 27.
66 Brenner’s later work The Economics of Global Turbulence places the demand problem centrally in its argument. However, political Marxism does not rely on this work, only on Brenner’s “Origins of Capitalist Development.”
67 Brenner, “Origins of Capitalist Development,” 92.
68 Marx, Theories, Vol. I, 164–216.
69 Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 352.
70 Mandel was that rare post-war Marxist whose link to the revolutionary working class set him apart from Marxist economics: though he used the term to describe his work, he did not belong to the tradition this essay criticises.
71 Mandel and Freeman, Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa.
72 Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital; Freeman and Carchedi, Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics.
73 Ferdinand Tönnies’s best known work, Community and Society, contains a remarkably lucid defence of Marx against the accusation that he could not reconcile average profits with value and thus suffered from the infamous ‘transformation problem’. Tönnies, Community and Society, 101. See also Desai, “Political Economy.”
74 So deeply accepted is the idea that there can be a Marxist sociology or anthropology or political science that the doyen of English Marxism, Perry Anderson, could write elaborate histories of Marxism on their basis: Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism; Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,”; Anderson, “Culture in Contraflow.”
75 Zarembka, “Lenin as Economist of Production,” 8.
76 Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism.
77 Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, 75.
78 U. Patnaik, “Free Lunch.”
79 P. Patnaik, Accumulation and Stability under Capitalism; P. Patnaik, The Value of Money; and P. Patnaik and Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism.
80 Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange; and Mandel, Late Capitalism.
81 Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder.
82 With exceptions, which have, however, their own limitations: Nairn, Break-up of Britain; Wood, “Unhappy Families”; and Teschke, Myth of 1648.
83 The popularity of Anderson, Imagined Communities, is exhibit A here; for a critique see Desai, “Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson.”
84 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 274.
85 List, National Systems of Political Economy.
86 eg Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society; for a critique see Desai, “Absent Geopolitics of Pure Capitalism.”
87 See Desai, Geopolitical Economy; and Desai, “Absent Geopolitics of Pure Capitalism.”
88 I have in mind works such as P. Patnaik and Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism; Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century; Ness and Cope, Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism; Cope, Divided World, Divided Class; and Desai, Geopolitical Economy.
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Radhika Desai
Radhika Desai is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She wrote Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994). She edited or co-edited Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism (2016), Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy (2015), Analytical Gains from Geopolitical Economy (2015), Revitalizing Marxist Theory for Today’s Capitalism (2010) and Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms (2009). Her articles and book chapters appear in international scholarly journals and edited volumes. With Alan Freeman, she co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press.