After the Fall: Marxian Political Economy since 1991
As a matter of strict intellectual principle, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later should have had little or no effect on Marxian political economy, since the bureaucratic gerontocracy that Mikhail Gorbachev inherited in 1985 and attempted unsuccessfully to reform had almost nothing in common with any variant of Marxism.
In practice, though, the collapse of communism did undermine the influence of Marxian ideas even among radical social scientists, not least in economics. By 1995 Anthony Brewer, the author of a well-received and largely sympathetic survey of Marxian theories of imperialism, was justifying the neglect of Marxian political economy in the mainstream literature on the grounds that Marx was such a poor economist that it was entirely correct to ignore him (see Brewer 1995 and the related mini-symposium). There were also many more apostates.The last quarter of a century has also seen a number of more or less innovative developments, which indicate that Marxian political economy has a future as well as a past. First, the temporal single system school has advocated a genuinely new approach to the transformation problem, arguing that both the Bortkiewicz and the Sraffian approaches had incorrectly applied neoclassical equilibrium theorising to a problem that must be solved without it. In a sense this had been anticipated in 1977 by Anwar Shaikh, who suggested that Marx’s transformation procedure should be seen not as the conclusion to the analysis but rather as the first stage of an iterative process. However, Shaikh’s proposed procedure led asymptotically to the Bortkiewicz solution, which was repudiated by advocates of the “temporal single system” approach. They in turn have been attacked, savagely so, by Ernesto Screpanti (2005), for “solving” the problem by assuming it away.
Certainly any trace of Marx’s “counteracting tendencies” to the falling rate of profit have disappeared; even “economy in the use of constant capital” now serves to reduce the profit rate instead of increasing it (Freeman and Carchedi 1996).Second, an intriguing effort to marry Marxist ideas with post-modernism has been made by David Ruccio et al. (1996), who advocate a “non-deterministic” or postmodern version of Marxism that draws on American post-analytic epistemology and on French post-structuralism. They emphasise decentred, multiple, endogenous subjectivities and social processes rather than objective laws of motion, and advocate a more complex notion of causation, in which everything is seen as both cause and effect. Postmodern Marxists reject the traditional Marxian view that the base (economy) and superstructure (politics, culture and the rest of society) must be analysed hierarchically, and reinterpret the labour theory of value as a class analysis of the mutual determination of production and exchange. Thus over-determination and difference are crucial concepts. They pay great attention to questions of race, gender and exploitation within the family and other institutions. There is no single “logic of capital”, they maintain, but rather open-ended, conjunctural trajectories of capitalist corporations. The relationship between the “real” economy and the monetary system is one of complex interaction, not one-directional causation. Uncertainty must be taken very seriously, which provides an alternative potential link with post-Keynesian macroeconomic theory to that supplied by Kalecki. Postmodern Marxism has something in common with the final, non-economistic, chapters of Monopoly Capital, and represents yet another, distinctively American, attempt to reformulate Marxian political economy.
A third innovation has seen the emergence of a Marxian variant of environmental economics, which had been anticipated by Sweezy in some of his final articles. Writers like Paul Burkett, Michael Perelman and John Bellamy Foster have argued that Marx was not an anti-ecological thinker, but rather that ecology was central to his thought.
The legacy of Hegelian Marxism, Foster suggests, was to deny the possibility of applying dialectical reasoning to nature, as Engels had unconvincingly attempted to do in his Dialectics of Nature (1872-83). On Foster’s interpretation, however, “Marx’s world-view was deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological” (Foster 2000: viii). For Marx, then, the alienation of human labour was closely connected to the alienation of human beings from nature. However, Foster has little to say about the environmental destruction perpetrated in the course of Stalinist industrialisation, which was often adduced by critics of Marxism as evidence of the malign influence of the labour theory of value, a dogma which appeared to deny any role to nature in the creation of wealth.Fourth, and with greater success, Marxian economists have taken up the challenges posed by the interpretation of globalisation. Here they are on much more natural home territory, for as Eric Hobsbawm (1998) noted in his one hundred and fiftieth anniversary edition, the Communist Manifesto was especially far-sighted on this question. Hobsbawm was not himself an economic theorist, but he did write the best single text on the social and economic history of twentieth-century capitalism (Hobsbawm 1994) and also coedited a major five-volume series, in Italian, on the history of Marxism (Hobsbawm et al. 1978-82), the first volume of which was also published in English (Hobsbawm 1982). Possibly the best of a large and growing Marxian literature on globalisation is Glyn (2006). The Alter-Globalisation movement of the late 1990s, with the slogan “another world is possible”, had its roots in the Marxian and other radical theories of underdevelopment that were discussed in the previous section, as did the “Occupy” movement that flourished briefly in many countries in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
Fifth, and closely related, is the increasingly salient issue of imperialism. Between 1945 and 1989 a combination of the Cold War and the United States’ economic and military dominance cast doubt on the relevance of the Hilferding-Lenin thesis concerning the inescapable and very dangerous rivalry between the world’s leading capitalist powers.
With the rapid and continuing relative decline of the United States’ economy, and the rise of China, it is not only Marxians who have begun to draw historical parallels with growth of tension between Britain and German before the outbreak of global warfare in 1914. However, Marxian political economy does have something distinctive to contribute on this vitally important issue, since it emphasises competition for raw materials, markets and outlets for surplus capital as the fundamental influence on the military and diplomatic policies of capitalist nation-states (Sutcliffe 2006).Sixth, there is the question of the rise of neoliberalism, “the return of the market”, that almost no one foresaw and that falsified the most important of all Marx’s long-range historical predictions. It also confounded the expectations of almost all of the theorists of the Second and Third Internationals. Howard and King (2008) claim that the rise of neoliberalism can in fact be explained in terms of the principles of historical materialism, that is, as the result of developments in both the forces of production and the social relations of production favouring the broadening and deepening of market relations and undermining resistance to them. On this account, Marx and his disciples had been asking precisely the right questions, but they gave precisely the wrong answers. Politically the rise of neoliberalism confirmed everything that the Marxists had always believed about the inherently predatory and essentially unreformable nature of the capitalist system. Capitalism, it is now clear, is indeed prone to ever-increasing inequalities in income and wealth; the capitalist state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, and the revisionist notion that it could be used in the interests of the working class has always been an illusion. However, this offers little consolation.