Social Structure of Accumulation Theory, Marxist Theory, and System
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Load more
Recommended publications
-
1 Jerry Shang 5/9/2018 History 310 Austro-Marxism: Finding
1 Jerry Shang 5/9/2018 History 310 Austro-Marxism: Finding Socialism in Modernity Introduction In Otto Bauer’s What is Austro-Marxism? (1927), he stated that Austro-Marxism was first coined by an American socialist, L. Boudin, to describe a collection of Marxist thinkers including Max Adler, Karl Renner, Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer and others who grew up in the socialist student movement of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Despite these thinkers’ common background, Austro- Marxism as a school of thought lacked the unity L. Boudin conferred to it through its name. Even Otto Bauer himself noted that this group of scholars “were united not so much by a specific political orientation.”1 These thinkers cited above all had interests in different areas, for example, Max Adler took on a theoretical approach and tried to apply a neo-Kantian emphasis on subjectivity and human volitions to the Marxist concept of historical progression; Karl Renner focused more on the law and its ability to support the capitalist system; Rudolf Hilferding was known for his discussion on finance capital and his extension upon Marxist economic theories; Otto Bauer focused on the question of nationality and its incorporation into Marxist thoughts. Though this was not to say that there were no communications and references between these thinkers, the various focuses and interests made it hard to characterize Austro-Marxism as a unified movement. In a sense, Otto Bauer’s question posed by his title remained unanswered. Current historiography on Austro-Marxism has also shied away from this question by focusing on individual thinkers. -
“State-Capitalist” Or “Totalitarian State Economy”
USSR: workers’ state, capitalist, or other? 1 “State-capitalist” or “totalitarian state economy” R L Worrall and Rudolf Hilferding USSR: Proletarian or capitalist state, by R L Worrall WITH THE SOCIALIST movement at its lowest ebb since 1914, the first neces - sity of the moment is to realise clearly the main reasons for this. For in order to grapple successfully with things as they are, it is necessary to see things as they are. In order to overcome that ignorance which is the inertia of history, and to loosen the bonds of existing conditions, those conditions must be analysed and described with scientific accuracy. Not for the sake of pedantry, but in order to release that human energy of social change which is made ineffective by doubt and confusion. 2 USSR: workers’ state, capitalist, or other? Above all, accurate knowledge, analysis and description of Russia is needed, to clear away the doubt and uncertainty, the revulsion and disap - pointment, which Stalin’s regime has brought to the working class as a whole. Ironically enough, one who has been the most outstanding opponent of Stalin has added to the confusion surrounding the nature of Stalin’s regime. Leon Trotsky persists in regarding Russia as a workers’ state, although that state has shattered proletarian democracy, putting the working class of Russia in a straitjacket, and killing or imprisoning tens of thousands of revolutionary internationalists. The state in Russia is a “degenerate” and “distorted” workers’ state, writes Trotsky, and so, in dutiful chorus, declare his followers. Still armed with the caustic pen which has been his lance, he cannot bring it to write that the former soviet system, whose growth he did so much to nourish, has been transformed into a new type of capitalist state, at the hands of Stalin and the bureaucracy. -
Michael Reich
St. John's University St. John's Scholar Theses and Dissertations 2020 eliberative Democracy in the Writing Classroom and Beyond Author(s): Michael Reich Michael Reich Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations Part of the Philosophy Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM AND BEYOND A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY to the faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH of ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES at ST. JOHN’S UNIVERSITY New York by Michael Reich Date Submitted: ___________________ Date Approved: ___________________ _________________________________ ________________________________ Michael Reich Dr. Granville Ganter © Copyright by Michael Reich 2020 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY IN THE WRITING CLASSROOOM AND BEYOND Michael Reich In this dissertation I explore the consequences of adopting a deliberative pedagogy, based on the study of one or two sample courses taught in 2018 at St. John’s University. The project as a whole argues that the university should be an idea place for students to develop a sense of personal and political agency, and First Year Writing courses organized around deliberation allow students to learn to listen and reason with each other as individuals and as citizens. My first chapter defends the methodology of a humanistic idea of deliberation (a pedagogy not based in classroom drills or Standard English) and where I also worry that the soft and fuzzy notion of deliberation that I practice collides with the measurement of my students’ “progress” on objective rubrics . -
Hilferding's Influence on Schumpeter
Munich Personal RePEc Archive Hilferding’s Influence on Schumpeter : A First Discussion Michaelides, Panayotis G. and Milios, John G. National Technical University of Athens 2004 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74462/ MPRA Paper No. 74462, posted 20 Oct 2016 11:34 UTC European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy Sixteenth Annual Conference on Economics, History and Development Crete, Greece, 28-31 October 2004 HILFERDING’S INFLUENCE ON SCHUMPETER: A First Discussion by Panayotis Michaelides and John Milios Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law School of Applied Mathematics and Physics National Technical University of Athens [email protected], [email protected] Abstract In the present paper, the origins of some of Joseph Alois Schumpeter’s views are traced back to Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, regarding the Schumpeterian hypothesis and the separation of roles between capitalists, entrepreneurs and managers. After a careful examination of Hilferding’s writings, the conclusion may be drawn that Schumpeter expresses ideas very similar to Hilferding’s on these issues, and seems to have been influenced by his conceptualisation of a “latest phase” of capitalism, shaped by the structure and functions of the “monopolistic enterprise”. Hilferding’s approach is understood in this paper as a major revision of Marx’s methodological perspective and conceptual understanding of the capitalist mode of production and, therefore, as a “paradigm shift” within Marxian economic theory. J.E.L. Classification: B14, B24 Key Words: entrepreneur, technology, monopoly, Schumpeter, Hilferding, Marx. 1 1. Introduction There is no doubt that Joseph Alois Schumpeter “was one of the greatest economists of all time” (Haberler 1950: 1).1 Given Schumpeter’s various theories and the modern spin- offs of his work, the issue of which theories or ideas might have influenced his thought becomes of great interest and deserves analysis. -
Seattle's Minimum Wage Experience 2015-16
Chairs Sylvia A. Allegretto Michael Reich CWED Policy Brief Seattle’s Minimum Wage Experience 2015-16 By Michael Reich, Sylvia Allegretto, and Anna Godoey June 2017 Michael Reich is a Professor at UC Berkeley and Co-Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED) at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Dr. Sylvia Allegretto is a Research Economist and Co-Chair of CWED. Dr. Anna Godoey is a post-doctoral researcher at CWED. We acknowledge support from the University of California and the Ford Foundation and we are grateful to Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer for their sage advice. ABSTRACT This brief on Seattle’s minimum wage experience represents the first in a series that CWED will be issuing on the effects of the current wave of minimum wage policies—those that range from $12 to $15. Upcoming CWED reports will present similar studies of Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and New York City, among others. The timing of these reports will depend in part upon when quality data become available. We focus here on Seattle because it was one of the early movers. Seattle implemented the first phase of its minimum wage law on April 1, 2015, raising minimum wages from the statewide $9.47 to $10 or $11, depending upon business size, presence of tipped workers and employer provision of health insurance. The second phase began on January 1, 2016, further raising the minimum to four different levels, ranging from $10.50 to $13, again depending upon employer size, presence of tipped workers and provision of health insurance. -
Karl Helfferich and Rudolf Hilferding on Georg Friedrich Knapp's State
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Greitens, Jan Conference Paper — Manuscript Version (Preprint) Karl Helfferich and Rudolf Hilferding on Georg Friedrich Knapp’s State Theory of Money: Monetary Theories during the Hyperinflation of 1923 Suggested Citation: Greitens, Jan (2020) : Karl Helfferich and Rudolf Hilferding on Georg Friedrich Knapp’s State Theory of Money: Monetary Theories during the Hyperinflation of 1923, Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) 2020, Sofia., ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Hamburg This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/216102 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available -
Mpsa Paper on Trans Capitalism
April 2016 Postsocialist crises and the rise of transnational capitalism in Eastern Europe: a theoretical framework for comparative analysis1 Besnik Pula Department of Political Science Virginia Tech [email protected] There is no question today of the deep institutional divergence of the postsocialist economies of Eastern Europe. The vision and designs of postsocialist reform in the early years aimed at turning Eastern European economies into capitalist economies akin to those of western Europe. But the outcomes of reform have been a plethora of capitalisms, which distinct and widely varying roles played by the state, domestic capitalists, transnational corporations, and workers. To examine this process of change, this paper offers a theoretical framework that explains why some East European economies became more embedded in transnational production than others. Its focus is on the political economy of institutional change. It assumes that economic institutional change is most dramatic under conditions of economic crisis. In the case of East European transformations, it sees the return of economic crises in the late 1990s as such episodes, serving as critical turning points in postsocialist efforts attempts to institute stable regimes of accumulation. 1 Working paper drawn from current manuscript on a comparative analysis of the making of postsocialist capitalisms, presented at the CEEISA-ISA International Conference (Ljubljana, June 23-25, 2016). Please direct comments to the author at [email protected]. 1 In the early years of reform, the reigning “transition paradigm” (Carothers 2002) in the study of East European transformations assumed East European states and economies to be headed towards the same endpoints of liberal democracy and liberal market capitalism. -
Department of Economics
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS Working Paper Problematizing the Global Economy: Financialization and the “Feudalization” of Capital Rajesh Bhattacharya Ian Seda-Irizarry Paper No. 01, Spring 2014, revised 1 Problematizing the Global Economy: Financialization and the “Feudalization” of Capital Rajesh Bhattacharya1 and Ian J. Seda-Irizarry2 Abstract In this essay we note that contemporary debates on financialization revolve around a purported “separation” between finance and production, implying that financial profits expand at the cost of production of real value. Within the literature on financialization, we primarily focus on those contributions that connect financialization to global value-chains, production of knowledge- capital and the significance of rent (ground rent, in Marx’s language) in driving financial strategies of firms, processes that are part of what we call, following others, the feudalization of capital. Building on the contributions of Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, we problematize the categories of capital and capitalism to uncover the capitalocentric premises of these contributions. In our understanding, any discussion of the global economy must recognize a) the simultaneous expansion of capitalist economic space and a non-capitalist “outside” of capital and b) the processes of exclusion (dispossession without proletarianization) in sustaining the capital/non-capital complex. In doing so, one must recognize the significance of both traditional forms of primitive accumulation as well as instances of “new enclosures” in securing rent for dominant financialized firms. Investment in knowledge-capital appears as an increasingly dominant instrument of extraction of rent from both capitalist and non-capitalist producers within a transformed economic geography. In our understanding, such a Marxian analysis renders the separation problem an untenable proposition. -
SOCIOLOGY 9191A Social Science in the Marxian Tradition Fall 2020
SOCIOLOGY 9191A Social Science in the Marxian Tradition Fall 2020 DRAFT Class times and location Wednesday 10:30am -12:30pm Virtual synchronous Instructor: David Calnitsky Office Hours by appointment Department of Sociology Office: SSC 5402 Email: [email protected] Technical Requirements: Stable internet connection Laptop or computer Working microphone Working webcam “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” – Karl Marx That is the point, it’s true—but not in this course. This quote, indirectly, hints at a deep tension in Marxism. If we want to change the world we need to understand it. But the desire to change something can infect our understanding of it. This is a pervasive dynamic in the history of Marxism and the first step is to admit there is a problem. This means acknowledging the presence of wishful thinking, without letting it induce paralysis. On the other hand, if there are pitfalls in being upfront in your desire to change the world there are also virtues. The normative 1 goal of social change helps to avoid common trappings of academia, in particular, the laser focus on irrelevant questions. Plus, in having a set of value commitments, stated clearly, you avoid the false pretense that values don’t enter in the backdoor in social science, which they often do if you’re paying attention. With this caveat in place, Marxian social science really does have a lot to offer in understanding the world and that’s what we’ll analyze in this course. The goal is to look at the different hypotheses that broadly emerge out of the Marxian tradition and see the extent to which they can be supported both theoretically and empirically. -
Secular Stagnation and Creative Destruction: Reading Robert Gordon
Chapter for inclusion in forthcoming book “Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy A Twenty first Century Agenda” Edited by Leonardo Burlamaqui and Rainer Kattel Routledge – 2018 Secular Stagnation and Creative Destruction: Reading Robert Gordon through a Schumpeterian Lens* 7 November 2017 Fred Block, Department of Sociology, UC Davis Returning to Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy after seventy-five years is not at all an antiquarian exercise. On the contrary, it is vitally important for anyone trying to understand our current political economic situation. Schumpeter sought to make sense of the turbulent decades that had produced the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Schumpeter was, above all, a theorist of historical discontinuity; he did not see societies or economies moving along some smooth trajectory, but rather, he emphasized disruption, creative destruction, and the likelihood of deep economic downturns. In this sense, Schumpeter’s approach contrasts sharply with the views that have dominated the social sciences since the 1950s. In parallel with the emergence of the United States as the dominant global power after World War II, the social sciences have generally emphasized continuity, linearity, and stability. This is most evident in neo-classical economics * I am grateful to the editors and to Larry Hirschhorn, Matthew Keller, and Marian Negoita for feedback on an earlier draft. 1 with its focus on the propensity of market economies to achieve equilibrium, but similar themes are echoed across the social sciences. In sociology and political science, for example, much work emphasizes path dependence – the tendency for social or political development to proceed along the same track that had been established sometime in the past. -
Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx
Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx Rudolf Hilferding Socialist Labour Press, Glasgow, ca 1920 http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1904/criticism/index.htm translated from « Böhm-Bawerks Marx-Kritik », Marx-Studien, Wien, 1904. Preface 1 Value as an Economic Category 2 Value and Average Profit 3 The Subjectivist Outlook Preface The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science. We have seen nothing of the "jubilant hue and cry" anticipated by Sombart. [1] No struggle of intellects has taken place; there was no contest in majorem scientiae gloriam. For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights. As spokesman for the bourgeoisie, it enters the lists only where the bourgeoisie has practical interests to defend. In the economico-political struggles of the day it faithfully reflects the conflict of interests of the dominant cliques, but it shuns the attempt to consider the totality of social relationships, for it rightly feels that any such consideration would be incompatible with its continued existence as bourgeois economics. Even where the bourgeois economists, compiling their "systems" or writing their "sketches," must perforce speak of the relationships of the whole, the only whole they succeed in presenting is laboriously pieced together out of its separate parts. They have ceased to deal with principles; they have ceased to be systematic; they have become eclectics and syncretists. Dietzel, author of Theoretische Sozialökonomie, is perfectly logical when, making the best of a bad business, he raises eclecticism to the rank of a principle. -
Social Structures of Accumulation: the Political Economy of Growth and Crisis (1994), Edited by 5
Social Structure of Accumulation Theory Paper prepared for conference on Growth and Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory and Analysis, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, November 2-4, 2006. Victor D. Lippit Department of Economics Univeristy of California Riverside, CA 92521 U.S.A. [email protected] 2 Social Structure of Accumulation Theory SSA theory and its origins Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory seeks to explain the long waves-- averaging about fifty or sixty years for a complete cycle--that have characterized capitalist economic growth, and the distinct stages of capitalism that have marked each long upswing. Thus in the United States, the upswing early in the twentieth century was marked by industrial consolidation, mass production, and the introduction of "scientific management"; the one following World War II was marked by the growth of the state, U.S. leadership in the world economy, limited competition, and tacit "accords" between capital and labor on the one hand, and between capital and the citizenry on the other. This second SSA is among those analyzed in greater detail below as a means of supporting and clarifying the theoretical argument presented here. The focus of SSA theory is on the institutional arrangements that help to sustain long wave upswings. Institutions can be thought of in a narrow sense as organizations (like universities or the World Bank), or in a broader sense as made up of customs, habits and expectations. In this sense, they are typically country or culture-specific.i A further division can be made within the broader sense, which might refer to something rather specific like collective bargaining on the one hand, or more broadly to the entire system of labor relations that exists within a country.