Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State
New developments
Marx depicted a system that was very dynamic, but also plagued with seemingly insuperable contradictions. Its very dynamism continually led capital to try to expand at a greater rate than could be sustained by the living labour power on which it ultimately depended. The barrier to capitalist production, Marx wrote, lay in capital itself. The implication was that as capitalism engulfed the whole world, it would be subject to longer and deeper slumps, interspersed with shorter and shallower periods of boom. At the same time, the concentration and centralisation of capital would produce an ever greater polarisation between a capitalist class which was diminishing in size and a working class that absorbed into itself the rest of society.
The model was by design an abstraction. Marx consciously ignored much of the day to day functioning of markets and many of the features of particular capitalist societies in his attempt to grasp the underlying tendencies built into the mode of production as such-its "general laws" . The way each of the three volumes of Capital operated at a different level of abstraction meant that the third volume, by integrating production and circulation, was closer to the actual operating detail of any really existing capitalist society than the first volume, even though its analysis depended on the basic concepts developed there. It dealt not only with the equalisation of profit rates, the deviation of prices from values, crises and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but also with credit and the banking system, commercial profits, interest payments to money lenders and rents to land owners. But even the third volume deliberately paid little attention to many important things: foreign trade, the impact on the capitalist system of absorbing the still enormous pre-capitalist parts of the world or the role of the state. Marx had intended in the original plan for Capital he drew up in the early manuscripts of the work further volumes dealing with such things. But he never had time to do so, immersed as he was in day to day revolutionary political activity, compelled to make a livelihood for himself through journalistic articles and, in the last years of his life, plagued by illness, although the three volumes he did fully or partially complete were themselves an incredible achievement.
CHAPTER FOUR
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