Towards a new political economy of capital--论文代写范文精选

政治经济,理解为寻找公民社会的解剖学,研究的是追求权力。当专注于资本主义社会,然而,它存在严重的结构性缺陷，资本仍然难以捉摸,严重的偏见。下面的paper代写范文进行详述。

ABSTRACT 
Existing theories of capital, neo-classical as well as Marxist, are anchored in the material sphere of production and consumption. This article offers a new analytical framework for capital as a crystallization of power. The relative nature of power requires accumulation to be measured in differential, not absolute, terms. For absentee owners, the main goal is not to maximize proŽts, but rather to ‘beat the average’ and exceed the ‘normal rate of return’. The theoretical framework builds on Thorstein Veblen’s separation of industry from business and on Lewis Mumford’s dichotomy between democratic and authoritarian techniques. Extending their contributions, we argue that capital is a business, not an industrial category, a human mega-machine rather than a material artefact. Indeed, it is the social essence of capital which makes accumulation possible in the Žrst place. Capital measures the present value of future business earnings, and these depend not on the productivity of industry as such, but on the ability of absentee owners strategically to limit such productivity to their own differential ends. Introducing the twin concepts of the ‘differential power of capital’ (DPK) and the rate of ‘differential accumulation’ (DA), we examine the non-linear and possibly negative link between industrial growth and accumulation in the USA. 
KEYWORDS :Capital; power; technology; institutional economics; Veblen; Mumford.

INTRODUCTION
Political economy, understood as the search for the ‘anatomy of civil society’ (Marx, 1859b: 20), studies the pursuit of plenty as much as the quest for power. When focusing on capitalist society, however, it suffers from a serious structural drawback: one of its major building blocks – capital – remains elusive and seriously biased. 

The reason is twofold. First, with the growing bureaucratization of academia, the study of political economy was gradually segmented into separate ‘departments’. Capital was monopolized by ‘economists’. ‘Political scientists’, ‘sociologists’ and ‘anthropologists’ were more or less forced to accept whatever deŽnition the dismal science of economics came up with. And given the growing materialistic bent of the latter, the result was to leave power pretty much out of the picture. Thus, as political economy lost its original cohesion, the intellectual journey of capital began limping on one leg. And as if to make a bad situation worse, this leg itself was not in such good shape. Indeed, the second problem is that economists could not agree on the proper deŽnition of capital. Capital was monetary wealth. 

That was clear enough. Figuring out what made it grow, however, was much harder. ‘What a mass of confused, futile, and downright silly controversy it would have saved us’, wrote Schumpeter (1954: 323), ‘if economists had had the sense to stick to those monetary and accounting meanings of the term instead of trying to “deepen” them!’ Of course, the problem was not the desire to ‘deepen’, but the direction in which the economists went digging. And the difŽculty persists precisely because economists insist it is exclusively theirs. According to Bliss (1975: vii), once economists agree on the theory of capital, ‘they will shortly reach agreement on everything else’. But then how could they agree on it, if capital, by its very essence, involves power which they view as lying largely outside their domain? Historically, the principal contention among economists stemmed from trying to marry two different perceptions of capital: one as an incomegenerating fund, or ‘Žnancial wealth’, the other as a stock of physical contrivances, or ‘capital goods’. The central question has been whether and in what way ‘capital goods’ are productive, and how their productivity affects their overall magnitude as ‘capital’. Mainstream economics has generally tried to show that capital goods were indeed productive, and that this ‘positive’ attribute is what made capital as a ‘fund’ valuable. 

The marriage did not work well, partly due to a large age difference. The older partner, capital, comes from the Latin caput, a word whose origin goes back to Babylon. In both Rome and Mesopotamia capital had a similar, unambiguous economic meaning: it was a pecuniary magnitude. There was no relation to produced ‘means of production’. Indeed, caput meant ‘head’, which Žts well with another Babylonian invention, the human ‘work day’ (Bickerman, 1972: 58, 63; Schumpeter, 1954: 322–3). The younger partner, ‘capital goods’, was born millennia later, roughly together with capitalism, and it was only since the physiocrats that economists began associating ‘capital’ with roundabout production processes. For most economists this association is common sense. But then the fact that ‘capital’ predates ‘capital goods’ by a few thousand years suggests that their overlap is not that self-evident. ‘Capital’ is best viewed as a shell, an abstract form in need of contents. 

The shell is a readily observable monetary magnitude, and is largely beyond dispute; its contents, on the other hand, are not at all apparent, and must hence be reasoned theoretically. Over the past few hundred years, perhaps due to the highly productive thrust of capitalism, most writers have chosen to look for ‘materialistic’ contents. But this need not be the only route. In fact, by focusing on ‘material’ considerations alone, much of the ‘social’ contents of capital, including that which is not unique to capitalism, has been left out of the picture. This neglect has proven costly, leaving capital theory, as well as many of its derivatives, mired in controversy. For the neo-classicists, the basic problem stemmed from trying to quantify ‘capital goods’ so that they can be aggregated into ‘capital’. The ‘formal’ problem, identiŽed already by Wicksell (1935: 149), was that unlike labour and land, capital goods were heterogeneous, and therefore could not be added in terms of their own technical units. The only way to do so was by using money values, but the value of capital goods depended on the rate of return, which already incorporated the quantity of capital in its denominator. 

The result was a circular deŽnition in which the quantity of capital depended on the . . . quantity of capital! A more substantive, ‘social’ challenge came from Veblen (1908a, 1908b, 1908c, 1908d, 1909), but it was only half a century later that the criticism began to echo. Following Sraffa (1960) and the ensuing Cambridge Controversy, it was shown that the ‘quantity of capital’ was a Žction, and that productive contributions could not be measured without prior knowledge of prices and distribution. Sraffa’s famous ‘reswitching’ examples demonstrated that, contrary to neo-classical theory, ‘capital intensity’ need not have a unique, inverse relationship with the rate of interest. In other words, the fact that a capitalist uses a less ‘mechanized’ process (fewer ‘capital goods’?) does not necessarily mean she is using less ‘capital’. The neo-classicists conceded there was a problem, offering to treat Clark’s quantitative deŽnition of capital not literally, but as a ‘parable’ (Samuelson, 1962). Some, like Ferguson (1969), even went so far as admitting that neo-classical theory was a ‘matter of faith’. But then parables and faith were hardly enough. With the ‘quantity of capital’ unde- Žned, there is no production function, no supply function and no equilibrium. And with these gone, economics fails its two celebrated tasks of explaining prices and quantities. The material footing of capital therefore had to be retained. The Žrst and most common tactic was to gloss the problem over, or ignore it altogether. So far this seems to be working, as Robinson (1971) predicted and Hodgson (1997) conŽrmed. 

Indeed, with the exception of ‘specialists’, most economists rarely lose sleep over capital theory. A more subtle line of defence was to argue that the problem, however serious in principle, was of limited importance in practice (Ferguson, 1969). Given the abstract nature of neo-classical theory, however, resting its defence on relevance is hardly persuasive. The third and probably most signiŽcant response was to embrace disaggregate general equilibrium models, in which there was no ‘capital’ and no general ‘rate of interest’, only individual inputs and individual input prices. But then this was hardly a solution at all. While the shell called ‘capital’ may or may not consist of individual physical inputs, its existence and pivotal social signiŽcance are hardly in doubt. By ignoring capital, general equilibrium has augmented its other weaknesses, turning itself into a hollow formality. The Marxist treatment of capital, though different in goals, has run into similar problems. Throughout Das Kapital there is no ‘analytical’ deŽnition of capital, perhaps for a good reason. Marx saw capital not as a ‘thing’, but as a comprehensive social context whose description was intertwined with its explanation (Marx, 1894: 947–8). The context of capital included the production process, the division of labour, technological progress and, above all, the institutional and power arrangements shaping the collective consciousness. 

According to Wright (1977: 198), the notion that capital accumulation involves merely the tangible augmentation of machinery, buildings, raw materials and the like is alien to Marxist thinking. Instead, he maintains, ‘capital accumulation must be understood as the reproduction of capitalist social relations on an ever-expanding scale through the conversion of surplus value into new constant and variable capital.’ Emphasizing this aspect of Marx’s writing, Shaikh (1990: 73) similarly reiterates that ‘capital is not a thing, but rather a deŽnite set of social relations’, and that in order to understand it, ‘one must therefore decipher its character as a social relation’. But then when it came to measuring capital, Marxist theory has never really managed to transcend the ‘materialistic’ boundaries of labour time. 

Marx (1867: 114) insightfully emphasized the societal essence of valuation, making the value of a commodity an expression of the ‘portion of the total labour-time of society required to produce it’. His troubles began when he tried to build this total from the bottom up – that is, on the basis of quantiŽable labour inputs. In so doing, Marx not only assumed that production contained the code of distribution and accumulation (which the post-Sraffa controversy put into question), but also that the production process, including that of ‘labour power’, could – at least in principle – be objectively identiŽed in functional, quantitative terms. Indeed, by concentrating on the role of production, Marxist value theory tends to ignore the impact on measurement of power institutions such as monopoly and oligopoly, dual labour markets and redistribution by government, to name only a few (Howard and King, 1992: 282; Sweezy, 1942: 270–4). In the absence of price-taking, freely mobile capitalists and workers, labour values become practically useless for the study of prices and accumulation. In fact, under non-competitive conditions, with the wage rate deviating from the worker’s ‘socially necessary’ cost of reproduction, the value of labour power itself – the basic input in all production processes – is already ‘contaminated’ by power relations. The problem of all production-based theories of accumulation – be they neo-classicist or Marxist – is well reected in their inability to deŽne clearly what is being accumulated. 

The implicit assumption is that accumulation could somehow be measured in material terms. In the neo-classical world, where the goal is ‘well-being’, capital is presumably reducible to some units of pleasure, or ‘utils’ as the neo-classicists like to call them. Marxists see capitalists as driven by the circular goal of accumulation for the sake of accumulation, a principle best understood in terms of power. Their analytical category of capital, however, is measured in terms of ‘labour time’, and therefore remains entangled in the material intricacies of production. The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative approach to the study of capital, seeking to break it loose from the overly ‘materialistic’ grip of economists and put it back where it belongs – in the broader Želd of political economy.1 Drawing on the institutional frameworks of Veblen and Mumford, our principal contribution is to integrate power into the deŽnition of capital. Briey, the value of capital represents discounted expected earnings. Some of these earnings could be associated with the productivity (or exploitation) of the owned industrial apparatus, but this is only part of the story. 

As capitalism grows in complexity, the earnings of any given business concern come to depend less on its own industrial undertakings and more on the community’s overall productivity. In this sense, the value of capital represents a distributional claim. This claim is manifested partly through ownership, but more broadly through the whole spectrum of social power. Moreover, power is not only a means of accumulation, but also its most fundamental end. For the absentee owner, the purpose is not to ‘maximize’ proŽts but to ‘beat the average’. The ultimate goal of business is not hedonic pleasure, but differential gain. In our view, this differential aspect of accumulation offers a promising avenue for putting power into the deŽnition of capital. The literature on social power is extensive and the relationship between power and accumulation has recently attracted considerable attention from Marxist and institutionalist writers. 

However, as far as we know, power has never been incorporated into the deŽnition of accumulation. If this can be done successfully, the theoretical consequences for political economy will be signiŽcant. In particular, it will help clear logical road-blocks in existing capital theory, making political economy more theoretically coherent. DIFFERENTIAL ACCUMULATION 173 Following this introduction, Section 2 uses Veblen’s separation between business and industry to examine the non-linear links between power and production. Section 3 builds on Mumford’s emphasis of symbolic drives, arguing that accumulation is possible only because capital is not a tangible artefact, but a social mega-machine. Bringing these two issues together, Section 4 offers a tentative operational deŽnition for differential accumulation, examines its development in the USA, and assesses some preliminary implications. The last section touches on the signiŽcance of power for the future of capitalism and beyond.

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