What Analytical Insights do Marxist Political Economy Provide - Essay Example

WHAT ANALYTICAL INSIGHTS DO MARXIST POLITICAL ECONOMY PROVIDES? INTRODUCTION In our contemporary world eulogized as post-ideological, Marxism has notonly become unpopular but it is also contemplated, in both academic and policy circles, as obsolete or extraneous. In the academic circle, it is argued to have lost its analytical value particularly in a ‘discipline’ that owes its development to Marxists thoughts, political economy. In the policy circle, it is believed that capitalism bests socialism politically because it favours democracy, and economically because it favours economic growth and progress. Thus, Marxism has, in many circles, been pronounced dead and people are called upon to rally round for its funeral. But the history of human societies shows that it is difficult to bury ideas more so ideas that are scientifically grounded and have practically underpinned epochal events such as revolutions. This has questioned the veracity of the claim, especially in the academic circle, that Marxist political economy has outlived its usefulness. This paper will attempt to highlight some of the arguments advanced on this contentious and contemporaneous issue. AN OVERVIEW OF THE MARXIST POLITICAL ECONOMY Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels brought about a revolution to political economy in the 19th century. They laid the foundation for a new political economy based on the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism. They started by criticizing classical political economy. Marx in particular was interested in studying the capitalist mode of production and so that he can lay bare the hidden facts of that system. He wanted to show the faulty conclusions of Adam Smith and other scholars such as David Ricardo, J.B. Say and John Stuart Mills. These scholars tried as much as they could to scientifically explain the principles of the system the saw at work, capitalism. Marx’s critique of the works of these classical writers led to the development of a law (dialectical and historical materialism) that seeks to explain the development of all societies including capitalist societies, which he believed could be uprooted. He therefore successfully provided a new structure for human interaction, one which rejects the classical economic disaggregation into the spheres of production, consumption, and exchange. Dialectics is an old approach developed by the Greeks. It was Hegel, Marx’s teacher and mentor that popularized it in 19th century. Dialectic has two broad meanings. In one sense, dialectics suggests that the world or nature is not static or stagnant. Rather, it is always in motion. In another sense, nature of realities exhibits contradictions: the unity of opposites. Dialectic suggests that it is conflict or forces of opposite present in a society that makes change possible. These forces in conflict of opposition are usually economic in nature as Marx conceived dialectics. Marx’s conception of dialectic differed from Hegel’s because for Hegel, the source of change in human societies is ideas. Marx argued that human ideas are a product of man’s material existence and therefore cannot take precedence over materialism. In other words, Marx gave dialectics a materialist interpretation. Materialism, to Marx, is the complete opposite of idealism. Idealism is the unreal and the ideal. It raises issues in terms of how it ought to be and not how it is. It is the metaphysical and the supernatural realm. Materialism is the real, the one we can see, verify and touch. In a more specific sense, materialism assumed that the economy constitutes the real foundation of all societies and that economic relationships determine all other relationships in the society. Furthermore, the Marxist political economy is not only dialectical and materialist, it is also historical. To really study a situation more scientifically, one requires knowing how the society arose, the various stages of its development and its ultimate end. Marx’s economic interpretation of history was done with the concept of mode of production. A mode of production is the totality of economic and political relationships that make up a society at a given period. He used the concepts of forces of production and relations of production to explain the five stages of human development or five modes of production; from the primitive communal society through the slave, feudal and capitalist societies to the socialists/communist society. From the outline above, one can say that when Marxism or the new political economy emphasizes the role of the economy in the changes in human society, they are talking about constant improvements in the forces and relations of production. Changes in these spheres tend to produce changes in the non-economic spheres of the society as well. But what is important in the teaching of Marxist political economy is simply the fact that changes in the economic sphere of society and hence changes that have accounted for the different epochs in the development of human society are rooted in class antagonisms or class struggles. Thus, central to the Marxist political economy is the question of class struggle. Marx did not discover the concept of class or was not the first to use the concept. However, he assigns to it the leading role in the economic interpretation of human history by identifying class struggle as the motive force of history. Hence the Marxist aphorism, “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles” (Rossiter, 1960: 5-25 and McLellan, 1979: 10-35). At the base of Marxist political economy is the ‘grand theory’ of accumulation, which is a embodiment of several Marxists’ theories such as those of state, surplus value, capital, labour, etc. These theories form the conceptual basis of Marxist political economic analysis. Although, most of these theories are argued to be extraneous in our contemporary world, few have been embraced by Marxists, their apologists and even intellectual opponents in their inquiries. They provide insights into the understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of circuit of capital, the appropriation of surplus value from labor, transformation of state, and the contradictions in an economic system analysed at national and supranational levels. This challenges the dominant orthodoxy in the social sciences and more particularly in political economy. Hence, political economy, as an approach, discipline, method of inquiry or analytical tool, is inherently contrived by Marxist and non-Marxist heterodoxies. Marx and Engels works have been revised giving rise to many versions of Marxism. However, from the early generation of Marxist theorists and activists that focused their inquiry on the economy and politics with pristine ideologies to the contemporary generation that sways and swaps in defence of the old tradition, a common factor has been an attempt to analyse human social relations in a system of production and the imbrications of such relations with the economy, politics and history of any given society. OF WHAT ANALYTIC VALUE IS MARXIST POLITICAL ECONOMY? Mavroudeas (2006), in his critique of Meuret’s (1988) thesis of “Political Genealogy of Political Economy”, highlights the materialist nature of Marxist political economy (Mavroudeas, 2006:1-13). This makes Marxist political economy not only a unique approach to political economy but also an indispensable analytical tool. A missing link between Marxist political economy and post-ideologists’ political economy is the value attached to social relations in capitalist mode of production. Unlike the neoliberal/post-ideologists’ approach that puts premium on politics and political power without regards to the socioeconomic forces, the Marxists’ approach emphasizes the dynamism of socioeconomic relations between the major actors and their subjects in a mode of production. Such relationship has to do with the distributional aspect of production, which is characterized by inequality and exploitation. As Anderson (www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso04/anderson_100304.pdf: 5) points out, “some form of distributional analysis is an essential element of a political economic approach”. Marxian tradition provides the most cohesive approach to distributional analysis of productive and social relations. Marxists’ theories of capital and labour vis-à-vis class and class struggle are useful analytical tools in distributional analysis of our contemporary society. At national and supranational levels, policies/decisions taken have distributional consequences, which can provoke responses that can best be explained by Marxist materialist dialectics, albeit short of revolutionary fervour. This is usually analysed by disaggregating conflicting interests, identifying class power and its mechanism, contradictory in nature. Apart from workplace unionism, this can be borrowed to explain social movements by students, environmentalists, women, etc, who rally around strictly non-class issues (such as global warming, peace, ecology, etc) that are considered by even non-Marxists as injustices (Scholte, 2000: 234-60: Woods, 2000: 7-10), or even class related issues that are promoted and protected using the rights-based approach (poverty campaigns, anti-globalization campaigns, etc). Such movements fall short of the pristine class struggles envisaged by Marx, the Russian socialist revolution or even international socialist movements spurred by radical Marxists in the 1970s but they are grounded in material dialectics. Using Marxist dialectical materialism one explain how the interests of the dominant class (which can loosely cover business elite and the monopolies, multinationals and even countries they sap) are legitimised against popularized interests. One can explain why, for instance, a government/politicians financed by business moguls may lower taxes, legislate to casualise labour, or even oppose control on the emission of Greenhouse gasses. It is, perhaps, only Marxist political economic approach that can demystify the complex relations between economic, political and social forces with dialectical cognisance (conflict of interests often taking transnational in orientation). Understanding the distribution system in an economic system (in reality mode of production) requires understanding the nature and dynamics of state, and of the classes that exist/subsist within (nationally) and without (globally) it. In our contemporary world, these major conceptual tools (state and class struggle) employed in Marxist political economic analyses have been practically transformed and theoretically obscured. The transformation of capital and labour as well as social classes and the interface between them, in particular, brought about by globalization (advanced capitalism) has made the argument of the demise of the state cogent. Thanks to technological advancement. Furthermore, the state is separated from the market. The state is seen as the public realm of the capitalist society which commandeers political power while the market is the economic realm that is protected from the influence of the state power. But all these have not rendered the central argument in the Marxist theory of state to be invalid. This argument — of a state being an instrument of the dominant and favoured class—best explains the social relations that connects the political and economic spheres in both nation-states just as it is employed in explaining the transnational character of state in our contemporary world. First the separation between the state (the political) and the market (economic) is real. The connectedness between the two is explained by the nature of social relations among the classes that exist in the capitalist state. Even when we decide drop the instrutmentalists interpretation of the state and take those of the structuralists (relatively autonomous and independent from and superior to all classes) or derivationists (“a political form from the nature of capitalist relations of production”) the state as Paul Sweezy argues: i) comes into action in the economic sphere in order to solve problems posed by the development of capitalism; ii) where the interest of the dominant class (who control directly or indirectly the machinery of the state), there is strong predisposition to use state power freely; and iii) the state may be used to make concessions to the lower classes (working class or by extension the subject of policies of the influenced policies of the state) provided that the consequences of not doing so are sufficiently dangerous to the stability of the system as a whole (Holloway, J. And Picciotto, S., 1978: 5 and Sweezy, 1968: 249). Thus the Marxist political economy helps us to better understand the workings (realities) of our contemporary societies. Marxist political economy can best be appreciated in the analysis of dynamics of globalization, which is treated under international political economy. Marxist political economy has been very useful in analyzing the relationship between the core (First World or developed world) and the periphery (Third World or developing world). This started with theories that seek to explain the world system and the subsequent shift of emphasis to explaining globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Marx and Engels’ works, especially those on division of labour and imperialism, were instructive in the explanation of the relationship between the centre and periphery. From their works, several Russian theorists, particularly Lenin, developed the concept of imperialism as an advancement of capitalism and its exploitative consequences. The scholarly works of the underdevelopment/dependency theorists starting with Paul Baran in the 1970s were also spurred by radical Marxism (Peterson, 1996: 213-50). Two other revisionists perspectives that significantly influenced Marxian political economic analysis of post-cold war inquiry in international political economy are, what Beiler and Morton (2003) called, “Open Marxism” and “Neo-Gramscian” perspectives. The central argument of Open Marxism school is that the “change in the form of the global existence of capital as characteristic of the current epoch, which has to be understood through an examination of the changing contradictions between capital, the state and labour”. This school is opposed to the argument of “retreat of the state”, separation of politics (state or public realm) and economics (market or private capital) and the individualistic conception of civil society, which to a great extent reduces the applicability of Marxist conceptual tool of political economic analysis. The neo-Gramscian perspective used Gamsci’s theory of hegemony to explain the contemporary world order. This school argues that “an analysis of global restructuring has to capture the transnational restructuring of the social relations of production. It has to account for class struggle that takes place at the transnational level not only in substance, but also in form, involving national and transnational class fractions, which operate from within and through national forms of state” (Beiler and Morton, 20035-12). Conclusion If we disconnect practical Marxism from theoretical Marxism, which is seemingly impossible, Marxist approach to political economy, is a distinctive conceptual tool for analysing. As compared to the strand of classical political economy developed by Adam Smith, which has been reduced to econometrics in the economic branch of social sciences, Marxist approach to political economy, crudely or in its various revisions, marries political and economic as well as sociological ingredients of theorization and application of theories in analyzing contemporaneous events/phenomenon. And more importantly, it does so with historical specificity. Thus Marxist political economy provides an alternative to the age-long liberal practice of separating the political from the economic, and the postmodernists/neoliberals’ relegation of the socioeconomic undercurrent of politics in our contemporary setting. It remains an alternative approach to political economy that interprets the world as it is (real world) and not how it ought to or perceived to be functioning (ideal world). Besides, it can be argued that it is the multiplicity of (analytical) approaches that makes political economy essentially distinct from obscured conceptualizations (political and economic theories) in either economics or political science. It thus validates the claim of political economy as an autonomous science of human socio-politico-economic relations. But, for the avoidance of doubt, while we argue that Marxist political economy is still a relevant analytical tool, changes in our real world has made knowledge to be adaptive and not static. Dogmatism (or even ideological consensus) has no place in the academics, which means it has its policy implications. A researcher will generally want to explain a particular research problem using the best analytical tools available. Dogmatism limits choice. Limiting choices of analytical tools means limiting the horizon of knowledge. Both Marxists and non-Marxists alike must go out of their cocoons by flexing their intellectual muscles in research and policy analysis. It is only by doing so that the essence of knowledge, and indeed usefulness of Marxism in our contemporary world, cannot be defeated. Bibliography Anderson, Tim. “Marx, Method and Western Political Economy” (www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso04/anderson_100304.pdf Nov. 23, 2007) Beiler, Andrea and Morton, Adam D. 2003. “Globalization, the State and Class Struggle: A ‘Critical Economy’ Engagement with Open Marxism” British Journal of Politics and International Relations. 5:4 Nov. 2003. Holloway, John and Picciotto, Sol. 1978. “Introduction: Towards a Materialists Theory of the State”. State and Capital: A Marxist Debate. London: Edward Arnold. Mavroudeas, Stavros D. 2006. “A History of Contemporary Political Economy and Postmodernism” Review of Radical Political Economics. 38: 499 Fall 2006. McLellan, David. 1979. Marxism After Marx. London: Macmillan. Meuret, D. 1988. A political genealogy of political economy. Economy and Society 17 (2): 225–50. Preston, Peter W. 1996. Development Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Balckwell Publishers Ltd. Rossiter, Clinton. 1960. Marxism: The View From America. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Scholte, Jan A. 2000. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave. Sweezy, Paul M. 1968. The Theory of Capitalists Development. New York: Modern Readers Paperback. Woods, Ngaire. 2000. The Political Economy of Globalization. London: Macmillan. Read More