Dominique Lévy

The economics of US imperialism at the turn of the 21st century

At the turn of the 21st century, US imperialism appears very strong. The paper focuses on economic mechanisms. Both direct investment abroad and portfolio investment contribute extensively to the remuneration of capital in the United States, under the form of interest, dividends and profits of transnational corporations retained abroad. The rates of return on these investments are high, in particular when compared to the returns of foreigners when they invest in the United States. The major contradiction results from the growing external trade imbalance. The outflow of dollars to the rest of the world is invested back in the country by foreigners. Their stock of assets on the United States is now the double of the stock of assets of this country on the rest of the world; the flow of income paid to foreigners is equal to that received from the rest of the world. These deficits are due to the tremendous wave of consumption by the richest fraction of the population, which followed the restoration of the income and wealth of these classes in neoliberalism. This path is unsustainable in the long run. A new phase is, therefore, on the agenda: a new configuration of neoliberalism or beyond neoliberalism?

The crisis of the early 21st Century: Marxian perspectives

The current crisis is one of the great crises punctuating the long history of capitalism, and to be properly understood it is vital to take into account its ongoing structural transformation. This book offers plural perspectives on the Great Recession, placing the analysis of finance, class and gender at the center of the debate. It begins with a comprehensive insight into the crisis, before moving on to focus on debt, asset inflation and financial fragility. Following chapters discuss global imbalances, structural monetary reform and the management of public finance, including a investigation of the Italian experience. The book concludes with novel contributions on the gender dimension of the crisis and the analogies between a nuclear and financial chain reaction.

Profitability and Stability

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the importance of profitability. This issue has been at the centre of our research programme for several years1 and the present essay is a synthesis of several earlier aspects of our work. Our organising theme concerning the importance of profitability is that Profitability matters because it is one important determinant of stability.

The Emergence and Functions of Managerial and Clerical Personnel in Marx’s Capital

The statement in the Communist Manifesto concerning the “simplifying” pattern of class relations within capitalism is well-known, and seems to settle definitively the issue: Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. [Marx and Engels, 1848, p. 109]

Managerial Capitalism: Ownership, Management and the Coming New Mode of Production

ing from intermediate groups, the class pattern is the three-polar structure of capitalists, managers, and popular classes (production workers and other categories of subaltern employees). The first steps of managerial capitalism were accomplished at the end of the nineteenth century. The ensuing twelve decades were punctuated by large crises, delineating three periods of a few decades, which we denote as social orders. A social order is a configuration of social powers defined by the hegemony of a class, the corresponding class dominations, and the potential alliances between classes. One can notably contrast the alliance between popular classes and managers after the Great Depression within the post-depression/postwar compromise or “social-democratic compromise” and the alliance at the top between managers and capitalist classes in neoliberalism after the crisis of the 1970s. These politics of managerial capitalism, as expressed within social orders, must be understood in relation to the historical trends of technology and distribution, and the secular rise of the class of managers, thus harking back to Marx’s analyses of the dynamics of productive forces and relations of production, and historical tendencies. This renewed Marxian interpretation of managerial capitalism is the object of the second part of the book. The third part attends to the long-term aspect of Marx’s analysis regarding the capability of popular classes to inflect the course of history. Looking backward, the stubborn and frustrating character of the historical dynamics of class societies is all too obvious. In the early stages of the development of capitalist relations of production, as during the revolutions of the seventeenth century in England and eighteenth century in France, the attempts at the establishment of advanced forms of democracy in line with the ideology of modernity were discouraged by the implacable course of the concentration of capital. The radical attempts at the inflection of the course of history in the direction of social progress—were they utopian or “scientific,” in Marx’s and Engels’ parlance—failed. Utopian attempts at the alteration of the course of history were undermined either by the outright negation of authority, in total contradiction with the course of socialization, or by the authoritarian concentration of power in the hands of a small minority or a single leader. Notably, new paths toward advanced forms of managerialism were opened within the countries of self-proclaimed socialism. But these endeavors ended up in sudden switches toward the structures of managerial capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. Seen from the

Welche Geschichte erzählen Pikettys Daten

Despite the remarkable work of collecting data on wealth in the major advanced economies conducted by Th. Piketty and his colleagues, the interpretations put forward in Capital in the 21st Century are not satisfactory. The analysis lacks reference to „capital“ itself, that which governs the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. The article criticizes both theoretically and empirically *Kontaktperson: Gérard Duménil,Ökonom, Forscher am CNRS (Frankreich), E ˗ Mail: gerard.dumenil@u-paris10.fr Dominique Lévy,Ökonom, Forscher am CNRS (Frankreich), E ˗ Mail: domi.levy@free.fr Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie 2015; 2(2): 219–254

TESTING FOR THE MARXIAN-CLASSICAL CRITERION OF TECHNICAL CHOICE

Below we use data from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) and Fixed Assets Tables of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA); and the Flow of Funds Accounts of the Federal Reserve (for financial variables and tangible assets). We consider the U.S. non-financial corporate sector for which appropriate data is available (and the U.S. domestic private economy for a comparison with Park’s calculation).

The Dynamics of Historical Tendencies in Volume III of Capital: An Application to the US Economy since the Civil War

As is well known, Marx did not ‘discover’ the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but found this famous law in the work of Smith and Ricardo. It is quite puzzling for us, as economists writing in the late twentieth century, why both Smith and Ricardo adhered to the existence of a declining historical trend of the profit rate. In particular it is hard to determine the empirical foundations of their conviction. For Marx, the existence of a tendency for the rate of profit to fall within capitalism was a prominent manifestation of the historical character of this mode of production. In the manuscript of volume III of Capital, Marx wrote the following: Thus economists like Ricardo, who take the capitalist mode of production for an absolute, feel here that this mode of production creates a barrier for itself.… The important thing in their horror at the falling rate of profit is the feeling that the capitalist mode of production comes up against a barrier to the development of productive forces which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; but this characteristic barrier in fact testifies to the restrictiveness and the solely historical and transitory character of the capitalist mode of production (Marx, 1894, ch. 15, p. 350).

The Economic Functions of Clerical and Managerial Personnel: A Historical Perspective

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the economic functions of managerial and clerical personnel within capitalism, including their nature, their relations to technological change, profitability, and business-cycle fluctuations. The issue is considered from an historical point of view, and illustrated using the example of the U.S. economy. Employees of public or private institutions are also considered with respect to the control of the macroeconomic stability of the system. Thus, all administrative functions, such as defense, education, welfare, etc., will not be examined.