Gérard Duménil

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.

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: nThus 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.

Long-Term Trends in Profitability: The Recovery of World War II

It has become accepted doctrine among economists that the rate of profit in the United States has declined since the mid-1960s. What is less a matter of agreement is whether this decline represents a stage in a long-term secular decline. In a recent article Dumenil, Glick, and Rangel (1987) reviewed the existing empirical evidence on this topic and found that independent of variation in the definition of the rate of profit. any series extending back to 1929 reveals a stable or increasing trend. Although two periods of serious decline exist (after World War I and in the late 1950s) they are connected by a leap forward during World War II In fact in any measure which does not subtract taxes from profit World War II coincides with a considerable restoration of the rate of profit. This is an important anomaly for Marxists who predict a long-term declining tendency yet it has never been addressed in the empirical literature on this topic. There is no doubt that a restoration of the rate of profit discovered in the 1940s questions the relevance of Marx s famous thesis of a falling tendency of the rate of profit in capitalist economics. Certainly when Marx discussed the tendency of the rate of profit he acknowledged the important role of counter tendencies. However one would not expect the counter tendencies which Marx discussed to have such a concentrated impact over such a short span of time. The purpose of the present study is to investigate more carefully this leap forward in profitability. In a first part we will fully explore the statistical characteristics of the leap forward. Specifically we will compare the leap forward with earlier and future fluctuations and trends in profitability (an effort will be made in spite of the deficiencies of the data, to cover a period of 120 years). We will further determine whether the leap forward is invariant to the choice of the definition of the rate of profit or whether it can be explained by a specific choice of statistical categories. A second part will consider whether the leap forward is the expression of changes in the relative price of fixed capital, or a variation in the workweek of capital. The final part will explore whether the leap occurred in specific industries or whether it was a general feature of the economy. In the conclusion we will discuss a number of further alternative explanations.