Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy

210 Pages·1999·0.55 MB·English

by  Robert Albritton (auth.)

Dialectics and
Deconstruction in
Political Economy
Robert Albritton
Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy
Also by Robert Albritton
A JAPANESE APPROACH TO POLITICAL ECONOMY: Unoist Variations
(co-editor)
A JAPANESE APPROACH TO STAGES OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT
A JAPANESE RECONSTRUCTION OF MARXIST THEORY
Dialectics and
Deconstruction in
Political Economy
Robert Albritton
Professor, Faculty of Arts
York University, Ontario, Canada
© Robert Albritton 1999
All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court
Road,London W1P 0LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified
as the author of this work in accordance with the
Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in hardcover 1999
First published in paperback 2001 by
PALGRAVE
Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVEis the new global academic imprint of
St.Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and
Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd).
ISBN 978-0-333-94837-8 ISBN 978-0-230-21448-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230214484
ISBN 978-0-312-22447-9 hardback (in North America)
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Albritton,Robert,1941–
Dialectics and deconstruction in political economy /
Robert Albritton.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Marxian economics.I.Title.
HB97.5.A443949 1999
335.4—dc21
99–21774
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction 1
2 The Unique Ontology of Capital 13
3 Hegel’s Dialectic and the Dialectic of Capital 54
4 The Anti-Essentialism of Max Weber 97
5 The Problematic Althusser 121
6 Deconstruction and Political Economy 150
7 Conclusions 179
Notes and References 182
Bibliography 193
Index 199
v
Acknowledgements
This book has emerged from years of discussion and thought about
Marxian political economy. Given the scope of the book and its gesta-
tion period, it would be impossible to trace all the influences on my
thought and adequately thank members of classes that I have taught,
study groups in which I have participated and participants in the
countless conversations I have had. I am thankful to live in such a sup-
portive and stimulating social milieu. But within this milieu there is
one person who stands out – Tom Sekine has influenced my thought
immensely, and it is through him that I have become acquainted with
at least some of the work of Kozo Uno. I also want to thank those
who have read parts or all of the manuscript and have offered con-
structive criticism: John Bell, Colin Duncan, Frank Pearce, Rafael
Indart, Stefanos Kourkoulakos, John Simoulidis, Randall Terada,
Marc Weinstein, Richard Westra and Alan Zeuge. Finally, grateful
acknowledgement is made to Editions Rodopi for permission to print
a substantially revised version of ‘The Unique Ontology of Capital’
(as Chapter 2 of this book), which appeared in Ryszard Panasiuk and
Leszek Nowak (eds), Marx’s Theories Today.
ROBERTALBRITTON
vi
1 Introduction
Our world is one in which the contradictions of relatively unopposed
capitalism are becoming more blatant every day. Neoliberal globalis-
ation is throwing a growing proportion of the world’s people into
desperate economic insecurity and poverty – providing ever fewer
well-paying, secure jobs relative to the world’s population. At the
same time, irreparable damage to the Earth’s environment is acceler-
ating at a truly frightening pace. And one of the great ironies is that
because of ideological manipulation, intellectual fashions and fads,
and the seeming triumph of neoliberal capitalism, less and less atten-
tion is being devoted to the task of refining and improving the theory
developed by Marx in Capital – the theoretical work that more than
any other advances our understanding of capital’s deep structures.
How ironic that intellectuals would turn away from a theory that sets
the explanation of the deep structure of capital on a strong footing
precisely at a time when capitalism is the main force wreaking havoc
in the world.
Of course there has been and continues to be at least some atten-
tion devoted to Marx’s Capital, but seldom is that attention directed
towards refining and improving the theory of capital’s inner logic as a
wholeor towards thinking in depth about the most effective use of the
theory as a whole to improve our understanding of concrete reality.
Typically interpreters have strip-mined Capital, extracting only those
gems that their intellectual niche market values. Few have attempted
to inhabit and reflect upon the world of the theory of capital’s deep
structure as a whole. Such an effort to dwell on capital’s inner logic
implies thinking about capitalist dynamics both economically and
philosophically in their purest and least dilute forms.1
There are a variety of reasons why few have taken this route.
Marxian economists have found fault with Marx’s theories of value
and price, and because they have failed to see the philosophical depth
and power of the theory as a whole, they have too easily abandoned it
instead of finding ways to rectify its technical flaws.2Philosophers have
sometimes written about aspects of the philosophical depth of the
theory, but because they lack the necessary grounding in economic
theory, they too often fail to see the importance of the theory as an
economic theory of capital’s inner logic as a whole.3 Finally, some
1
2 Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy
well-meaning Marxian economists have radically reinterpreted Capital
in order to make it more immediately relevant to the rough and
tumble of history, where ‘inner logics’ seem out of place and disequi-
librium is more apparent than equilibrium.4Here the internal integrity
of a theory of capital’s deep structures is sacrificed to the demand for
‘relevance’ and immediate empirical applicability. The problem, as I
see it, is to combine an understanding of the philosophical implica-
tions of the theory of capital’s deep structure with a rigorous
refinement of the theory of capital’s economic logic as a whole. This
combination of painstaking economic and philosophical analysis is
difficult to come by given the division of disciplines in modern acade-
mia. It is the work of Japanese political economists Kozo Uno and
Tom Sekine that, in my view, most closely approximates this combin-
ing of philosophy and economics, and hence it is their work that
provides the theoretical basis for this book.5
Indeed it is by studying their work that I have become increasingly
aware of the unique ontology of capital – an ontology that in its
uniqueness requires not only a rethinking of economic theory but also
an extensive rethinking of philosophical categories. Above all this
book is a rethinking of philosophy from the point of view of Uno and
Sekine’s approach to political economy, or perhaps a critique of phil-
osophy from the point of view of a particular Marxian philosophical
economics.6If, as I believe, capital is the most important single deter-
minant of modern history, and if capital has a unique ontology, then it
becomes necessary to begin rethinking philosophy from the point of
view of capital. A careful analysis of capital’s ontology leads us
towards challenging and revising nearly every philosophical school,
discipline and category. The philosophical economics presented in this
book casts doubt on all general philosophical theories of subject–
object relations, of language and of knowledge. It does so by insisting
that capital’s ontology and epistemology are unique, and by showing
how this uniqueness fails to be accounted for by the generalising
ontologies and epistemologies that are typical of most philosophy. I
argue that many fundamental philosophical categories need to be
rethought from the point of view of the unique ontology of capital.
For example, no general philosophy of subject–object relations will do
if it is contradicted by the subject–object relations peculiar to capital.
No general theory of language will do if it is contradicted by consider-
ations of how language needs to be understood in relation to the
theory of capital. And it will be argued that the science of political
economy, which aims to understand capitalism, is not only ontologi-
Introduction 3
cally, epistemologically and methodologically unique, but is also onto-
logically differentiated internally between distinct levels of analysis.
According to Uno and Sekine, political economy can be divided
into three relatively autonomous levels of analysis: the theory of a
purely capitalist society, the theory of stages (no teleology implied) or
phases of capitalist development, and the theory of historical change.
Their approach is unique in emphasising the distinctiveness of each
level and the complex articulations between them. It is an approach
that though originating in Uno’s work in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s
is particularly germaine to today’s intellectual milieu, that in being
overly sensitive to the pitfalls of essentialism and reductionism has
challenged our ability to advance substantive knowledge about the
world.
Our age seems increasingly to be one of relativism, cynicism, lack of
vision and lack of realistic alternatives. Lack of confidence in our
rational capacities has led to timidity when it comes to making knowl-
edge claims. Mainstream economic theory, with its abstract formalism
on the one hand and narrow instrumentalism on the other, has not
and is not serving us well. Indeed it is too deeply embedded in capital-
ism itself to achieve the degree of objectivity needed to provide the
basis for thinking about the sort of radical structural transformations
that are called for by our historical predicament. What is desperately
required in this area of intellectual endeavour is theoretical work that
is not simply formalistic but instead grasps the substance of the deep
structures of capital, and can use this understanding to inform the
structural transformations required to achieve democratic socialism.
The need for a science of political economy, by which I mean the
same thing as a science of capitalism, derives from our need to under-
stand our past so that we can move towards the future with a sense of
who we are and what our possibilities are. Capitalism has been around
for such a long time that we have largely become its creatures. Can we
rest content to remain so when rampant consumerism threatens the
planet and growing inequality threatens the moral fibre of civilised
life? And yet, clear and realistic thought about alternatives since the
demise of ‘actually existing socialism’ appears to be undermined by a
postmodernism that is all too often morbidly self-indulgent, aestheti-
cist and paralysed by all-encompassing ‘undecidability’.
It seems that there is not much to choose between mainstream econ-
omic theory that is inherently procapitalist, and postmodernism, which
either rejects economic theory or reduces it to radically contingent and
contextual rhetoric, and reduces radicalism to a series of hyper-