Josef Schumpeterian sectoral creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian economy-wide transformation of base with impacts on superstructure: Marx promised rupture once technology fettered property relations; history delivered sectoral churn and chronic institutional lag; let us try to keep the soft‑true elements & discards the millenarian theological stagecraft in Marx…

Share

Columbia’s Adam Tooze said last week that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Share DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before

He does not say why:

Adam Tooze: Top Links 976 <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>: ‘[Karl Marx] “Men… enter into definite relations… independent of their will… [with] their material forces of production…. [That] constitutes the economic structure of society… on which arises a legal and political superstructure and… consciousness…. Material productive forces… come into conflict with… [property] relations of production… [which] turn into their fetters [on development]. Then… social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure…. Ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight… out… the contradictions of material life….

New superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured…. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve….

In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs…. The bourgeois mode of production is the last… form… antagonistic… emanat[ing] from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but… bourgeois society create[s] also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes…

Refer a friend

But I can say why I, at least think about this. Divide the passage into six threads:

Let us look at the passage. (I have reparagraphed the passage to make the separate thoughts clearer.) Here we have, working backward:

1. Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,

2. Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.

3. Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.

4. Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.

5. Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.

6. Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that

Give a gift subscription

And I argued <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>:

Read more