TOWARDS A NEW THEORY OF CAPITAL--论文代写范文精选

生产关系和积累之间的联系是显而易见的，从马克思的两种形式的循环，简单的循环目的是使用价值,扩大流通最后是更多的资本。下面的paper代写范文进行详述。

ABSTRACT 
Our starting point is that accumulation is not an offshoot of production, but rather an interaction between productivity and power. The concept of power is problematic, no less than that of capital. Without getting too deeply into its complexities, our own emphasis is on asymmetric power, or ‘power over’. Following Lukes, we see power in capitalism as held and exercised by groups of individuals, whose action or inaction significantly affects the actions and thoughts of others. This power is applied within structural constraints, though the agency–structure distinction is itself potentially ambivalent and theory-dependent. For instance, the power of one group is often imposed as structure on another, power could be solidiŽed into structure and then melted back into power, structure could be altered by power, or it could have its own internal dynamics (for a critical treatment, see Lukes, 1974, 1977, 1978). 

The link between power and accumulation is evident from Marx’s two forms of circulation: simple circulation (C M C), where the purpose is use value, and expanded circulation (M C M ), where the end is more money. The difference is fundamental. In the Žrst case, typical of the worker’s life cycle, the goal is material; in the second case, representing the capitalist drive, the aim is symbolic. Capitalists of course tend to consume more than workers, but that is beside the point. ‘Accumulate, Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!’ writes Marx. ‘Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake’ (1867: 652). The capitalist seeks higher proŽt, not in order to buy more goods and services, but in order to assert his or her differential power. 

Unfortunately, Marx’s insight into the power drive of accumulation has never been integrated into his analytical framework. The parallel dynamics of simple and expanded circulation captured the duality of productivity and power, but the vehicle of accumulation, C, remained arrested in a one-dimensional material framework of ‘labour content’. The Žrst step in reinstating the duality of productivity and power is to remove the superŽcial separation between ‘economics’ and ‘politics’. Capitalism is not an ‘economic system’, but a whole social order, and its principal category of capital must therefore have an ‘encompassing’ deŽnition. As we see it, capital should be understood in terms of ideology, religion and the basic instincts of violence and sex, as well as in terms of production, creativity, consumption and well-being. 

In short, an attempt to deŽne capital – if that is at all possible – should begin with a broad institutionalist view of society. Perhaps the Žrst attempt to develop an institutionalist theory of capital along such lines was offered at the turn of the century by Thorstein Veblen. Later, his student and colleague Lewis Mumford expanded some of Veblen’s themes into a broad theory of power civilization. The frameworks of both writers build on the primal social interaction between creativity and power: Veblen associated this interaction with a distinction between industry and business, whereas for Mumford it was part of a conict between democratic and totalitarian technologies. Their profound insights, unduly neglected by political economists, deserve close scrutiny and we turn to them now.

Industry and business 
Neo-classical economists see hedonic pleasure and the pursuit of material well-being as the ultimate goal of human beings, and the drive to equilibrium as the governing mechanism (or at least the underlying ideal) of all societies. Veblen, on the other hand, started by identifying the conict between creativity and power as the prime mover of human history. In the modern capitalist order, he argued, this duality is reected in a fundamental distinction between industry and business. For Veblen, industry and business are two separate spheres of human activity. Industry constitutes the material context of capitalism, although it is not unique to it. When considered in isolation from contemporary business institutions, the principal goal of industry, its raison d’être according to Veblen, is the efŽcient production of quality goods and services. 

The hallmark of industry is the so-called ‘machine process’, which Veblen equated not merely with the use of machines, but more broadly with the systematic organization of production and the reasoned application of knowledge. Above all, Veblen accentuated the holistic nature of industry. The neo-classical emphasis on individualism and its Robinson Crusoe analogies of the innovative ‘entrepreneur’ and single ‘consumer’ were misleading myths. The machine process was essentially a communal activity, whose productivity derived Žrst and foremost from cooperation and integration. The reasons were both historical and spatial. First, modern industrial production is contingent on the ‘technological heritage’ of society, the general body of ‘community knowledge’ grounded in the ‘accumulated wisdom of the past’ (Veblen, 1908b: 326–9). Second, over time the gradual accumulation of knowledge makes production more spatially interdependent. ‘Evidently’, writes Veblen, ‘the state of industrial arts is of the nature of a joint stock, worked out, held, carried forward, and made use of by those who live within the sweep of the industrial community. 

In this bearing the industrial community is a joint going-concern’ (1923: 64). Following Sombart, he emphasized the comprehensive nature of industry, in that it ‘draws into its scope and turns to account all branches of knowledge that have to do with the material sciences, and the whole makes a more or less delicately balanced complex of sub-processes’ (Veblen, 1904: 7–8). Given this growing dependency of both knowledge and processes, says Veblen, the efŽciency of industrial production increasingly hinges on synchronization and standardization of both production and wants (an issue resurrected half a century later by Galbraith (1967) with his ‘revised sequence’ and attack on ‘consumer sovereignty’). As a highly integrated system, industry is strongly disposed towards elaborate planning and close cooperation. 

Ultimately, it calls for ‘solidarity in the administration of any group of related industries’ and, more generally, ‘for solidarity in the management of the entire industrial trafŽc of the community’ (Veblen, 1904: 17). Although Veblen’s emphasis of integration and synchronization seems hardly earth shaking, mainstream economists have managed to ignore systematically two of its key implications. One is that distribution cannot possibly be based on factor productivity. The other is that distribution should therefore be sought in the realm of power. According to Veblen, business differs from industry in both methods and goals. Business enterprise means investment for proŽt. It proceeds through purchase and sale towards the ulterior end of accumulated pecuniary wealth. 

While industry is carried by the ‘instinct of workmanship’, business is a matter of ownership and power; whereas the former requires integration, cooperation and planning throughout society, the latter spells conict and antagonism among owners, and a cleavage running between businessmen and the underlying population of working consumers. These profound differences have crystallized into two different ‘languages’. Unlike industrial activity with its tangible, material categories, business trafŽc and achievements are counted in strictly pecuniary terms. Economists insist on reducing business magnitudes to ‘real’ utilitarian units, though that merely attests their pre-capitalist habit of thinking. Under the price system, men have come to the conviction that money-values are more real and substantial than any of the material facts in this transitory world. So much so that the Žnal purpose of any businesslike undertaking is always a sale, by which the seller comes in for the price of his goods; and when a person has sold his goods, and so becomes in effect a creditor by that much, he is said to have ‘realized’ his wealth, or to have ‘realized’ his holdings. In the business world the price of things is a more substantial fact than the things themselves.(论文代写)

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