8/11/2019 Marxian Crisis Theory and the Role Nof Interest...

1/1

SIMOULIDIS, JOHN. MARXIAN CRISIS THEORY AND THE ROLE OF INTEREST:

AN UNOIST APPROACH

The paper to be presented can be best appreciated within the context of two fairlyrecent trends in Marxian political economy. Interest in multilayered analyses of thecapitalist economy has been revived (by French Regulationists, the Social Structure ofAccumulation School and others) since the collapse of the Keynesian consensus in theearly 1970s. This particular trend has been motivated by an effort to distinguishbetween what is essential to capitalism in all of its phases and the historically specificforms it has taken. The second, more recent, trend has been a renewed interest inMarxs relationship to Hegel in terms of his dialectical method and its application to thecritical analysis of capital and the law of value. In both respects, it is my view thatUnoist political economy has gone the furthest in distinguishing the different layers orlevels of analysis and in applying the dialectical method to the study of capital at themost abstract level of analysis. What I will seek to do is illustrate the uniqueness of thisapproach by examining a particular aspect of Marxian crisis theory, the relationshipbetween the rate of profit and the rate of interest at the most abstract level of analysis,

and the ways in which this relationship is mediated by institutional forms at moreconcrete levels of analysis that are not anticipated at this most abstract level.The necessity of analyzing the capitalist economy in terms of different levels of analysisis based on the understanding that the social reproduction of any society cannot befully subsumed by the commodity-economic logic of capital. While there are manyreasons why this is the case, perhaps the most fundamental is that the accumulation ofcapital is essentially dependent upon a non-capitalist commodity, labour power. Marxanalyzed the regulation of industrial capitalism through the law of value, whereby thecompetition between capitals would tend towards the equalization of profit rates and allcommodities would be supplied in socially necessary quantities and produced withsocially necessary labour-time. But the law of value cannot directly regulate the supplyof non-capitalistically produceable commodities. Periodic crises are necessary to

ensure the continued commodification of labour power.In the theory of a purely capitalist economy, the rate of profit and the rate of interesthave a clear relationship that is governed by the commodity-economic logic of capital.A particular variant of an excess capital theory of crisis (labour-power shortage) will bepresented that sees crises triggered as the rate of interest gradually rise above the rateof profit and as capital moves from a phase of extensive to intensive accumulation. Atthe level of intermediate or stage theory, the relationship between the rate of profit andthe rate of interest is mediated by a variety of social institutions. Here, the role of stateeconomic policy and the rise of oligopoly led Uno (and before him, Hilferding andLenin) to study how these could reduce the acuteness of periodic crises yet lead to thenecessity of imperialist war. Finally, I will attempt to identify some of the problemsassociated with attempting to determine the relationship between the rate of interest

and the rate of profit at the level of historical analysis, given that both interest rates andprofit rates within and between countries and industries can be so radically divergent.