As the unemployment figures continue to increase implacably upwards, it is sobering to reflect that the underlying structural crisis of the world capitalist system is now in its tenth year. The recent article by Michel Aglietta (‘World Capitalism in the Eighties’) in nlr 136 (November–December 1982) is undoubtedly a major contribution to a Marxist understanding of why chronic stagnation has dominated the world economy since the end of 1973. Especially stimulating is Aglietta’s emphasis on the dynamics of the international division of labour between the main capitalist economies, and the international monetary relationships and contradictions to which this gives rise. Without observing the concrete motion of the relations among nations each having a specific insertion in the international economy, the global structure of the world economic crisis is not comprehensible. Thus Aglietta is correct to adopt a comparative and historical mode of analysis that rejects abstractions pitched at the level of ‘capital logic’ or the neo-classist fantasy of a homogeneous international economic order.
In my opinion, however, Aglietta bends the stick too far: his very proper emphasis on the international division of labour slips into an analytic position that makes the trade relations among heterogeneous nations the central process of crisis generation. It is especially curious that an author whose principal work, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (nlb 1976), devoted such priority to the class struggle at the point of production in the etiology of crisis, should now have so little to say about the roles of class relations and capital accumulation. Why are the central problematics of the respective analyses kept so distinct?
The separation of themes reminds me of the implicit procedure of Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy’. His master plan, formulated at the end of the 1850s, envisioned the treatment of six major items: Capital, Landed Property, Wage Labour, State, Foreign Trade, and the World Market. As evident in the final form of the finished sections of Capital, the basic principles of the first three themes are initially treatable in abstraction from the latter three. Aglietta’s recent essay raises the question of whether the latter three, especially foreign trade and the world market, can be analysed by themselves. I must register a methodological objection and say no. Even in the most concrete study of phenomena arising from the world economic crisis, it is necessary to refer to the underlying dynamics of accumulation and class struggle which are refracted through the surface of international commercial and financial relations. Otherwise, observations can not help being more or less fragmented, ad hoc and superficial. Likewise, the political implications of such observations will probably be obscured and misleading. Frankly, Aglietta’s essay is not immune from such tendencies.