‘Opening up’ Marx. A comparison of Open Marxist and French Regulationist approaches to political economy.

by Juraj Draxler

Dissertation

MA Comparative Politics

Department of Politics

University of York

Supervisor: Dr. Simon Parker

Year: 2005

Abstract

The paper describes two neo-Marxist political economy schools, Open Marxism and the Regulation Approach, as two contradictory discourses. Both schools start with similar aims: to revive Marxist political economy, to overcome deterministic, structuralist Marxism, and to demask neoclassical attempts to portray society in terms of an equilibrium-oriented market composed of free, contracting individuals. Yet, at the end, the two schools come up with very different statements about the nature of reality. They disagree on the significance and nature of the 1929 and 1987 Wall Street crashes, they construe inflation in strikingly different terms, or, most notably, give different pictures on how capitalism is going to overcome (or how it is overcoming) the economic slowdown that set in after the boom postwar decades.

The paper shows how the outcome is given by the different discursive strategies chosen. Essentially, the Regulation Approach, as a self-avowedly scientific, empiricist school, chooses to constantly describe, categorize and re-categorize events. Open Marxism is more interested in a narration that presents capitalism as always the old story – capital tries to get the better of labour and vice versa. While doing so, Open Marxists claim they are creating an ‘open’ approach to Marxism, and Marxist political economy, by rejecting the rigidity of sociological categories that has been subverting class struggle.

The paper, however, contends that their approach, rejecting ‘intermediate categories’ and relying on two terms, ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ for any meaning, necessarily does come up with intermediate categories. Except it leaves them ill-defined and therefore without the possibility of showing their interlinking and transcendence. In order to hold the narrative together, introduction of new discussion terms is not allowed. The result is a closure towards praxis.

Contents

  1. Introduction…4
  1. Background
  2. Literature review…9
  3. The two schools
  4. Regulation Approach…13
  5. Open Marxism…19

Part one

  1. Capital

3.1 Capital and capitalism…24

3.2 Value…38

3.4 Capital circuit…49

3.5 Money…52

3.6Capitalist crisis…61

  1. Labour

4.1 Production and consumption…65

4.2Coercion, command and class…71

Part two

  1. Discourse

5.1 Epistemology and methods…74

5.2Discussion pragmatics – coherence,

logic and ‘straw men’…77

5.3 Discursive formations…84

6. Conclusion…88

1.0Introduction

In early 1990s, a group of political scientists and philosophers who had been members of Conference for Socialist Economists, a wider discussion forum that sought to revive Marxist political economy, came together to found a counter-current to what they saw as a noxious tendency in Marxism. This was, according to them, sociological fetishism, the tendency to accept social relations as ‘thinglike’ (Bonefeld et al, 1992a). Their stated aim was to revive the dialectical element of Marxist political economy. Early ideas of this group were aired on the pages of Capital & Class, a journal, new defunct, of the above-mentioned Conference for Socialist Economists. They then published a three volume ‘manifesto’ Open Marxism, a compendium of texts by authors subscribing to the programme of the group. Some of the contributors also published their own books on political economy and social philosophy.

‘Open Marxism’ has remained a small group. The number of core authors can be said to be well under ten[1], with a few ‘outsiders’ having contributed to the discussions either in Capital & Class or Open Marxism. The somewhat exclusive nature of this group is being underlined by the tendency of these authors to cross-reference within ‘the group‘- in their discussions, as we shall see, they very seldom cite as sources of inspiration or empirical fact anybody else but yet another member of ‘Open Marxism’.

Why, one might well ask, would someone want to write a dissertation on a relatively obscure group, whose epistemological predilections he does not completely share, as will probably become clear in the course of this paper?

There are at least two good reasons. First, the concerns that ‘Open Marxists’ express about the ‘closure’ of Marxist analytical concepts are simply worth pursuing for anyone interested in the general development of Marxism. Secondly, the analysis of Open Marxist discourse, this paper will try to show, serves to expose the typical tension that Marxism faces by being both a source of powerful analytical concepts and at the same time insisting on ‘praxis.’ The latter might lead to an emphasis on subject-empowerment, emasculating the analytical drive of Marxist discourse. My aim is to show that this is the case with Open Marxism. At the same time, the paper does not strive for a ‘normative’ statement. The strong pairwise confrontation with the other school analysed here could encourage such perception. However, the objective here is to strictly bring out clearly the discursive tendencies in Open Marxism.

Open Marxism: Volume 1 (1992) begins partly as an attack on the Regulation Approach[2]. The Regulation Approach, editors of this volume claim, is an offshoot of Althusserian structuralism (Bonefeld et al, 1992: ix), something that ‘Open Marxism’ will consciously stand against.

This is a strange statement, since the Approach (and certainly the core of it, embodied by the work of Aglietta, Boyer and Lipietz, otherwise known as the Paris regulation school[3]) has been based on the rejection of the notion of ahistoricity of structures as exhibited in Althusserian Marxism. Regulationists posit that a variety of modes of regulation are possible, and view the process of evolution towards them as essentially indeterminate (Boyer 1990: 12).

Nevertheless, the Approach certainly does exhibit most of the traits that the editors of OpenMarxism Vol. 1 list as noxious tendencies in Marxism. First, there is the issue of structures as such. The Regulation Approach is essentially concerned with identifying a peculiar set of institutions that according to it define the form of capitalism that arises. An offshoot of this is a certain tendency to periodise the development of capitalism – we will deal with this later. This is, secondly, due to the fact that Regulationists are keen to contribute to “the renovation of positive research” and to “develop the potential of Marx’s concepts by deploying them” in critical studies of transformations in individual countries (Aglietta 1979: 17).

But ‘positivism’ is an almost derogatory term for Open Marxists. “[] the closure and positivism of sociology” (Bonefeld et al, 1992: x), according to them, effaces the “dialectical dimension” in Marxism. Also, “empirical research…can elide all too conveniently with positivism” (Benefeld et al: xi).

To restore the dialectics of Marxism to its place, Open Marxists propose a programme of “opening up” Marxist categories. “This openness appears in, for instance, a dialectic of subject and object, of form and content, of theory and practice, of the constitution and reconstitution of categories in and through the development, always crisis-ridden, of a social world” (Bonefeld et al, 1992: x). In ‘closed Marxism’, which Open Marxists identify as the dominant form[4] social relations becomes thinglike and are presented in “a commodified and sheerly structural form” (Bonefeld et al, 1992: xi).

The attack on the Regulation Approach appears strange, since, as we said, Regulationists explicitly aim to overcome the epistemological and methodological straitjacket of immutable and determinate structural forms. But, this is not the only area where the methodological aims and scope of analysis of the two approaches overlap.

Both Open Marxism and the Regulation Approach promise to revive Marxist political economy, and they do focus on abstract as well as rather spatio-temporally specific phenomena. Both approaches discuss the economic slowdown of 1970s, the fall of the Bretton Woods system, onset of monetarist and laissez-faire orthodoxies, nature of credit economy, the meaning of the term ‘globalisation’, and so on.

Both approaches profess close affinity with Marx’s conceptual framework. Both offer sharply critical views on the conceptual basics of neoclassical economics. And both, for example, criticise those voices that mention how capitalism might be becoming less exploitative due to changes in production methods or labour organisation[5].

So, Open Marxists and Regulationists set off on their journeys with similar aims. Then something happens, and the two approaches emerge with different statements about the nature of real world phenomena, and different praxis, and downright policy, prescriptions (or non-prescriptions).

The aim of this book is to research precisely this something that happens in between. To do this, it is not enough to take the concepts used somehow for granted. It is necessary precisely to investigate the way these concepts are discursively construed and joined together. Here, the inspiration comes from discourse theory and partly from the speech acts theory. The methodology used is not rigorous, and serves mostly to give a simple, rough and ready exposition of the contrasts presented by the two approaches. It is expounded in ‘Methodology’ section of this introductory part of the paper.

The main body of the paper is divided into two parts. Part One deals with the simple narratives of Open Marxism and the Regulation Approach, comparing practically pairwise the statements of these two approaches regarding key concepts, such as capital, labour, money, credit, and so on. Part Two, then, delves into the analysis of the discourses themselves, opening up with some general remarks on epistemology and on methodology-construal. It then discusses ‘pragmatics’ of argument presentations by the Open Marxist approach (especially how they present arguments which they seek to refute) - the reason why only of this approach is simple – while the Regulationists strive for a widely accepted scientificity, which includes careful documentation of claims and counter-claims, Open Marxism seeks an entirely different way of argumentation which must be described in order to proceed further in its dissection. The final section presents how, especially, frequency and positioning of concepts in narratives makes up for discursive formations, which need to be identified in order to assess how the particular discourse ‘acts’.

The introductory section of the paper includes a basic overview of Open Marxist and Regulation approaches. This is meant to establish a basic understanding between the author of the paper and the reader. It cannot substitute for reading of the texts in question themselves. Especially when it comes to the Regulation Approach, which comprises a dense and extensive set of conceptual tools, the ‘implied reader’ of this paper is someone who is already familiar at least with Aglietta’s seminal A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. Sound understanding of Marx’s as well as of neoclassical economics is also presupposed.

2. Background

2.1Literature review

The seminal work that introduced Regulation Approach to the world was Aglietta’s A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. Here, he built on some of the research work done by Destanne de Bernis, who proposed the term ‘regulation’, and the Research Group on the Regulation of the Capitalist Economy (French abbreviation GRREC), who “devoted themselves to describing the different norms and adjustment variables specific to capitalism” (Boyer 1990: 16). Aglietta’s book also helped to coin the term neo-Fordism, which in later literature became post-Fordism, originally proposed by Christian Palloix (Aglietta 1979: 122). Theory is an attempt to interpret changes in social formations in the United States by studying them as modes of regulation, which developed to make possible regimes of accumulation (in other words, the specific labour organisation and capital accumulation setups). The ‘make possible’, again, should not be understood in a predominantly functionalist sense – Aglietta tries to see relations of production as essentially indeterminate, developing ‘spontaneously’ as sets of social structures. These structures are necessary to contain social contradictions. The study is a detailed analytical work packed with historical analysis of quantitative and qualitative data.

Although it took six years to sell the whole first run of the French edition of the book, the Approach was quickly picked up by an ever-growing group of researchers (Boyer 1990: 18 and 22-4).

There developed a variety of sub-approaches. In macroeconomic analysis, for example, there are differences in reliance on Kaleckian, Kaldorian, or neo-Keynesian toolboxes (Jessop 1988:150). Also, different researchers adopted different theories of value, ranging from more subjective to more objective versions. Aglietta himself, for example, adhered strongly to Marx’s labour theory of value in Theory, yet in his later La violence de la monnaie (1982) and in Les metamorphoses de la société salariale (1984) he abandoned it (Baslé 1995: 26).

But this arguably does not amount to a substantive difference. Where Regulationists themselves see their approaches as different is the precise understanding of the concept of regulation. Destanne de Bernis’ Grenoble group tends to understand regime of regulation as heavily formed by the state (Boyer 1990:16). The Paris school that follows more closely the concepts introduced by Aglietta rejects the notion that “regimes of accumulation remain invariant over the long run, only the institutions supporting them change without affecting their nature” (Boyer 1990: 17).

This paper follows the Paris variant of the Regulation Approach. Aglietta’s Theory will be the most heavily quoted source. This is because, first, it remains the most complete introduction to the Approach, and secondly, because due to its adherence to labour theory of value it provides a good basis for a comparison with Open Marxist texts, which, too, use labour theory of value, yet in a discursively different way. Two other books will be used for reference, Boyer’s The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction, and the compendium Régulation Theory: State of the Art, edited by, again, Boyer and Yves Saillard.

As for Open Marxism, the trilogy Open Marxism, Volumes I-III, will be used as the primary source, since it is the kind of a manifesto of the approach. And since this paper compares political economy discourses, two other books by Open Marxist authors that deal with this area will be used, The Politic of Change: Globalization, Ideology and Critique, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis, and Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, edited by Bonefeld and John Holloway. Occasionally, there will be references to other books by the core Open Marxist authors, in an effort to go to those works where concepts that appear hazy might be clarified. Also, an important source of information on Open Marxism is the journal Capital & Class.

The paper heavily relies on analysis of concepts. For this, a source is needed that clarifies in detail the extension of Marx’s conceptology as well as pitfalls of his methodological approaches. The author of this paper found none as helpful as Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx. There appears an occasional footnote reference to other neo-Marxists, such as Ernst Mandel, whose Late Capitalism especially is an extensive treatise both on epistemology and methodology and on key developments of modern capitalism.

Capital & Class provided a ‘battleground’ for the future Open Marxists and authors that critiqued their approaches, even from Regulationist positions (for example Jessop 1988). However, there does not exist, to the knowledge of the author of this paper, an extensive monographical critique of Open Marxism, let alone a comparison with the Regulation Approach. Since, again, these two share a number of stated aims and, nominally, concepts, and yet come to very different conclusions regarding nature of socio-economic reality and presciptions for praxis, it is worth investigating how this becomes possible.

2.2The two schools

2.2.1Regulation Approach

The Regulation Approach has become in the wider academic world associated with the terms Fordism and neo- or post Fordism. The term ‘Fordism’ has been adopted from Gramsci’s analysis of US capitalism (Boyer 1990: ix). As we shall see later, Fordism does not refer to an economy where some employers prefer Ford’s assembly line techniques and the wage contract where employees get paid relatively well, in homogeneous wage bands, while the industrial conglomerate siphons back this purchasing power through sales. The term denotes the type of economy based on Fordist labour organisation and on economy-wide organisation of production and demand that provides for a smooth commodity cycle. Post Fordism (we will use this chronologically younger term in preference to Neo-Fordism) refers to a regime where new technologies and labour organisation are accompanied by changing patterns and principles of capital accumulation. Economies of scale are replaced by economies of scope and of networks. Massified labour force based on manual skills is being broken up into smaller units where flexibility rather than assembly line rigidity is the norm (Jessop 2002: 96-103). And so on.

The association with these two words has become somewhat excessive and unfortunate. It leads to the simplifying view that what the Regulation Approach is primarily concerned with is the need to somehow ‘periodise’ the development of capitalism. Regulationists state clearly, however, that this would be putting the carriage before the horse. Indeed, in his 1979 Theory, Aglietta even expresses doubt whether something new will soon replace Fordism and as late as 2002 Jessop expresses reservations about the notion of Post Fordism (2002: 97).