The unique ontology of capital

pp. 13-53

in: Robert Albritton, Dialectics and deconstruction in political economy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

The object of knowledge of political economy, as I understand it, is capitalism. It is generally agreed that capitalism has existed for at least 300 years, but in that period it has developed unevenly and taken many different forms, some societies being more capitalist and some less. Despite the multiplicity of forms, there seem to be certain persistent forces or logics at work that tend to homogenise social relations in capitalist societies, even if they fall short of ever achieving full homogenisation. Commodity-economic logics seem to have a certain automaticity about them that, though never total, is discernable, as in the movement of capital from less profitable to more profitable sectors, or in the movement of prices as supply and demand vary. Also, once commodity-economic logics subsume the labour and production process they are both expansive and invasive, in the sense that in the long run they tend to expand globally and to subsume other forces or shape other social forces more than being shaped by them, as evidenced by the increasing globalisation of capitalism and the impact of capital on all areas of social life. And if we look at capitalist history, it seems as though the tendency towards the domination of economic life by an increasingly self-regulating commodity-economic logic grew until at least the 1870s (some might say to the present day, but today the degree of state intervention and other forms of organised intervention is much greater than in the 1860s in England).