A two-part lecture series by C.P. Chandrasekhar, professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, on ‘Revisiting Capital in the Age of Finance – 150 Years of Das Kapital’ here on Saturday gave a wonderful insight into the dialectics of anarchy and order within capitalism.
The programme was jointly organised by the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation (CREST) and Chintha Ravindran Foundation.
The 150th anniversary of the publication of Das Kapital, Prof. Chandrasekhar said, was to celebrate a treatise that has had a major influence on people who tried to understand the nature of capitalism and its dynamics.
Marx framed the elements of Das Kapital from the traditions of French socialism, German philosophy, and English political economy. But it was in England that he saw the classical ground for capitalism, he observed.
Three tendencies
According to him, Marx had weaved into his analysis three tendencies that made capitalism. The first was the logic of accumulation under capitalism that resulted in rapid development of the forces of production and brought it into conflict with the social relations of production. The second was the conflict between capital and labour, and the third was the inevitability of crisis under accumulation, he said.
Classical political economy, in the view of Marx, belonged to a period in which class struggle in capitalism was yet underdeveloped. The weakness of that struggle gave the still-nascent bourgeois political economy its scientific perspective.
Finance today is very different from the times in which Marx wrote Das Kapital with credit assets forming the main form of financial assets and banking the over-whelming dominant financial activity. Finance, insurance and real estate accounted for high shares of total value added in the U.K, U.S., and Germany, Prof. Chandrasekhar said.
Modern economies seem to be flooded with assets that would qualify as fictitious capital in the view of Marx, he said.