3. The Method of Political Economy - Part 7 of 7

Wealth is seen by bourgeois economists as being produced for “the state”, with the state being yet another abstraction more or less synonymous with the abstractions “people”, “nation”, “society”. But, the state is the state only of the ruling class. Wealth is produced only for the latter, and only, thereby, also for the state. The state exists not to produce wealth, or to distribute wealth, to society, but only to facilitate the production of wealth for the ruling class, and to enable it to hold on to it. So, for example, in the last 30 years, capitalist states have actively worked to restrain economic growth, where it risked causing wages to rise and squeeze profits, or risked causing interest rates to rise, causing asset prices to crash.

In other words, the state actively tried to hold down social wealth, in order to protect the specific wealth of the ruling class, which takes the specific form, now, of fictitious capital. The ruling class, today, owns wealth in the form of such assets – shares, bonds and their derivatives (fictitious-capital) – whose interests are antagonistic to those of industrial capital.

So, reflecting this more mature stage of development and heightened contradiction, in which this ruling class itself becomes a fetter on the further development of capital, its state acts to hold back economic development, and capital accumulation, solely in order to protect the immediate interests of fictitious-capital, even though, ultimately, that fictitious-capital itself, and so the interests of the ruling class, depends upon the development of industrial capital! Its most blatant expression comes in the calls of speculators and bourgeois ideologists like Larry Summers for the Federal Reserve to act to create a recession, increasing US unemployment by 50%, so as to restrain wages, reduce inflation, and, thereby, interest rates, so that asset prices can again rise.

In the past, the state has done so via austerity, and via QE, as well as by the introduction of physical lockouts and lockdowns of production.

Marx, then, sets out the proposed layout of his overall critique of political economy of which, what was to become the three volumes of Capital, and the three parts of Theories of Surplus Value, formed only a part. As we know, in fact, Marx had to abandon that original scheme, and revise it, in the process of writing Capital.

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Forward To 4. Production