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MARXISM AND THE ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM

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Flows of value and the analysis of class relations

The phenomena and the causal processes which figure in [Spatial Divisions of Labour] are conceptualised in terms of class, and in more general terms social, relations and not in terms of value. This, I have come increasingly to believe, is an important distinction. Value analysis and class analysis are of course not mutually exclusive approaches; they are indeed clearly related. And value itself, as is oft repeated, is a social relation. However, they do often exist uneasily side by side in empirical analysis. Moreover it seems to me to make an important difference to the whole tenor of an analysis, which of the two is adopted as the main entry-point. This is quite apart from the byzantine entanglements into which the ‘law of value’ has fallen and which make it, in my view, unusable in any empirical economic calculus. This is not to say that the concept of value is not useful for thinking through the broad structures of the economy and for forming the absolutely necessary basis for some central concepts – exploitation, for instance. But that is quite different from the, in my view vain, attempts to use it as a basis for empirical economic calculation – the frequent references in some literature to things such as ‘the organic composition of capital’, for instance, often being in fact references to capital intensity measured in terms of price. However besides all these technical objections it seems to me that there are also important implications for the nature of analysis which arise from taking class rather than flows of value or even of capital as the initial frame.

Perhaps most obviously, class interests as perceived by the members of any class are not necessarily the same as economic interests and particularly not necessarily the same as short or medium-term economic interests. Moreover class interests may override immediate economic interests, or may hold the key to understanding why long-term rather than short-term economic advantage proved to be decisive as a basis for action.