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Abstract: The article discusses the relevance of a reference to the framework(s) of analysis of capitalism developed by Marx during the second half of the 19th century in the analysis of contemporary capitalism. The perspective is simultaneously the history of modern human societies and, more technically, the economy of capitalism. The contention is that, in both instances, a Marxian political economy provides the foundations of our understanding, but a number of adjustments are also required. The analysis of modern corporations in Volume III of Capital, with the separation of ownership and management, must be prolonged to present-day institutional features and mechanisms. The homogeneity of wage labor must be broken to incorporate the class foundations of the social divide between managers and other categories of production or clerical workers. The new framework allows for the reassertion of the role of class struggle as the engine of history. Concerning basic concepts, such as the theories of value and capital, or mechanisms, such as competition, the business cycle, and technical and distributional tendencies, the issue is the use of contemporary theoretical and empirical tools, introducing to a process of "sophistication" rather than "revision."
Key words: political economy, Marx, capitalism, classes, periodization
To those who had doubts, the violence of three decades of neoliberalism and the sudden occurrence of a major crisis provide a compelling evidence of the continuing relevance of a Marxian approach to the political economy of capitalism. As Marx and Engels had convincingly contended in the Communist Manifesto, the dynamics of capitalism, led by capitalist classes, tend constantly to propel economic mechanisms beyond the limits of what can be controlled. Recurrently, through a few decades-long phases of growth, major crises mark the historical advance of capitalist accumulation.
Capitalism revealed, however, a truly fascinating ability to recover from each of these episodes of perturbation and to initiate new phases of expansion. This resilience echoes another facet of Marx's analysis. Capitalism also promotes what Marx used to denote in Capital as the "socialization of production," the rising coordination of economic mechanisms. More sophisticated procedures are gradually established within enterprises, through national and international markets, nationally and internationally, and by the development of centralized procedures and policies beyond what Marx himself had expected. But the course of these...