Capital Accumulation: Breaking the Dualism of "Economics" and "Politics"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter outlines the main problems of capital theory, key issues which need to be resolved, and the way in which an alternative concept of capital may affect the future evolution of IPE. Briefly, existing theories of capital can be classified into three groups, based on their relationship to production. The neoclassical paradigm makes output a function of factor inputs (the amount of the different factors of production – labour, raw materials and capital goods – used to produce that output). Capital, perceived as one of these factors, is counted in its own technical units. Marxists view production as a socio-material transformation in which capital changes its skin from money, to commodities, to more money. The engine of this transformation is the labour process, in which living labour power is converted into “dead labour” embedded in commodities. Capital, growing directly from this process, is measured in labour time. For the institutionalists, production is a complex societal process, whose qualitative intricacies cannot be easily deciphered, let alone quantified. In this latter framework, capital is neither a productive input nor a material output, but rather a symbolic pecuniary crystallization of the power controlling the process. Seen in that way, capital can be measured only in differential terms, relative to other capitals. Conceptually, neoclassical and Marxist theories are built from the bottom up, deriving accumulation from the underlying process of production. The institutionalist view, on the other hand, is constructed from the top down, with production subjugated to accumulation. The troubled history of capital theory suggests that bottom-up explanations are logically vulnerable if not impossible. The top-down view, although largely unexplored, is unlikely to face the same problems. Indeed, by focusing directly on power and on the way it shapes societal reproduction, this route not only bypasses the intractable “input-output structure” of industry, but also offers a way of integrating politics into our very conceptualization of capital.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".