Four Lectures on Marxism

The paper was based on four lectures of Paul Sweezy delivered at Hosei University in Tokyo in October 1979, covering researches on Marxist methodology, capitalist economic laws and their specific historical manifestations, the central and peripheral structures that strengthen capitalist systemic crises, and the characteristics of proletarian revolution and state socialism. In the first lecture, Sweezy had shared his life experience of teaching and researching Marxism in the tumultuous context of capitalist in the 20th century, as well as the development of the Monthly Review school. Based on his understanding of dialectics, Sweezy had believed that the cognitive structure of the interaction between productive forces and production relations, as well as the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure, had arised and could only be appled in capitalist society. He had opposed the interpretation of historical materialism as a general economic determinism applicable to all societies. In the second lecture and its two important appendices, Sweezy had combined the study of logic and history to summarize the inherent tendency of capitalist overaccumulation in specific historical stages. He had proposed that the purpose of studying the Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit was not to predict the demise of capitalism or serve as the basis for crisis theory, but rather to measure the intensity and irresistibly of capitalist internal contradictions. Since the end of the 19th century, concentration and centralization of capital had been furthered, bringing changes to the forms of competition among capitals. Monopoly still strengthened the motivation for capital to cut labor costs to increase the rate of surplus value, layered profit rates, and the transfer of surplus value to large capital. The third lecture focused on the structure of center and periphery, emphasizing the endogenous reasons for the higher exploitation rates in the peripheral regions and the solidification of differences in political and social systems between the center and the periphery. It had pointed out how the center-periphery structure reinforced the crisis of the global capitalist system, including overinvestment, vast expansion of debt structure, weakening of the international monetary system, growing equality of central and periphery. In Marxism and the Future, Sweezy had put forward that the proletarian revolution movement in peripheral countries in the 20th century signified that Marxism became more of a universal phenomenon than any other ideology in human history, from its initial specific European context. In contrast to the concept of “socialism” in Marx and Engels’s literature, Sweezy pointed out that the Soviet Union’s denial of the existence of class conflict in its socialist model negated the fundamental principle of historical materialism that class struggle was the driving force of social development. However, he also believed that state societies have eliminated or ameliorated some of the most disastrous and intolerable contradictions of capitalism, new proletarians would in their turn revolt transform themselves from objects into subjects of history and embark on a new adventure in creating a good society.