Capital Calls the Tune'

...Even Adam Smith saw in acquisitiveness not virtue but expedience in promoting growth...

...Heilbroner gets off to a slow start and, at least through the first half of the book, decelerates...

...With each new Heilbroner book comes the expectation that, even in the dry gulch of professional economics, some clear light can be made to fall on the most intractable subjects...

...The Nature and Logic of Capitalism should have ended on a conviction of strength...

...What emerges most clearly here is an understanding of how attitudes toward wealth have evolved...

...At the heart of that relationship is domination, not the brandishing of the whip as in days of old, but what can be equally harsh in its effect, the refusal to sell and the withholding of jobs...

...Under the juggernaut lie two victims: nature and culture...

...Described in admirable detail, these Kondra-tieff cycles (named for their Russian inventor) are the subject of much controversy...

...Put simply, "capital calls the tune...

...Nothing is evil that generates profits, which are rationalized as "earnings...

...The argument is neither advanced nor is it made very enjoyable with the likes of this: "The viscosity that is so prominent a feature of social history must therefore be traced to the stabilizing influence of the behavior-shaping cores of its social transformations...

...Qualified by what might be called Heil-broner's uncertainty principles, the guarded statement becomes merely banal...

...by J. Patrick Lewis Five years ago, in Marxism: For and Against, Robert Heilbroner provided an eloquent, original, and generally sympathetic account of that checkered world view, Now he has turned—and not for the first time—to the Marxist bugbear, capitalism...

...Such terms as "the business world" and "industrial society" convey at once too much and too little...

...All that was necessary was for John Locke to come along and proclaim that the drive to amass wealth had God and logic behind it, and of course he did...

...He seeks to understand the game without the players, without workers, executives, technocrats, shareholders, people who walk...

...Talcott Parsons redux, A pleasure it is then to turn from this analysis of institutions to ideology, where Heilbroner so often has so much to say...

...Acquisitiveness, once widely regarded as greed, a sinful "passion," as Albert Hirschman has called it, was gradually transformed into a calming "interest...

...Among these endowments are the universal necessity for the bestowal and receipt oflibidinal energy or affect...

...The real issue, no longer to be avoided, he believes, is the definition of capitalism, the laying bare of its dynamics...

...it contains little that is new...

...The tainted notion of surplus, redolent of exploitation, has been effectively erased from the canon of orthodox economics...

...It is unlike Heilbroner to make this case in rarefied terms...

...Marketability becomes the measure of brilliant ideas...

...Uncharacteristically, bite is exactly what this book lacks...

...lie, make love, vote...

...There follows a relentless social war among capitalists "where the only defense available [is] the successful recapture of capital-as-money from the hands of the public...

...We have long since arrived at the position where capital is virtually free of any obligation to justify itself...

...Capital's success depends on the compliant attitude of workers willing to dance to the tune...

...That singularly critical element, the drive to amass capital, is not an end in itself but a means of attaining more wealth, The transformation of capital into money and back into capital (Marx's M-C-M formula) is actually a social process involving "the owners of money and goods, the momentary embodiments of capital, and the users of these embodiments," the workers...

...The thread of the argument is unexceptionable...

...Its legitimacy is unqualified and rarely questioned...

...His analysis of the role of the state is no less derivative...

...He begins with an empty claim: Capitalism is "that social order in which a certain kind of nature gives rise to a historically unique logic...

...Far from being a private economic system, the regime of capital falters without "socializing, protecting, and stimulating state activities...

...Capitalism's contemptuous disregard of the environment has been widely noted...

...Why this could not also apply to preliteraie cultures, feudalism, and socialism is left unremarked...

...The sacred and the secular—religion and science—serve to promote the capitalist logic of untrammeled growth...

...Heilbroner weaves the work of classical economists Max Weber, Thorstein Veb-len, Ernest Mandel, and others into a Marxian quilt...

...In short, questions of morality cannot intrude upon the drive to amass wealth...

...Is this sex...

...On the subject of human nature, jargon overwhelms...

...That these earnings appear because the owners of capital agree "not to withhold their property from use" is never considered...

...Here they are assumed to be "the expression of deep-rooted changes in the contest of forces that determine the prevailing profitability of the system—in short, the 'class struggle.*" But the picture of the future is particularly vague...

...This theme of domination, played out J. Patrick Lewis, an economist, teaches in the Integrated Studies program at Otler-bein College in Ohio...

...in "the regime of capital," occupies central ground here because Heilbroner is at pains to show how it binds together the drive for wealth on the one hand and the attainment of power on the other...

...The aim is "to give the argument as much specificity as possible, without which it would not have the bite I intend for it...

...The Nature and Logic of Capitalism is an exception...

...While "the outlook for accumulation should be propitious," economic growth "seems likely to generate material and social consequences of increasing disruptive magnitude...

...Heil-broner is noted not least for the strength of his convictions...

...Heilbroner further emphasizes the cavalier treatment of ideas—"the commodifi-cation of life"—where "the most outrageous—indeed, even overtly subversive-books, games, motion pictures, art, or even style can be quickly absorbed ('coopted') by the system...

...Heilbroner draws a convincing picture of the past as a series of "long waves," twenty-five years of prosperity followed by equally long bouts of sluggish growth...

...Predictions are impossible, expectations unwarranted, all because of the "opaque processes"—technology, the nuclear threat, the class struggle, changes in ideology...