معماری اجتماعی سرمایه داری

self-organises into a dynamic equilibrium with statistical properties that are in close qualitative and in many cases quantitative agreement with a broad range of known empirical distributions of developed capitalism, including the power-law firm size distribution, the Laplace firm and GDP growth distribution, the lognormal firm demises distribution, the exponential recession duration distribution, the lognormal–Pareto income distribution, and the gamma-like firm rate-of-profit distribution. Normally these distributions are studied in isolation, but this model unifies and connects them within a single causal framework. The model also generates business cycle phenomena, including fluctuating wage and profit shares in national income about values consistent with empirical studies. The generation of an approximately lognormal–Pareto income distribution and an exponential–Pareto wealth distribution demonstrates that the power-law regime of the income distribution can be explained by an additive process on a power-law network that models the social relation between employers and employees organised in firms, rather than a multiplicative process that models returns to investment in financial markets. A testable consequence of the model is the conjecture that the rate-of-profit distribution is consistent with a parameter-mix of a ratio of normal variates with means and variances that depend on a firm size parameter that is distributed according to a power-law.

The dominant social relation of production within capitalism is that between capitalists and workers. A small class of capitalists employ a large class of workers organized within firms of various sizes that produce goods and services for sale in the marketplace. Under normal circumstances capitalist owners of firms collect revenue and workers receive a share of the revenue in the form of wages. Over the last hundred years or more the number and type of material objects and services processed by capitalist economies have significantly changed, but the social relations of production have not. Marx [1] proposed the distinction between the forces of production and the social relations of production to convey this idea. The existence of a social relationship between a class of capitalists and a class of workers mediated by wages and profits is an invariant feature of capitalism, whereas the types of objects and activities subsumed under this social relationship is not. The social relations of production constitute an abstract, but nevertheless real, enduring social architecture that constrains and enables the space of possible economic interactions. These social constraints are distinct from any natural or technical constraints, such as those due to scarcities or current production techniques. Therefore, unlike many economic models that theorise relations of utility between economic actors and scarce commodity types (i.e., actor to object relations studied under the rubric of neo-classical economics), or theorise relations of technical dependence between material inputs and outputs (i.e., object to object relations studied under the rubric of neo-Ricardian economics) the model developed here entirely abstracts from these relations and instead theorises relations of social dependence mediated by value (i.e., actor to actor relations, arguably a defining feature of Marxist economics). The model ontology is therefore quite sparse, consisting solely of actors and money. The aim is to concentrate as far as possible on the economic consequences of the social relations of production alone, that is on the enduring social architecture, rather than particular and perhaps transitory economic mechanisms, such as particular markets, commodity types and industries. As the worker–capitalist relation is dominant in developed capitalism the model abstracts from land, rent, states and banking. There are important causal relationships between the forces and relations of production, but in this paper they are ignored. In what follows a dynamic, computational model of the social architecture of capitalism is defined and a preliminary analysis given. It replicates some important empirical features of modern capitalism.

The aim was to understand the possible economic consequences of the social relations of production considered in isolation and develop a model that included money and historical time as essential elements. The theoretical motivation for the approach is grounded in Marx's distinction between the invariant social relations of production and the varying forces of production. Standard economic models typically do not pursue this distinction. The model of the social relations of production replicates some important empirical features of modern capitalism, such as (i) the tendency toward capital concentration resulting in a highly unequal income distribution characterised by a lognormal distribution with a Pareto tail, (ii) the Zipf or power-law distribution of firm sizes, (iii) the Laplace distribution of firm size and GDP growth, (iv) the exponential distribution of recession durations, (v) the lognormal distribution of firm demises, and (vi) the gamma-like rate-of-profit distribution. Also, the model naturally generates groups of capitalists, workers and unemployed in realistic proportions, and business cycle phenomena, including fluctuating wage and profit shares in national income. The good qualitative and in many cases quantitative fit between model and empirical phenomena suggests that the theory presented here captures some essential features of capitalist economies, demonstrates the causal importance of the social relations of production, and provides a basis for more concrete and elaborated models. A testable conjecture is that measures of the empirical rate-of-profit distribution will be consistent with a parameter-mix of a ratio of normal variates with means and variances that depend on a firm size parameter that is distributed as a power-law. A final and important implication of the computational deduction outlined in this paper is that some of the features of economic reality that cause political conflict, such as extreme income inequality and recessions, are necessary consequences of the social relations of production and hence enduring and essential properties of capitalism, rather than accidental, exogenous or transitory.