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the concept of structural crisis, in which all contradictions of the capitalist mode of
production are determinedly in the forefront.
Structural crisis, partial indeterminancy and the pro tempore level of inner
determinancy of variables, and the parametric determinism are all so well. Besides,
these concepts, either singly or collectively, have been part of political economic
studies of capitalist growth and crisis; increasingly and especially so since Mandel’s
prolific efforts. Even when Bettelheim inveighs about his provisos as to the autonomy
of parameters since the supposedly askew degree of variables as opposed to some
insubstantial change in their otherwise structural pattern, he reproaches, needlessly
undersells the formulaic breakthroughs in Marx’s explanatory schemes; Mandel
correctly notes that through an even growth of the two departments or an even rate of
accumulation within those two departments as ‘methodological abstractions’,
researchers can perhaps analyse variables of capital valorisation in their invariably
coherent foundation; but, ‘laws’ per se cannot consider the changes in the variables
themselves. More so, although Marx’s analytical categories are explorotary of long-
term consequences of accumulation(the increasing organic composition of capital, the
declining rate of profit), these are not about the exact/invariant quotients between
these tendencial consequences. In his words, ‘it is precisely the integration of general
long-term tendencies of development with the short and medium-term fluctuations of
these variables which makes possible a mediation between abstract ‘capital in general’
and the concrete ‘many capitals’. In other words, it is this which makes it possible to
reproduce the actual historical process of the development of the capitalist mode of
production through its successive stages’(1978:43)
At one level, Bettelheim’s asides are redolent of a very particular cussedness in
epistemology, quite at home next to the value-theoretical controversies in political
economy in general, and in Marxist theory in particular. Often value as ‘magnitude’,
as a fixed metric alone, is tantamount to a forthright mystification of value analysis in
Marx as sole ‘metaphysics’(see Robinson 1964). The signs of abating for this
amalgam of pontifications, sciolism and adverserial give-and-take are not yet
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