"The Nature and Logic of Capitalism"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Robert L. Heilbroner, in "The Nature and Logic of Capitalism", struggles with three difficult-to-define words --'nature', 'logic', and 'capitalism' and comes to some startling, if not revealing, opinions on capitalism. It evaluates his theory that nature is the innate ability or power to create relationships and it wields this ability in a structured logic, the end result, which is a regime known as capitalism. It looks at how he analyzes capitalism not as a mere economic system but as a regime. A regime indicating a ruling power structure empowered to make and enforce change.

From the Paper:

"Heilbroner, acknowledging and confirming Marx, then posits the theory that competition among capitalists, left unchecked, would drive profits to zero. Marx stopped at this point, satisfied with his theories of the challenges of surplus value. Heilbroner takes Marx further by suggesting that Marx's ?factors of production" (land, labor, capital) are not comparable or equivalent entities and produce wealth only when workers act upon land. That is the "nature" of the beast. Heilbroner, then, sees the "logic" of this "nature" as having several distinctive features. The first was that capitalists, as holders of social power, were independent of the state's control ever the means of production, and over the socializing "nature" of the state."

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