Laws and tendencies in Marxist political economy

Fleetwood, Steve

Abstract

Whilst terms like 'law of the tendency', 'tendency law' and 'tendential law' appear in Marxist political economy, they are unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies and disambiguates them. Part 1 differentiates between law as (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency; and (iii) tendency. Part 2 focuses on (ii) identifying five interpretations: tendency as a trend, cyclical variation, stochastically specified law, counterfactual event and a deliberately imprecise concept. Part 3 introduces tendency as the (transfactual) way of acting of a thing with properties. Part 4 explains why this conception of tendency is impossible to mathematise. © The Author(s) 2012.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Nov 8, 2011
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 26, 2016
• Journal: Capital and Class
• Print ISSN: 0309-8168
• Electronic ISSN: 2041-0980
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 36
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 235-262
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816812437921
• Keywords: tendency, law, regularity law, tendential law, ontology, aetiology, critical realism
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/968212
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816812437921
• Contract Date: Mar 29, 2016