Acta Oeconomica 10. (1973)
1973 / 2. szám - BOOK REVIEWS - Becsky Gy.: Sweezy, P.: Modern Capitalism and Other Essays.
BOOK REVIEWS which it may be concluded that — as he sees it — “the” multinational firm does not exist, nor even “the” American multinational firm. I wish to restrict myself here to state that the lack of clarification about the relationship of (particularly) the big international business empires with the country where the parent company is registered points strongly to the necessity of more research in this field. The forecast of Professor Franko that MNCs are increasing their involvement in the LDCs is a rather mooted point; the spread of worldwide sourcing is quite compatible with an overall decrease of direct investments. Nor does it seem warranted that something like an Eastern European MNC is likely to emerge in 1975. Indeed, new forms of interfirmcooperation between socialist enterprises are searched for and evolving, but they will have little in common with MNCs of the Western pattern.Gy. Ádám Sweezy, P.: Modern capitalism, and other essays. New York—London, 1972. Monthly Review Press. 184 p. Sweezy’s recently published volume of essays provides a comprehensive survey of the studies he had published in the past few years, for the most part in various issues of the Monthly Review, as well as of one or two studies written earlier (1956, 1959) related thematically to the newer ones. As regards the scope of the questions studied, and the relationship of the problems dissected in the different essays, the selection was a successful one. Even though the author examines questions apparently as distant from one another as the operation laws of the modern capitalist world economic system, and the relationship among the political economic teachings of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, we nevertheless receive a comprehensive picture of Sweezy’s views on the most important aspects of the capitalist world economy, its basic law of motion and its social consequences. As to the majority of these views, we know them from earlier works by Sweezy (and Paul Baran), but we consider it expedient to complete their brief review and criticism in connection with this new volume of Sweezy. “What distinguishes the ‘scientific’ economists from the other people who think, talk or write about economic topics, is a command of techniques that we class under three heads: history, statistics and ‘theory ’(...) Of these fundamental fields economic history — which issues into and includes present day facts — is by far the most important” (pp. 3 — 4). The author uses this Schumpeter quote to open the first study in the volume (“Modern Capitalism”) and in ’ general he sticks consistently to the principle cited above. He derives the development of European and world capitalism not from the abstract schemes, but depicts it as a concrete process of economic history. He finds the basic feature of the process in the external financing of the primary accumulation of capital, in other words, in acquiring the necessary liquid capital from exploiting the early colonies and in the steady continuation of this process, as a result of which the majority of the countries of the world were doomed to backwardness within the system. “Ever since then capitalism has consisted of two sharply contrasting parts: on the one hand, a handful of dominant exploiting countries, and on the other hand a much larger number of dominated and exploited countries. The two are indissolubly linked together and nothing that happens on either part, can be understood if it is considered in abstraction from the system as a whole” — emphasizes Sweezy (p. 5), and this is equally true of the pre-industrial revolution mercantile capitalism and of the industrial capitalism that followed. He terms the two parts of the system as developed and underdeveloped ones: “We thus do not subscribe to the usage which equates ‘modern’ with ‘developed’. The