If we go back in time, we can remember Critical Theory, of Marxist inspiration, which emerged from 1920 onwards and which, essentially, resulted from the theoretical production of the Frankfurt School, with Charles Tilly and Michael Mann as its main exponents.
Charles Tilly sought to explain the trend of convergence towards the Nation-State form of organization based on the need to increase the capacity to “wage war” based on this new organizational reality.
Michael Mann chose to develop an explanatory model of the sources of power in capitalist economies, namely, the IEMP model (relating to the four sources of power, Ideological, Economic, Military and Political).
However, none of the authors managed to explain the contradictions of the Orthodox Marxist School, whose main representative was Charles Bethelheim, nor of the Monthly Review School, associated with the theoretical production of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy.
Both sought to explain the survival of capitalism based on the conceptual analysis of imperialism.
For Charles Betlelheim, capitalism would have postponed its “death” thanks to the direct investment of large multinationals in the underdeveloped periphery, obtaining very high rates of profit that mitigated the effects of the Law of Low Profit Rate Tendency in the developed center.
Hence the need for imperialist capitalism to concentrate investment in underdeveloped countries, which corresponded, for Bethelheim, to the “exploited countries”.
However, the majority of direct investment abroad by large multinationals is channeled to developed countries themselves. If 20 or 30 years ago it corresponded to 80% of the total FDI of multinationals headquartered in the developed center, today, thanks not to underdeveloped economies, but rather to Intermediate Countries (such as China, India and Brazil), almost 60% still continues to be channeled to the developed center, with 40% channeled to the Rest of the World.
For Baran and Sweezy, the emergence of capitalist imperialism had allowed cyclical crises to be mitigated by the export of production surpluses to peripheral economies, to “exploited economies”.
Hence, whenever a recession occurs in the capitalist center, a recession that generates crises of overproduction, this would lead the economies of the developed center to channel their exports primarily to the underdeveloped periphery, iefor the “peripheral countries”.
However, the majority of exports from economies in the developed center are channeled to other economies in the developed center itself (and even for some Intermediate Countries), even when the aforementioned developed world is faced with recessionary crises.
To date, no consistent explanation has been produced for these contradictions.
As, in fact, a consistent and detailed theoretical construction has never been produced on how a model based on a centrally-directed economy would work in the future and, furthermore, how economic, global and sectoral policies would be applied with coherence and effectiveness, in a model radically different from the capitalist one.
Marx himself said little or nothing concrete about this matter.
Speaking exhaustively about the contradictions of capitalism, he said little or nothing about how a collectivist society would work in the future.
No more, no less…
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