Varieties of Capitalism: A Marxist View By: Muhammad Ridha Marxist explanation on capitalism often accused for its over-generalization. Its emphasis on capital-labour contradiction as the universal essence of capitalism is a counter-intuitive notion since in the empirical level, the process of capitalism cannot be reduced solely to this notion. Logical as it is, this argument seems does an unfair assessment of Marxism on its ability to explain capitalism. Marxism does sensitive on the question on specificity of capitalism in which addressing the problem of the varieties of capitalism that exist within capitalism itself. This essay then, will try to answer (or argue) about why capitalism developed differently across the world from Marxist perspective. This essay suggests that varieties of capitalism can be understood as uneven and combined development of capitalism. The uneven and combined development creates specific class contradiction that shapes the power structure in the state. This then implicate on how the state determine the outcome of development itself. The main argument of varieties of capitalism came from how competition operates in capitalism. Competition in capitalist world is not a perfect competition in which firms are entirely passive and make no attempt to reduce price and cost (Moudud 2010, p. 15). Rather, capitalist competition is a forceful condition in which every firms has to actively minimize their unit cost. In here, firms utilize tactics and strategy to gain and hold market share, and price cutting and cost reduction are major feature in this constant struggle (Shaikh 1980). According to Marx (1976), competition enables the capitalist to minimize the unit cost of the capitalists by mechanization of means of production in the long run. It means that the value of the machinery has to be increased in order to increase the productivity. For Marx, profit is a money-form of surplus value. The accumulation of capital thus understood as accumulation of surplus value. Labour (I.e workers) then create surplus value from their interaction with means of production (machinery, etc). Mechanization then makes the process of production more efficient since it can reduce the needs of the worker while increasing the number of commodity production. This then makes the firms more profitable than before. Within this capitalist competition, it is unsurprising for some capitalist to concentrate and centralize the ownership of capital. Concentration of capital understood as the increase of capital through the capitalization of surplus value by capital, while the centralisation of capital is the joining together of various individual capital unit which thus form a new larger unit (Bukharin 1927, p. 117). In here, the competition between those firms which are able to mechanized their productive forces and those firms which unable to do that create a winner-loser relation in which the winner will crush the loser in competition. Trotsky (Allinson and Anievas 2009, p. 51) argues that this nature of competition shapes geopolitical relation within capitalism which constitutes the internal development of a nation. In his observation on Russia at that time, he found that as a result of a particularly poor 'natural -economy condition' of the Russian economy, the character of Russian state influenced by direct economic competition. It was through directly geopolitical rivalries that the economy techniques and organizational innovations of the West determined the Russian economy via the agency of the state. This imbalance nature of geopolitical power, which backward (periphery and semi periphery) and advanced (core) country can coexist, in the single moment of capitalist development on the world scale called by Trotsky as uneven and combined development of capitalism. True as it is, this idea needs to be clarified further. Rosenberg (in Allinson and Anievas 2009, p. 54) argues that 'combined development' developed by Trotsky needs to be extended. He develops the concept of 'combined development' in three distinct but inherently interconnected ways. First, combined development refers to the coexistence and interactive development of all societies throughout history. Second, through these processes of inter-societal development, there results an interdependence of 'the structures of social, cultural, and material life' (p. 324). In other word, the