Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818. Over half a century ago, economists, building on the work of Piero Sraffa, extended Marx's critique. They showed that his approach to political economy was basically correct. The marginal revolution was a mistake. Here are the titles of some of the books on my bookshelf: Syed Ahmad. 1991. Capital in Economic Theory: Neo-classical, Cambridge and Chaos. Edward Elgar. C. E. Ayres. 1946. The Divine Right of Capital. Houghton Mifflin. Eugen von...

Several editions have been published of the works of Marx and Engels. One can also look in the Marxists Internet Archive. Many individual works have been published in various translations in various places. Marx's manuscripts ended up in the Institute of Social History (ISH), in Amsterdam. A first attempt was started in 1927, the first Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), in which the works were to be published in their original languages. This project was never completed. David Riazanov,...

1.0 Introduction This post argues that there is more than one labor theory of value. 2.0 The Labor Theory of Property John Locke argued that what one mixes one labor with, one has a right to own. One could read Marx's Capital as a reductio ad absurdum of this labor theory of property. I disagree with this reading. 3.0 Labor Commanded as a Theory of Welfare Given a unit of money - one dollar or one british pound - the labor commanded by that money is the amount of person-years of labor...

Table 1: Selected Events 1853 - 1856Crimean war.1861Emanicpation of the serfs under Alexander II.1877 - 1878Russo-Turkisk war.1881Alexander II assassinated by a Narodnik conspiracy.1883Plekhanov founds Emancipation of Labor Group, struggles against Narodniks.1898Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founded, first congress.1900 - 1901First publications of Iskra, an all-Russian underground newspaper for the RSDLP.1902Lenin publishes What is to be done?1903Second party congress of RSDLP,...

Guido Lorenzoni and Ivan Werning. Inflation is Conflict. Bob Rowthorn is referenced, as he should be. Frederick Guy and Peter Skott. 2005. Power-Biased Technical Change and the Rise in Earnings Inequality. The references on twitter must be to something more recent. Seth Ackerman interview with James Forder, about the myths economists believe about the Philipps curve and 1970s stagflation. Cybersocialist planning. This Jacobin article talks about Ian Wright's work among others....

In mainstream economics, marginal productivity does not determine distribution. Furthermore, every correct proposition of marginal productivity theory is consistent, under competitive conditions, with Marx's claim that workers are exploited by capitalists. Assume technology is given, the economy is in a stationary state, and one knows what technique is chosen. (Ludwig von Mises called a stationary state an 'evenly rotating economy'.) The technique consists of a list of the physical inputs...

1.0 Introduction I find the question in the title of this post hard to answer. I should probably say something about secondary literature, which I do not consider myself well-informed on. For purposes of this post, I ignore distinctions between socialism and communism. 2.0 Marx Wanted To Implement An Utopian Vision Of A Post-Capitalist Society You will sometimes find reactionaries assert that wherever Marxism was implemented, the government killed tens of millions. They are too ignorant...

Jacobin is a recent, popular socialist magazine in the United States. I think the editor is Bhaskar Sunkara. Doubtless, some of you will have objections to some of the politics of some of their writers or interpretations of various things. One nice aspect of their magazine is that they provide profiles and write ups of lesser known historical figures and events in the past. Some of these are academics writing on their speciality. Some are book reviews. I have gathered together some...

Figure 1: A Part of a Parameter Space This post revisits my numerical examples in which I demonstrate the possibility of the reswitching of the order of fertility and of the reswitching of the order of rentability. Each of those posts presents a numeric example. In each, different ranges of the coefficients of production a0,2 and a1,2 are considered. This post combines those ranges, while still not considering the full parameter space, even for the slice for these coefficients. In the...

1.0 Introduction Here are some attempts to step back, but not very far, from some of the details in my numeric examples. 2.0 Henry George and Piero Sraffa Henry George's book Progress and Poverty misrepresents classical political economy. I cannot justify this claim, since I read George's book more than a decade ago. But George and his followers are absolutely correct on a couple of points. Marginalism developed by extending the theory of intensive rent, as in David Ricardo's...