Tag Archives: capitalism

This is my short response, originally posted here, to William I. Robinson's post here and Fred Magdoff's note in the comment section of that post:While I generally agree with Robinson's and Magdoff's analyses, what is absent, specifically with respect to Robinson's discussion, is a concrete assessment of the acute variables that measure the degree to which national States have the capacity to engage in power-maximizing behavior and, thus, pursue certain responses, i.e. imperialism, to the...

[embedded content] Short documentary on the limits of capitalism mostly based on an interview by Richard Wolf. I find the simplistic explanation of exploitation at the end (around minute 27:30) based on the time of work (prices proportional to labor incorporated) to be problematic (for a discussion of the Labor Theory of Value, LTV go here). At any rate, worth watching whether you agree with Wolf's interpretation of Marx and capitalism or not.

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McCloskey, Lazonick, Despin, and Shaikh (I'm covered) The joint AEA/URPE session was very lively, but suffered from the last minute absence of Brad DeLong. He did send the notes of what he was going to discuss here. On the topic of stagnation per se only Hans Despin suggested that it was an important phenomenon, but not necessarily for the same reasons Larry Summers and Brad De Long. It was unclear to me, however, that his views were based on a demand side story, and, hence, that this...

Marginalist ReOrientation Slow posting for a while. Too many things happening that I didn't comment on, but I'll try to weigh in on the paper by Paul Romer on the trouble with macro. At any rate, the paper DisORIENT: Money, Technological Change and the Rise of the West has been published.

Jack Goody was one of those rare thinkers that tried to think big. Not common in economics anymore, and less clear in other social sciences, as somewhat narrowly defined techniques take over the breadth of historical understanding. I've only read before his The Theft of History, somewhat iconoclastic book in which he debunks the idea that individualism, democracy and freedom were somehow invented by modern Western society.I started reading now his Metals, Culture and Capitalism. There are...

In the videos below.But first let us look at Marx’s theory. It is that capitalists aim at increasing their theft of surplus value from workers.They can do this in three ways: (1) by increasing the length of the working day while holding down the real wage to a subsistence level (that is, increasing absolute surplus value);(2) decreasing the price of the basic commodities making up the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour by automation, and thus reducing the real subsistence...

The economic historian Paul Bairoch (1930–1999) subjected some Marxist myths about Western capitalism and imperialism to critical scrutiny in his now classic book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York and London, 1993).First, was the Western industrial revolution dependent on energy from the Third World?Bairoch (1993: 59) notes that right up until the post-WWII era the West was almost completely self-sufficient in energy, and as late as the 1930s much of the developed...

This follows quite clearly from (1) the logic of Marx’s own theory in volume 1 of Capital and (2) the empirical history of capitalism.Let us run through the steps: (1) Let us assume that the concept of abstract socially necessary labour time is valid (even though the concept is incoherent, cannot be properly defined and is empirically irrelevant). But, as I note, let’s assume – for the sake of argument – that it is coherent and empirically relevant.(2) For Marx, the total working day is...

In a word: no.Why? Because an economy with more and more automation based on private enterprise and private capitalist production could still sell its output and obtain money profits, if a government managed the demand-side of the economy by providing a guaranteed income (with, say, taxes on consumption, property, and ownership of financial and real assets and returns from those assets, with the shortfall covered by central bank money creation). As long as the balance of payments functioned...