Tag Archives: Karl Marx

In 1975, when I began to study Capital as a first-year graduate student, I was looking for the errors that my undergraduate economics teachers had told me rendered Capital obsolete. Several of these teachers belonged to the Union of Radical Political Economists and saw themselves as Marxists. But they agreed with their non-Marxist colleagues that Marx’s core value concepts were naively Hegelian. The good news, they said, was that the superstructure of Marx’s theory–class, capital...

What should the purpose of studying the history of economic thought be? Piero Sraffa explains it.The post is short and important in the study of history of thought, not only economic thought.Sraffa's answer is consistent with Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change.Naked KeynesianismOn Sraffa and the History of Economic ThoughtOpening comments, "Roundtable on Sraffian Economics as Part of the Radical Political Economics Tradition," URPE 50th...

Mariana Mazzucato’s new book is a detailed exposé of the parasitic character of modern capitalism, drawing on Karl Marx’s theory of the source of value creation. But understanding the law of value is only a first step to providing an alternative to a system that cannot overcome its inevitable tendency for periodic crises and which needs to be overthrown, argues Peter Taaffe. Socialism TodayParasitic capitalism exposed Peter Taaff | general secretary of the Socialist Party of England and...

I present four claims about Marx's Capital. I strive for topics more general than, for example, squabbles about the transformation problem. I suggest that some of these claims present a useful focus for reading Marx's book, even if part of your focus is arguing why the claim is wrong. If this were more than a blog post, I would need to cite various Marxists and scholars that inspired me. Short. Not wonkish. Worth thinking about, e.g, relative to "normalizing Marx." Implies Marx was a...

I present four claims about Marx's Capital. I strive for topics more general than, for example, squabbles about the transformation problem. I suggest that some of these claims present a useful focus for reading Marx's book, even if part of your focus is arguing why the claim is wrong. If this were more than a blog post, I would need to cite various Marxists and scholars that inspired me. Thesis I: Capital is organized around a model of a pure, two-class capitalist economy. I think the...

If you are interested in Marx.Speaking as a philosopher commenting on Marx as a philosopher more than he was an economist, I think that Matias Vernengo gets is about right. He is in agreement with John Kenneth Galbraith on it.Marx was a materialist ontologically. He had written his doctoral dissertation on Greek materialism.  He looked forward to occupying a chair in philosophy at a university as a career. His political activism obviated this, and he was forced to go into exile to more...

In this post, I will contrast the analysis of foreign trade found in Professor L. Randall Wray’s book “Modern Money Theory” and contrast it to the analysis of foreign trade that logically emerges from Marx’s theory of commodities, money and capital.... A Critique of Crisis TheoryModern Money (Pt 3) Sam Williams

1.0 Introduction This post presents a model of a steady state with a constant rate of growth in which: Total wages and total profits grow at same rate. Neutral technical change increases the productivity of labor in all industries. The wage per hour increases with productivity. Each worker continues to consume the same quantity of produced commodities. But each worker takes advantage of increased productivity to work less hours per year. In these times, when concerns about global warning...

The takeaway: The appropriate modes of economic organization vary from country to country. In saying this, I’m following Edmund Burke, who wrote: Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. The answer might lie in a distinction made by Burke as described (pdf) by Jesse [Norman]....

Frank Li is a Chinese ex-pat that settled in America after receiving a PhD in the US. He is an electrical engineer and entrepreneur.His take is informed from both the Chinese and American (Western) points of view and he offers a reasonably objective analysis in comparison to the largely one-sided and ill-informed one that one generally encounters in the West. His work covers the social, political and economic spectrum but this one focuses on economics. The dramatic rise of China over the...