Tag Archives: Karl Marx

Remembering Erich Fromm on the fortieth anniversary of his passing. Most people remember him for his book, The Art of Loving, but he wrote several other important works in sociology. Fromm’s critique of contemporary capitalism continued a year later in The Art of Loving, perhaps his best-known work. Not the most obviously socialist or Marxist book (in fact, Herbert Marcuse criticized Fromm for supposedly betraying radical thought, and becoming a “sermonistic social worker”) Fromm was...

Last week I gave a lecture in the seminar series on Marxist political economy organised by the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The Marxist Political Economy series is a course mainly for post-graduates and has several lecturers on different aspects of Marxian economics. Course Handbook – Marxist Political Economy 2019-20 (8)Mine was on Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Not surprisingly, the department team has...

Global capitalism, with humanity in tow, is now facing a triple crisis: a deepening structural contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, one manifested as a multi-dimensional crisis of ‘valorisation’ – that is to say, a crisis in the production of ‘surplus-value’, the very lifeblood of the profit system; an acute crisis in international relations stemming from the fact that the global productive forces are bursting the confines of the nation-state system, whose individual units...

[embedded content]Anwar Shaikh On The Transformation Problem Lots of empirical work shows that prices tend to be proportion to the labor embodied in commodities. My references in this article document this claim. Furthermore, empirical wage-rate of profits curves tend to be close to straight lines. This is not what, say, Sraffa' mathematical economics would lead me to expect. What explains these surprising empirical findings? Almost 34 minutes in, in the above video, Shaikh makes the...

This post concerns an implication of Marx’s treatment of productivity and labor complexity for the appropriateness of alternative processes of wage determination. For simplicity, it is assumed that all activity is productive in Marx’s sense (that is, productive of surplus value) and that conditions are competitive in the Marxian (and classical) sense that investment is free to flow in and out of sectors in search of the highest return. Introducing unproductive labor, including a substantial...

Minsky’s journey from socialism to stability for capitalist profitability comes about because he and the post-Keynesians deny and/or ignore Marx’s law of value, just as the ‘market socialists’, Lange and Lerner, did. The post-Keynesians and MMTers deny/ignore that profit comes from surplus value extracted by exploitation in the capitalist production process and it is this that is the driving force for investment and employment. They ignore the origin and role of profit, except as a residual...

Marx of course supports collective ownership of the means of production. But by this he does not mean simply transferring ownership deeds from private to collective entities, but rather ensuring that the working class owns and controls the means of production. He makes this clear in writing, “When one speaks of private property, one is dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already...

1.0 Introduction I have sometimes set out Marx's model of expanded reproduction, only with prices of production instead of labor values. I assume two goods, a capital good and a consumption good, are produced with constant technology. If one assumes workers spend all their wages and capitalists save a constant proportion of profits, one can derive the Cambridge equation in this model. The Cambridge equation shows that, along a steady state growth path, the economy-wide rate of profits is...

A considerable body of literature has been published, during the last century, arguing that a movement away from competitive markets must be recognized in trying to describe and understanding contemporary capitalism. The literature I am thinking of emphasizes big business, corporations, and finance. Here are some selections, not all of which I have read: Rudolf Hilferding (1910). Finance Capital: A study of the latest phase of capitalist development. Adolfe A. Berle and Means (1932). The...

Figure 1: Rate of Profits Unequal to Scale Factor for Rate of Profits This post continues the example in the previous post. I modify the prices equations so that the rate of profits in producing corn is (s1 r̂), and the rate of profits in producing ale is (s2 r̂). The solution to the price equations are: pcorn = 16 [16 + (s1 - s2) r̂]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂] pale = 32 [10 - (s1 - 3 s2) r̂]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂] w = 4 [51 - (9 s1 + 5 s2) r̂ - s1s2 r̂2]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂]...