Tag Archives: Marxian Economics

As is well known, Marx and the classical political economists before him made a distinction between productive and unproductive labor. Marx’s distinction is somewhat differed from Smith’s. For Marx, labor is productive when it is: (i) directly productive of surplus value; and (ii) exchanged directly against capital. I remain unsure how applicable the distinction is to a state money system. Some of my misgivings are explained in an earlier post. The uncertainty has held back an attempt to...

This is a repost by Socialist Economist of an earlier article by Nick Johnson. If you didn't catch it here at MNE the first time, here it is again. If you did, well, it's more evidence of MMT getting media exposure.Socialist EconomistModern Monetary Theory and Inflation – Anwar Shaikh’s Critique Nick Johnson, The Political Economy of Development

Recent extreme volatility and sharp drops in US stock markets underscore the instability of capitalism yet again. As many commentators now note, another economic downturn looms. We know that all the reforms and regulations imposed in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s failed to prevent both smaller downturns between 1941 and 2008 and then another big crash in 2008. Capitalism’s instability has, for centuries, resisted all efforts to overcome it with or without government...

This year’s conference of the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) in Pula, Croatia had the theme of The State of Capitalism and the State of Political Economy. Most submissions concentrated on the first theme although the plenary presentations aimed at both.... Michael Roberts BlogThe state of capitalism at IIPPEMichael Roberts

China’s policy in the Great Recession was not just ‘fiscal stimulus’ in the Keynesian sense, but outright government or state investment in the economy. It actually was ‘socialised investment’. Investment is the key here –as I have argued in many posts – not consumption or any form of spending by government.… As John Ross said on his blog at the time, “China is evidently the mirror image of the US …If the Great Recession in the US was caused by a precipitate fall in fixed investment,...

Probably not of interest to all but worth posting for those interested in a contemporary Marxian approach. When we embarked on our project to explore Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), at the back of our mind was the phrase from the Marx and Engels’ German Ideology, ‘[human beings] must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’’. In class societies, since there lies between ‘living’ and ‘making history’ webs of social relations that enable and inhibit life, Marxism has...

Indeed, the real issue ahead is the battle for trade and investment globally between China and the US. The US is out to curb and control China’s ability to expand domestically and globally as an economic power. At the workshop, Jude Woodward, author of The US vs China: Asia’s new cold war?, outlined the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But this policy is failing. Trump may have launched his tariff...

First there was the Great Gatsby curve. Then there was the Proust index. Now, thanks to Neil Irwin, we have the Marx ratio. Each, in their different way, attempts to capture the ravages of contemporary capitalism. But the Marx ratio is a bit different. It was published in the New York Times. Its aim is to capture one of the underlying determinants of the obscene levels of inequality in the United States today—not class mobility or the number of years of national income growth lost to the...

While mainstream ecological theory has been dismissive of Karl Marx, serious research in recent decades has recovered some of his very important insights on ecological issues. The pioneers have been James O’Connor and the journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism—a tradition continued by Joel Kovel—but the most systematic and thorough investigations on Marx’s ecological views are those of John Bellamy Foster and his friends from Monthly Review. Many ecologists accuse Marx of “productivism.”...

I kid to this previously, but it was in a list of links. It is important enough to give it its own post.Hudson at his best. It's a must-read. Longish, so save it for the weekend if time is an issue.Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism“Creating Wealth” through Debt: The West’s Finance-Capitalist Road— To be delivered at the Peking University, School of Marxist Studies, May 5-6, 2018Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term...