Tag Archives: Marxism

Michael Roberts comments briefly on Richard D. Wolff's two new book, Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism. Probably the salient point: "As Wolff has said: 'If you want to understand an economy, not only from the point of view of people who love it, but also from the point of view of people who are critical and think we can do better, then you need to study Marxian economics as part of any serious attempt to understand what’s going on. Not to do it is to exclude yourself from...

I have been invited by the ISEPA’19 conference (organised by the Dicle University) to speak atheir conference. Since I could not make it due to other obligations I was asked for a video lecture. Its subject is ‘Economic Crisis and the crisis of Economics: Political Economy as a realistic and credible alternative’ Nikos Zappas did an excellent job in recording and editing the video. The link for watching the video is below: [embedded content] The abstract of the lecture is the...

Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Science , originally written in 1985, but reprinted at the end of 2017, recounts a wide history of serious Marxist thought on science starting with Marx and Engels themselves, and going up to the mass workers’ movements of the 1930s and 1940s. In keeping with a dialectical conception of science, Marxist ideas aren’t presented as static but evolving through debate and experiment in the face of new scientific and political challenges.... This...

Mag[ie continues to fisk Paul Mason on Marxism and MMT. Magpie's Asymmetric WarfareGetting all Tied Up (4) Magpie

The post is interesting from the POV of history of economics. Antony P. Mueller points out how MMT owes more to Kalecki than to Keynes. His criticism of MMT goes astray in assuming the conventional economic view of debt-financed fiscal deficits crowding out private sector productive investment. MMT shows how this assumption is erroneous in that the net spending after taxes injects the exact amount of bond issuance in offset. It's the spending that funds Treasury security issuance.  In...

The presntation for the lecture at Universidad Computense (Madrid 24-4-2019) can be downloaded from the following sites: https://www.academia.edu/38916945/CONCEPTS_OF_STRUCTURAL_CHANGE_MAINSTREAM_HETERODOX_AND_MARXIST_CONCEPTIONS_AND_THE_GREEK_CRISIS https://www.scribd.com/document/407446210/Concepts-of-Structural-Change-lecture-in-Universidad-Computense-Madrid-2019...

Personally, I’d recommend Marxists to pay MMT closer attention. It has plenty to teach us. I would say the same to MMTers. Marxism is about emancipation of workers from wage-slavery, which Marx analyzes in terms of capitalism as concentrated private ownership of the means of production being based on rent seeking and rent extract. This is free riding on the system and is parasitical.  Under capitalism, workers are in a position similar to serfs and peasants under feudalism and the...

I am reposting the article below by Wally Mooney (with permission) which was an indirect reply to Paul Mason’s recent article. I thought it was a very lucid and well-argued piece on why Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)’s conclusions as to how money is created is factually correct and that is the case whether you are a Marxist or a Capitalist or somewhere in between. For me it also illuminated Marxist ideas (with which I have to imagine, Paul Mason presumably agrees). Must-read, IMHO.Wally...

A perennial question for Marxists is how to overturn capitalism. Will institutional changes that improve the lot of workers but fall short of ending capitalism immediately help or harm this cause? To the extent that social struggle is a learning-by-doing process, it may be that the securing of small gains can whet the appetite for more significant gains and that institutional reforms of a transformational nature can place revolution on a more secure footing if and when it does occur. But...

World Review of Political Economy Vol. 9, No. 4, Journal Article Is the Financialization Hypothesis a Theoretical Blind Alley? Stavros Mavroudeas and Demophanes Papadatos World Review of Political Economy Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter 2018), pp. 451-476 Published by: Pluto Journals DOI: 10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.9.4.0451 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.9.4.0451 Page Count: 26...