Subjects Archives: Economic Theory

Recent reporting reinforces the false impression that the United States is threatened by Chinese and Russian expansionism.

With the continuing pandemic–and expiring housing and unemployment benefits across the country–millions of people may have their utilities cut off soon.

Both the number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation and the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation are once again on the rise, signaling a worsening of the Pandemic Depression.

Unequal distribution means the poorest countries are getting trampled in the stampede for COVID-19 vaccines.

Capitalism will not ‘automatically’ morph into some ‘postcapitalist’ or socialist system due to technology replacing the human workforce. As the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY explains, ending capitalism will require a conscious, collective action on the part of ‘the many’—the working class.

As millions of Americans stand on the brink of economic annihilation, the money keeps flowing to Wall Street thanks to carefully contrived mechanisms to maintain a dying financial system afloat.

Hobsbawm’s thinking was guided by dialectical materialism, which was a scientific outlook based on analysis. It always accounted for unpredictable human agency and, though economic factors played the principal role in the development of history, this study rejects the claim that Hobsbawm was a mechanical determinist.

IT is often believed that the ability to pass on property to one’s progeny is an essential element of capitalism, without which the capitalists’ incentives will dry up and the system will lose its dynamism.

The third major influence on Marx’s critique of political economy (in addition to and combined with classical economics and Hegel’s philosophy) was utopian socialism.

The U.S. military establishment will breathe a sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Nearly 800 former high-ranking military and security officials penned an open letter in support of the Democratic candidate during the campaign.

India is being pushed toward a de facto unitary state, with states being kept totally out of the loop in decision-making, as seen in the new agricultural laws, goods and services tax compensation, Jammu and Kashmir bifurcation and new National Education Policy.

The new U.S. financed counter-revolution hopes to manipulate sensitive issues and create the conditions for a social confrontation, for conflict and destabilization of the country.

WEALTH distribution data are notoriously difficult to interpret. This is because variations in stock prices affect wealth distribution, so that a stock market boom suddenly makes the rich appear much richer, while a stock market collapse makes wealth distribution less unequal overnight.

But where did Marx’s critique of mainstream economics come from? It certainly did not emerge in one fell swoop, as a ready-made theory of capitalism. And it wasn’t produced in isolation, independently of the society within which it was first produced and then further elaborated.

Keynes’s criticisms of neoclassical economics set off a wide-ranging debate that came to define the terms of—and, ultimately, the limits of debate within—mainstream economics.

Once it was created as a new theory of capitalism, neoclassical economics expanded its influence—in its original countries as well as elsewhere.

Readers today will be more familiar with contemporary mainstream economics than with the mainstream economics of Marx’s day. So, let’s start there.

In the previous chapter, we saw that Marxian economics represents a two-fold critique: a critique of mainstream economic theory and a critique of capitalism, the economic and social system celebrated by mainstream economists.

In this episode, Money on the Left hosts speak with Rebecca Marchiel, Assistant Professor of History at University of Mississippi, about her important new book, After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (University of Chicago Press, 2020). After Redlining tells the story of the anti-racist urban reinvestment movement in early […]

It’s an obvious question for those of us living now, in the twenty-first century. Is Marxian economics still relevant?