Subjects Archives: Economic Theory

In this episode, Money on the Left cohost Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) expands upon the argument made in his video essay, “Inglorious Basterds: Nazi Desire Fully Employed,” which takes a neochartalist lens to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).

First there was the Great Gatsby curve. Then there was the Proust index. Now, thanks to Neil Irwin, we have the Marx ratio.

In our inaugural episode, we consider the recent resurgence of full employment politics in the United States from both a political and historical perspective with historian David Stein (@davidpstein).

There is no time for long introductions. The world is, possibly heading for yet another catastrophe. This one, if we, human beings will not manage to prevent it, could become our final.

In a 2014 study, Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael Norton asked about 55,000 people around the globe, including 1,581 participants in the United States, how much money they thought corporate CEOs made compared with unskilled factory workers.

Using Marx’s critique of political economy, it’s possible for workers employed in a variety of industries to calculate the value of their work and how this value is divided between employer and employee. It becomes possible to calculate the socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, worker wages and employer profits in their particular workplace.

The commoditisation of education which makes it completely incapable of providing students with the wherewithal to engage in any active and worthwhile public discourse, has proceeded apace under the neo-liberal regime.

Credit is essential for the continuation of capitalism but also a major source of its instability, writes the Marx Memorial Library.

PUERTO RICANS marked six months today since the formation of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island, causing about $100 billion (£72bn) in damage.

The dystopia of the American healthcare system certainly invites a utopian response—a ruthless criticism as well as a vision of an alternative.

Uruguyan novelist and historian Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) wrote more than 40 books. Monthly Review lauded his creative non-fiction Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973[1971]) as ‘outstanding political economy … and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx’.

In parts one and two of this series I’ve talked about the fact that there are two conflicting versions of intersectionality, one employed by some honest to god leftists who reach backward across decades to ventriloquize the term into the mouths of the Cohambee comrades, of Audre Lord, even of Claudia Jones and Sojourner Truth, and how this exists alongside another, hegemonic version of intersectionality deployed by the corporate funded lawyers, media and the nonprofit sector which invented the term in the first place for reasons Cohambee or Claudia Jones would never touch.

he overall picture shows a small number of countries, led by the U.S., towering over the rest. Only 33 countries out of 180 have an index that is more than 1% of the U.S. index number! In the chart, the columns for these would look like the x-axis, so I have shown just the top 20 countries. Of those, only five are close to or above 20% of the U.S. number: the UK, China, Japan, France and Germany.

A literalist, out-of-context reading of Marx can get one into trouble, or at the very least, leave you hopelessly confused. For help, I look to David Harvey. Perhaps the preeminent expert on Marx’s Capital in the English-speaking world, Harvey meticulously reconstructed Marx’s approach to money in his major treatise, Limits to Capital (1982).

Warren Buffett is one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is also Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hathaway, a huge U.S. investment conglomerate. Looking at Berkshire’s investment policy reveals some important features of the economics of imperialism today and the role of money capitalists.

A recently published paper by three Yale scholars reveals “that Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed toward racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality.”

After the Global Financial Crisis, Steve Keen achieved worldwide acclaim with his book Debunking Economics (2011). It attacked the core tenets of neoclassical economics and some of its heterodox rivals. It also revealed Hyman Minsky’s post-Keynesianism as the most promising route to a scientific revolution in economics.

The last four decades have been marked by rising wage inequality, with the vast majority of American workers experiencing wage stagnation while those at the top rung of the economic ladder reap the benefits of growth in productivity. These dynamics mean that many workers struggle to make ends meet; in 2016 one in five families in which at least one person worked were living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau 2017).

No doubt about it, the recently passed tax bill is terrible for working people.  But as Lance Taylor states in a blog post titled “Why Stopping Tax ‘Reform’ Won’t Stop Inequality”: “Inequality isn’t driven by taxes—its driven by the power of capital in relation to workers.”  Said differently we need to concentrate our efforts on shifting the balance of class power.  And that means, among other things, putting more of our energy into workplace organizing and revitalizing the trade union movement.

Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.