Review of Radical Political Economics

In this article, the authors evaluate the New Economyaccording to its own claims of growing prosperityand rising standards of living. Using statistics and indicators from the recent economic expansion, theydemonstrate that many of the claims about the New Economy’s increasing prosperitywere highly suspect and remain so today. They conclude that the New Economy discourse is an ideological expression of an explicit political agenda favoring corporate interests.

This article describes the role of Malthusian thinking as a rationale for the commercial development of global agriculture at the expense of peasant-livelihood security. Focusing on the impact of the cold war, in an era of peasant insurgency, it explores how the Green Revolution reflected and reinforced the West’s conviction that technological innovation, rather than more equitable systems of production, should resolve the problem of world food security said to be due to “overpopulation.”

This article reexamines the problem of labor exploitation in advanced capitalist economies, especially the United States. The article specifies the concept of labor exploitation by using both the Marxian and marginalist notions and measures. The implicit neoclassical presumption of no or little labor exploitation in a capitalist economy is rejected by the results. The alternative heterodox argument of persistent and increasing labor exploitation has been confirmed for contemporary capitalism, particularly for the United States, in recent years.

Regulation’s theory of consumption has been a significant but rather “hidden” item behind the Fordist/post-Fordist labor process connotations. Its main argument is that working-class consumption was capitalistically commodified only after World War II. Thus, there was no mass consumption to cover the capitalist mass production established in the 1920s. The basis of the post–World War II boom was the creation of a social consumption norm (via wages indexation to productivity) that ensured unfettered capitalist accumulation. This schema is both analytically and empirically invalid.

This teaching case study aims to draw out discussion in a variety of classes about the responsibilities of large corporations and their role in society. The authors provide a profile and a set of questions about Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world. Ultimately, the purpose of the study is to provoke discussions about the marketplace, social welfare, cultural homogenization, labor, and economic structure and agency in the context of expanding global corporate influence in society.