Review of Radical Political Economics

This paper argues that an important mechanism linking increasing rents and the rising earnings’ inequality among workers with similar skills is the increase in domestic outsourcing and the growth of networked forms of production. This has multiplied contractual relationships and legal claims to profit and rents that reflect interfirm power relations. Firms with the greatest clout are able to claim the largest share of the rents; the weakest struggle to remain viable.

These are comments on Eileen Appelbaum’s David Gordon Memorial Lecture.

This paper locates social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory in relation to traditional Marxism. It then applies SSA theory to analyze the current trajectory of system transformation in the global system. Drawing lessons from the global crisis of the 1930s, it uses SSA theory to illuminate the causes and possible consequences of the system transformation that now appears to be developing—a transformation that may be replacing parliamentary democracies by right-wing nationalist repressive regimes in many countries.

After the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shifted towards a greater acceptance of capital controls (what it calls capital flow management measures) for regulating international capital flows with the publication of its “New” Institutional View. This begs the question of what such a change means for developing economies; specifically, whether the new framework addresses the needs they have for producing financial stability. That is the topic examined in this paper.

The capitalist system is based on property rules, which are the same for all forms of property. Yet these rules operate differently for capital and labor as distinct forms of property. This paradox obscures the role of living labor as the source of surplus value, and hence mystifies money as self-expanding value. This “fetishism of money” facilitates “financialization,” prevents accurate analysis of the capitalist system, and the formulation of alternatives.

The present paper seeks to locate the Bhaduri–Marglin (B-M) model as an historical outcome of the Left’s internal disputes over the prospects for social democracy. In better contextualizing the B-M model as a historical response to the perceived political economic failings of the social compromises upon which the growth of postwar advanced capitalist economies had rested, both the model’s popularity and its potential limitations can more easily be understood.

This paper suggests that the conception of fundamental uncertainty grounding post-Keynesian monetary macroeconomics is consistent with a particularly complex type of decision making characterized by the social determination of preferences and outcomes. Contrary to the argument that positivism grounds post-Keynesian analysis, such a framework of analysis reflects a world in which knowledge is situated. As a practical consideration, this paper considers briefly the implications for a gendered theory of financial instability in a Post-Keynesian monetary framework.

In part 5 of the third volume of Capital, Marx analyzed the relationship between the monetary and credit systems in mid-nineteenth-century England. He argued this relationship shaped the complex form that crises took in 1847, 1857, and 1867, as well as the contradictory role and effectiveness of the Bank of England in managing those crises.

Small artisan businesses have been promoted as a liberatory alternative to large-scale enterprise. We analyze advice manuals for aspiring artisan entrepreneurs by extending Boltanski and Chiapello’s framework. While they analyze the transformation of large firms, we show the same themes have been adopted by small businesses. Focusing on themes of autonomy and creativity, we reveal that the artisan economy promoted by these texts represents a further evolution in capitalism’s co-option of the artistic critique.

Scholars have different views on the nature and pace of capitalist transformation of the Chinese agriculture. In this paper, we have, for the first time, estimated the approximate size of agricultural proletariat in China as well as the prevalence of wage labor in agricultural work. We argue that by comparing with typical capitalist agricultures in the world, China’s agriculture is increasingly capitalist rather than petty producer/populist.

Rent seeking has once again become an important topic in economics. However, rent seeking poses challenges that standard economic theory is not well equipped to handle. This paper develops a working definition of rent seeking that can be applied to post-Keynesian growth models. The main finding is that, in a post-Keynesian framework, rent seeking will have an effect on income distribution and average productivity. In addition, increases in rent seeking can have undesirable effects on the distribution of talent.

Risk of disaster exposure is often associated with prior conditions of economic deprivation, and it is held that risk would be less for an asset-rich household than an asset-poor one. Observational data may, however, contradict this expected pattern. The contradiction is resolved when we examine risk distribution through the lens of Weberian class distribution, and associate risk with peoples’ class situations. This paper draws upon the household survey data from Tanzania to illustrate this argument.

The decade of the 1980s witnessed massive changes in the internal structure and functioning of English football.¹ Several rules, instituted during the infancy of the professional game to limit profit-making, were overturned with remarkable rapidity within the space of a few years, culminating in the formation of the English Premier League (EPL) in 1992. In this paper, I engage with two questions. One, why and how was the century-old structure of English football so rapidly transformed and what were the consequences? Two, what sort of Marxian theoretical framework can we use to understand the historical trajectory of English football? With respect to the former, I follow David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberal strategies used to restore upper-class dominance to argue that the formation of the EPL can be interpreted as another instance of accumulation by dispossession, one among myriad attempts to solve the profitability crisis of the 1970s by creating an avenue for financial speculation in football clubs. Together with the deregulation of television, it converted football from a domain formerly regarded as “off-limits to the calculus of profitability” into a “business proper.” In terms of a theoretical framework, I propose that it is useful to think of football as serving global capitalism in a dual manner: as an avenue for accumulation (the accumulation function) and as a tool for legitimizing capitalist rule by producing alienated consciousness in society (the legitimation function).

There is growing awareness of the need for interdisciplinary research on complex issues, but also of the obstacles that historical boundaries between social disciplines pose to such dialogue. It is increasingly recognized that the somewhat constitutive autonomy, the progressive autonomization, and finally the “imperialism” of economics have severely reduced the possibility of interdisciplinary discussion. This paper is a first step towards developing a research program on the foundations of a non-imperialist economics. It investigates gift exchange as a missed opportunity for economics. It aims at showing that, by refusing to tackle the complexity of the gift, economics has not only lost an opportunity to develop a method suitable for the analysis of complex problems, but has voluntarily chosen not to follow a path which would have prevented it from colonizing other disciplines. Reintroducing the concept of gift into the economic discourse may thus represent a required precondition to produce an innovating discourse on economics.

Macroeconomics has been constrained by assumptions that the economy tends toward full employment, and longterm growth depends on exogenous factors, productivity, and labor force growth. This discounts effects of demand on the labor force participation and immigration, and on investment and productivity growth. Expansionary fiscal policy and greater effective demand could induce reverse (or benevolent) hysteresis where capacity grows faster with higher employment, investment, and productivity.

Since 2010, fiscal policy austerity has been a disaster for both Europe and the United States. But how much better could things be? How much good could be done by a restoration of a sensible fiscal policy? I take a sensible fiscal policy to be one that, in the words of Abba Lerner, recognizes the first principle of functional finance.

Uno and Sekine considered the early postwar stage as a qualitative divergence from the structural characteristics of capitalism resulting in a gradual ex-capitalist transition. For Westra, the disintegration happens when self-commodified money capital in the money and capital markets disintermediates itself from the value augmentation processes in the production sphere. Westra develops a theory of financialization of globalization distinctive from the post-Keynesian notion of finance-led growth regime or the classical Marxist notion of finance capital.