Radical Political Economy

Abstract

Radical political economy emerged out of critique of capitalism from conceptual and moral grounds, and developed in conjunction with the trade-union and left-wing political movements. Unlike neoclassical economics, which takes market foundation of economy for granted and eternal, radical political economy treats economy as a social organization and maintains ephemerality of market system, as well as capitalism. In Capital, Marx put forward that capitalist economy is a particular kind of market economy where labor power is also commodified. In this analysis Marx sublimated moral critique into conceptual and offered conceptual base to radical political economy. There are three main contributions in Capital: (1) fetishism of commodity, (2) surplus value, and (3) law of tendential fall of profit. After Marx, researches extended to crisis theory, monopoly capital and imperialism, management of socialist economy, etc. In spite of oppression arising from the Cold War, the anti-Vietnam War Movement instigated resurrection of radical political economy, and the Union of Radical Political Economics was founded in the US in 1968. Their agenda included economic segmentation and poverty, labor process and the firm, crisis theory, dependency, theories of state, culture, and ideology. When it comes to globalization, however, radical political economists tend to view it from the dependency perspective of dependency theories, which interpret the problem of underdevelopment homological to capital–labor relations transposed horizontally across space. This simplistic argument can be rectified and radical political economy conceptually enriched through closer interface with critical economic geography to formulate a real ‘middle-range theory’. Economic geography can also be placed on a more critical and conceptually robust foundation by incorporating crisis theory, neocolonialism, dependency, and new international division of labor (NIDL) theories.