Bourgeois Economists Research Articles

Regulating and Directing the Healthy Development of Various Types of Capital in China under the Guidance of the Capital View of Historical Materialism

Only by adhering to the scientific concept of capital as explained by Marx in Capital, and by drawing a clear line between the two different views of capital based on materialist and idealist conceptions of history, can we understand the phenomenon of capital in the real economy of contemporary China. In the real economy of developing commodity production, public and private capital share some common features, but there are differences in their nature. The misunderstanding, created by Western bourgeois economics, of the relationship between public and private capital harms efforts to achieve a scientific regulation of the healthy development of various types of capital, and needs to be clarified. Where the practical work of regulating and guiding the healthy development of capital is concerned, great importance should be attached to restoring and guaranteeing the dominant position of public capital within social capital as a whole; to ensuring that state-owned capital effectively fulfills the dominant role; to strictly governing the otherwise disorderly development of private capital; to strengthening control over the quantity and quality of foreign capital introduced to the economy; and to keeping state-owned capital firmly in control of the national financial system.

Ideas, Virtues and the Bourgeois Deal: McCloskey’s Rhetoric of Economics Reasserted

Deirdre N. McCloskey’s contributions to Economics cover a wide range of topics, includingstudies in Economic History, Methodology, Language and Ethics. Her most recentcollection of studies, the Bourgeois Trilogy (2006, 2010a and 2016a), substantiates thisinterdisciplinarity by bringing these fields together to reassess the history of the ModernWorld. The following paper aims to investigate how McCloskey’s interest in the rhetoricof economics impacts her reading that the Modern World rose thanks to a rhetoricalchange, known as the Bourgeois Deal, and its virtues. The discussion will fundamentallybe around the ideas expressed in The Rhetoric of Economics (1983 and 1998a) and in theBourgeois Trilogy, besides other correlated works. We believe that her studies about theRhetoric in economics and its importance for the scientific method have a fundamentalinfluence on the research structure regarding the Trilogy. Even further, our argumentemphasizes that the Bourgeois Virtues alongside Rhetoric have not only a methodologicalsense, but also an ethical one, highlighting McCloskey’s appeal to a more humane, liberaland bourgeois economics.

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Technical or political? The socialist economic calculation debate

Abstract The paper presents both the key arguments and the historical context of the socialist economic calculation debate. I argue that Oskar Lange presented the most developed strategy to deal with bourgeois economics, decisively helping to create the scientific consensus that rational economic calculation under socialism is possible. Lange’s arguments based on standard economic theory reveal that the most ardent defenders of capitalism cannot reject socialism on technical terms and that, as a consequence, the Austrian School was left with no choice but to diverge from mainstream economics in its search to develop a framework that could support its political position. This shows that Mises’ challenge from 1920 was solved and has been replaced by a political posture developed by Hayek and leading Austrians economists, who have been struggling since the 1980s to revise the standard interpretation of the socialist economic calculation debate. I argue that this revision should not be uncritically accepted and conclude that socialism cannot be scientifically rejected; it can only be politically rejected, by those whose economic interests it opposes.

Marx’s Argument for the Labor Theory of Value

In a Times Literary Supplement review of some recent literature on Marx and Marxism for a general readership, Jonathan Wolff claimed that Marx’s solution to the so-called “transformation problem” is “half-baked.” The aim of this paper is to challenge this complacent dismissal of some of Marx’s central economic ideas. In the process, I want to show that although the issues here are subtle and complex, Marx’s ideas retain a great deal of intuitive appeal, and his “solution” to the so-called “transformation problem” is neither conceptually implausible nor mathematically dubious. Crucial to this aim is to show that Marx viewed the categories of (what he called bourgeois) economics through a social lens, which is given in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital.

The legend of Unoism in Japan

Marx taught that economics, as a social science, must seek to know the noumenon (thing-in-itself) of capitalism, not just this or that of its phenomena, despite Kant’s well-known thesis that suggests the impossibility of such an enterprise. Uno was the only Marxist who understood this message from his study of Capital, and so developed his elaborate tripartite methodology, quite different from the usual “positivist” approach adopted by the natural sciences and bourgeois economics. His genriron (or pure theory of capitalist society) marked the first step towards the dialectic of capital that lurks behind Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy, and initiated a truly scientific enquiry into the dialectical (i.e., synthetically-logical) structure of the capitalist mode of production. Economics based on this knowledge is scientifically dependable in comprehending not only the developmental phases in the past of our capitalist history, but also its process of disintegration that began after WWI and is continuing at present. Without this lucidly Uno-Marxian perspective, scientific approach to economics is fundamentally impossible.

Der geplante Mensch im Unternehmen – Teil 1

In practice, it is always amazing to observe that companies do not have sufficient personnel planning. However, it is also just as astonishing that the working human being in the value-added work-sharing process still does not receive the acknowledgment that is actually due to him as the only new value-adding factor in connection with nature. In contrast,the capital endowed by the dominant bourgeois economy is merely a derivative factor of production, and the neoclassical marginal productivity theory completely bypasses economic reality. However, it is also a fact that the added value created by humans in production must always first be realized on the market. However, the risks that arise here do not necessarily affect only the owners of the capital but also the employees. They are general business risks and not just business risks.All of this is worked out in the first chapter of the article and made calculable and verifiable in the second chapter. On the basis of business-related (derived) added value, these include various key personnel policy indicators that reveal valuebased labor intensity and labor productivity as well as the distribution of added value in the wage and value added quota. In the third chapter of the article (Part 2 (4/2019)), the conditions for a labor demand (recruitment), but also for redundancies in a market-capitalist enterprise, and their influence are shown. This shows that the personnel plan is dependent on the sales, production and investment plan of a company and is also determined by political and legal measures. Annoying in the use of personnel is from the point of view of capital, the economically indeterminate employment contract. The fourth chapter deals with the determination of the quantitative and qualitative human resources needs. Here, special emphasis is placed on a practically never performed gross-net-bill as well as on a calculation of the gross and net working volume. Important in this context are dynamic input-output establishment plans. The final fifth chapter then deals with strategic personnel adjustments in corporate crisis situations to avoid possible redundancies.

Ubuntu: Revisiting an Endangered African Philosophy in Quest of a Pan-Africanist Revolutionary Ideology

In the final analysis, Kwame Nkrumah advanced that pan-Africanism must be about the unity of African masses under socialist governments. However, the concept of pan-Africanism in recent times has been misconstrued in the most treacherous manner. On one hand, the concept has been reduced to a “dansiki-wearing” competition by a layer of cultural nationalists; and on the other hand, it has been reduced to a “Black capitalism” bourgeois agenda. In spite of the apparent failures of capitalism, bourgeois economists like Nigeria’s Tony Elumelu, have been peddling a purported refined capitalist system under the ambiance of “Africapitalism”, as a stimulant for economic growth and development in Africa. Under the pretense of a “pan-African” agenda, bourgeois economists have been touting this neoliberal agenda across the continent and beyond, for self-serving purposes. The danger this portends is the detachment of pan-Africanism from its socialist agenda. Indeed, existing works on African personality have showed the nexus between a pre-colonial communal relationship and socialism. The Sotho epistemology, Ubuntu, is undoubtedly a product of this ancient communal relationship. Ubuntu expresses the humanistic tendencies that are fast going into extinction in today’s individualistic society. Ultimately, the withering of Ubuntu is not unconnected to the dominance of capitalism. The economic system through alienation has not just distorted the relationship among humans, but also between humans and nature. This study thus argues that Ubuntu as a value system is a material product of pre-feudal African society; and that because of this trajectory, Ubuntu must be reassessed as a potential social force for resistance that can pave the way for the emergence of a scientific socialist African society. Ubuntu is not scientific socialism and vice-versa, but the value system if properly understood can lay the foundation towards the birth of the former.

A forgotten economic work by Rosa Luxemburg

The recent and very useful edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s economic works compiled by Peter Hudis ( The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg) left out one essay: her review of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, edited by Karl Kautsky in 1905. While book reviews are nowadays a minor genre usually limited to a short length, that was not the case when Luxemburg wrote her essay: her review – published in Vorwärts, the daily of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), just before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905 – was extensive and dealt with a variety of theoretical and political issues. We offer the first critical edition in English of this work, setting it against the background of Rosa Luxemburg’s previous works and of the revisionist controversy within the SPD and the Second International, as well as contextualizing it within the framework of contemporary polemics with bourgeois economics, particularly with the German historical school and with marginalism. We also offer a comparison between the methodological issues raised by Luxemburg in her review and those raised by Rudolf Hilferding in his review of the third and last volume of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, published in 1911. We close with a brief assessment of the place of Luxemburg’s essay in the later development of her economic thought, concluding with The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913.

Breakthroughs on Fundamental Issues of Socialist Political Economy in China’s Economic Reform

How to effectively integrate the basic economic system of the primary stage of socialism in which public ownership is the dominant and diverse economic sectors develop side by side with a resource allocation model in which the market plays a decisive role is a fundamental issue in building a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. Western bourgeois economics and the traditional understanding of Marxist classical writers reject the possibility of such integration. In the transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the practice and theoretical exploration of combining the two ended by abandoning public ownership. The fundamental feature of socialist economic reform practice with Chinese characteristics is to uphold their organic unity. This approach has already achieved great progress but at the same time is confronting a series of new problems.

Tracing secular stagnation to the prevention of communism, through the prism of economics and Marxist political economy

This paper addresses the limits encountered by bourgeois economics in understanding the significance of the term ‘secular stagnation’, using the concept of ‘total factor productivity’ to make this case. It then criticises Marxist political economy for creating models of capital, which prevent one moving much beyond an abstract theory of crisis to grasp what underlies capitalist elite concerns about secular stagnation. The paper then offers some reflections on why the meaning of secular stagnation is more likely to be found between the real movement of capitalism, socialism and communism, rather than economic models of capital.

Vladimir Iowa Lenin, Part 1: A Bolshevik Studies American Agriculture

ABSTRACTA busy year for Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917 also marked the publication of his study of American agriculture. The report reads as more than a historical curiosity, offering insights, however era-bounded, on a variety of topics of substantive and epistemological interest today. Lenin writes of the history of American agriculture, its dynamic regionalism, and its sector-specific class conflicts. Along the way, despite his obvious structural tendencies, we meet an anti-foundational author who, while upbraiding bourgeois economists for their expedient technicism, often in scathing terms, also warns that sweeping conclusions about the sizes of farm and capitalization are problematic in the face of historically dependent and contradictory trends. Here, in the first of the paper’s two parts, we begin to place Lenin’s project in the broader stream of critical agrarian studies, including the classic contrast with agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov, but also the diseconomies of modern agriculture, the biological limits on industrializing food production, and Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign. Our aims here are more than academic. The exploration is framed by the roles the structure of agriculture and its impacts on its participants play in political change, from elections to revolution.

Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross

This article appraises the poetics of two of the foremost African creative writers whose literary sensibilities exhibit conspicuously Marxist conceptual models. The writers have poignantly deployed their creative ingenuities towards raising social consciousness against the bourgeois economy which imposes a politics of asymmetry, parasitism and stratification on the economic thought of the African society that once projected a communal spirit. Considering the precarious conditions of Africa’s economy due to the pernicious effects of capitalism, it is imperative to examine the sordidness of classism, alienated labour, commodification or thingification of the underclass and other bourgeois tensions in African literature, as portrayed by these writers. Marxist theoretical models of economic determinism and historical materialism are discussed as the simulacrum of Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle. Though Marxists are fixated on revolution as the only solution to end the misery of the underclass and terminate the hegemony of the oligarchy that exploits sellers of labour, the paper advocates economic revivalism through the exploration of the opportunities offered by the communal mode of production.

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds by Martha Feldman (review)

Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. By Martha Feldman. (Ernest Bloch Lectures.) Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. [xxiii, 421 p. ISBN 9780520279490 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520962033 (ebook), $60.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Then too, when castrato first came into being, human body in Europe was still a open and reproducible (p. 208). So writes Martha Feldman in Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Although this statement refers to Enlightenment-era decline of castrato in popularity, it could also be mapped onto Feldman's book itself. In this thoughtful, thorough exploration, figure of castrato becomes a relatively open site, permeable to Feldman's larger inquiries, which include definitions of social masculinity and emergence of sexual binaries as associated with singing voice, cultural impact of shifting systems of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury patronage, vocal production and anatomy, virtuosity and sensibility, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performance practice.This book can easily be situated within current discourse on castrati, patronage, seventeenth-century masculinity, and performance practice. Recent comprehensive studies on figure of castrato have given much-needed attention to individual castrati, following in recent musicological trend of singer-oriented versus workoriented approaches. (These studies include: Patricia Howard, Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and Coming of a New Operatic Age [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014]; Helen Berry, Castrato and His Wife [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]; Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in Life of Atto Melani [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009]; and Nicholas Clapton, Moreschi and Voice of Castrato [London: Haus Books, 2008].) In contrast, Feldman provides a new approach by putting lives of many castrati in dialogue with a complex web of culturalhistorical anthropology.She emphasizes that her goal is not to merely offer an explanation of phenomenon of castrato from 1550 to 1922. Rather, hybridity of castrato is, in Feldman's deft hands, means by which readers can better understand unresolved questions around social, economic, and cultural practices of Western classical vocal production (p. xvi). castrato's hybrid status results from his ability to take advantage of both hybridized socioeconomic systems (a gift economy governed by patron-client relations and an emergent bourgeois economy based in mercantilism and cash exchange, p. xvi) and stillflexible eighteenth-century concepts of gender. book is divided into three parts: Reproduction, Voice, and HalfLight. Three major themes revolving around this concept of hybridity run through six chapters of book: reproduction, economics, and representation. Although musical figures and images are interspersed within individual chapters, additional, more substantial collections of images appear at end of each part.Chapters 1 and 2 (Of Strange Births and Comic Kin and The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was: A Tale of Reproduction) explore castrato's attempts to participate in various forms of male social (p. xvii). strictures of primogeniture in early-modern Italy provided perfect climate for a proliferation of castrations: the castrato's nonprocreative status [had] a distinctive place within critical boundaries of patriarchy (p. 45). castrato was thus a sacrificial victim of reproduction who, nonetheless, produced economic advantages for his family. Castrati, despite their inability to sexually reproduce, were politically masculine, and Feldman asks how a man and being a castrato converged on hard ground of lived life (p. 43). Arguing that presence of satirical and comedic accounts of castrati prove that maleness of castrato was indeed historically accepted as tenable, Feldman explores various ways in which castrati participated in reproduction. …

Value and Hidden Cost in André Breton’s Surrealist Collection

André Breton’s collection provides a unique perspective on the environment within which the principles of surrealism were crystallized. In addition to his collection of European paintings, Breton’s Oceanic object collection grew during World War Two in New York. In essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Breton ascribed a “poetic view” and “prestige” to these things with no reference to their monetary value. And yet his history of acquisition and de-acquisition of such things and paintings show that he also understood collecting as a form of investment, despite his avowed objection to the forces of French colonialism that made it accessible to him. “Value and Hidden Cost in André Breton’s Surrealist Collection” examines the acknowledged—poetic—and unacknowledged—monetary—value of Breton’s collection and what is shows about his understanding of art acquisition as a form of patronage, in contradiction to his intellectual rejection of any form of engagement in the bourgeois economy. This contradiction constitutes a hidden cost to the consistency of his ethical position in favor of leftist politics. In his admiration for the Easter Island statuette with which he started his collection as a teenager, and his elevation of such non-Western things to works of art, he also unconsciously perpetuated a form of intellectual colonialism. This contradiction lies at the root of his slow reassessment of his pre-war attitudes in light of his growing post-war understanding of the cultures that produced the objects he revered and his intellectual engagement in the process of French de-colonization that coincided with his return to Paris from New York.

The Fiction of Economic Coercion: Political Marxism and the Separation of Theory and History

AbstractThe theory of social-property relations, or political Marxism, has argued that in contradistinction with pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, capitalism is characterised by the separation of the economic and the political, which makes surplus appropriation under this system uniquely driven by economic coercion. In spite of political Marxism’s various strengths, this article argues that the paradigm puts forward an ahistorical and sanitised conception of capitalism typical of bourgeois economics, which is an outcome of its formal-abstractionist approach to the concept of the mode of production and the separation between theory and history that it operates. A more satisfactory solution to political Marxism’s inability to make sense of past and present forms of coercion and violence under capitalism can be found in Jairus Banaji’s emphasis on Marx’s historical – rather than formal – conception of the mode of production.

Victor Valentinovich Novozhilov: A Marxian Mathematical Economist in Honour of the 120th Anniversary of His Birth

This article attempts to present the important contribution of Victor V. Novozhilov to Marxian economic theory, the proof that the theory of optimal planning is the proper field of general economic equilibrium theory and that this theory, by fully respecting the objective law of value, leads to planned prices which equalize supply and demand and for which the labour theory of value holds: prices of production are proportional to marginal labour values. In Novozhilov's and Soviet terminology marginal labour values are differentially socially necessary labour which includes not only the socially necessary labour needed to produce a unit of a given product, as it is commonly understood by bourgeois and many Marxian economists, but also the socially necessary accumulation of the means of production. In mathematical programming this is the rational for the Lagrange multipliers and norms of effectiveness. Novozhilov in fact proofs that in an optimal plan (Pareto optimum), prices are proportional to marginal labour values and use values.

Abe Isoo and Kawakami Hajime in Interwar Japan — Economic Reform or Revolution?

This article explores the views of two eminent professors of economics, Abe Isoo (1865-1949) and Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946), regarding their socialist economic theories for easing poverty in Japan during the interwar years (1918-1939). Prior to this period, Abe believed the cure to capitalism’s ills lay in a combination of socialist economic reforms (sangyo demokurashii) and individual spiritual refinement. Kawakami, at that time a bourgeois economist, prioritised the spiritual revolution of the rich over any socialist-type economic reform. Thus, although convinced of the need for a different approach to eradicating poverty, they nevertheless agreed in the need for gradual change rather than radical reform (Gavin East Asia An International Quarterly 24:1, 30). The year 1928 marked a significant turning point both for Japanese social movements and in the lives of Abe and Kawakami. That year heralded Japan’s first national election under the new Universal Male Suffrage Law, and saw the police exercise their extended authority as they undertook a nationwide round-up of students and intellectuals suspected of left-wing tendencies (the March 15 Incident). Also in that year, Abe and Kawakami resigned from academic posts to dedicate themselves to alleviating the privations of the working class. Abe, by then well known as the father of Japanese socialism and as a Christian pacifist, became a symbolic figure for Japan’s working class parties, although he later came to support the government during WWII. Kawakami, who was forced to resign from his post during the round-up, “washed his hands of bourgeois economics”, became a prominent spokesman for Marxism in Japan ([28], xi, pp. 76, 169). This article will reveal that both Abe and Kawakami’s social and economic theories changed during the interwar period, so that Abe came to see imperial sovereignty as crucial to socialist economic reform, while Kawakami came to see it as a minion of the capitalists and advocated institutional and political revolution.

Poverty and Its Possible Cures: Abe Isoo and Kawakami Hajime

This article explores the views of two eminent Meiji intellectuals, Abe Isoo (1865–1949) and Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946), regarding poverty and its possible cures. Both men addressed this subject at a time which saw the rapid development of monopoly capitalism in Japan. Politically, this period was typified by the social and political oppression that followed the Public Order Police Law (1900) and the High Treason Incident (1910). The latter marked the beginning of the “winter” of the socialist movement in Japan. Abe, the father of Japanese socialism, and the younger Kawakami, a bourgeois economist and later a Marxist, were two of the more prominent intellectuals concerned with poverty. This article outlines their thoughts on poverty and its possible cures in the period between 1903 and 1916 as expressed in their most representative works on the issue, Abe’s Saikin no shakai mondai (Current Social Problems), (1915) and Kawakami’s Bimbo monogatari (The Tale of Poverty), (1916).

‘Free’ Food, the Local Production of Worth, and the Circuit of Decommodification: A Value Theory of the Surplus

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity” [Marx, 1967 Capital, Volume 1 first paragraph (International Publishers, New York)]. As Marx moves beyond the first paragraph of Capital, he famously argues that value makes the commodity a ‘hieroglyphic’. But his own opening is also a sort of hieroglyphic: it rings true for bourgeois economy as it does for his critique of that economy, but for entirely different reasons. The purpose of Capital is to obliterate this apparent corroboration, yet a hieroglyphic quality is maintained throughout, as Marx subjects his own successive claims to iterative, immanent critique. This chain cannot be said to be indefinite for Marx, but neither is it complete. Here, I hark back to Marx's opening gambit to ask: in capitalist society, what else accumulates besides commodities proper? The paper proceeds iteratively, offering a series of revised opening claims that mimic yet spiral away from Marx's original. I argue specifically that, although devaluation (decommodification) inheres in the production and circulation of value, it has its own accumulation logic. The example is of food banking. I explore this activity as simultaneously material, representational, and political, and examine the constitutive force of each of these modalities. I treat food banking, therefore, as a form of commodity afterlife, through which devaluation becomes (imperfectly) a positivity.