Marxian Economics Research Articles

Commodity Fetishism, Legal Fetishism, Converted Forms, and Aesthetic Fetishism

In this paper, we analyse two recent contributions to the Marxist critique of the political economy of art: the article “Artistic Labor and the Production of Value: An Attempt at a Marxist Interpretation” by José María Durán and the book Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics by Dave Beech. While Durán emphasizes the emergence of the legal category of intellectual property rights as crucial for value production in art, Beech has reached the contrary conclusion that artistic labour does not produce value and that artistic production is therefore excepted from capitalist commodity production. In our paper, we criticize both conclusions. While agreeing with Beech that artistic labour does not produce value and is thus excepted from the ideology of commodity fetishism, we believe that through the ideology of converted forms it nevertheless becomes part of capitalist commodity production. We would argue that the sector of artistic production, through the converted form of monopoly rent, establishes a production relation with other, competitive, sectors of capitalist economy. This production relation is enabled by the ideology of aesthetic fetishism, supported by the ideology of legal fetishism through the category of intellectual property rights. Contrary to Durán, we thus conclude that intellectual property rights allow for a hidden transfer of surplus value produced by the workers in the competitive sectors of the capitalist economy.

Commodity Fetishism, Legal Fetishism, Converted Forms, and Aesthetic Fetishism

In this paper, we analyse two recent contributions to the Marxist critique of the political economy of art: the article “Artistic Labor and the Production of Value: An Attempt at a Marxist Interpretation” by José María Durán and the book Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics by Dave Beech. While Durán emphasizes the emergence of the legal category of intellectual property rights as crucial for value production in art, Beech has reached the contrary conclusion that artistic labour does not produce value and that artistic production is therefore excepted from capitalist commodity production. In our paper, we criticize both conclusions. While agreeing with Beech that artistic labour does not produce value and is thus excepted from the ideology of commodity fetishism, we believe that through the ideology of converted forms it nevertheless becomes part of capitalist commodity production. We would argue that the sector of artistic production, through the converted form of monopoly rent, establishes a production relation with other, competitive, sectors of capitalist economy. This production relation is enabled by the ideology of aesthetic fetishism, supported by the ideology of legal fetishism through the category of intellectual property rights. Contrary to Durán, we thus conclude that intellectual property rights allow for a hidden transfer of surplus value produced by the workers in the competitive sectors of the capitalist economy.

Financialization and Capital Accumulation

:In the last decades, financial activities have grown disproportionately compared to other activities. This aroused a growing discussion in Keynesian and Marxian economists about the structures of modern capitalism and the role played by the dominance of finance on capital accumulation. After a brief review of the main issues, we discuss some mechanisms explored in this literature connecting financialization and aggregate investment.

The dynamics of financial instability: simplifying Keen's Goodwin–Minsky model

AbstractMarket capitalism typically goes through cycles of expansion and contraction. Every now and then, these common economic cycles go off the hinges. They become unstable and can lead to recessions, crises and depressions—phenomena that economists typically explain by looking to exogenous forces. Alternative explanations—mostly Marxian and Keynesian—for the instabilities have been sought within the structure of the economic system itself. One such explanation is provided by Steve Keen in his Goodwin–Minsky model. The model effectively mimics the dynamics of key indicators prior to, during and after the 2007/08 crisis. However, the model is also over‐specified, highly sensitive to initial conditions and therefore more difficult to convey. In line with George Box's plea for parsimony, this paper presents a more straightforward version of Keen's model that remains consistent with its fundamental behaviour. The model also illustrates the potential for further dialogue between Marxian economics and system dynamics.© 2019 The Author System Dynamics Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of System Dynamics Society

Marxian Economics: Notes from a Neo-classical Viewpoint

Marxian economics has the twin features of attracting some of the best minds and at the same time being rejected by policymakers world over, even by those who had adopted them to begin with. These features are discussed in this article. It is argued that the first feature is because of the existence of inequality and its worsening and associated poverty, and the difficulty in the continued extraction of surplus is a possible explanation for the second. It is further argued that the labour theory of value is not really essential to the theory of exploitation of workers by capitalists, and we try to establish that Marx was way ahead of his time in setting up the worker–employer relation in modern terms. JEL: A20, B13, B14, B24, B51, D02, D86

Contesting slavery in the global market: John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia

ABSTRACTJohn Brown, author of Slave Life in Georgia, published in London in 1854, proffered a radical approach to ending slavery in the USA in step with Marxian economics. In this paper, we will explain how Brown’s representation of subjectivity may have caused critics to neglect it. Brown treats freedom as something foreign and external. He has to learn what freedom means, first through exposure to a model of liberal citizenship and then through the experience of several modulations of fugitive liberty. Brown’s social world is wholly determined by external forces. Whether slave or freeman, he faces ambiguous situations. Is one master better than another? Will he join a community of fugitive slaves in Indiana? Will he seek refuge from slavery as a labourer in a copper mine? Will he accompany a patron to England? Brown’s hesitancy at each of these modalities of freedom takes him to Canada West, where he serves as a carpenter among other fugitives. These Canadian model communities, designed under the purview of white benefactors, also ultimately displease Brown. He finally leaves for England, where he takes up a new charge: a systematic attack on the economic conditions that support the slaveocracy. He aims to undersell southern cotton and dismantle the Southern economy through competition. Despite failing to execute his design, Brown remains an important voice committed to economic intervention rather than moral suasion.

Acceptance Speech for the World Marxian Economics Award (I)

Acceptance Speech for the World Marxian Economics Award (I)

‘Articulating value’ for clients in a global engineering consulting firm: ‘immaterial’ activity and its implications for post-knowledge economy expertise

ABSTRACTMoulier Boutang’s book Cognitive Capitalism introduces a radically different conception of the key resources – ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘capture of externalities’ – for economic activity, compared with the argument in the knowledge economy discourse that professionals manipulate ‘symbols’. The paper explores this claim by firstly, outlining the tenets of Moulier Boutang’s argument and explaining why it introduces a new conception of value compared with how that concept is normally defined in neo-classic and Marxist economics. Secondly, explaining why client-facing project teams constitute a paradigmatic example of immaterial activity. Thirdly, makes visible the modes of activity which facilitate the capture of externalities by supplementing Moulier Boutang’s concept with Boltanski and Thevénot’s ideas about different economies or conceptions of worth. Case study evidence of a global engineering consulting company is then used to identify three expressions of immaterial activity – educative’, ‘experimental’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ – that assist engineers to articulate their value to clients. The paper concludes by arguing immaterial activity: (i) constitutes a form of expertise that is very different from the prevailing knowledge economy wisdom that knowledge workers manipulate symbols explicitly or tacitly; and, (ii) problematises the sui generis nature of the global ‘employability’ skills discourse.

Cornelius Castoriadis on the Scope and Content of Neoclassical and Marxian Economics

:The paper presents the thought of the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on economic methodology and the neoclassical and Marxian traditions. Castoriadis suggested that the scope of economic theory includes the identification of “local” regularities and not the search for invariant “laws.” He criticized the use of equilibrium and the utilitarian framework in the neoclassical tradition and proposed to approach human agency based on the Aristotelian concept of the “social individual.” In addition, he criticized the deterministic nature of the Marxian “laws.” According to Castoriadis, the use of concepts such as the “production function” and “capital” presents a number of caveats.

A Marxist Correspondence

Paul A. Baran (1910–1964) and Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004) were two of the most creative and influential Marxist economists of the last century. The Age of Monopoly Capital collects hundreds of letters between Baran and Sweezy, written between 1949 and Baran's death in 1964. The correspondence contains numerous interesting, important, and unanticipated ideas. Nuggets of wisdom about economic theory, socialist history, dialectical method, academic politics, and many other topics are scattered throughout.
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Winners of World Marxian Economics Award (2017)

Winners of World Marxian Economics Award (2017)

Arun Bose on Sraffa:Value Theory and Demand

This paper provides a detailed account of the engagement of Arun Bose (1919-2003), the Marxist economist, with Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), based on the articles he published in the 1960s in the Economic Journal and Economic Weekly. The paper closely deals with the two fundamental aspects of Bose’s involvement with Sraffa’s 1960 book: (a) the assumption of constante turns to scale and (b) the role of demand in value theory. The Bose-Sraffa engagement yields a useful output – an interpretation of Sraffa’s work, in the tradition of the classical economists.

Ajit Singh (1940–2015), the Radical Cambridge Economist: Anti‐imperialist Advocate of Third World Industrialization

Ajit Singh (1940–2015), the Radical Cambridge Economist: Anti‐imperialist Advocate of Third World Industrialization

The Overdetermination of Our Collaboration

The concept of “overdetermination”—developed by Freud, Lukács, and Althusser, among others—shook the received wisdom of Marxists who engaged with it (rather than ignoring or dismissing it). Engagement forced a rethinking of the philosophical foundations of modern Marxism: both its notion of what theory is and does and its notion of what society is and how it changes. Steve Resnick and Rick Wolff together undertook that engagement and that rethinking subject to all the influences stemming from their time’s particular phase of capitalist development: from the Cold War, from the ideologically servile structures of U.S. academia, from their personal and family lives. In short they used the concept of overdetermination to rethink Marxism and especially Marxist economics. This essay likewise uses overdetermination to explain something about their collaboration, including its importance in and to their lives and works from 1973 to 2013.

Professor Resnick Is Mean, or Productive Misinterpretation in Economics Pedagogy

This essay examines the role of theory and history in Stephen Resnick’s teaching. An undergraduate student thinks Resnick hates poor people because of his rigorous presentation of the links between assumptions and policy conclusions in neoclassical economics. Another graduate student believes Resnick knows little economic history because of his focus on the development of a theoretical framework almost to the exclusion of historical narrative. These examples of productive miscommunication in teaching are developed mostly through a lecture Resnick gave on “Competition, Colonialism, and Imperialism,” but also through discussion of contemporary capital flows and some open questions in global commodity-chain research. Resnick’s precision and focus on theory was powerfully formative for generations of Marxian economists, even those who preferred to teach discursively and through narrative.

From Classical Market View to Marxian Market View: Reinterpreting the Theory of Market Value

This article aims at reconstructing theoretical viewpoint of the market in Marxian economics. We usually assume that the asset of Marxian economics should be the theory of exploitation, which must be proved under the condition of the market equilibrium. In this article, however, we think Marxian economics should provide the whole set of apparatus to criticise capitalism as a social science. To construct Marxian economics as a general social science, we need to develop not only Marxian theory of production but also Marxian theory of market, which can be substituted for the equilibrating theory of market. Here we focus on the theory of market value in Capital Volume III and consider how technological factors affect the market in Marxian terms.

Acceptance Speech for World Marxian Economics Award (II): Marxism is Simply the Social Science of Our Time

Acceptance Speech for World Marxian Economics Award (II): Marxism is Simply the Social Science of Our Time

Winners of World Marxian Economics Award (2018)

Winners of World Marxian Economics Award (2018)

Систематизация концепций кризисных явлений в экономике в научных экономических школах: от классического марксизма до посткейнсианства

Систематизация концепций кризисных явлений в экономике в научных экономических школах: от классического марксизма до посткейнсианства

Zero-sum thinking and economic policy.

A main tenet of folk economics is the assumption that the world is zero-sum. Many implications stem from this assumption. These include: beliefs regarding taxation; beliefs regarding economic regulation; beliefs regarding inequality; and the core of Marxist economics. Zero-sum folk economic thinking is short-term and deals with distribution; standard economic thinking deals with the size of the pie and is longer-term.