The Contours of the Future in the Context of the World's
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Uncovering Marx's Yet Unpublished Writings
Uncovering Marx's Yet Unpublished Writings Kevin B. Anderson Published in Critique (Glasgow), No. 30-31 (1998), pp. 179-187 [reprinted in Marx, edited by Scott Meikle (Ashgate 2002); translated into Turkish in Insancil, Istanbul, May 1997] When Lawrence Krader published his historic transcription of Marx's Ethnological Notebooks 25 years ago, a new window was opened into Marx's thought. What in published form had become 250 pages of notes by Marx on Lewis Henry Morgan and other anthropologists which he had compiled in his last years, 1880-81, showed us as never before a Marx concerned as much with gender relations and with non-Western societies such as India, pre-Colombian Mexico, and the Australian aborigines, as well as ancient Ireland, as he was with the emancipation of the industrial proletariat. As will be shown below, to this day there are a significant number of writings by Marx on these and other issues which have never been published in any language. Why this is still the case in 1997, 114 years after Marx's death, is the subject of this essay, in which I will also take up plans now in progress in Europe to publish many of these writings for the first time. The problem really begins with Engels and continues today. While Engels labored long and hard to edit and publish what he considered to be a definitive edition of Vol. I of Capital in 1890, and brought out Vols. II and III of that work in 1885 and 1894 by carefully editing and arranging Marx's draft manuscripts, Engels did not plan or even propose the publication of the whole of Marx's writings. -
66, 13 January 2014
sanity, humanity and science probably the world’s most read economics journal real-world economics review - Subscribers: 23,924 Subscribe here Blog ISSN 1755-9472 - A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 12,557 members, join here - Sister open-access journals: Economic Thought and World Economic Review - back issues at www.paecon.net recent issues: 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 57 56 Issue no. 66, 13 January 2014 In this issue: Secular stagnation and endogenous money 2 Steve Keen Micro versus Macro 12 Lars Pålsson Syll On facts and values: a critique of the fact value dichotomy 30 Joseph Noko Modern Money Theory and New Currency Theory: A comparative discussion 38 Joseph Huber Fama-Shiller, the Prize Committee and the “Efficient Markets Hypothesis” 58 Bernard Guerrien and Ozgur Gun How capitalists learned to stop worrying and love the crisis 65 Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Two approaches to global competition: A historical review 74 M. Shahid Alam Dimensions of real-world competition – a critical realist perspective 80 Hubert Buch-Hansen Information economics as mainstream economics and the limits of reform 95 Jamie Morgan and Brendan Sheehan The ℵ capability matrix: GDP and the economics of human development 109 Jorge Buzaglo Open access vs. academic power 127 C P Chandrasekhar Interview with Edward Fullbrook on New Paradigm Economics vs. Old Paradigm Economics 131 Book review of The Great Eurozone Disaster: From Crisis to Global New Deal by Heikki Patomäki 144 Comment: Romar Correa on “A Copernican Turn in Banking Union”, by Thomas Mayer 147 Board of Editors, past contributors, submissions and etc. -
Capitalism As a Mode of Power. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Interviewed by Piotr Dutkiewicz
Capitalism as a Mode of Power Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Interviewed by Piotr Dutkiewicz Jerusalem, Montreal and Ottawa, July 2013 www.bnarchives.net Creative Commons A shorter version of this interview is forthcoming in 22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conver- sations with the World’s Foremost Thinkers, edited by Piotr Dutkiewicz and Richard Sakwa (New York: New York University Press, WPF and the Social Science Re- search Council, 2013). Piotr Dutkiewicz: In a unique two-pronged dovetailing discussion, frequent collabo- rators and coauthors Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler discuss the nature of contemporary capitalism. Their central argument is that the dominant approaches to studying the market – liberalism and Marxism – are as flawed as the market itself. Offering a historically rich and analytically incisive critique of the recent history of capitalism and crisis, they suggest that instead of studying the relations of capital to power we must conceptualize capital as power if we are to understand the dynamics of the market system. This approach allows us to examine the seemingly paradoxical workings of the capitalist mechanism, whereby profit and capitalization are divorced from productivity and machines in the so-called real economy. Indeed Nitzan and Bichler paint a picture of a strained system whose component parts exist in an an- tagonistic relationship. In their opinion, the current crisis is a systemic one afflicting a fatally flawed system. However, it is not one that seems to be giving birth to a uni- fied opposition movement or to a new mode of thinking. The two political econo- mists call for nothing short of a new mode of imagining the market, our political sys- tem, and our very world. -
Rising Corporate Concentration, Declining Trade Union Power, and the Growing Income Gap: American Prosperity in Historical Perspective Jordan Brennan
Rising Corporate Concentration, Declining Trade Union Power, and the Growing Income Gap: American Prosperity in Historical Perspective Jordan Brennan February 2016 Rising Corporate Concentration, Declining Trade Union Power, and the Growing Income Gap: American Prosperity in Historical Perspective Jordan Brennan* March 2016 *Jordan Brennan is an economist with Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector labor union, and a research associate of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.jordanbrennan.org. Contents Executive Summary 2 Acknowledgments 4 List of Figures 5 Part I: Corporate Concentration, Secular Stagnation, and the Growing Income Gap 6 Part II: Labor Unions, Inflation, and the Making of an Inclusive Prosperity 24 Appendix 48 References 51 1 Executive Summary The rise of income inequality amidst the deceleration of GDP growth must rank as two of the most perplexing and challenging problems in contemporary American capitalism. Comparing 1935–80 with 1980–2013—that is, the Keynesian-inspired welfare regime and, later, neoliberal globalization—the average annual rate of GDP growth was more than halved and income inequality went from a postwar low in 1976 to a postwar high in 2012. How do we account for this double-sided phenomenon? The conventional explanations of secular stagnation and elevated inequality are inadequate, largely because mainstream (“neoclassical”) economics rejects the notion that the amassment and exercise of institutional power play a role in the normal functioning of markets and business. This analytical inadequacy has left important causal elements outside the purview of researchers, policymakers, and the public at large. This two-part analysis investigates some of the causes and consequences of income inequality and secular stagnation in the United States. -
The Buy-To-Build Indicator New Estimates and Comment
The Buy-to-Build Indicator New Estimates and Comment Joseph Francis, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1 London, Jerusalem and Montreal March-April 2013 Creative Commons The first part of the exchange is a short article by Joseph Francis. The article provides new estimates and an assessment of the buy-to-build indicator for the United States and Britain. The second part offers commentary by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. 1 Joseph Francis is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics ([email protected]; http://www.joefrancis.info/). Shimshon Bichler teaches political economy at colleges and universities in Israel ([email protected]; http://bnarchives.net). Jonathan Nitzan teaches political economy at York University in Toronto ([email protected]; http://bnarchives.net). The Buy-to-Build Indicator: New Estimates for Britain and the United States Joseph Francis* London School of Economics www.joefrancis.info March 2013 This note presents new long-term estimates of what Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (2002: 53-4, 82-3; 2009: Ch.15) have named the ‘buy-to-build indicator’, which is calculated as the value of mergers and acquisitions as a percentage of gross capital form- ation. Estimating the buy-to-build indicators is not simple, principally due to the absence of consistent series for expenditure on mergers and acquisitions. Nevertheless, as this note describes, it has proven possible to calculate them for both Britain and the United States. For Britain, the new estimates build principally on the research of the Leslie Hannah, as well as official government statistics, while for the United States, they repres- ent significant revisions of Nitzan and Bichler’s own original estimates. -
Casp's 'Differential Accumulation Versus Veblen's '
WORKING PAPERS ON CAPITAL AS POWER No. 2018/08 CasP’s ‘Differential Accumulation versus Veblen’s ‘Differential Advantage’ Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan November 2018 http://www.capitalaspower.com/?p=2557 CasP’s ‘Differential Accumulation’ versus Veblen’s ‘Differential Advantage’ Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1 Jerusalem and Montreal November 2018 bnarchives.net / Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) 1. Introduction This paper clarifies a common misrepresentation of our theory of capital as power, or CasP. Many observers tend to box CasP as an ‘institutionalist’ theory, tracing its central process of ‘differential ac- cumulation’ to Thorstein Veblen’s notion of ‘differential advantage’ (Cf. 1904, 1923). This view, we argue, betrays a misunderstanding of CasP, Veblen or both. As we show below, CasP’s notion of dif- ferential accumulation is not only different from, but also diametrically opposed to Veblen’s differential advantage. Our argument is articulated in several steps. Section 2 outlines the key claims of CasP, contrasting them with those of received theory and articulating the way in which they relate and lead to our concept of differential accumulation. Sections 3 and 4 examine Veblen’s twin concepts of strategic sabotage and differential advantage, showing that the latter is concerned not with differential profit, but with the earning of profit as such. Section 5 develops this claim further, demonstrating that Veblen’s analysis of accumulation, hostage to neoclassical absolutes, understood capitalists as seeking not differential profit, but maximum profit. Section 6 examines the historical context in which Veblen was writing, suggesting that this backdrop made it practically impossible for him to conceive – let alone theorize and measure – differential accumulation, even if he had wanted to. -
An Invited-Then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Working Papers on Capital As Power, No
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan Working Paper The Capital as Power Aproach: An Invited-then- Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2020/02 Provided in Cooperation with: The Bichler & Nitzan Archives Suggested Citation: Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan (2020) : The Capital as Power Aproach: An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2020/02, Forum on Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, s.l., https://capitalaspower.com/?p=3925 , http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/640/ This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/218867 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. -
Dialogue of Cultures and Partnership of Civilizations
RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF EDUCATION ST. PETERSBURG INTELLIGENTSIA CONGRESS ST. PETERSBURG UNIVERSITY OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES under the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia DIALOGUE OF CULTURES AND PARTNERSHIP OF CIVILIZATIONS May 15–20, 2014 The Conference is held in accordance with The conference, originally called ‘The Days of Sci - the Decree of President of Russia V. V. Putin en ce in St. Petersburg University of the Humanities ‘On perpetuating the memory and Social Sciences’ is the 22nd in number of Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov’ and the 14th in the status of the International No 587, dated from May 23, 2001 Likhachov Scientific Conference To implement the project ‘The 14th International Likhachov Scientific Conference’ state funds are used. The funds are allocated as a grant in accordance with the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of March 29, 2013 No 115–rp and the tender held by the Association “Znaniye” of Russia St. Petersburg 2014 ББК 72 Д44 Scientifi c editor A. S. Zapesotsky, Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the International Likhachov Scientifi c Conference, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Sc. (Cultural Studies), Professor, Scientist Emeritus of the Russian Federation, Artist Emeritus of the Russian Federation Recommended to be published by the Editorial and Publishing Council of St. Petersburg University of the Humanities and Social Sciences Dialogue of Cultures and Partnership of Civilizations: the 14th Inter national Д44 Likha chov Scientifi c Conference, May 15–20, 2014. St. Peters burg : SPbUHSS, 2014. — 174 p., il. ISBN 978-5-7621-0792-1 In the collection there were materials of the 14th Likhachov’s International Scientifi c Readings published, it was held on May 15–20, 2014 in SPbUHSS in accordance with the Decree of the Presi- dent of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin “On perpetuating the memory of Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov”. -
Casp's 'Differential Accumulation Versus Veblen's '
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan Working Paper CasP's 'Differential Accumulation' versus Veblen's 'Differential Advantage' Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2018/08 Provided in Cooperation with: The Bichler & Nitzan Archives Suggested Citation: Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan (2018) : CasP's 'Differential Accumulation' versus Veblen's 'Differential Advantage', Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2018/08, Forum on Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, s.l., http://www.capitalaspower.com/?p=2557 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/189830 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ www.econstor.eu WORKING PAPERS ON CAPITAL AS POWER No. -
Castoriadis, Veblen and the 'Power Theory of Capital'
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Bichler & Nitzan Archives THE ‘POWER THEORY OF CAPITAL’ Castoriadis, Veblen, and the ‘Power Theory of Capital’ D. T. Cochrane In Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” a group of adults sit around a table, drinking gin and telling stories of love. It is apparent that none of them can adequately express what love really is.1 One woman describes the abuse she experienced at the hands of her ex-husband. She insists that his actions, although terrible, were, in their own way, a manifestation of love. Her current husband insists that this cannot be so for love would never provoke someone to violence. Ultimately they agree to disagree. Despite the importance of love in their lives and their assertions that they feel love and loved, they could not provide an exact meaning for the word; a precise understanding of what ‘love’ signifi es – either in form or content – escapes everyone at the table. Like the characters in Carver’s story who have diffi culty in knowing how to talk about love, academics experience similar diffi culties when speaking of ‘capital.’ Economists, political scientists, even literary theorists, freely employ the concept, yet few can say what the word ‘capital’ truly signifi es. Either unaware of or unconcerned by the serious problems with both the Marxist labor theory of value (LToV) and the neoclassical utility 1. Thanks to the participants of the 2008 Great Lakes Political Economy Conference who provided feedback on this paper. -
Inflatable Marx
Gareth Stedman Jones. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016. Illustrations, maps. 768 pp. $35.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-674-97161-5. Reviewed by Terence Renaud Published on H-Ideas (March, 2018) Commissioned by Eliah Bures Last year the city of Hamburg celebrated the 2018, the series will celebrate the two hundredth 150th anniversary of Capital (1867), whose frst anniversary of Marx’s birth as well as the fftieth volume was originally published there. An inflat‐ anniversary of May 1968. While attendees will ed bust of Karl Marx, modeled on the forty-ton hear from the faction of the leftist German party, monument in Chemnitz, greets visitors to a spe‐ Die Linke, which sponsors the event, their main cial exhibit in the city’s Museum of Work. Called task is to deploy Marxist ideas in today’s fght Karl Marx light by its creator Hannes Langeder, against neoliberalism and far-right populism. this inflated sculpture symbolizes a new, buoyant Their Karl Marx may have more substance than version of Marx, whose legacy has fnally shed the the Hamburg inflatable, but he is just as free from monumental burden of the Cold War. Today we the weight of the past. can ostensibly read Marx afresh and decide which These recent, uplifting engagements with of his ideas still apply to our world. The Hamburg Marxism stand in contrast to Gareth Stedman exhibit features a playful staging of scenes from Jones’s new biography of Marx. While it too aims Capital, including faux supermarket aisles to shatter the “monumental mythology” that has stocked with “commodities.” Visitors can even ac‐ surrounded the German philosopher since the cess digital content through WhatsApp. -
Fifty Years of Struggle Over Marxism 1883-1932
Appendix to Rick Kuhn ‘Marxist crisis theory to 1932 and to the present: reflections on Henryk Grossman’s Fifty years of struggle over Marxism’ presented at the Society of Heterodox Economists Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2-3 December 2013 Henryk Grossmann, Fünfzig Jahre Kampf um den Marxismus 1883‐1932, Fischer, Jena, 1932, and as Part 7, ‘The further development of Marxism to the present’, of the essay Sozialistische Ideen und Lehren I in Ludwig Elster (ed.), Wörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft. Band 3, 4th edition, Fischer, Jena 1933, pp. 272‐341. Fifty years of struggle over Marxism 1883‐1932 Henryk Grossman Translated from German by Rick Kuhn and Einde O’Callaghan A Marxists of the early period Until the end of the seventies of the last century, circumstances for the understanding of Marx’s ideas were not particularly favourable, even within the socialist camp. A particular difficulty was that initially Capital was only available as a torso, as only one of several volumes. Almost another three decades passed before the volumes completing the system appeared (volume 2 in 1885, volume 3 in 1895). And a further fifteen years passed before Karl Kautsky brought out the last volume of Theories of surplus value (1910). These, intended by Marx as the fourth part of Capital, are a magnificent history of political economy from the end of the 17th century, one that bourgeois historical writing has been unable to equal. During the first decade after the founding of the German Empire it was hardly possible to speak of ‘Marxism’ in Germany (and still less in other countries).