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Is It Global Economics or Neo-Laissez-Faire?
“For Ralph Miliband, socialism was more than an intellectual and theoretical preoccupation. He was intensely concerned with socialism as a practical political project, and with the key element of that project, working-class power. I would be less than respectful of Miliband’s lifelong commitment if I did not acknowledge . . .” read more
Social Democracy and Full Employment
“‘The voters, now convinced that full employment, generous welfare services and social stability can quite well be preserved, will certainly not relinquish them. Any Government which tampered seriously with the basic structure 0f the full-employment Welfare State would meet with a sharp reverse at the polls’ (Antony Crosland,1956). . . .” read more
An Anti-Hayekian Manifesto
“Whither Socialism? poses as an attack on the possibility of market socialism. But that pose is superficial. The central object of Stiglitz’s attack is the conventional general equilibrium model of twentieth-century economic theory, fathered by the French economist Léon Walras in the late nineteenth century, and brought . . .” read more
Political Ecology, Distributional Conflicts, and Economic Incommensurability
“Environmentalism is sometimes seen as a product of prosperity, an approach usually known as the ‘post-materialist’ thesis. But this fails to do justice to the scope of environmentalist movements today; there is also the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ which grows out of distribution conflicts over the use of . . .” read more
Harnessing the Market
“The clearest and most concise statement of John Roemer’s project in A Future for Socialism occurs at the end of his book. In its concluding chapter he summarizes his argument as pivoting on two ‘crucial ideas’—the idea that ‘socialism is best thought of as a kind of egalitarianism, . . .” read more
China in the Russian Mirror
“When people all over the world think about the collapse of the Soviet Union they draw a certain picture in their minds. According to this picture, modern societies developed along two different paths: the market economy and the command economy. Countries that took the path of the command . . .” read more
A Reply to Maurice Glasman
“I am pleased to have been given the chance to reply to Maurice Glasman’s article in nlr 205. Glasman raised certain fundamental issues about which debate is urgently necessary. However, his article also contained a number of factual errors which, if not cleared up, may hinder genuine . . .” read more
The Great Deformation: Polanyi, Poland and the Terrors of Planned Spontaneity
“Labour is only another name for a human activity that goes with life itself. . .To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of their purchasing power, would result . . .” read more
Amartya Sen’s Unequal World
“This short work exhibits (often, perforce, only in fleeting cameo) the current state of Amartya Sen’s decades-long engagement with problems of equality and its absence. The book provides not only an exhilarating tour d’horizon of ideas developed at greater ease elsewhere, but also fresh nuances that are designed . . .” read more
Western Europe’s Economic Stagnation
“At the beginning of the 1990s, Western Europe is clearly facing more acute economic problems than are the other major countries of the oecd area. Both the United States and Japan seem to be hesitantly recovering in 1993 from their earlier, and relatively modest, slowdowns. Europe, on . . .” read more
The Costs of Stability: The Advanced Capitalist Countries in the 1980s
“It is widely recognized that economic policy in the advanced capitalist countries shifted profoundly in the 1980s. Employment levels were abandoned to market processes, government deficits would be eliminated to squeeze inflation and release resources for private initiative, profitability had to be restored to improve the climate for . . .” read more
The Regulation Approach: Theory and History
“In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the . . .” read more
Economies Out of Control
“At the end of the 1980s a word was pronounced in London and New York which had virtually dropped out of economic vocabulary at the start of the decade—stagflation. The Reagan and Thatcher booms are over and their successors have been left to grapple with a legacy of . . .” read more
Different But Not Exceptional: The Feminism of Permeable Fordism
“This article does not take the usual form of a political or academic intervention. It is an essay in intellectual autobiography. Such an effort is, of course, different from the history of ideas—the recounting of ‘debates’ and descriptions of other theorists’ trajectories—which constitutes one of the staples of . . .” read more
Third World Industrialization: 'Global Fordism' or a New Model?
“From the 1960s to the 1970s, industrial output in almost all Third World countries grew rapidly. Growth was especially fast in a subset of developing countries that can be called ‘late industrializers’, countries which industrialized without the competitive asset of being able to monopolize an original technology. Late . . .” read more
Still a Question of Hegemony
“The analysis in nlr 179 by Bob Jessop, Kevin Bonnets and Simon Bromley of Thatcherism’s current difficulties in terms of the weaknesses of its economic strategy, demonstrates the power and indispensability of ‘traditional’ political economy. But it also shows some of the limitations of that approach. They . . .” read more
The Debt Problem, European Integration and the New Phase of World Crisis
“The market crash of October 1987 and the tremor of 1989 both prompted speculation that some replay of the 1929 crisis was in prospect. When the markets recovered, a cry of relief went up: ‘The Crisis Is Over’. But in reality the crisis has persisted now for more . . .” read more
Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction
“Many on the left find a source of hope in the realignment of ‘green’ and socialist perspectives. I believe they are right to do so, and I share the hope. But it remains true that important currents within Green politics and culture are hostile to socialism (as they . . .” read more
The Politics of Post-Fordism: Or, The Trouble with 'New Times'
“The ‘post-Fordist’ hypothesis concerning the development of a new ‘mode of regulation’ of modern capitalism is a fertile and important one. It was developed, following Gramsci’s key early understanding of the significance of mass production and consumption, by Michel Aglietta and other members of the ‘regulation school’ in . . .” read more
The Cost of Neo-Liberal Europe
“Throughout the present decade, neo-liberal economic strategies—interacting with intense competitive pressures on world markets—have sought to remodel the capitalisms of Western Europe. In the context of mass unemployment the drive towards a renewed subordination of workforces has found unity and direction in the demand for labour flexibility, while . . .” read more
Commercial Capital and British Development: A Reply to Michael Barratt Brown
“Despite their overtly historical nature, Anderson and Nairn’s essays on British development were profoundly theoretical. The identification of British ‘peculiarity’ or ‘exceptionalism’ involved a challenge not only to Marx and Engels’s commentaries on the times in which they lived, but also to the general Marxist theory of capitalist . . .” read more
Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?
“The virtues of the market and the deficiencies of central planning have become common sense for many socialist economists, both in the capitalist countries and in those of ‘actually existing socialism’. Some spirited defences have recently been made of non-market forms of economic co-ordination, particularly by Ernest Mandel, . . .” read more
The Transition from Actually Existing Capitalism
“The question of socialism is once more in the air. Paradoxical though it may seem, the setbacks suffered by various Socialist, Social Democratic and Communist parties in Western Europe have brought up the question of the feasibility of socialism in advanced capitalist countries. At the same time, the . . .” read more
The Myth of Market Socialism
“We must be grateful to Alec Nove for keeping the controversy to the essentials, avoiding red herrings and side issues. Our debate does not concern the most adequate strategy for assuring immediate rapid economic growth and increasing social equality in relatively less developed countries. Neither is its object . . .” read more
Ownership, Control and the Market
“For many years capitalism was defined in terms of two key elements: private ownership of the means of production, and the existence of wage labour. These conditions gave rise to the existence of surplus value, which, in the hands of capitalists, became capital. From this sprang a definition . . .” read more
Markets and Socialism
“I am grateful to Ernest Mandel for his thoughtful criticism of my ideas concerning ‘market socialism’ (‘In Defence of Socialist Planning’, nlr 159). By a coincidence, I received on the same day a copy of an attack on these ideas from the New Right: Crozier and Selden’s . . .” read more
The Formation of British Capitalism
“Periodically a book illuminates and orders a complex and vexed question not so much by discovering anything new or by fresh theory, but simply by looking at it systematically and avoiding premature conceptualization. In setting out to close ‘the most outstanding lacuna in the understanding of our recent . . .” read more
Capitalism in the Computer Age
“Norbert Wiener, in the early 1960s, foresaw a parallel between the process of automation and the nature of magic as it has been depicted in countless fantasies, from Goethe’s tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice to W.W. Jacob’s Monkey’s Paw. The characteristic of magic in these stories is its . . .” read more
In Defence of Socialist Planning
“In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism Alec Nove criticizes the methods of Marxist economics, as misleading or irrelevant for the task of building socialism, and rejects the goal of Marxist politics—socialism without commodity production—as impossible of realization. Any effective answer to his objections must follow the . . .” read more
Socialism--Feasible and Viable?
“Alec Nove’s Economics of Feasible Socialism is an important landmark in contemporary writing on socialism. Not only does it consistently, and on the whole successfully, combat a series of long-established myths; it also attempts to present, or at least to sketch, the essential features of ‘feasible socialism’. It . . .” read more
Probability, Economics and the Labour Theory of Value
“In our book Laws of Chaos, published by Verso in 1983, we advocate a fundamental methodological shift in the foundations of political economy. Economists and economic philosophers have often pointed out the essentially indeterminate and statistical nature of economic categories such as price and rate of profit. Marxists, . . .” read more
Robots and Capitalism (Comment)
“Tessa Morris-Suzuki has opened up an interesting and necessary discussion of the consequences of automation in manufacturing and of the associated rapid growth of the software industries. As she shows, using Japanese data, the use of robots, etc., is now developing at a speed which makes it important . . .” read more
Robots and Capitalism
“‘The key to innovation is not to be found in chemistry electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital’. Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital.” read more
On 'The Geometry of Imperialism'
“Giovanni Arrighi’s The Geometry of Imperialism (NLB, 1978) is an effort by a well-known Italian Marxist economist to deal critically with the Leninist theory of imperialism. That theory, as Arrighi observes, is virtually the only theory of Marxism to which non-Marxist economists give serious consideration. More specifically, the . . .” read more
The Value Controversy and Social Research
“Debates on the labour theory of value are usually waged at the most abstract levels of theoretical discourse. Frequently these debates are preoccupied with questions of the appropriate methodological stance toward social analysis, epistemological disputes about what it means to ‘explain’ a social process, and mathematical arguments about . . .” read more
The 'Rediscovery' of Ricardo
“In 1927, when the thirty-year-old Sraffa arrived in Cambridge, Anglo-Saxon economics was dominated by Marshall’s thought. Morever, both in Europe and America, one or another form of marginalist economics held undisputed sway—with its subjectivist theory of value and its anti-socialist implications. Sraffa himself had recently become notorious in . . .” read more
Keynes, Sraffa and the Capitalist Crisis
“In order to find a work of economic theory as ‘abstract’ as Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by means of Commodities, we have to go back to the very foundation of the science: to François Quesnay’s Tableau économique (1758). However, this abstraction is the result of a protracted . . .” read more
Introduction to Sraffa
“Piero Sraffa was born in Turin in 1898, the son of a law professor at the university. As he himself described in a 1924 letter to Gramsci (quoted in the article by Ferrata below), he was a ‘pacifist socialist’ as an adolescent, in the years 1915–17: the Italian . . .” read more
Sraffa’s 'Tabula Rasa'
“A re-reading of Production of Commodities by means of Commodities has confirmed my initial impression that it is ‘things’ rather than ‘subjects’ which move around in Sraffa’s construction. In other words, it suppresses the first term of the relationship between subjects (at once producers and consumers) and . . .” read more
Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis
“The history of capitalism shows us that the periodic recurrence of crises is not a function of the working class’s strength or combativity, of ‘mistakes’ in economic management, or even of ‘parasitism’ in society. The tendency towards crisis is indissolubly linked to the existence of capitalism itself. It . . .” read more
Phases of US Capitalist Expansion
“The characteristic mode of existence of developed capitalism is large-scale industry with its mass production. Yet capitalist relations of production do not just arise from thin air. They derive historically from the formation of the wage-earning class by the gradual dissolution or destruction of previous modes of production. . . .” read more
The 'Crisis of the Seventeenth Century'
“‘It is clear that the seventeenth century—with a world-economy larger than it had been in the sixteenth—saw a new division of wealth, under the banner of a many-sided competition, unfettered by loyalty, ferocious and premeditated, since decline and stagnation were poor counsellors: nothing was yielded, everything taken that . . .” read more
On the Origins of Capitalist Development
“Robert Brenner’s article in nlr 104 concerns a number of issues that have been the subject of debate within Marxism. Its focus is the explanation of the origins of capitalism, and related but not identical to this is the analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. . . .” read more
Comment on Brenner
“When I read Robert Brenner’s article, I rubbed my eyes in wonderment. It was a long time since I had last looked at the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in which I participated along with Maurice Dobb and others some thirty years ago (recently re-issued . . .” read more
Reply to Sweezy
“Readers will have to judge for themselves whether or not I have mischaracterized Paul Sweezy’s arguments. I do not think my understanding of his case is idiosyncratic. Other writers, most recently John Merrington in his ‘Town and Country in the Development of Capitalism’ (nlr 93, September–October 1975, . . .” read more