From the very beginning, the area of mainstream economics devoted to Third World development has been imbued with a utopian impulse. The basic idea has been that traditional societies need to be transformed in order to pass through the various stages of growth and, if successful, they will [...]
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Mainstream economists refer to it as price theory, everyone else value theory. But whatever it’s called, it’s at the center of economists’ differing explanations of what happens in (and alongside) markets.
As I see it, price/value theory serves as the framework to [...]
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As I tell my students, nothing gets a mainstream economist frothing at the mouth quite like mentioning Karl Polanyi.
Or at least it used to, when mainstream economists actually knew who Polanyi was and grasped—however dismissively—what he wrote about the history of [...]
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Utopia and the Critique of Political Economy
In my article, published in the Winter 2017, No. 79 issue of the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE), based on my 2016 E. L. Wheelwright Memorial Lecture, I show that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had a much more positive [...]
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The debate about our ecological predicament is heating up and, as it turns out, the Marxian critique of political economy is at the center of that debate.
Much of the discussion right now concerns the Anthropocene, the idea that the current geological age—overlapping with or, [...]
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This is the text of the talk delivered by David F. Ruccio at Gleebooks, Sydney, 19 October 2016, as part of a ‘Class Acts in Political Economy’ roundtable with Katherine Gibson.
First, thanks to Adam Morton for organising this event. And to Katherine Gibson for taking time [...]
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I have argued many times over the years that mainstream economists, especially mainstream macroeconomists, largely ignore the issue of inequality. And when they do see it, they tend to misunderstand both its causes (often attributing it to exogenous events, such as globalization and [...]
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Back in 2013 (and in a series of other posts), I have argued that neoliberalism (including so-called “left neoliberalism,” as espoused by Hillary Clinton and her new runnning-mate Tim Kaine) is not a unified period or stage of capitalism but, rather, a project to remake the world. Therefore, [...]
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