The theories of monopoly capitalism and unequal exchange make important contributions to economic theory. They emphasize, respectively, how big companies can use their power over consumers and smaller-firm suppliers, and how rich countries can exploit poorer ones.
Capitalist [...]
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Marx’s method of political economy offers a critique of the political economy of capitalism in relation to its historical, social and material foundations, and this contributes to understanding and explaining the nature and functioning of capitalism, as well as the root causes of social [...]
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The release of the latest Marvel blockbuster, Avengers: Infinity War, has coincided with an age of political uncertainty and upheavals, and the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. Released in the current political climate of Trump, Brexit, and nuclear crises, with a resurgence of class struggle, so [...]
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Our lives are shaped by manifestations of a working and applied ideology, and they embody a preference for certain explanations. This leads us to think about ideology. The idea of ideology involves the claim that people’s ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values cannot be taken for granted, but [...]
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A year ago, while I was studying for Honours, I would never have foreseen volunteering to read a 500 page volume of Marx’s work in my free time. But a week after I completed my thesis, at a local bar on a Friday night, I found myself eagerly agreeing to take part in a reading group of [...]
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The rent-seeking argument emerging out of the progressive side of the mainstream economics community runs something like this: the top 1% are socially unproductive and receive obscene amounts of money by securing themselves into positions of ownership that permit them to misappropriate [...]
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“So, what did you do over the summer”? Most students respond to this ubiquitous question with the familiar answers: “caught up with family”, “earned some money” or (perhaps more commonly) “lots of daytime drinking”. For a small group of political economy students from the University of [...]
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One of the first times I was provoked to think about the labour theory of value was in a university seminar, in which we discussed what lay behind the prices of things. Demand? Usefulness? Or was it completely random? The amount of labour embodied in a commodity certainly didn’t seem to [...]
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