In 20th-century discussions of Karl Marx's economics, the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule by which to transform the "values" of commodities into the "competitive prices" of the marketplace. This problem was first introduced by Marxist economist Conrad Schmidt and later dealt with by Marx in chapter 9 of the draft of volume 3 of Capital. The essential difficulty was this: given that Marx derived profit, in the form of surplus value, from direct labour inputs, and that the ratio of direct labour input to capital input varied widely between commodities, how could he reconcile this with a tendency toward an average rate of profit on all capital invested among industries, if such a tendency exists?
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review. He is best remembered for his contributions to economic theory as one of the leading Marxian economists of the second half of the 20th century.
Paul Alexander Baran was an American Marxist economist. In 1951 Baran was promoted to full professor at Stanford University and Baran was the only tenured Marxian economist in the United States until his death in 1964. Baran wrote The Political Economy of Growth in 1957 and co-authored Monopoly Capital with Paul Sweezy.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
The law of the value of commodities, known simply as the law of value, is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with reference to David Ricardo's economics. Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work, namely that the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them within the capitalist mode of production.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is a theory in the crisis theory of political economy, according to which the rate of profit—the ratio of the profit to the amount of invested capital—decreases over time. This hypothesis gained additional prominence from its discussion by Karl Marx in Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III, but economists as diverse as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo and William Stanley Jevons referred explicitly to the TRPF as an empirical phenomenon that demanded further theoretical explanation, although they differed on the reasons why the TRPF should necessarily occur.
Stephen Alvin Resnick was an American Marxist economist. He was well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis. His work, along with that of Wolff, is especially associated with a post-Althusserian perspective on political economy.
Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies, campaigns and academic disciplines. This includes general intellectual criticism about dogmatism, a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to materialism, arguments that Marxism is a type of historical determinism or that it necessitates a suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives. In addition, empirical and epistemological problems are frequently identified.
Ronald Lindley Meek was a Marxian economist and social scientist known especially for his scholarly studies of classical political economy and the labour theory of value. During the 1960s and 1970s, his writings had a strong influence on the Western academic discussion about Marx's economic theory.
Makoto Itoh was a Japanese economist who was considered internationally to be one of the most important scholars of Karl Marx's theory of value. He taught at Kokugakuin University, Tokyo, and was a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
Okishio's theorem is a theorem formulated by Japanese economist Nobuo Okishio. It has had a major impact on debates about Marx's theory of value. Intuitively, it can be understood as saying that if one capitalist raises his profits by introducing a new technique that cuts his costs, the collective or general rate of profit in society goes up for all capitalists. In 1961, Okishio established this theorem under the assumption that the real wage remains constant. Thus, the theorem isolates the effect of pure innovation from any consequent changes in the wage.
The temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI) of Karl Marx's value theory emerged in the early 1980s in response to renewed allegations that his theory was "riven with internal inconsistencies" and that it must therefore be rejected or corrected. The inconsistency allegations had been a prominent feature of Marxian economics and the debate surrounding it since the 1970s. Andrew Kliman argues that charges of inconsistency serve to legitimate the suppression of Marx's critique of political economy and current-day research based upon it as well as the "correction" of Marx's inconsistencies.
Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order is a 1966 book by the Marxian economists Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran. It was published by Monthly Review Press. It made a major contribution to Marxian theory by shifting attention from the assumption of a competitive economy to the monopolistic economy associated with the giant corporations that dominate the modern accumulation process. Their work played a leading role in the intellectual development of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. As a review in the American Economic Review stated, it represented "the first serious attempt to extend Marx’s model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism." It attracted renewed attention following the Great Recession.
Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions, and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given or as transhistorical. The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with modernity.
Alfredo Saad-Filho is a Brazilian Marxian economist.
Ian Steedman was for many years a professor of economics at the University of Manchester before moving down the road to Manchester Metropolitan University. He retired from there at the end of 2006, but was appointed as an emeritus professor.
An Essay on Marxian Economics is an analytical essay written by in 1942 by economist Joan Robinson. The essay deals with the orthodox teachings of capital accumulation, the essential demand crisis and real wages by comparing it to Karl Marx's Das Kapital. It is a wide-ranging critique on Marx and Orthodox economics while also arguing for a long-term economic view that builds on the problems that Marx first identified in the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences. An example of this can be found in the works of Soviet economists like Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet Political Economy.
Crisis theory, concerning the causes and consequences of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist system, is associated with Marxian critique of political economy, and was further popularised through Marxist economics.
