Radical Political Economics Research Papers (original) (raw)

2025

My differences with Fred and Winfried don't start with Adam and Eve, but they're not far from it. We agree on the first page of the first chapter of Capital, but we split on the second page, when Marx introduces exchange value. There is a lot to say about Fred's book, but in this short presentation, I will focus on his interpretation of the first few pages of Capital's chapter 1. We are talking about different readings of Marx's Capital, but this is not just a discussion for theory nerds. The different readings can have consequences for our understanding of capitalism and of a post-capitalist economy. But that is not the topic for today.

2025

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, to present a growth account of the evolution of the value composition of capital and in so doing to deal with some of the issues raised by Zarembka’s (2015) contribution. And on the other hand, to review some crucial relations between the variables that relate to the movement of the rate of profit and the current predicament.

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

This paper by using the categories of productive and unproductive labor and by extending and further elaborating the data series utilized in Shaikh and Tonak (1994) reveals a sharp expansion of the unproductive activities in the U.S. economy during the period 1964-2007. The combination of growing productivity and the stagnant or even falling real wages of productive workers increased the rate of surplus value in the recent decades to unprecedented highs. As a consequence, the general rate of profit from the early 1980s onwards was also rising until the last years of our analysis; meanwhile the net rate of profit remained at levels much lower than those of the 1960s and the slightly rising trend during the post-1980s has been already reversed. The patterns of these crucial variables reveal startling similarities with the onset of the slowdown that started in the mid- to late 1960s.JEL classification: B5, E1, O51

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

A common concern in audit studies of racial discrimination is that names assigned to a particular race may also proxy for socioeconomic status. We conduct a correspondence study in Jamaica, a predominantly black middle-income country, and find that these concerns may be valid. The evidence from sending out over 1,000 résumés suggests employers prefer applicants perceived to be from high-income backgrounds. While qualifications are not independently important, those with names preferred by employers have a lower chance of being selected if they have high-quality résumés. The results suggest that class discrimination may matter as much as race discrimination. JEL Classification: I31, J71, J64

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

The “green economy” is fast becoming the new alpha and omega for many policy makers, corporations, political actors, and NGOs who want to tackle both the environmental and economic crisis at once. Or would it be better to speak about “green capitalism?” Going green is not only important in the fight against environmental destruction, it also makes a country “stronger, healthier, safer, more innovative, competitive and respected,” argues Thomas Friedman, the well-known New York Times columnist. “Is there anything that is more patriotic, capitalist, and geostrategic than this?” Indeed, the rationale underlying the nascent project of the green economy is that if the market could become the instrument for tackling the environmental crisis, the fight against this crisis could be the royal road to solving the problems of the market. Focusing in particular on the green economy’s impact on climate change, this paper analyzes the green economy as a hegemonic project that tries to retranslate...

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

The article is based on the second essay of my PhD dissertation. I am thankful to Jaime Ros, my dissertation advisor, and to my committee members, Amitava K. Dutt, Kwan S. Kim, and Kajal Mukhopadhyay, for their helpful comments and... more

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

The consensus among economists is that China’s post-1978 market reform policies have produced one of the world’s greatest economic success stories. Some progressives believe that China is now capable of serving as an anchor for a new (non-U.S. dominated) global economy. A few claim that the reform experience demonstrates the workability (and desirability) of market socialism. This article is critical of these views. Its four main conclusions are as follows: first, the reforms have led to the restoration of capitalism, not a new form of market socialism. Second, the gains attributed to the reforms have been seriously overstated. Early successes were largely due to the economic foundation established during the pre-reform Mao era. Moreover, the reform process has begun to undermine this foundation, increasing the country’s dependence on foreign investment, technology, and markets. Third, the reforms have produced an increasingly exploitative growth process, one that generates consider...

2025

This paper analyses two central issues in exploitation theory. First, the appropriate definition of individual and aggregate measures of exploitation is discussed. Second, the relation between profits and exploitation (the so-called Fundamental Marxian Theorem) is analysed. A general framework for the analysis of exploitation in the context of convex cone economies is proposed and various alternative equilibrium concepts are discussed. The limits of subjectivist approaches to exploitation, which crucially depend on agents' preferences, are shown. An objectivist approach to exploitation, which is related to the socalled 'New Interpretation' (Dumenil, 1980; is proposed. It is argued that it captures the core intuitions of exploitation theory and that it provides appropriate indices of individual and aggregate exploitation. Further, it is shown that it preserves the Fundamental Marxian Theorem in general economies. JEL Classification Numbers: D31 (Personal Income and Wealth Distribution), D46 (Value Theory), D63 (Equity, Justice, Inequality, * We are grateful to Tadasu Matsuo and participants in the Hitotsubashi University workshop on Exploitation Theory for comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies. This research started when Roberto Veneziani was visiting Hitotsubashi University. Their generous hospitality and financial support is gratefully acknowledged.

2025, Research Note

The start of the second millennium brought a growing sense that capitalism was becoming more ‘authoritarian’ and ‘illiberal’, with various indicators suggesting that ‘democracy’ is waning around the globe, that the protection of human and... more

2025, Economic and Political Weekly

Krishna Bharadwaj's critique of neo-classical marginal economics had a wide-ranging and long-lasting impact. She was a brilliant teacher, a defender of human rights and an inspiring figure for me throughout my life.

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

Conflicts in the water sector are now well-known, and also increasingly researched by economists, particularly in relation to major ideological differences over state-run versus privatized municipal systems. A major dividing line is over how to access and sustain the financing required to expand and maintain municipal grids. In the context especially of third world urban processes, a crucial determinant is whether market-based pricing of water can generate health benefits to justify new capital investments. Such benefits have typically required strong public systems that offer adequate water supply (with sufficient proximity to source) at an affordable price. A variety of financial and fiscal pressures emerged since the 1980s, leaving full cost recovery as the core practice required by international aid agencies, multilateral financiers, and multinational corporations. Those firms were attracted by high potential profits which, ultimately, could not be realized (in part because of c...

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

This paper evaluates the five most popular analytical approaches to the East Asian "miracle" economies: neoliberal, structural-institutional, "flying geese," Greater China, and dependency perspectives. Distinguishing between national and regional development visions, we specify the key forces that each approach sees driving industrialization and growth, as well as the most likely barriers each sees to continued growth and development in East Asia. In pointing out the main analytical shortcomings of the five perspectives in light of the East Asian crisis, we sketch some key elements of a Marxist framework capable of overcoming these difficulties in a politically useful way.

2025

This paper investigates bilateral market power in labor markets by merging an effort or labor discipline model with a turnover cost model. The effort model indicates unilateral employer power over workers; adding costly turnover allows for bilateral power in employment relationships. Systematic differences in exogenous determinates of the cost of job loss to workers and replacement costs to firms can help explain observed patterns of wage differentiation, including distinctions between segments of dual labor markets, interindustry wage differentials, the response of skill-based differentials to technological change and international competition, race- and gender-based differentials, and regional and national changes in unemployment.

2025, Review of Radical Political Economics

2025, Monthly Review

In 1964, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy wrote an essay entitled "Notes on the Theory of Imperialism" for a festschrift in honor of the sixty-fifth birthday of the great Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki. Later reprinted in Monthly Review in March 1966, the essay offered the first major analysis of multinational corporations within Marxian theory. Parts of it were incorporated into Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital in 1966, two years after Baran's death. Yet for all that book's depth, "Notes on the Theory of Imperialism" provided a more complete view of their argument on the growth of multinationals. In October and November 1969, Harry Magdoff and Sweezy wrote their article "Notes on the Multinational Corporation," picking up where Baran and Sweezy had left off. That same year, Magdoff published his landmark The Age of Imperialism, which systematically extended the analysis of the U.S. economy into the international domain. 1 In the analyses of Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, as distinct from the dominant liberal perspective, the multinational corporation was the product of the very same process of concentration and centralization of capital that had created monopoly capital itself. Likewise, it was to be understood in the context of the class-based society of capitalism and the capitalist state. As the main mechanism of monopoly capital abroad, multinational corporations were not to be analyzed merely in terms of the firm versus the state, but as components of an imperialist world system, in which firms were bound to state structures and class societies, and stood to gain from the hierarchy of nation-states within the world capitalist system and the division between center and periphery. Not only was such an analysis more complex, dynamic, and structurally rooted than mainstream studies; it better explained the long-term evolution of global corporations. Other radical thinkers, such as Stephen Hymer, Intan Suwandi is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Oregon. John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.

2024, International Critical Thought

In Marxist political economy, the firm-level rate of profit and the average rates of profit by industry play a central role in the study of intra-and-inter industry real competition. Nevertheless, there has been a relatively lack of empirical research about competition and distribution of profit rates, especially for peripheral countries. This paper estimates the distribution of profit rates among and within industries in Colombia and interprets those results in light of the Marxist economic theory. The econometrical methodology relies on non-parametric techniques (kernel density estimations) employing firm-level data from the 4963 biggest firms in the country in 2018. The main results are: First, a significant dispersion in the firm-level profit rates as well as in the average profit rates across industries. Second, a non-normal unimodal tent-shape distribution for the general firm-level rates of profit as well as for the distribution of profit rates in the majority of industries. Third, negative profit rates as a structural feature of profit rate distribution at both: general and sectoral levels. Fourth, in comparison with interest rates, the firms exhibit low profitability: 60.5% of the firms yielded profit rates below the average deposit interest rate. Grosso modo, those findings are congruent with Marxist economic theory but not with other economic paradigms.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

Using the methodology of overdetermination, class process of surplus labor as the entry point and socially determined need of food security, we deliver an alternative class-focused rendition of the public distribution system (PDS) in India. We first surmise our theoretical framework to infer that the overdetermined and contradictory relation of class and social needs matter for PDS. Beyond the reasoning of being pro-poor, fair, or wasteful, we deploy this framework to reinterpret the formation of Indian PDS in the 1960s. Its demonstration requires revisiting the historical condition that shaped capital’s passive revolution through the post-independence Indian state and its subsequent crisis arising out of the contradictions and conflicts in the class-need space. We argue that PDS signals a case of success and not failure of capitalism.

2024

In the "early and rude state" of the world, before there were capitalists and landlords, the whole of the produce of the worker belonged to the worker. However, once the means of production are in the hands of capitalists, the value the worker's labour adds to the means of production is shared between worker and capitalist in the forms of wages and profit. Under these circumstances, it is no longer the case that the relative prices of commodities are directly proportional to their labour values. This state of affairs, which in Marx falls under the problematic of the "transformation problem", was something that it is clear Smith was fully aware of, and understood. It is also the case that Smith's "resolution" of the price of a commodity into the components of wages, profit and rent, a procedure rejected by Marx on theoretical grounds, leads to powerful insights into the relationship between the labour embodied in commodities and their relative prices, which are in turn entirely consonant with the standpoint taken by Marx on the issues involved.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

2007). In spite of these criticisms, the ADAS framework had continued to dominate the textbooks, with little or no response to these criticisms. This paper reviews the main criticisms of the ADAS framework, and then focuses on Gregory Mankiw's presentation of ADAS in his best-selling Macroeconomics textbook. Two main criticisms will be discussed: logically inconsistent and empirically unrealistic. The paper is concerned primarily with the short run and the upward-sloping short run AS curve, because that is the curve that is logically inconsistent with the AD curve. So when I say "the AS curve" without qualification in the pages that follow, the implied meaning is the upward-sloping short run AS curve.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

This paper explores the institutional factors behind the crisis of capital accumulation in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Estimations show that political instability accounted for most of the fall in the rate of accumulation, independent of distributive outcomes, such as the level of profitability. Contrary to prior criticisms, these results provide empirical support for a social structure of accumulation (SSA) interpretation of the performance of the South African economy.

2024, Trade and Industry Policy Secretariat Annual Forum, …

This paper examines how distributive outcomes and unresolved distributive conflicts affect the rate of productive investment and what the implications are for the level of joblessness people face in South Africa. The link between investment and employment is developed within a context of "Keynesian" and "classical" unemployment. Using time-series and cross-sectional data, estimates of the relative importance of different determinants of the rate of investment in South Africa show strong robust effects from profit rates, economic growth, and the degree of social and political conflict. The results support the argument that both distributive outcomes and distributive conflicts are important influences on the rate of investment. A short discussion of policy implications concludes the paper. I.

2024

Abstract: Despite the fact that the significance of institutional economics is com-monly recognized, the uncertainty of basic concepts of institutional economics – institutions – and its investigation sphere is widely mentioned today. The paper aims to trace the process of evolution in the understanding of the no-tion of institution, from its spontaneous mentions and pragmatic use of the so-called pre-institutional era to the desire to understand and to define the essence of the institution in the period of early institutionalism. Based on the analyses of appropriate literature, the paper tries to study how the term “institution ” was understood at the three initial historical period of its usage. For this purpose, the first part of the paper analyses how the term “institu-tion ” was used at the start by religious figures in VII and XIII centuries and then by thinkers in XVII-XVIII centuries which are considered as a pre-history of the term “institution ” wide usage. The second part...

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

Marxist categories, emphasizing class relations, essentially ignore the ways in which gender relations shape class struggle and class formation of women workers. Accounts of class formation use indicators such as unionization and strike activity as a yardstick of class capacities, thus denying the particular conditions women workers face under a dual system of domination: capitalism and patriarchy. Women are a significant percent of the total work force and an increasing percent of the total unionized work force. Yet women work in occupations which have been regularly viewed as nontraditional arenas for unionization. Our analysis looks at the labor process and gender domination as mechanisms of control within the workplace. We argue that an understanding of the differential forms of women's struggles should consider how capital structure and labor markets affect organizational capacities of women workers, and how the degree of gender domination corresponding to technically and n...

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

This paper concerns the role played by mainstream economics in the unequal assertion of people’s right to clean water. First of all there is a conflict between satisfying wants and asserting rights. Second there is also a contradiction between aiming at maximizing social utility and ensuring rights. Finally, the market being considered the default regulation institution, the human right to water is hindered because markets are both inefficient in reaching universal coverage and unaccountable. JEL Codes: A13, B40, I30

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

This article outlines the "fundamental myth" about the structure of property rights in a capitalist economy, namely the idea that being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is part of a bundle of property rights known as the "ownership of the firm." Residual claimancy is contractually determined so there is no such "ownership." The fundamental myth exposes a basic fallacy in capital theory that has hitherto escaped attention in the capital theory debates.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

2024, PSL Quarterly Review

The purpose of this paper is to present some notes on the contemporary Brazilian economy between 2010 and 2022, translating items from the value added statement (VAS) and the balance sheet of a sample of 48 companies that make up the Bovespa Index (Ibovespa, in Portuguese) portfolio into Marxist economic theory. The information was obtained from InvestSite (https://www.investsite.com.br/) and Economatica (https://economatica.com/) databases. In this sense, we observed some general trends and countertrends of real competition in the Brazilian economy, based on the empirical formulation of the concepts of constant capital, variable capital, surplus-value, turnover of capital, costprice, price of production, rate of profit, and rate of surplus-value. In this way, we hope to contribute to a research agenda on the criteria for production and appropriation of surplus-value in Brazil, as well as to use the Marxian procedure of transformation of values into prices of production as a macroeconomic tool.

2024

At each point in time (year), given the technique, an average specimen of commodity has at the same time a labour-value, a value price, a production price, a Sraffian price, an actual long-term price and a short-term market price, all of which (except values) reflect the prevailing income distribution (the trio rate of exploitationgeneral profit rate-value compositions of capital). The transformation of the vector of value prices, ($) , into production prices, (&) , is carried out using a linear operator (matrix) that makes (&) = ($) possible. The matrix is completed with other similar matrices that allow determining the exact quantitative relationship between all prices and the quantities of direct labour and total labour (labour-values). The Marxian "Transformation" is a two-step solution. First, ($) and (&) are defined using actual long-term prices () to value both costs and profits, and finally the "correct" (&) are obtained, the same ones that Marx's critics consider to be their own prices but not Marx's (even though it was Marx who discovered them: Marx 1894:165). The key is the two successive assumptions found in Capital: in Books I-II prices are assumed to be equal to ($) , and in Book III they are assumed to be equal to (&) .

2024

This article first shows that one of the main misunderstandings surrounding the labour theory of value arises from the non-distinction between real determination and mathematical determination: although mathematically it is possible to link value prices (values expressed in money) and production prices through a linear transformation that operates in both directions, from the point of view of a realistic economic theory the "real relations of value" (Marx 1868), which take place in the real world, are prior to, and determine de facto, univocally, those theoretical-mathematical relationships. Secondly, to study prices appropriately it is necessary to distinguish between actual prices, which are as real as labour-values, and the pair of theoreticalhypothetical prices that would exist if the rate of profit or the rate of surplus value, respectively, were uniform (which they are not in reality). Thirdly, after defining the equations of these prices in the correct way in which they appear in the literature, it is proven that it is possible to read the Marxian Transformation in two steps, showing that the first Marxian definition of both types of prices (which are defined using only actual prices) gives way to a second and definitive definition in which both coincide with the correct definitions. Fourthly, the transformation is framed in a broader framework of various (linear) transformations to show that value prices and production prices are related, also exactly, on the one hand to actual prices and on the other hand to the values and quantities of direct labour represented in the commodities, so that all the vectors involved are calculable simultaneously within a single accounting system. Fifthly, it is explained why a physical theory of value, based on a substance of value alternative to labour, cannot prosper. And finally it is shown that the only productive factor of value is labour, and, although all factors cooperate with labour in the production of wealth (use values), this is an irrelevant question for the determination of prices.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

The paper focuses on the “structural characteristics” of the Greek economy: domestic sectoral productive linkages, specialization profile, level of industrial and technological development, relative income elasticities of demand, international trade profile. Our analysis in these characteristics indicates that the Greek economy is a rather ‘‘extraverted” economy, within the EU frame. This “extraversion,” and not the labor costs, is the real cause of the Greek poor economic performance and low competitiveness. Input-output analysis confirms this suggestion.

2024

In his theoretical model of production prices Marx follows the classical economists in treating wages as being paid in advance. Sraffa, instead, tends to treat them as being paid post factum. However, when Marx tackles the problem under less abstract scrutiny, he abandons the classical approach and declares that, as a matter of fact, wages are postponed. We prove that, if the period of postponed wage payment differs from the length of the production process, the correct prices are better approximated by an equation with the full post-payment of wages than by one with full pre-payment. Under perfect competition and postponed wage payments, Sraffa’s approach to price determination is the correct one, and validates Marx’s non-classical vision, whatever the period of wage payment.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

To eradicate poverty, pro-market policies were implemented in Uganda. This article reveals that the policies did not improve the welfare of peasants. Instead, the peasants were made to depend on the market as a result of the harsh environment created that compelled them to increasingly abandon self-provisioning farming. Consequently, the people are increasingly faced with food shortages and the number of children dying of malnutrition is on the rise while land seizures are taking place. JEL Classification: Q02, Q11, Q15

2024, Journal of Contemporary Asia

The aim of this article is to estimate the main categories of classical economics in Iran from 1986 to 2016 using the method of Shaikh and Tonak (1994). The article first provides a theoretical discussion on the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, and this distinction is used to analyse the distribution of total value in the economy. Next, products and economic activities are reclassified to create classical basic tables and examine the trends of key variables in the classical economy. Finally, the value composition of capital and the general rate of profit are estimated using three models: the Circulating Capital Model, the Fixed Capital Model, and the Single Turnover Model. The findings indicate that the years under study can be divided into three periods based on the components of the most fundamental category of classical economics, which is the rate of profit. These periods are referred to as consolidation, deepening, and crisis phase of liberalism.

2024, RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

The present paper examines the determinants of investment activity in Greece over the period 1960-1999. It describes briefly the investment activity in Greece and then tests for the factors that presumably influence this investment activity. The paper uses a multiple linear regression model incorporating various factors that presumably influence investment activity in Greece, based on theoretical as well as on empirical evidence. The results confirm the anticipated positive relationship between investment and output, investment and profitability, and the anticipated negative relationship between investment and interest rate. Also, the first oil crisis and the incorporation of Greece in the wider EU financial area in 1992 seem to have influenced investment activity. Finally, the paper estimates investment elasticities with respect to the various factors, and makes some comments concerning the encouragement of investment activity in Greece.

2024, RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

2024

2024, Hastings Environmental Law Journal

2024

Two years ago Asia’s tiger economies were celebrating the Asian miracle, operating in an environment of relatively low inflation with a stable but cautious monetary policy. However, the rising wave of growth has suddenly turned into an Asian Tsunami. Rapid growth and prudent macroeconomic policies, therefore, do not guarantee a sustainable economic environment. This paper examines the characteristics of the current economic storm in Asia and the IMF

2024, Social Science Research Network

2024, Working Paper Series, …

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

Eco-Wars tells us not to give up hope. According to Libby, battalions of social movement organizations are out there, preparing to balance the power of corporations and win the war against businesses and for the environment. The groups have done it before, and can do better in the future. Libby's analysis of the past 15 years of environmental battles is broad in scope if thin on theory. His title and first chapter suggest there are ways to organize environmentalists to effectively oppose business. The cases he offers, however, illustrate the difficulties in proving the existence, not to mention effectiveness, of such claims. His cases range from animal rights to secondhand smoke ordinances to the anti-biotechnology campaigns opposing genetic engineering of foods. He also covers the "Big Green" campaign in California, and the anti-bovine growth hormone campaign in the Northeast. Around this array of disparate issues, Libby attempts to build a general theory of "Expressive Interest Groups" and their related Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) which will show that these groups can oppose various large corporate interests. This approach leads to an engaging catalogue of political campaigns concerning "environmental issues," yet leaves the reader disappointed with the outcomes for the environmentalists, as well as the theories of political action needed to strengthen citizens' groups for the future. On the positive side, Libby gives a good account of many different SMOs and their methods, successful and less so, of attempting concrete social change. Libby also shines a bright light on the anti-environmentalists. His explanation of how corporations successfully appeal to the general public in opposing environmental interests is excellent. Students of environmental and social movements will find these cases serve well as a guide for their own work.

2024, Review of Radical Political Economics

2024

This thesis examines tbe role of tbe state in redistributing income between social classes in New Zealand during tbe years 1949-1975. It applies an innovative methodology, developed by E. Ahmet Tonak, to a set of data drawn from New Zealand's national accounts and estimates a quantity labelled 'net-tax', defined as tbe taxes tbat the working class cede to the state less the expenditure that tbe working class receives from the state in tbe form of a social wage. A detailed tbeoretical discussion precedes tbe empirical analysis. Insofar as Tonak's method requires that the social wage (the portion of state expenditure consumed by the working class) be identified as an empirical quantity, the argument that all taxes, and hence all state expenditures, originate from surplus value is confronted. The views of the main representatives of tbis contemporary school of tbought are subjected to detailed scrutiny. They are rejected in favour of the views of a school which considers the portion of taxes funding the state expenditure that constitutes tbe social wage to originate in 'wages'. A model which theoretically 'grounds' the comparison of taxes paid to state expenditure received, effected in the remaining chapters of tbis study, is then formulated. In the empirical analysis, tbe empirical referent of the 'net-tax' concept is calculated for the years 1949-1975. The net-tax data set is then used to construct a transference ratio, which indicates the degree and direction of income redistribution effected by the state. The main finding to emerge is that, in all but one of the twenty-seven years surveyed in this study, the working class has surrendered more wealth in taxes to the state than it has received back from the state as a social wage. In light of these results, it can be concluded that the welfare state has not materially benefitted the working class in New Zealand. Moreover, insofar as income has consistently been redistributed from the working class to 'non-labour' (the capitalist class and the state itself), the state can be considered to owe the working class a debt in the amount of 3671.26 million (constant 1975) dollars.