Radical Political Economics Research Papers (original) (raw)

The object of investigation of this book is generalized commodity production, or, capitalism, a notion that is strikingly missing in standard textbooks supposed to study it, as the authors note. Given the scope of the subjects the book deals with, and the range of theoretical approaches and analytical models covered, one can easily conclude that it is the fruit of decades of work. The book employs an integrated theoretical framework based on the writings of classical political economists, mainly Smith, Ricardo, and especially Marx, to study the growth-and crisis-prone, turbulent nature of capitalist economies. This includes a broad range of subjects from the theory of value and price to competition within and between industries to international trade to recurrent crises and long cycles. The book comprises two parts, and each part consists of five chapters. The first part is titled "Theories of Value and Empirical Evidence." It opens with a bird's-eye view of the labor theories of value as found in classical political economists. Marx's law of value is detailed as the main tool to understand capitalist economies. Chapter 2 picks up from surplus product, the main concern of the physiocrats, and simple and expanded reproduction as Marx framed it in terms of schemes of reproduction in the second volume of Capital. The next chapter deals with two controversies of historical importance, both related to the theory of value. First, the authors give an overview of the so-called transformation problem, briefly sketching the solutions proposed by different scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and favoring Shaikh's (1977) solution over the others. The second stop is the Cambridge Capital Controversy, where the authors detail how British Cambridge overcame neoclassical Cambridge on theoretical grounds, as was admitted by Paul Samuelson, one of the leading figures in the neoclassical camp. Once the stage is set by the first three chapters for empirical analysis based on classical political economics, chapter 4 studies the empirical deviations between labor values, prices of production, and market prices. It contains an extensive literature review, a detailed discussion of theoretical and empirical models, and both cross-sectional and intertemporal analysis of deviations. The second part of the chapter deals with the empirical relationship between price changes and income distribution following Piero Sraffa's footsteps. Chapter 5 is on the theory of competition, where the framework adopted by classical political economists was fundamentally different from that of neoclassical economics. In the first part of the chapter, the detailed treatment of how Sraffa's work on the incompatibility of decreasing, increasing, or constant returns to scale with perfect competition, and his critique of the Marshallian firm led to the monopolistic competition revolution in the interwar period, and how perfect competition reestablished its hegemony is of great history of thought interest. The second half of the chapter details the view of competition as a dynamic process of rivalry between individual capitals, capital and labor, capital and the state, the state and other states, and workers and other workers. Tendencies and patterns observed in prices and profit rates within and between 1016909R RPXXX10.