Consumption demand in Marx, his crisis theories and in the current crisis

Isabella M. Weber and Evan Wasner challange the dominant view of inflation that it is macroeconomic in origin and must always be tackled with macroeconomic tightening. In contrast, they argue that inflation is predominantly a sellers’ inflation that derives from microeconomic origins, namely the ability of firms with market power …

Could working less make people and the planet better off? Find out in this dossier by exploring the landscape of working time reduction policies and their potential for reimagining, restructuring, and redistributing time as a political resource in the 21st century economy.

Dans cette contribution, nous examinons la relation sociale à l’énergie au sein du régime d’accumulation fordiste et du capitalisme financiarisé et mondialisé qui s’est mis en place depuis les années 1970. L’objectif est d’identifier des ruptures dans les modalités d’usage de l’énergie qui accompagnent les transformations observées dans d’autres domaines. Pour cela, nous procédons à une analyse empirique et comparatiste de l’utilisation de l’énergie dans les principales économies à haut revenu (Allemagne, États-Unis, France, Japon et Royaume-Uni) entre 1950 et 2010. Le fordisme se caractérise par une utilisation extensive de l’énergie et une utilisation intensive du travail. Les forts gains de productivité de ce dernier sont alimentés notamment par une augmentation rapide de la quantité d’énergie incorporée au processus de production. À partir de 1970, le ralentissement de la croissance de la quantité d’énergie coïncide avec le ralentissement de la productivité du travail et contribue à l’érosion du compromis social fordiste. L’émergence du néolibéralisme se traduit par une restauration de la part du capital dans le partage de la valeur ajoutée et s’accompagne, d’une part, d’une utilisation de plus en plus intensive de l’énergie, la productivité de celle-ci se mettant à augmenter fortement dans les principaux pays à haut revenu ; d’autre part, par la délocalisation de l’utilisation de l’énergie.

After completing the module, participants should have knowledge and understanding about the theory of Critical Political Economy and its basic methods. They should be able to apply central concepts to analyse critical questions regarding the embeddedness of economic relations within broader social, political and ecological relations.

In this lecture Ben Fine aims at stimulating interest for and explaining the relevance of Marxist Political Economy. Ben Fine dedicates the first half of his comprehensible lecture to the question on how mainstream economics became the way it is by explaining its key concepts and how those evolved during the past 150 years. While critically reflecting those concept he also emphasizes that mainstream economics does not consider historical processes. This is the point of departure on his presentation of the core terms and crucial categories of Marxist Political Economy: e.g. the production process and class relations (Part 1). Part 2 examines the consequences of the capitalist mode of production and its propensity to crises. Ben Fine illustrates this Marxist analysis with the example of the current crisis and explains current conditions for the accumulation of capital.

Most mainstream neoclassical economists completely failed to anticipate the crisis which broke in 2007 and 2008. There is however a long tradition of economic analysis which emphasises how growth in a capitalist economy leads to an accumulation of tensions and results in periodic crises. This paper first reviews the work of Karl Marx who was one of the first writers to incorporate an analysis of periodic crisis in his analysis of capitalist accumulation. The paper then considers the approach of various subsequent Marxian writers, most of whom locate periodic cyclical crises within the framework of longer-term phases of capitalist development, the most recent of which is generally seen as having begun in the 1980s. The paper also looks at the analyses of Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Claire Mitchell, two US institutionalist economists who stressed the role of finance and its contribution to generating periodic crises, and the Italian Circuitist writers who stress the problematic challenge of ensuring that bank advances to productive enterprises can successfully be repaid.