COVID-19 and Economic Development in Latin America

Understanding gender inequality is possible only when looking at the intersections between race and class inequalities. The health crisis is no different: Stevano takes a feminist and social reproductive perspective, from unpaid household work to social infrastructure and services.

The background for the present elaboration is twofold: firstly, the ongoing debate about whether the Marxian theory of value has been damaged (or even destroyed) by the alleged impossibility of solving the ‘transformation problem’ and secondly, the fact that almost all of the (later) economic manuscripts of Marx are now …

It is perhaps fitting that the seriousness of the coronavirus threat hit most of the Western world around the Ides of March, the traditional day of reckoning of outstanding debts in Ancient Rome. After all, problems and imbalances have accumulated in the Western capitalist system over four decades, ostensibly since it took the neoliberal road out of the 1970s crisis and kept going along it, heedless of the crises and problems it led to.

Warum wurden nach der Finanzkrise weder die Finanz- und Wirtschaftsordnung noch die Wirtschaftswissenschaft angepasst oder erneuert? Warum wird an vorherrschenden Prinzipien und Theorien festgehalten? Joseph Vogl geht diesen Fragen im Vortrag „Das seltsame Überleben der Theodizee in der Ökonomie“ nach und spricht von einer Oikodizee, einer Glaubensehre in der Ökonomie, einem metaphysischem Ansatz und einer dogmatischen Substanz im ökonomischen Denken, die nicht angetastet wird. Ein besonderes Augenmerk der Vortrages liegt auf ökonomischen Prognosen in der Krise und Theorien zu Märkten.

"Allons-nous au-devant d'un nouveau big bang de la monnaie ?" Les crypto-monnaies semblent avoir profondément modifiées le paysage monétaire, avec en tête de liste le Bitcoin. Mais est-ce que ces crypto-monnaies sont-elles réellement des monnaies ?

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.