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

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.

Im Vortrag „Finanzkapitalismus in der Krise? Das Verhältnis von Finanzialisierung und Euro", präsentiert Christoph Scherrer eine übersichtliche Genese der Finanzialisierung, mit besonderem Augenmerk auf der Rolle des Einheitlichen Währungsraumes. Der Vortrag ermöglicht dabei ein Verständnis zentraler Begriffe wie Finanzialisierung oder Finanzkapitalismus sowie der Rolle von beispielsweise Deregulierungen. Zudem stellt Scherrer die Frage, ob Finanzialisierung begrenzt werden kann und präsentiert Hürden möglicher Reformen, unter anderem Hegenomie und Globalisierung.

Post-Colonialisms Today researchers Kareem Megahed and Omar Ghannam discuss the importance of industrial policy during the pandemic to improve domestic capacity for manufacturing essential goods.

Professor Joseph Aldy from Harvard Kennedy School gives us some insights about how economics can set the balance between policymakers, scientists, employers and citizens.

According to Karl Marx, work should satisfy people and encourage creativity. But the capitalist production, the separation of labour and the exploitation of workers alienates them from their products.

This paper surveys the development of the concept of socialism from the French Revolution to the socialist calculation debate. Karl Marx’s politics of revolutionary socialism led by an empowered proletariat nurtured by capital accumulation envisions socialism as a “top-down” system resting on political institutions, despite Marx’s keen appreciation of the long-period analysis of the organization of social production in the classical political economists. Collectivist thinking in the work of Enrico Barone and Wilfredo Pareto paved the way for the discussion of socialism purely in terms of the allocation of resources. The Soviet experiment abandoned the mixed economy model of the New Economic Policy for a political-bureaucratic administration of production only loosely connected to theoretical concepts of socialism. The socialist calculation debate reductively recast the problem of socialism as a problem of allocation of resources, leading to general equilibrium theory. Friedrich Hayek responded to the socialist calculation debate by shifting the ground of discussion from class relations to information revelation