Economic Democracy: The Cooperative Alternative

Use economic models to learn how prices and markets benefit society in the face of scarcity, and then apply those models to analyze policy.

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), the Director of Research at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and the author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 50 …

Economic theory must distinguish between publicly owned and privately owned property if it is to account for the effect of institutions on the behavior of individuals. Careful study of the theories of Marxists and the real-world experience in the Soviet economy offer important lessons and insight for economic modeling and the ongoing development of theory. In this course, Marxist/Leninist theory and Soviet reality will be studied with an open mind, and with the goal of taking lessons from the case study. To what extent was the Soviet economy an accurate expression of Marxist theory? If Marxism were tried somewhere else would the results be the same?