Guglielmo Carchedi

University of Amsterdam | UVA

The increasing saturation of all facets of contemporary capitalism, including human labour, with computer and digital technologies, has given rise to a number of apologetic concepts, variously termed the information society, cognitive capitalism and digital capitalism. These concepts are ideological in nature. They have gained wide acceptance becau...

This work focuses exclusively on the modern economic aspects of imperialism. We define it as a persistent and long-term net appropriation of surplus value by the high-technology imperialist countries from the low-technology dominated countries. This process is placed within the secular tendential fall in profitability, not only in the imperialist c...

After an assessment of the Horizon 2020 European Defence Research Program, this article discusses the basic assumption behind both civilian and military expenditures, namely, that such expenditures foster economic growth and are successful anti-crises policies. First, the historical example of the long period of economic growth following WWII is co...

A fundamental tenet of Marx’s theory of history and revolution is the contradiction between labour’s productive forces and the capitalist production relation. ‘At a certain stage of development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces...

The Internet has given a new shape to modern capitalism. These new features have drawn the attention of numerous scholars and have become the focus of highly topical and controversial questions. However, as a rule, the literature has not taken as its starting point the development of a Marxist epistemology. The reason for this is the failure to der...

There are many misconceptions, some very old and some new, about Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The paper attempts to show that Marx's law is not indeterminate but is logical and its conclusions are consistent from its premises. And the law can be tested empirically and shown to have substantial predictive power in explai...

The ultimate cause of crises in capitalism is lack of profitability. The Keynesian and Austerians (the supporters of austerity measures), deny this. So their solutions to crises do not work. Keynesian state-induced stimulus programs (redistributive, monetary, and fiscal) cannot overcome the underlying tendency for profitability to fall. The same ho...

Guglielmo Carchedi's essay deals with Marx's theory of the tendency of the profit rate to fall as an explanation of economic crisis. Using empirical data on the development of the U.S. economy since the Second World War the author takes a closer look at the two fundamental classes, capital and labor, as well as the process of value production. He r...

The financial crisis that erupted in 2007 and the subsequent crisis of the euro have received enormous attention both in the media and in specialized journals. One of the features of the recent literature is that the relation between Marx's law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit and the earthquake that has stricken the euro zone has been,...

The law of the tendential fall in the profit rate provides the basis for a Marxist critique not only of neoliberalism but also of Keynesian anti-crises policies. This article argues that Okishio’s critique of the law, far from providing the definitive proof of its inconsistency, is undermined by a logical inconsistency and is based on the replaceme...

Chris Arthur's approach aims at a systematic re-ordering of Marx's categories. This article argues that his approach is actually a different ordering of different categories that are positioned within a specific theoretical whole, a Hegelian re-interpretation of Marx and especially of abstract labour, which distances itself from Marx. While the deb...

While many inconsistencies can be found in Marx's theory if one chooses a view of reality in which time is absent, these inconsistencies disappear if the view is taken that time is an essential component of that theory. The debate is thus between the simultaneist and the temporalist camp. This article sides with the temporalist approach but at the...

Building upon the theory submitted in the previous issue of this journal, this article examines both similarities and differences with Engels' dialectics of nature. It argues that Engels' approach is unsuitable to reveal the specificity of society's movement towards both reproduction and supersession. It then considers the basic features of formal...

This article develops a new dialectical method of social research. Contrary to the Hegelian tradition, it extracts this method from Marx's own work by taking a class—determined perspective of social phenomena. Contrary to formal logic it stresses social reality's dynamism by focusing on social phenomena's contradictory nature. It starts by setting...

The recent expansion of the European Union to the Eastern European countries was preceded by the 2004 Treaty of Nice, through which the stronger countries retain their dominant position within EU institutions. Traditional imperialist motives still play a role, but the basic aim of this expansion is the enlargement of the Euro area within the contex...

The recent expansion of the European Union to the Easter European countries was preceded by the 2004 Treaty of Nice through which the stronger countries retain their dominant position within the EU institutions also after the expansion. The traditional imperialist motives still play a role but the basic aim of this expansion is the enlargement of t...

This essay examines whether the European Union, already the most powerful economic and financial rival of the United States, can develop its military arm to a level compatible with its economic and financial weight. It concludes by suggesting a parallel between European currency and the European military. The ECU started as virtual money that evolv...

This essay examines whether the European Union, already the most powerful economic and financial rival of the United States, can develop its military arm to a level compatible with its economic and financial weight. It concludes by suggesting a parallel between European currency and the European military. The ECU started as virtual money that evolv...

This article examines the effectiveness of Keynesian policies from the perspective of Marxian value theory. It starts from a sketch of the economic cycle, whose ultimate cause is identified in the decreasing production of (surplus) value following technological innovations, and argues that the strongest case for Keynesian civilian policies is not t...

This article aims at contributing to the development of a Marxist theory of the production of knowledge, and in particular of natural sciences and techniques (NST), under capitalism. It rejects the double critique that the labor theory of value has become obsolete under modern capitalism and that Marx’s theoretical structure cannot accommodate ment...

In the last few years, Chris Arthur has developed a ‘new’ concept of abstract labour and exploitation.2

Europe’s economic integration will reach a higher stage with the creation of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Daily, the media bombard us with reports and analyses which, due to their ideological and apologetic nature, are unable to uncover the contradictions marking this process. Thus, the sudden eruption of monetary crises, the last one hav...

Debates on whether capitalism has entered a new phase are not new to Marxism and have coincided with periods of deep social, economic and political transformations. Not by chance, then, has the same question emerged again after the fall and disintegration of the Soviet Union. What follows argues that this momentous event has ushered in a new phase...

The central thesis of this article is that, besides the imperialism of some of the EU member countries (national imperialisms), there exists also imperialism of the EU as a whole. The thesis is argued theoretically and illustrated by considering the following: first, relations between the EU and the Central and Eastern and European Countries; secon...

Brenner's `The Economics of Global Turbulence' is a review of the world economy in the second half of the 20th century and its momentous changes. It deals with a wide range of issues and developments and is supported by a wealth of statistical and historical material. At the same time, it debunks many of the myths upon which recent (economic) histo...

Usually, the notion of globalization put forward by the majority of both popular and academic publications emphasizes three aspects. First, there is the economic dimension — that is, the further internationalization of capital within which the multinationals play a predominant role. In this view, not only national capitals but even nation-states ar...

It is often argued by Marxist and non-Marxist authors alike (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner, 1968; Horverak, 1988) that Marx’s production prices, the outcome of the transformation procedure in volume III of Capital, are equilibrium prices and that, as far as this is concerned, there is no substantial difference with equilibrium prices as in neocl...

After a few introductory notes on the relation between production of value, productivity, economic crises, and inflation, this article submits a theory of exchange rates, revaluations, and devaluations in terms of tendential (and counter-tendential) international distribution of value both among individual countries and between the imperialist cent...

This article argues that Marx's transformation procedure has been turned into a nonexistent transformation ‘problem’ by abolishing time, i.e. by implicitly applying the methodology of neo-classical general equilibrium theory. It then depicts the real transformation process from individual into social values both when technological change is abstrac...

Usually, Marxist attempts to theorize international production prices share two drawbacks: they rest on the obsolete assumption of international capital and labor immobility, and ignore the need to develop a theory of exchange rates. The approach submitted here extends Karl Marx's transformation procedure of individual into social values to the int...

The theory of international trade and prices is one of the least developed in Marxist economics. It is partly because of this that the Ricardian theory of comparative advantages has been almost unanimously accepted even by Marxists as the explanation of the mechanism behind international trade, prices and specialization. This paper exposes both the...

There are two major lines of criticism moved at Marx's approach to the transformation of values into prices. The circularity critique holds that constant and variable capital appear in Marx's numerical examples as inputs at their individual values and as outputs at their social, transformed value (or price of production). This critique is rejected...

The immigrant worker in Europe is the "poor cousin" of the European working class. He is also, of all the characters animating the stage of political economy, one of the most disregarded and neglected. He is treated unjustly not only in reality but also in the realm of theory. As we will attempt to show, an analysis of his nature and function under...

This article starts with a discussion of the capitalist production relations which are defined as the relations binding two types of agents of production and the means of production. These relations are considered from the point of view of ownership, expropriation of value, and function performed. The ownership element is given the determinant role...

This essay attempts to define the new middle class from an economic standpoint, with particular reference to the capitalist production relations. These relations bind the three elements of the capitalist production process and can be regarded from the view point of the ownership of the means of production, of productiveness, and of the function per...

Summary This article examines various levels of living indices, evaluates them as tools of social engineering; and attempts to show that such indices, when applied to underdeveloped countries, are culturally biassed. Chief consequence of such a bias is that development programs tend to be modeled on the; pattern of development of the more economica...

La crisis financiera de 2007 ha vuelto a encender el debate sobre las crisis, su origen y sus posibles remedios 1 . Actualmente la tesis más influyente en la izquierda ve la crisis como una consecuencia del subconsumo y recomienda políticas keynesianas para su solución. En este trabajo se argumenta que debemos entender la crisis desde la perspectiv...