Marxian Political Economy

Abstract

This book combines a lucid exposition of the fundamental categories of Marxian political economy with an interpretive analysis of advanced capitalist development. Unlike neo-Marxist economists, who attempt to reinterpret Marx in the light of Keynes, Professor Becker adopts an unalloyed Marxist approach to the leading problems of political economy. The book forthrightly defends the labour theory of value, argues that its alleged theoretical weaknesses are groundless, and demonstrates its continuing analytic fruitfulness in the age of monopoly capitalism. In the same vein, the author explains the importance of orthodox Marxist conceptions concerning both productive and unproductive labour and productive and unproductive consumption. Professor Becker uses Marx's celebrated theorem concerning the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to analyse the current 'stagflation' crisis. He argues that officially announced goals of full employment and growth are impossible without structural change. This presentation of Marxian economics critically appraises those premises of utility maximizing and economic hedonism that often underlie conventional economic theory.

Policing the industrial reserve army: An international study

“…In all four of them Wallerstein and Western [161] demonstrate that unionization continued to grow although at a slower pace or remained more or less stable since the 1990s. 6 A steady decline in union density was observed in Germany since the 1990s. Although the process of deunionization was interrupted by the effect of the unification of West and East Germany in 1991, it continued rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s.…”

“…The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have also been suffering peculiar declines in unionization. 10 Japan and the Republic of Korea have also seen a decline 6 Böckerman and Uusilato [10] claimed that union density reached its highest point (nearly 85%) in Finland in 1993, but it declined by more than 10% in less than ten years. 7 For a detailed analysis of the decline of trade-union membership in Germany see Fitzenberger et al [46] 8 Greece also has gone through a sharp decline in unionization.…”

“…Indeed, contemporary scholars have continued to pour over Marx's sometimes contradictory assertions about mental versus manual labour, productive versus unproductive labour, how service within and outside the realm of circulation should be understood, and finally whether the demise of capitalism might be better grasped, anticipated, or accelerated by theorizing and empirically mapping workforce composition based on proximity to production (e.g. [6,16,94]). In short, manufacturing employment and especially manufacturing unemployment speaks directly to core Marxist maxims dealing with value creation, class consciousness, and revolution.…”

“…Credit continues to flow, spawning the further intensification of production and allowing consumers to borrow in order to buy more. The domestic service sector economy and the circulatory spheres balloon to take up the required demand for the overproduction of manufactured goods but this is not sustainable in the long term, eventually resulting in a system-wide crash (see [6]). Thus, Pilat et al [119] argue that although there has been a continuous decline in manufacturing employment over the past three decades in western countries, manufacturing production and value-added have continued to grow as a result of high productivity.…”

Reviews

“…Putting the issue of exposition aside, Harvey's book is a masterful testament to at least ten years of intensive study of the Marxist literature. Since the renaissance of historical materialism within the English speaking world over the last fifteen or so years a number of similar books attempting a reworking and extension of Marx's Capital have appeared (for example, Becker, 1977;Cohen, 1978;Fine and Harris, 1979;and Weeks, 1981). David Harvey's contribution is notable as the first to come from a geographer.…”