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This text brings together studies in various aspects of the theory of the capitalist economy. It focuses on major themes of the Marxist tradition that postulate the existence and importance of social relations and structures underlying the esoteric realm of economic categories: prices, profits, wages, etc. The author takes a reappraising, critical look at the concepts of the deep structure - value, explitation, immanent crisis - using the analytical tools of modern economics to improve those concepts. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 explores the essential nature of capitalism, re-examining problems in the theory of value and exploitation. Part 2 tackles the issue of capitalism-specific paths of growth and technical change, putting forward a rigorous theory of biased technical change and non-steady-state growth. Part 3 examines the cyclical character of capitalist growth and the theory of crises. Finally, Part 4 places capitalism in the wider framework of modes of production, considering the theory of precapitalist formations and aspects of the theory and practical experience of socialism. The guiding theme is the combination, or confrontation, of rigorous, quantitative analytical techniques with equally demanding qualitative and political-economic conceptualization. The book's premise is that this interface is essential to a progressive yet distinctively Marxist social theory.
List of contents
I: Value and Exploitation; 1: Value and Labor: a Conceptual Reconstruction; 2: The Capitalist Transformation of Value; 3: Labor, Value, and Exploitation; 4: Productive and Unproductive Labor; II: Accumulation and Technical Change; 5: Technical Change and Capitalism: An Overview; 6: Technical Change, the Real Wage, and the Rate of Exploitation; 7: Optimal Choice of Technique and Biased Technical Change: The One-Sector Case; 8: Two-Sector Growth with Endogenous Technical Change; III: Cycles and Crises; 9: Cycles and Crises: An Overview; 10: Profit Cycles and Investment Catastrophes; 11: Cyclical Growth and Intersectoral Dynamics; 12: From Consistent Path to Secular Crisis; IV: Before and After Capitalism; 13: Modes of Production and Theories of Transition; 14: The Soviet Union: Historical Materialist Interpretations; 15: Socialism: Prices, Social Structures, and Labor Values; 16: Toward a Working Theory of the Socialist Economy
About the author
David Laibman
Summary
This text brings together studies in various aspects of the theory of the capitalist economy. It focuses on major themes of the Marxist tradition that postulate the existence and importance of social relations and structures underlying the esoteric realm of prices, profits, wages, etc.
