Michael Roberts — ASSA 2021: part two – the radical answers [including Michael Hudson]

At the annual conference of the American Economics Association (ASSA), there are sessions hosted by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) for Marxist and other heterodox economists to present papers.

At this year’s ASSA 2021, many of the URPE sessions were concerned with the economic impact of COVID-19 and climate change, as did the mainstream sessions, but, of course, from a different perspective. But before I look at those sessions, let me start with the annual David Gordon lecture presented by a different radical economist each year.

This year it was Michael Hudson who gave the lecture. Hudson is a longstanding radical economist with a wide reputation. He considers himself a Marxist. His theme for the lecture was Has Finance Capitalism Destroyed Industrial Capitalism? Hudson argued that capitalism started as a progressive force in developing the productive forces because it was industrial capitalism. But since the 1980s, ‘financial capitalism’ had superseded industrial capitalism. And this was really a return to feudalism where the surplus in an economy was extracted by landlords (rent) and financiers (interest and capital gains), not by exploitation of labour power (profits).

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ASSA 2021: part two – the radical answers
Michael Roberts