Important if you are into economic theory or the history of economics. It is chiefly an exploration comparing and contrasting Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism, Competition and Crises and Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital.
The third book is John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. It is not reviewed in this post.
The post is longish but not wonkish. It is an easy read that is well worthwhile.
A Critique of Crisis Theory
Three Books on Marxist Political Economy
Sam Williams
The post is longish but not wonkish. It is an easy read that is well worthwhile.
A Critique of Crisis Theory
Three Books on Marxist Political Economy
Sam Williams
Here is an interesting tidbit. Walrus, who is the most single most influential economist historically as the founder of general equilibrium based on marginalism, is widely disparaged by heterodox economists for basing his theory on perfect competition theoretically and at least nearly so in practice.
Was Walrus really that naïve?
Well, it turns out that Walrus was no dummy. He understood what it would take practically — nationalization of land and zero income on wages, advocated for this as policy.
I have explained elsewhere in this blog that the term “socialism,” unlike “communism,” is imprecise. The Bolshevik Party of Lenin used the term “socialist,” but so did the bourgeois centrist Radical Socialist Party (7), which dominated the French Third Republic, which existed between 1871 and 1940. It was also used by Adolf Hitler and his extreme-right National Socialists—the Nazis. Could Leon Walras, the economist whose ideas more than any other form the basis of present-day neo-liberalism, also be a socialist? Yes! Indeed, Walras considered himself a “democratic socialist.”
Like certain radical followers of David Ricardo and Henry George and his followers in the United States, Walras believed that the land should be nationalized. The government would then depend on ground rent alone for its revenue. Walras was especially opposed to taxes on wages. If wages were not taxed and land was nationalized, Walras believed, wage workers would be able to transform themselves into self-employed individual businesspeople if they so desired. If the government followed these “democratic socialist policies,” Walras believed, the number of independent business people would explode, creating the conditions that would allow an approximation of perfect competition to be achieved in practice.
Today’s neo-liberal microeconomists, though their theoretical foundations are “Walrasian,” do not advocate the nationalization of the land nor do they oppose taxes on wages. On the contrary, they are both staunch supporters of private property in land just as they support private ownership of capital. And they support policies that attempt to shift the balance of taxation onto the shoulders of workers.
