In order to stage a sustained encounter between literary theory and Marxian political economy, this paper initiates a dialogue between Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" on one hand, and Marx's Capital, on the other. I will theorize the two-fold transition from the language of labor...

Today, Karl Marx is considered one of the preeminent social scientists of the last two centuries, and ranks among the most frequently assigned authors in university syllabi. However in Marx's time, many competing sociological traditions and socialist political movements espoused similar ideas...

This is a pre-publication version of a full-length review of Kuhn, R. (2007) Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. Urbana and U of Illinois. Please cite as Freeman, A. 2008. ‘The Discontents of Marxism’. Debatte, 16 (1), April 2008 pp. 122-131

This paper was submitted to the 2001 conference of the International Working Group on Value Theory at the Eastern Economic Association. It was an initial short response to the idea, which has become common amongst Simultaneoust Marxist Economists, that in Marx’s theory, equilibrium or...

The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) is often proposed as a pre-Soviet popularizer of Marxist economic theories due to its electoral successes in Germany in the decades before World War I. Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), we examine whether German-language print references...

This paper discusses the relation between law and contingency in the formation of value. It begins from a much-ignored assertion of Marx, repeated throughout his works, that the equality of supply and demand is contingent and their non-equality constitutes their law. This highly complex and...

This paper undertakes a critical examination of the concept of 'centre of gravity' as adapted by economics from classical mechanics, relating it to the idea of 'long-run' profits, prices and quantities, as presented in the work of the post-Sraffians.(1) It will also address the origin of this...

Hermann Heinrich Gossen is generally known as the predecessor of Walras, Menger and Jevons in preparing modern economic analysis. What is generally not known is his Fundamental Theorem as a marginal approach to the labour theory of value. This paper presents his Fundamental Theorem in terms of...

The manufacturing sector has traditionally been regarded, particularly in development economics and in the Kaldorian literature, as having a ‘special role’ as an engine of growth. This article examines Marx’s approach to manufacturing, and the extent to which manufacturing could be...

The services sector has grown as a share of GDP and employment in most countries in recent years, and there has been increasing interest in understanding this sector and in its growth potential. This article analyses the meaning and nature of the 'services sector' from a Marxian perspective....