Competitive equilibrium is not Pareto optimal if returns to scale are not constant, except in special and accidental circumstances. This result is demonstrated using a classical production model; it holds quite generally and independently of all other sources of Pareto inefficiency, such as...

Stadial (stage-based) theory clarifies the relation between the evolving conception of mature socialism, on the one hand, and historical experiences of central planning and “market socialism,†on the other. The core of mature socialism is a system of multilevel democratic iterative...

Despite its exasperating opacity and lack of closure, the value debate has a vital objective: to grasp those defining aspects of capitalist society that do not appear on the visible surface space of conscious individual actors. In pursuit of this objective, careful conceptual analysis reveals...

Marxist categories — especially those of "capital" and "class" — are employed in a critical examination of two propositions: that capitalist pro duction relations, in a "state-capitalist" form, exist currently in the USSR: and that a novel "bureaucratic-exploitative" mode of...

Recent work has drawn attention to the connection between technical change and the labor market. Reasonable assumptions concerning both the reality of positive capital accumulation and the effect of technical change on wage rates reveal the ubiquitous possibility of viable technical changes that...

Frank Thompson has proposed (this Review, 30(1): 90-107) that accumulation can cause the profit rate to fall (by forcing the wage rate to rise), but that biased technical change, by itself, can only cause the profit rate to rise (by forcing the wage rate to fall). By contrast, this paper argues...