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 was presented to the Brasilian Society for Political Economy at its 1998 conference. It presents the principal differences between the temporal and the simultaneist approach to the theory of value. It was the first paper to present a formal conceptual analogy between the temporal...

El propósito de este artículo es presentar una caracterización teórica de una de las categorías propias del análisis económico de Marx, como es la composición del capital, la cual a su vez incorpora tres variantes, la dimensión técnica, en valor y orgánica. A partir de un análisis de...

The paper argues that a formal, and fruitful, historical analogy can be drawn between economics and a religious hierarchy, most notably the mediaeval Catholic church. This idea was fully developed in Freeman (2007), ‘Heavens Above: what equilibrium means for economics’, in Mosini, V (ed)...

This unpublished paper, written for distribution on the OPE-L list, seeks to clarify the conception of socially necessary labour time in Marx’s conception of value. It shows that this is not reducible to ‘replacement cost’ as simultaneist authors argue. Moreover that the implied conception...

This chapter argues that the Marxian theory of exploitation underlies the concepts of surplus and deficit industries that appear in Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. This is seen from archival research of the unpublished papers of Piero Sraffa housed at the...

This chapter argues that Marx's definition of “accumulation of capital” is sufficiently ambiguous to lead to troublesome conceptions after his death. It is held that Lenin moved conceptualization in a misleading direction by moving accumulation of capital away from social relations of...

Marx's 1865 lectures offer an easily accessible summary of his theory, addressed to an English-speaking audience. However, one weakness preventing common usage (including classroom use) is the dialogue in the first twenty pages with one John Weston. This abridged version stays with the exact...

This paper was presented to the May 2013 conference of the Postglobalization Initiative in Moscow, and deals with the function of economics in the modern world order. It seeks to explain why, as a profession (notwithstanding individual exceptions) economics failed to predict the crisis that...

This is a prepublication version of ‘Money, Labor, and Logic: A critical comparison’, published in Critique of Political Economy. Please cite as Freeman, A. 2011. ‘Money, Labor, and Logic: A critical comparison’, Critique of Political Economy No. 1. 152-175. The article seeks to promote...