The present paper on the now partly well known Russian mathematician and "amateur economist" v. Charasoff was originally written in 1987 together with H. Duffner three years after Charasoff's remarkable contribution of 1910 "Das System des Marxismus" (The system of Marxism) had been rediscovered...

This paper tries to clarify the logical structure of the relationship between labour values and prices from an axiomatic perspective. The famous 'transformation problem' is interpreted as an impossibility result for a specific interpretation of value theory based on specific assumptions and...

This paper compares Marx's economics with those by Sraffa, Keynes, Kalecki and Minsky. The paper takes an "ex post" view on the matter and rather looks at the output side of the respective authors, but not at the input side. This means no attempt is made at studying in a systematic way, if and...

The paper sketches a coherent history of the choice of the measure standard from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to Sraffa's Production of Commodities. As neither the Smithian labour commanded unit nor the Ricardian-Marxian labour embodied one provide a general solution to the dilemma concerning...

Karl Marx's magnum opus, Das Kapital, presents an analysis of the long run dynamics of a mature capitalist economy. The analysis is conducted at two primary levels of abstraction - "capital in general" (where competition between individual capitals is abstracted from) and "many capitals" (where...

Austrian economist Ludwig Mises’s central role in the socialist calculation debates has been consensually acknowledged since the early 1920s. Yet, only recently, Nemeth, O’Neill, Uebel, and others have drawn particular attention to Mises’s pertinent encounter with one of the most colorful...

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of long waves of capitalist development from two perspectives. First, I look for evidence of long waves of economic growth taking the dates for turning points of long waves from the historical literature (Mandel, 1995). Using historical data for 20...

Marx’s theory of money is critiqued relative to the advent of fiat and electronic currencies and the development of financial markets. Specific topics of concern include (1) today’s identity of the money commodity, (2) possible heterogeneity of the money commodity, (3) the categories of land...

Attempts to use commodities to construct theories of value and use such value theory to claim that, in capitalism, commodities can be exploited, just like labour is, rest on two conceptual aws: (a) failure to distinguish between labour and labour-power; and (b) failure to distinguish...