This paper was first presented at the conference on value of The Laboratory for Social Critique, Rome, May, 21, 2002 and subsequently at the 2002 conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, July 2002. This is the most complete version, presented to the 2002 conference of the Middle...

This paper work assesses the key aspects of a framework for research on revolutions. Our approach includes a heuristic based on an idea suggested by Marx in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”. From...

Cuba’s post-revolutionary economic history was penalized by the twin sets of distortions stemming from its former, artificial trade relations with the CMEA and from the very nature of the state socialist model, let alone the severe costs imposed by the US embargo. Conversely, Cuba’s...

Since the inception of the special period and the loss of its traditional export markets for sugar and other goods, Cuba has turned towards services as new sources of foreign exchange. Tourism has been reactivated and its performance has been broadly satisfactory, yet its long term growth...

Input-output analysis was a particular way of state intervention. Its success was due to the connection of a theory to a model and to an instrument. It was a tool for science and for action. This articulation of an explanatory, a descriptive and a prescriptive dimension may be understood as an...

Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Marx's Schemes of Reproduction is the only genuinely immanent critique of Marxian dynamics. But it needs to be brought up to date. To this end, in this paper it is placed in the context of more modern discussions of dual instability, in order to gain a better...

Abstract This paper begins with a critical presentation of Kondratiev’s (1926) seminal paper on the question of the existence as well as his theoretical explanation of long cyclical fluctuations of the level of economic activity. Furthermore we argue that a coherent explanation of long-run...

This chapter starts with a discussion of the economic situation in the USA and UK in the 1920s and 1930s and argues that the fundamentals of these two economies in the 1920s were already in a bad shape. In fact, we show that in the US economy the fall in the rate of profit and the stagnation of...

The present paper scrutinizes the logical foundation of Marx’s dialectic analysis of the evolving money economy. The minimalistic frame of reference is thereby given with the set of structural axioms. It turns out, first, that the commonplace notion of exploitation has to be replaced by...

The difficulties of the classical and Marxian labour theory of value are overcome when labour value is understood as cost, analogously to marginal cost as marginal labour value. Marginal labour value is the reciprocal of the marginal productivity of labour. Under “perfect ompetition”...