The Idea of a Meaningful Synthesis of Marxist and Non-Marxist Systems of Political Economy as a Mirror of Intellectual Turmoil (About V.T. Ryazanov’s Book «Modern Political Economy: Prospects of Neo-Marxist Synthesis»)

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-98
Author(s):  
A.B. Lyubinin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Subjective Assessments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Political Economic

Review of the monograph indicated in the subtitle V.T. Ryazanov. The reviewer is critical of the position of the author of the book, believing that it is possible and even necessary (to increase the effectiveness of General economic theory and bring it closer to practice) substantial (and not just formal-conventional) synthesis of the Marxist system of political economy with its non-Marxist systems. The article emphasizes the difference between the subject and the method of the classical, including Marxist, school of political economy with its characteristic objective perception of the subject from the neoclassical school with its reduction of objective reality to subjective assessments; this excludes their meaningful synthesis as part of a single «modern political economy». V.T. Ryazanov’s interpretation of commodity production in the economic system of «Capital» of K. Marx as a purely mental abstraction, in fact — a fiction, myth is also counter-argued. On the issue of identification of the discipline «national economy», the reviewer, unlike the author of the book, takes the position that it is a concrete economic science that does not have a political economic status.

scholarly journals Toward a Political Economy of ‘Audience Labour’ in the Digital Era

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brice Nixon
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Consumption ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Productive Activities ◽  
Labour Exploitation ◽  
Human Labour ◽  
Political Economic

This article contributes to a political economic theory centred on the concept of “audience labour”. First, the previous use of the concept of audience labour is briefly traced and the process of rethinking the concept as the basis of a political economic theory is begun. Second, a theory of the audience labour process is developed, drawing on previous theories of audience activities of cultural consumption as productive activities of signification and adapting Marx’s theory of the human labour process to the audience labour process. Third, a political economy of audience labour is outlined. As a theory of the basic processes through which communicative capital can control and extract value from audience labour, it describes the exploitation of audience labour and accumulation of communicative capital through distribution relationships of rent and interest. Finally, the continuing centrality of audience labour exploitation in the digital era is discussed.

The Political Economy of Charles E. Lindblom

1978 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 1012-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
Social Coordination ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
And Control ◽  
Coordination And Control

The consistent theme in Charles E. Lindblom's work is a vision of political economy as constitutional engineering. Lindblom sees the question of institutional design in terms of a mechanical metaphor in which political economic systems are contrived out of relatively simple components. Politics and Markets compares a broad range of capitalist and socialist systems as a means of evaluating market mechanisms and authority structures as instruments of social coordination and control. Lindblom's argument that the privileged power of the corporation poses a problem for liberal market-oriented societies is logically distinct from his case that the corporation fits “oddly” with democratic theory, and the latter may be the more significant theme for further inquiry in political economic theory.

‘Useless but True’: Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities of Economic Science*

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Fine ◽  
Dimitris Milonakis
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Capitalist Economy

AbstractThe recent economic crisis has brought to the fore another crisis that has been going on for many years, that of (orthodox) economic theory. The latter failed to predict and, after the event, cannot offer an explanation of why it happened. This article sketches out why this is the case and what constitutes the crisis of economics. On this basis, the case is made for the revival of an interdisciplinary political economy as the only way for offering an explanation of the workings of the (capitalist) economy in general and of economic crises in particular.

Political Economy

2014 ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Blake
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Political Economist ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Economic Criticism ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
David Ricardo ◽  
Liberal Imperialism

Victorian studies has long attended to money matters in literature, while on the subject of money it has long wrung its hands. We see now a ‘new economic criticism’ that is more tolerant or even capitalist-friendly. Appreciation of Adam Smith, founding expositor of political economy, is growing. More reluctance and distaste remain as concerns Thomas Malthus. Bias and neglect continue concerning Jeremy Bentham, their utilitarian ally. J. S. Mill as political economist is becoming better known, as is David Ricardo, with more needed on their utilitarian ties. Expanded attention to economic theory in relation to concrete practice will expand understanding of the ‘political’ in political economy, part and parcel of liberalism while also, paradoxically, of ‘liberal imperialism’. Reviewing political-economic principles that set themes of new economic criticism, this essay connects theory to historical specifics and assesses what has and can be done to place Victorian literature in this grand-scale context.

A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova’s Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Familiar Object ◽  
External World ◽  
Sacred Grove ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Exegetical Tradition

The symbolic mode betrays the habit of thinking of mental and sensory events in terms of habitual places (the last is the task of allegorisation): instead it deals with cosmological states. Renata Litvinova’s film forward concerns of intentionality as a matter of discursive interruption and drawing the spectator’s attention to the film’s self-referential strategies. Film as a form of knowledge regains the discourse of the sacred place in that it operates from its own sacred grove of immanence, that is, it alludes to the ‘external world’ by means of the exegetical tradition. Goddess utilises the rhetoric of doubling which problematizes the distinction between objective reality and dreamed reality. The only way for the spectator to tell the difference between the realms is by paying attention to the politics of location. Cinematic enlargement serves as a form of the uncanny in that it presents the familiar object / texture in a completely different way by disturbing the conventions of haptics, kinesics and chronemics. The film demonstrates how the discourse speaks through the subject whose function is no longer to contain discourse but to provide its own commentary. The resulting effect in Goddess is a proposition that thought and signification are performances.

The Political Economy of Revolution: Karl Polanyi in Tahrir Square

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642098452
Author(s):  
Hany Zayed
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Karl Polanyi ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Egyptian History ◽  
Theoretical Apparatus

The causes and consequences of revolutionary change have long been the subject of scholarly debate. Through a systematic integration of political economic elements into an analysis of contemporary social transformations, this article joins this conversation by asking how Karl Polanyi’s double movement framework can clarify, and be extended by, the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. By embedding a nuanced account of neoliberalism in Egypt’s modern politics and by bringing those in dialogue with Polanyi’s theoretical apparatus, this article contends that there is a broad alignment between the first movement and the Egyptian neoliberal experience, a partial alignment between the second movement and the Egyptian Revolution, and a multilayered entanglement that implicates and encircles both movements. Not only does this research demonstrate that contemporary Egyptian history can find new currency in and be further illuminated by Polanyi’s political economy, it also critiques, complicates, reconceptualizes and extends Polanyi’s theoretical framework. In so doing, it redresses the underfocus of Polanyian political economy on the theory of revolution in general and the Egyptian Revolution in particular, problematizes extant accounts on neoliberalism and the double movement, and extends analyses between neoliberalism and revolution in political economy literatures. By clarifying our understanding of contemporary social change, this essay underscores how Polanyi’s work remains a pertinent, viable and valuable prism to examine momentous social transformations.

scholarly journals CONCEPT OF SWITCHING MODE OF REPRODUCTION AND EVOLUTIONARY THEORY: ISSUES OF METHODOLOGY

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-126
Author(s):  
V. I. Mayevsky
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Rational Behavior ◽  
Innovation Development ◽  
Mode Of Reproduction ◽  
Evolutionary Economic ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Switching Mode ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Changes

The purpose of the article is to show that the innovation development of the economy, being the subject of research of evolutionary economic theory, occurs mainly in the switching mode, and therefore is organically linked with the so-called switching mode of reproduction, which is currently being intensively developed at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For representatives of the Orthodox Economic Science, all subjects are homogeneous, that is, they are characterized by rational behavior, the intention to maximize profits and the striving for equilibrium states. Evolutionary economists consider this homogeneity to be far from obvious. They pay primary attention to innovative development as a process of qualitative changes, distinguish subjects who implement qualitative changes and subjects who do not, but rather counteract changes. The concept of a switching mode of reproduction is based on a fundamentally different methodological prerequisite and therefore is a development of both evolutionary and orthodox economic theory.

Marx's Critique of Economic Reason

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gideon Freudenthal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Economic Reason ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Commodity Money ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Organic Metaphors

The ArgumentIn this paper I argue first that Marx's Critique of Political Economy employs “critique” in the Kantian meaning of the term—i.e., determining the domain of legitimate application of the categories involved and maintaining that outside these borders understanding is led into error and entangled in metaphysics.According to Marx, his predecessors in political economy transgressed these boundaries of application, and therefore conceived of all different modes of production as being essentially similar to commodity production, and thus implied that commodity production and the bourgeois form of life corresponding to it are “natural” not historical and transitory. In Marx's conception there are no super-historical economic categories or laws.I argue moreover that Marx's methodology of reconstructing the “development” of socioeconomic entities and categories from their “germ” or “cell” also serves his critical intention. Whereas social theorists of the time referred with organic metaphors to human collectives (“family,” “community,” etc.), Marx referred with such metaphors to economic entities only (“commodity,”“money,” etc.). The difference is crucial, since the first carries deterministic consequences for the development of society while the latter does not: Social form and historical development in Marx are contingent and not necessary, historical and not natural, transitory and not eternal.I also stress that Marx's procedure of critique is internal. He uses only such assumptions, observations, and arguments as could in principle also be used by the scholars criticized. Nevertheless the outcome of the critique is not merely a new theory but an entirely different one — i.e., a historical conception of the discipline of political economy and of its laws.

JANE EYRE'S PURSE: WOMEN'S QUEER ECONOMIC DESIRE IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-759
Author(s):  
Meg Dobbins
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Core ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Economic

“Young ladies don't understandpolitical economy, you know,” asserts the casually misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch(1871) (17; bk. 1, ch 1). Although Eliot's heroine resents both her uncle's remark and “that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights,” her attempt to teach herself political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncle's assessment (18; bk. 1, ch. 1): Dorothea gathers a “little heap of books on political economy” and sets forth to learn “the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or – what comes to the same thing – so as to do them the most good” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening “spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors” to “do[ing] them the most good,” Dorothea fails to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so misunderstands the subject matter before her: “Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book] for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).

Naturalizing the Subject of Economics: From Following the Norms of Natural Science to Owning the Laws of Nature

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Economic Research ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
Empirical Foundation

One of the central threads in the historical development of economic science since the 18th century is the search for ways to turn the economy into a discipline resembling natural science, to put it on a solid empirical foundation expressed in mathematical language completely devoid of subjectivity while it apprehends the laws of nature. The article reviews the epistemological history of economics as a discipline through confrontations between epistemic virtues (“moral certainty” and “mechanical objectivity”), research strategies (empiricism and mathematical rationality) and institutional status (science or art). In this regard, the authors analyze the transitions from understanding economics as a “moral science” through the marginalist and formalist revolutions to taking economics as a field for formal ontologies and abstract mathematical models and tools. They then focus on tracing economic theory’s consistent adherence to the epistemological standard of scientific knowledge which was set by classical mechanics — the historical core of science in the modern era — together with the costs incurred by mathematical presentation and rejection of the ideal of “moral certainty”. The authors show how the loss of the empirical component and the growing issue of the substantive component of formal models have resulted in the “empirical turn” in economics. Using the example of neuroeconomics as the most radical attempt to naturalize the subject matter of economics, they outline the modern attempts to saturate economic research with empirical content and return to the project of a “physicalist” economics that will discover the laws of nature as the natural sciences have done. The authors argue from the ambivalent nature of the purposes and results of neuroeconomics to show that the empirical path of neuroeconomics, which was adopted in order to link the formal concepts of neoclassical economic theory with the experimental data and material models of neuroscience, leads instead to further degradation of the subject matter of economics as social objects are replaced with their presumed material infrastructure (neurophysiological correlates of social facts) without solving the problem of the empirical foundation for economic theory.

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