Articles

Il Salario Sociale in Germania (the Social Wage in Germany)

October 1, 1986

In 1986, following the publication of Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa, Alan Freeman and Paolo Giussani worked with Ernest Mandel on a project to provide data on the growth of poverty in Europe. We concentrated on Germany, working with Peter Bartelsheimer and Harald Wolff to use the very comprehensive data available from German sources, and produced a chapter originally intended for the book by Anwar Shaikh and E. Ahmed Tonak later published

Why Quantitative Marxism?

December 1, 1987

This paper arose directly from the work which Paolo Giussani and I conducted, following the publication of Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa, at the request of Ernest Mandel and commissioned by the Hamburger Institut fuer Sozialforshung. The work was intended to be an examination of poverty in Europe, with the advent of neoliberalism of course lurking in the background. We decided to adopt the method of Shaikh and Tonak in their Measuring

The Crash of ’87

June 1, 1988

This article was published in a Capital and Class symposium on the 1987 crash. Its analysis retains its full force. It compared the 1987 and the 1929 crash, and explored the historical similarities between the long US postwar decline and the UK’s, from the mid-nineteenth century. It situated both in a rigorousvalue-theoretic framework rooted in Marx’s concept of superprofit.

Time, the Value of Money and the Quantification of Value

September 12, 1988

This paper establishes, and illustrates for the case of the UK, a temporal method for calculating the labour values of outputs from any process or sector of a market economy. It exhibits the temporal calculation of the Monetary Equivalent of Labour Time (MELT), the general ratio between monetary and labour time magnitudes, for a single national economy, but does not correct for the consequences of value transfers within the world

National Accounts in Value Terms for the UK, 1950-1986

February 1, 1991

This paper reproduces, for archival purposes, chapter 5, of the same name, which appeared in Dunne (1991). It represents one of the first systematic attempts that I know of, to present complete ‘Value National Accounts’, that is to say, accounts presenting social reproduction in terms of the value categories of Karl Marx.

The Gulf War and the New World Order

July 1, 1992

This collection responded to the first US attack on Iraq. Edited by Chaim Bresheeth and Nira Yural-Davis, it broached ideas that rose to prominence in subsequent critical thinking about International Relations, including the nature of modern Imperialism, the USA’s role within it, and the new and aggressive phase Western expansionism that accompanied neoliberalism and the collapse of the USSR.

Reappraising the Classics–the Case for a Dynamic Reformulation of the Labour Theory of Value

February 21, 1994

This paper laid the basis for a ‘reformulation’ of the theory of value, based on Marx’s crucial but under-discussed observation in Chapter V of Capital Volume 1, in which he points out that value cannot be created in exchange. This point has wide-ranging implications for economic theory as a whole, which eventually led me to the axiomatic formulation presented in 2020 in ‘General Theory of Value and Money: Foundations of

Value and the Foundations of Economic Dynamics (the TSSI fish)

March 16, 1994

Submission to the mini-conference of the International Working Group on Value Theory, hosted by the Eastern Economic Association, 1997. This paper can be thought of as a detailed study of the relation between labour and money; more precisely, it examines the concept, due to Alejandro Ramos, of the ‘Monetary Expression of Labour Time’ (MELT).

Poverty of nations and unequal exchange

January 16, 1995

Slideshow of presentation at SOAS. Early value-theoretic formalization of the role of unequal exchange as the driver of inequality between nations, demonstrating that the positive feedback mechanism that maintains technical superprofit has to be formalized in a temporal framework.

Relative Surplus Value and Expanded Reproduction

March 15, 1995

This paper was presented to the 1995 conference of the Eastern Economic Association as part of the second mini-conference of the International Working Group on Value Theory (IWGVT), the main forum within which the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s value theory emerged. The paper considers the way in which technical change, leading to rising labour productivity and hence cheapening of the elements of capital, interacts with expanded accumulation.

Negative net products with positive profits

June 1, 1995

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to the ‘Fundamental Marxian Theorem’ (FMT), a positive net product is not a necessary condition for a positive profit. That is to say, a positive profit may arise even though society produces less than it consumes of at least one good. This discovery became central to the 2007-2008 controversy between Mohun, Veneziani, Kliman and Freeman, cf ‘Replicating Marx: a reply to Mohun’, Capital and Class

Marx without Equilibrium

July 1, 1995

This article, published in Capital and Class 56, was the first peer-reviewed presentation of what at the time was termed the ‘sequential and non-dualist’ interpretation of Marx’s value theory. This terminology, following Kliman, was replaced by the term ‘Temporal Single System’ and, as Kliman points out, constitutes an interpretation of Marx. In such an interpretation, values transform into prices in accordance with Marx’s two equalities, and the rate of profit falls

A note on moral depreciation

January 26, 1996

The distinction between moral and material depreciation is critical to Marx’s thinking. In the early history of TSSI, John Ernst’s insistence on it was central. I treated this mathematically in Marx and non-Equilibrium Economics (Freeman 1996a) and in papers written on this site. However these papers don’t directly address Marx’s treatment and how it informed TSSI scholarship. Originally an OPE-L list post, this became a formal note in 2000 in response

Notes on the Measure of Value

January 28, 1996

This private comment,was circulated during the 1994 Bergamo conference organised by Riccardo Bellofiore on the anniversary of Volume III of Capital. This was a watershed encounter between traditional and alternative interpretations of Marx’s theory of value, including TSSI, the ‘New Solution’ and the ‘Simultaneous Single System Interpretation’ (SSSI) of Wolff, Callari and Roberts. It also develops the burgeoning discussion arising when Alejandro Ramos introduced the concept of the MELT.

An endogenous profit rate cycle (English and Spanish)

March 13, 1996

This paper presents an abstract model of the business cycle in which the explanatory variables are the interaction between the rate of profit and the rate of investment. It proves that this exhibits stable, persistent cycles. It was written as a counter to Goodwin’s celebrated model in which the cycle is caused by the interaction between the wage and employment, and proves that cycles are possible even when these two

Price, value and profit – a continuous, general, treatment

July 1, 1996

This text comprises chapter 13 of Marx and non-equilibrium Economics[1].  It provides a general mathematical specification of a non-equilibrium interpretation of Marx’s theory of value. It refutes the Okishio theorem and solves the transformation problem. It is a foundation work of scholarship within the TSSI (temporal single-system interpretation) of Marx.

The Psychopathology of Walrasian Marxism

July 1, 1996

This comprises chapter 1 of Marx and Non-equilibrium Economics. It specifies a non-equilibrium of Marx’s theory of value which demonstrates a fully consistent transformation of values into prices and reproduces Marx’s tendential law of the falling profit rate. It explains why this approach is inaccessible to consciousness under present social relations, and why resistance to its acceptance has been particularly strong among Marxists. It was my first full exposition

The Poverty of Nations

August 1, 1996

This paper assesses two linked problems. First: why, despite unceasing technical advance, do growing poverty and misery reign in most of the world? Second, why did the entry of the USSR and other Eastern countries into the market produce a catastrophic collapse in standards of living and welfare, and an unparalleled crisis in all aspects of production and political life?

Mr Marx and the Neoclassics

September 1, 1996

This article, presented to the 1996 Conference of the History of Economics Society, Vancouver, gives a historical analysis of the origins of the general equilibrium or comparative static approach and demonstrates that economic thought as a whole is divided, in each of its schools of thought, between the equilibrium paradigm and its alternative, the temporal paradigm. This applies across the board with, for example, the divergence between Post-Keynesian or Kaleckian

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