Articles

Calgary Conference of the Humanities: GERG panels on Ukraine and Russia

May 31, 2016

The Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG), together with the editors of New Cold War (NCW), organised three panels for the Society for Socialist Studies (SSS). The first was on ‘Russia, Ukraine and Crimea: national class, and economic dynamics’, the second on ‘Russia, China and Eurasia in the multipolar world’ and third was entitled ‘Round Table on the state of the economics discipline.’ This post contains the proposals and the SSS

Calgary Conference of the Humanities: The Trouble with Economics

June 1, 2016

GERG’s panel on the state of economics took place against the background of a doubling-down in neoclassical economics and the further suppression of heterodox economics. In Notre Dame this led first to the separation, isolation and then closure of a separate ‘heterodox economics’ department. A similar process threatened to unfold in the University of Manitoba. These attacks on the very theorists who had predicted the catastrophe of 2008 is at

The Economics of Enough: a future for capitalism or a new way of living? Joint paper with Victoria Chick

June 17, 2016

This paper, originating in the [Harcourt conference], finally materialised in the Dow-Jespersen-Tily volume on ‘Money, Method and Post-Keynesian Economics for the 21st Century’ Cite as: Chick, V. and A. Freeman. 2018. ‘The Economics of Enough: a future for capitalism or a new way of living?’. In Dow, S., J. Jespersen and G. Tily. Money, Method and Post-Keynesian Economics for the 21st century. Edward Elgar, 2018.

The Whole of the Storm: Money, Debt and Crisis in the Current Long Depression

July 7, 2016

This definitive article investigates the mechanisms and causes of recessions and depressions, and their relation to the more spectacular financial crises which announce them. It demonstrates how the concept of the Monetary Expression of Labour Time (MELT) allows us to understand the most difficult aspect of this relation, namely how money acquires value, and thereby serves, under definite conditions which characterise recessions and depressions, as self-expanding value, so becoming an

The Uncomfortable Question of Class

September 7, 2016

‘The Uncomfortable Question of Class’. Presented to the conference of the Political Science Association Marxism Specialist Group, Manchester, September 2016. This presaged my later critique of the standard Marxist approach to Volume III, which was to view this as a purely technical work of Economic High Theory. In fact, this volume is about the relation between revenue and class – where class is properly understood not just as the conflict

Brexit, the City, and the crisis of Conservatism

October 10, 2016

This paper by Radhika Desai and myself was published by the Val Dai club as https://valdaiclub.com/a/reports/report-brexit-the-city-and-the-crisis/. This post also contains a shorter article in the Winnipeg Free Press.

The Living Wage and the Minimum Wage – a comparison.

October 22, 2016

Presentation to International Symposium on ‘China Path toward Poverty Eradication and Comprehensive Well-off Society’, Peking University, October 22-23, 2016. This particular slideshow, which I used on a number of other occasions, is the definitive version.

A Note on Causation, Logical Implication, and the Ordering of Variables in Equations

November 6, 2016

This article was a response to a charge, by Changkeun Kim (2016) that there is circular reasoning in Freeman and Kliman’s definition of the Monetary Expression of Labour Time (MELT). Kim also charges that the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s value theory does not yield falsifiable conclusions, because it does not predict prices. Both charges depend logically on an erroneous claim about what an arithmetic equation consists of,

Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism.

December 1, 2016

This special issue of International Critical Thought, edited by Radhika Desai, myself and Boris Kagarlitsky, was devoted to the conflict in Ukraine, its origins, and its geopolitical implications. It was also published as a book by Taylor and Francis. Because the work is still in copyright, it cannot be reproduced here, but authors can be contacted for prepublication versions of specific chapters. This post contains our editors’ introduction. Cite as:

A Penny for your Thoughts: a Note on the Impact of Knowledge

December 2, 2016

Colin Gillespie asked me to write a think piece on the process of revolutionary ‘Kuhnian’ changes in scientific thinking, such as the Quantum Physics, which have a long-term impact on all fields of production. The question he posed was: can we identify the ‘next’ scientific revolution, and if so, can we invest in it now? Originally the intention was to make some kind of video out of it, but this

The return on investment in culture.

January 7, 2017

Interview with CBC. Two audio files. This arose because the Manitoba government, which fell to the Progressive Conservative Party in the 2016 elections, accepted some of the general case for an investment in creative industries, it sought to identify individual projects in which to invest, on the basis of a comparison of the return to investment.

Value and price: a Critique of Neo-Ricardian claims, by Michel Husson

September 7, 2018

Michel Husson originally published this landmark article in French as Manuel Perez (1980), which prefigured almost all the criticisms that TSSI scholars later made. I translated it into English to ensure this historic work was accessible to Anglophone readers, and offer a new generation of Marx scholars a resource which academic Marxism has rejected, except for a minority tradition in which this article played a foundational role: the opportunity to

The Second Opinion: an ethical approach to learning and teaching

July 7, 2019

Chapter in Wolfram Elsner and Svenja Flechtner’s volume on approaches to teaching economics. Cite as: ‘The Second Opinion: an ethical approach to learning and teaching’. In Decker, Samuel, Wolfram Elsner, and Svenja Flechtner. 2019. Principles and Pluralist Approaches in Teaching Economics: Towards a Transformative Science. Routledge.

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