David McNally: Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · africa, body, capitalism, folklore, literature, neoliberalism, political economy, popular culture, zombies
Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.
Publisher BRILL, 2011
Volume 30 of Historical Materialism Book Series
ISBN 9004201572, 9789004201576
308 pages
review (Mark Worrell, Marx & Philosophy)
Comment (1)Andrew Kliman: The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, debt, economics, history, political economy, production
“The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been analysed endlessly in the mainstream and academia, but this is the first book to conclude, on the basis of in-depth analyses of official US data, that Marx’s crisis theory can explain these events.
Marx believed that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, leading to economic crises and recessions. Many economists, Marxists among them, have dismissed this theory out of hand, but Andrew Kliman’s careful data analysis shows that the rate of profit did indeed decline after the post-World War II boom and that free-market policies failed to reverse the decline. The fall in profitability led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems, desperate attempts of governments to fight these problems by piling up even more debt – and ultimately to the Great Recession.
Kliman’s conclusion is simple but shocking: short of socialist transformation, the only way to escape the ‘new normal’ of a stagnant, crisis-prone economy is to restore profitability through full-scale destruction of existing wealth, something not seen since the Depression of the 1930s.”
Publisher Pluto Press, 2011
ISBN 0745332390, 9780745332390
256 pages
Reviews: Matthew Wood (Marx & Philosophy, 2013), David J. Bailey (Political Studies Review, 2013), Michael Roberts (2011), Tibor Rutar (n.d.).
PDF, PDF (updated on 2020-1-30)
Comments (3)Real-World Economics Review, No. 1-59 (2000-2012)
Filed under journal | Tags: · economics, economy, finance, financial crisis, market, money, neuroeconomics, pluralist economics, plutonomy, political economy, post-autistic economics, society
“The movement for Post-Autistic Economics (PAE) was born through the work of Sorbonne economist Bernard Guerrien. The movement is best seen as a forum of different groups critical of the current mainstream: from behavioral and heterodox to feminist, green economics and econo-physics. Started in 2000 by a group of disaffected French economics students, Post-Autistic Economics first reached a wider audience in June 2000 after an interview in Le Monde.
It was supported by the Cambridge Ph.D. students in 2001 with the publication of ‘Opening Up Economics: A Proposal By Cambridge Students’, later signed by 797 economists.
PAE has challenged standard neoclassical assumptions and incorporated ideas from sociology and psychology into economic analysis. Specifically, the notions of utility theory, rational choice, production and efficiency theory (Pareto optimality), and game theory have been criticised.
Other topics include ‘Gross National Happiness’, realism vs. mathematical consistency, ‘Thermodynamics and Economics’, or ‘Irrelevance and Ideology’. Contributors include Bruce Caldwell, James K. Galbraith, Robert L. Heilbroner, Bernard Guerrien, Emmanuelle Benicourt, Ha-Joon Chang, Herman Daly and Richard D. Wolff.
In March 2008 the Post-Autistic Economics Review changed its name to the Real-World Economics Review.” (from Wikipedia)
Editor: Edward Fullbrook
Associate Editor: Jamie Morgan
Open-access journal
ISSN 1755-9472
wikipedia (Post-autistic economics)
authors (RWER blog)
publisher
PDF (Issue 59, March 2012)
PDF (Issue 58, December 2011)
PDF (PDF papers, all past issues)