Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Surplus approach, Historical Materialism, and precapitalist economies:

New Paper by Sergio Cesaratto on a topic closely related to what he has discussed here before. From the abstract:

In the classical economists’ surplus approach retrieved by Sraffa (1951; 1960) and Garegnani ([1960] 2024), institutions regulate the  material  basis  of  society  and,  in  particular,  the  extraction and distribution  of  the  social  surplus.  In  this  regard,  classical theory  provides  a  material  anchor,  alternative  to  neoclassical New Institutional Economics, to anthropological, archaeological and  historical  studies  of  precapitalist  economies.  Expunged  of any teleological meaning, Marx’s Historical Materialism (HM) is a   natural   source   of   inspiration   for   this   interdisciplinary perspective. The nature and dynamics of Marx’s notion of modes of  production  (MOP)  are  not,  however,  firmly  defined  and  have been  the  object  of  over-complicated  doctrinal  disputes  among Marxists. Since I am unable to provide a comprehensive overview of these debates, I will limit myself to a few aspects that seem to me to be most central or that best convey the issue. The question of MOP dynamics is the most relevant and complex. All in all, the most  mature  Marx  leaves  us  a  very  flexible  reading  of  HM  as  a method of connecting economic, social, and institutional history that can be broadly shared by non-Marxists.

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Surplus approach, Historical Materialism, and precapitalist economies:

New Paper by Sergio Cesaratto on a topic closely related to what he has discussed here before. From the abstract: In the classical economis...