The Unreal Basis of Neoclassical Economics

By Al Campbell, Ann Davis, David Fields, Paddy Quick, Jared Ragusett and Geoffrey Schneider

originally posted here

Introduction
Ten years after the financial crisis, we still find mainstream economists engaging in overly simplistic analysis that does not accurately capture the dynamics of the real world. People studying economics need to know that the principles of mainstream economics are hopelessly unrealistic. In this short article, we demonstrate that the ten principles of economics in Gregory Mankiw’s best-selling textbook are divorced from reality and reflect an extreme and unwarranted bias towards unregulated markets.[ii] Mankiw’s “Ten Principles of Economics” should more accurately be titled “Ten Principles of Unrealistic Neoclassical Theory.”

Mankiw’s Principle #1:  People Face Tradeoffs/There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Mankiw ignores the historical determination of the distribution of resources and the crucial distinction between those whose income comes almost entirely from the performance of labor and those whose income comes from their ownership of capital. As a result he is unable to recognize the political power that results from the concentration of wealth in the capitalist class, and to analyze the distributional impact of decisions in which those who gain are often significantly different from those who lose. In addition, history is full of accounts of forcible appropriation of resources that appeared to be “free” to those who acquired them.

Mankiw’s Principle #2:  The Cost of Something Is What You Give Up to Get It/Opportunity Cost
Insofar as individuals are able to make decisions, their choices can be described as “giving up” one opportunity in order to take up another. This tells us nothing about the determination of the choices that are available to them. The “choice” of a worker as to whether to take on a dangerous job or face eviction from a home requires a very different analysis than one suitable for a discussion of the choice between apples and oranges. On a different level, an analysis of the “trade-off” between income now and increased income in the future requires an understanding of ecological limits to the growth of material production.

Mankiw’s Principle #3:  Rational People Think at the Margin.
Neither consumers nor producers, nor humans in many other social roles, generally act on the margin. The assertion of marginal analysis that decisions must be such as to equate marginal benefit with marginal cost is simply a restatement of the first derivative condition resulting from maximization subject to a constraint, rather than a reflection of real human choice. Mainstream theory then defines behavior according to this mathematical construction even though it does not govern actual choice in the real world. But more important is the presumption that all decision-making is guided by the well-being of isolated individuals, and thus that “rationality” consists of behavior that maximizes the benefit of the individual decision–maker. This dismisses the fact that people are social animals whose decision-making recognizes the interaction between individuals, and it ignores how in the real world people make decisions considering their whole situation under possible alternatives, material restraints, imperfect information, their cognitive abilities, the existing power structures, and culture.

Mankiw’s Principle #4:  People Respond to Incentives.
This is tautological. Furthermore, models based on monetary incentives by selfish, isolated individuals and firms in perfectly competitive markets are unrealistic and ignore crucial real world issues. Monetary incentives are not all that matters. In the real world people make many decisions on the basis of their evaluation of the resulting well-being of many people beyond themselves, or on social and cultural norms.

Mankiw’s Principle #5:  Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off.
Trade can increase total production, but trade has distributional impacts, with winners and losers. Trade in modern capitalism tends to foster inequality while undermining wages and working conditions for many laborers. This principle promotes unregulated trade, but unregulated trade has not proven to be the best route to economic development, nor is it good for all people. In the real world, infant industries, immiserating growth, terms of trade shocks, and increasing inequality render this principle useless as a policy guide.

Mankiw’s Principle #6:  Markets Are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity.
As there are no measurable units by which one can classify all specific economic activities in the real world as “good” or not, principle #6 is nothing more than a neoclassical ideological declaration of faith. Markets are human creations that operate differently in various economic systems, and the various existing and potential economic systems themselves are human creations. The first real question then is if under an existing system private capitalist markets driven by the profit motive do better than possible alternative human creations for providing the good or service, potentially driven directly by the desire to meet specific human needs. Important examples providing evidence of the inferior performance (efficiency and effectivity) of private capitalist market-driven systems are well run social security systems and single-payer health care systems. Avoiding the error of accepting the system as given, a deeper question would be if under some different economic system, which was not built to favor capitalist accumulation, alternatives could outperform profit-driven markets operating in capitalist systems.

Mankiw’s Principle #7:  Governments Can Sometimes Improve Market Outcomes.
Behind this assertion is the idea that markets are natural and could run without any government intervention, and that such natural markets tend to be efficient but sometimes are not quite optimal. In those cases the efficiency of markets could be improved by government tweaks. To the contrary, in the real world all markets are created by governments, which both establish the rules of the game and enforce them, and thereby determine market outcomes. If the government passes laws requiring that food be safe, that changes the market for food, and yields different market outcomes than if those laws did not exist. With this understanding, principle #7 is reduced to the not very profound statement that because governments create markets, they have the ability to create them with better or worse outcomes. Further, the issue always ignored by neoclassical economics of social divisions is particularly important for considering “better market outcomes”: better for whom? Market rules are shaped by power structures to benefit some classes and other social groups more favorably than others (for example capitalists at the expense of workers, First World countries at the expense of Third World countries, etc.).

Mankiw’s Principle #8:  A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services.
Higher GDP per capita does not necessarily result in a higher material standard of living for all people within, as well as between, countries. Furthermore, neoclassical economics operates with a definition of “standard of living” as the amount of goods and services consumed, so this principle reduces to the not quite tautological, but not very insightful, claim that the amount of goods and services consumed in a country depends on its ability to produce them. In the real world what people are concerned with is their quality of life, which includes social respect, power to act on one’s desires, conditions of work (and not just pay), social relations, and much more. Neoclassical economics does not address the extension of principle #8 to what people in the real world are actually concerned with, their quality of life, for which the goods and services produced are just one among many determinants.

Mankiw’s Principle #9:  Prices Rise When the Government Prints Too Much Money.
Since the neoclassical definition of “too much money” is the amount that makes prices rise, this is a tautology. In the real world the relationship between prices and the money supply is complex: expanding money might cause a jump in prices or it might cause no price increases at all, depending on many other things in the economy.  The applied policy transformation of this into the incorrect claim that “prices rise when the government prints more money” is an ideological artifice, used today to justify austerity policies and keeping wages low.

Mankiw’s Principle #10:  Society Faces a Short-Run Tradeoff between Inflation & Unemployment.
The relationship between inflation and unemployment is complex and does not follow a systematic pattern. By the 1970s data from the real world had caused textbooks to go from Phillips Curves to Shifting Phillips Curves to abandoning them entirely. In view of that experience, principle #10 of a short-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment has become a neoclassical ideological justification for challenging those who advocate policies that would reduce the rate of unemployment, by fostering fears of inflation that may never materialize.
In conclusion, Mankiw’s so-called “Ten Principles of Economics” ignore crucial realities of the economic world. In particular, Mankiw excludes power imbalances, inequality, social forces, development experiences, the realities of market behaviors, laws and outcomes, realistic measures of quality of life, and recent macroeconomic data from his principles. It is hard to imagine a less useful set of ideas to guide modern societies in designing a good economic system. Unfortunately, almost all other mainstream principles of economics textbooks parrot these same principles. Students of economics will have to look elsewhere for useful analysis of the economy and how to build a democratic economy and society that works for all.

References
Mankiw, Gregory. Principles of Economics, 7^th Edition. Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage. 2015.

End-notes
[i] In a subsequent article, we will offer a set of principles of radical political economy to provide a more realistic, alternative approach.
[ii] The authors are members of the steering committee of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). The ideas presented in this article are those of the authors and not of URPE. The purpose of this article is to make readers aware that there are alternatives to the principles of economics put forth by mainstream economists. We synthesize the critiques of mainstream economics by radical political economists in order to give students and teachers ammunition to confront the unrealistic paradigm of neoclassical economics that currently dominates the profession.

The Mission of Radical Political Economy

The mission of radical political economy is to accentuate the perseverance of critical social scientific enquiry. As such, the aim is to make palpable how the insights of social justice research widely make apparent how the global socioeconomic system does not automatically generate efficient situations whereby unique organizations of production, exchange, and distribution guarantee the attainment of maximum social welfare.

The idea that humans are simple instrumentally rationalists, who supposedly oscillate like a homogeneous globule of Hobbesian brutes, is conclusively a fiction. Radical political economy exposes hidden complex social fractures that limit the capability of humans to safeguard social assets, social claims, and social ties requisite for sustaining an institutional nucleus for human survival. Hence, the goal is to embrace scholarship that evinces the impingement upon the accruement and management of resources vital for catholic cogitation, and realization, of conscious desires for humans to reach their full potential.

In this sense, the purpose is to establish the appropriate consciousness needed to untie the Gordian knot of social complexity, in order to surpass rudimentary assumptions concerning the nature of human social interaction. Accordingly, the concern is with elucidating the intrinsic causal social relationships—the Hegelian ‘notion’ of truth submerged and contained within the confines of appeared ‘being’—that furnishes meaning and understandability, so as to strengthen a philosophy of praxis that strives to build the social conditions for a reconstruction and reconstitution of the social world, such that higher stages of human development are sought and achieved.

In other words, what is requisite active engagement in the construction and strengthening of a broadly shared paradigmatic and methodological orientation that emphasizes the trenchant questioning of manifest social phenomena, in order to expose the underlying structural dynamics that engender mass deprivation and dispossession. This is a tireless exercise in solving the inherent problems related to relationship between abstraction and social reality, in order to elucidate the philosophical, metaphysical, epistemological, ephemeral, and ontological qualities that condition the human lived experience and, regrettably, foster the unnecessary barriers for humans to be masters of their own social organization.

The human brain confronts matters in the most efficient manner possible; so much so that it often becomes counterintuitive to undergo analysis that extends beyond the simplest explanation, even if that explanation is suspect. It is in this inherent method where dogma is born. This process of edification, however, has the power to overcome innate tendencies towards such reductionism. Since radical political economy presents an authentic humanism, which posits as fundamental that human beings of all social locations subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation, then this predisposition towards apathy—intensified through systems of coercive, disconnected, and hierarchical social institutions—can be broken down, spawning a community that is both cooperative and collaborative, whereby all human dignity, creativity, and survival are held in the highest regard.

Another post on radical political economy is here

New Website For Union For Radical Political Economics (URPE) Up and Running

The official website for Union For Radical Political Economics (URPE) has been refurbished, with a new layout design, including new drop-down menus, etc. See here.

New Book: The 2015 Hampton Reader, Selected Essays and Analyses from the Hampton Institute

A collection of essays and analyses from the The Hampton Institute - A Working Class Think Tank. Includes, articles by David Fields, and Hampton's most popular essays from 2013-14 in addition to exclusive content that can only be read here. From a follow-up to Sean Posey's timely analysis of Youngstown, Ohio as a microcosm of the post-industrial American "rustbelt" to Andrew Gavin Marshall's in-depth research on "the intellectuals and institutions of American imperialism," the 2015 Hampton Reader is sure to generate ideas, spark debate, and cultivate dialogue.

See here.

Tom Weisskopf on 50 Years of Radical Political Economy

From the abstract,

I examine first how radical political economy (RPE) has evolved over the last five decades, as the overall political climate in the United States has shifted increasingly to the right. I explore how this political shift, as well as new developments within mainstream economics, have altered the focus of much of RPE and the activities of many of its practitioners. I then offer suggestions to radical political economists as to the future orientation of RPE.

Read rest here (subscription required).

And for other posts on the nature & evolution of radical political economy, see here & here.

Ben Fine on British Coal Industry's Contribution To Work of Paul Sweezy

My research has delved me into the plethora of work produced by the 'Monthly Review School'. Interestingly enough, I came across this article by Ben Fine, which I found to be quite illuminating. 

From the abstract:

Paul Sweezy has been a central figure in the understanding and development of Marxist political economy both in the United States and more widely in the West. For a long period, much like his counterparts in the United Kingdom, Maurice Dobb and Ronald Meek, his was almost a lone voice along with his close collaborators, most notably Paul Baran. Much has changed in the last twenty years with the renewed intellectual interest in Marxism following the student activisim of the sixties-so much that Marxism has even attained the status of academic respectability. This has meant that whilst there was always opposition to the Sweezy problematic (as represented by the “Monopoly Capital” or Monthly Review school), only in recent years has it been substantially criticised and counterbalanced by alternative schools of Marxism. In particular, there has been a lessening sympathy for underconsumptionist theory; for the notion that monopoly and competition are inversely related; for the validity of the concept of the potential surplus and its compatibility with value theory; and, as a more general aspect of the latter, that monopoly and competition and accumulation can be analyzed independently of the labour (value-producing) process, whatever the merits of Braverman’s (1974) seminal contribution. In addition, unfortunately on the margins of political economy, rather than its occupying a central position of debate as within the often supposedly separated discipline of economic history, Sweezy has been a prime mover in the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism’ which has subsequently given way to the “Brenner Debate” [...] The purpose of this article could hardly be to provide a “political economy of Sweezy.” For this, the present author cannot claim adequate acquaintance with Sweezy ’s intellectual and political biography. Indeed, here we rely exclusively upon the articles of Sweezy that have appeared in the academic journals. As a study of the evolution of Sweezy’s political economy, we have made use then of only a few of the pieces of the jigsaw that make up his intellectual biography, although we also have available some overall picture of the “final product,” as represented in his mature works.

Read rest here (subscription required).

Monthly Review: The Baran–Sweezy Letters Project

By Nicholas Baran

The correspondence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in the 1950s and early ‘60s is one of the great, unknown legacies of Marxian political economy in the United States. Over the past year and a half, I have been transcribing all of these letters with the goal of having the collection published by Monthly Review press, both as a hardcopy book of selected letters, as well as an unabridged e-book. In commemoration of my father, Paul A. Baran, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death on March 26, 1964, we decided to refer publicly for the first time to the Baran–Sweezy Letters Project and to publish a few important and representative letters.

Read rest here.

Herbert Marcuse on Paul Baran’s Critique of Modern Society and of the Social Sciences

Paul Baran and Herbert Marcuse's (author of One Dimensional Man) friendship went back to their days together at the Institute for Social Research (the foundational school of critical theory in the social sciences, which led to the future establishment of The New School For Social Research in NYC, and became the intellectual impetus for spawning the 'New Left' in the US - for more on this, see here) in Frankfurt in pre-Hitler Germany. Their close connection is revealed in a series of letters they wrote to each other in the 1950s and early ’60s (posted this month on the Monthly Review website).

From John Bellamy Foster:

The following talk, delivered only days after the publication of Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Marcuse reveals his admiration for Baran’s article on “The Commitment of the Intellectual.”Marcuse also provides his understanding of the critical importance of Baran’s notion of economic surplus, as introduced in The Political Economy of Growth and its significance for the critique of monopoly capital. This throws light on Marcuse’s own use of the concept of monopoly capitalism, which is frequently mentioned in his work (see for example his Counter-Revolution and Revolt).

Marcuse criticizes Baran for rejecting—in “Marxism and Psychoanalysis”—the use of psychological terms and for distancing himself from Freudian psychoanalysis and its left interpretations. Marcuse was clearly disappointed (as he indicated in a letter to Baran on September 22, 1959, where he commented on the galleys to Baran’s article) that Baran had not embraced the kind of argument he himself had put forward in Eros and Civilization. Nevertheless, it is worth adding that Baran—as Marcuse no doubt understood and as their own correspondence reveals—was far from simply rejecting psychological issues out of hand. Baran’s essay on psychoanalysis was aimed at the critique of what he called “psychologism” and “social psychologism”—and not psychology and social psychology. He insisted in this respect that what was needed was a more revolutionary social psychology—that took into account as its initial datum the structure of capitalist society as a whole. He sought to push this view forward near the end of his life through the critique of the cultural apparatus, overlapping in this way with the concerns of such thinkers as Marcuse, Fromm, Williams, and Mills. (See the special July-August 2013 issue of Monthly Review on “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital”). To the end Baran remained an uncompromising critic of the narrow economic rationalism of monopoly-capitalist society and the damaging effect that it exerted on the material existence, culture, and consciousness of humanity.

Read rest here.

Michael D. Yates on Teaching Workers

By Michael D. Yates

Karl Marx’s famous dictum sums up my teaching philosophy: “The philosophers of the world have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” As I came to see it, Marx had uncovered the inner workings of our society, showing both how it functioned and why it had to be transcended if human beings were to gain control over their lives and labor. Disseminating these ideas could help speed the process of human liberation. From a college classroom, I thought that I could not only interpret the world, I could indeed change it.

Thinking is one thing; the trick is bringing thoughts to life. How, actually, does a person be a radical teacher? How, for example, can students be shown the superior insights of Marxian economics in classes that have always been taught from the traditional or neoclassical perspective—taught, in fact, as if the neoclassical theory developed by Adam Smith and his progeny is the gospel truth? My college expected me to teach students the “principles” of economics: that people act selfishly and independently of one another, that this self-centeredness generates socially desirable outcomes. And further, that capitalism, in which we, in fact, do act out of self-interest, is therefore the best possible economic system. Had I refused to do this and taught only Marxian economics, I doubt I could have kept my job.

Read rest here.

Barbarism on the Horizon: An Interview With István Mészáros

by Eleonora de Lucena

Lucena: Mr. István Mészáros, you are coming to visit Brazil to talk about György Lukács. As a profound expert of the work of the philosopher, how do you evaluate the importance of his ideas today? 

Mészáros: György Lukács was my great teacher and friend for twenty-two years, until he died in 1971.  He started publishing as a politically conscious literary critic almost seventy years earlier, moving toward the discussion of fundamental philosophical issues as time went by.  Three of his major works in that field -- History and Class Consciousness (1923), The Young Hegel (1948), and The Destruction of Reason (1954) -- will always stand the test of time.  His historical and aesthetic studies on great German, French, English, Russian, and Hungarian literary figures continue to be most influential in many university departments.  Moreover, he is also the author of a monumental aesthetic synthesis which, I am sure, will see the light one day also in Brazil.  More fortunately, his equally monumental volumes on the problems of the ontology of social being are being published right now in this country by Boitempo Editorial.  They address some vital issues of philosophy which also have far-reaching implications for our everyday life and ongoing struggles.  What is less well known about Lukács's life is that he was directly involved at high levels of political organization between 1919 and 1929.  He was Minister of Culture and Education in the short-lived revolutionary government of 1919 in Hungary, which emerged from the great crisis of the First World War.  In the Party he belonged to the "Landler Faction" -- indeed he was its second in command.  This faction -- named after Jenö Landler, who was a leading trade unionist before becoming a high-ranking party figure -- tried to pursue a broader strategic line, with much greater involvement of the popular masses.  Lukács was defeated in direct politics in 1929.  However, way back in 1919, in one of his articles (you can find it quoted in my book on Lukács now published by Boitempo), he warned that the communist movement could face a great danger when "the proletariat turns its dictatorship against itself."  He proved to be tragically prophetic in this warning.  In any case, in all of his public roles, political as much as theoretical, one can find his great moral stature always in evidence.  Nowadays we read so much about corruption in politics.  One can also see Lukács's importance as a positive example, showing that morality and politics not only ought to (as Kant advocated it) but also can go together.

Read rest here.

On The Rise and Fall of Radical Political Economy In US

The professional eyes of the [social scientist] are on the down people, and the professional palm of the [social scientist] is stretched toward the up people … he is an Uncle Tom not only for this government and ruling class but for any government or ruling class. 

-Martin Nicolaus, “Remarks at ASA Convention,” The American Sociologist 4, 2 (May 1969): 155

The rise and fall of radical political economy in the US is rooted in the rise and ultimate decline of social radicalization there of the 1960s and 1970s. This radicalization was dominated by fuzzy New Left (NL) ideological critiques of American capitalism, notwithstanding that many radicals of the time rejected such critiques as inadequate.

By Al Campbell

Since the term NL was created to refer to everyone with a radical critique of the system other than the ‘Old Left’ (OL), it included many different strands of political thought and ideologies. In addition, in the early years of the NL in the mid-sixties, many prominent members and groups pointedly declared themselves ‘anti-ideological,’ asserting that pure activism would replace ideology. Most currents in the NL fairly quickly came to realise that they had an ideology whether they acknowledged it or not, and so turned to its conscious development. In practice this resulted in approaching one or another of the orientations that existed in the (small) US left, above all Stalinism, Social Democracy, Anarchism, (US) Radical Populism or Marxism. The various NL individuals and currents typically eclectically mixed these and, in addition, continually made major changes to their theories and ideologies over relatively short periods of time. All of these points together indicate the need for caution when referring to ‘a NL ideology’. For a compact treatment of a significant number of the threads in the US NL ideological tapestry, see Young (1977). I will simply refer to ‘the vague NL ideology.’ It was largely a product of the specific history of that US radicalisation. Above all, it was defined by things in the existing society that it was against. Critically absent was an alternative based on a radical social theory – by implication, the alternative was just to eliminate the problems.

Two central issues divided the NL from the OL. The first was the issue of class. The OL had always recognised the need to fight against all forms of oppression. For example, many though far from all of the leaders of the fight against racism both after and before WWII were part of the OL or strongly influenced by it. But the OL at the same time argued that class oppression played a special role in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism. Capitalism’s goal was the accumulation of capital which required and rested on class oppression and exploitation. Other forms of oppression could be just as individually damaging as class oppression, but they did not play the same role in the continual reproduction of capitalist social relations. The NL, to the contrary, argued strongly for the absolute theoretical symmetry of all forms of oppression as sources of exploitation, leading to the political idea of ‘multi-vanguardism.’ One of the founding documents of the premier NL RPE group in the USA (discussed further below) reflected this concept: ‘The organization opposes all exploitation on the basis of class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other social/economic/cultural constructs’ (URPE, 1968). As the NL went on to develop its ideologies, it drew on (among other sources) C. Wright Mills’ (1956) model of elites based on power, and consciously opposed this to the Marxist concept of class based at its deepest level on economic exploitation. Mills’ concept was particularly suited to a view of multiple, conceptually equivalent, exploitations.

The other central issue for the NL presented itself Janus-like with two related but conceptually very different faces. Negatively (in several senses of that word), the NL exuded a politically primitive anti-authoritarianism. This was an important endogenous contribution to the NL’s general inability to create sustainable institutions. Positively, the NL championed the concept of Participatory Democracy against both the OL and bourgeois democracy. Long after the NL disappeared, this latter idea has remained as a permanent contribution (or ‘rediscovery,’ as the idea existed before the NL), and is still being debated and developed by many (proto) social movements in the USA that continue to fight against capitalism.

Read the rest here.

It’s the System Stupid!

By Hans Despain

On Thursday, December 13, 2012, The Guardian announced Queen Elizabeth finally received an answer to her question—“Did nobody see this coming?”—about the 2008 financial crisis.1 While she was touring the Bank of England, Sujit Kapadia, one of the bank’s economists, informed Her Majesty that financial crises are a bit like earthquakes and flu pandemics: rare and difficult to predict. An impressive answer indeed. Brilliant for its vagueness, spuriousness, and obtuseness. 

However, Kapadia is simply wrong not to have explained that many economists, financiers, and regulators anticipated and predicted the financial collapse. Additionally, metaphors of natural disasters are highly misleading. Financial crises are not inevitable occurrences, but historical, human-created, and contingent phenomena.

Her Majesty had asked: “Did nobody see this coming?” Perhaps she could have also asked three more questions: Does nobody see the suffering and socioeconomic injustices of oligopolistic-finance capitalism? Does no one see that the problems are structural and systemic? And is there no alternative to a system that generates continuous “quadruple crises”—the socioeconomic, political, environmental, and personal/psychological?

The conventional wisdom is “There Is No Alternative,” or TINA. For this reason most Americans simply acquiesce to capitalistic social relations and, like Sisyphus, are resigned to performing eternal tasks while enduring the “endless” quadruple crises generated by a pathological system. The most extraordinary aspect concerning the absence of an alternative is that it is fallacious. The capitalistic system itself must be transformed. To put it into a slogan: Capitalism Is No Alternative, or CINA.

Read rest here.

New introductory heterodox macro textbook, "Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies"

New introductory heterodox macroeconomics textbook (see here) by acclaimed writers, Howard J. Sherman & Michael Meeropol (whom I was a student of). In similar vein as E.K Hunt and Howard J. Sherman's "Economics: An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views," the authors stress the inherent instability of the capitalist macro-economy. Moreover, the entire book, as the subtitle indicates, centers on the debate between activist and austerity policies. Hence, it takes on many of the most important issues related to what has become known as the Great Recession.

Political Economy of the Environment: A Conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics Co-sponsored by New Politics

A Conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics

Co-sponsored by New Politics

St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY • Saturday, October 5, 2013

Call for Workshop Presentations

If you would like to make a workshop presentation related to the theme of this conference, please send an email to the URPE National Office at urpe@labornet.org.

We are living in a period of increasing environmental crisis and growing inequalities within and between the countries of the world. The obstacles to sustainable development and the equitable distribution of the products of our labor lie in the ways in which our political economic system operates. The necessary technology is already available, and the resources required to end the use of fossil fuels, for example, exist. But multinational corporations, and the governments they control, base their decisions on the maximization of profits, not on the well-being of the world’s people. Understanding and challenging capitalism is therefore essential for the building of local, national and international environmental movements.

The goal of this conference is both to clarify areas of agreement among progressive environmental activists and to promote friendly discussion of disagreements. Thus we would like the plenaries and workshops of the conference to address questions such as the following:

• What would a sustainable and just future look like? 
• What short-run reforms, if any, can enable us to survive the climate crisis until fundamental change can be achieved? 
• Would sustainable development necessitate a reduction in living standards? 
• What have been the main successes of environmental movements and how were they achieved? 
• How do we promote environmental justice, making sure that environmental movements in the US address the specific concerns of African American and Latino/a communities? 
• Is there a conflict between the environmental movement and the labor movement? 
• How are people in the US and other countries responding to the challenge of fracking? 
• How do we assess the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the Copenhagen summit fail? 
• How should we address hazardous waste disposal -- locally, nationally, and internationally? 
• What are the relative merits of carbon taxes and tradable carbon-emission permits as ways of reducing worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases? 
• What are “green taxes” and how could the imposition of taxes on pollutants be made “revenue neutral” or used to make a tax system more progressive? 
• Does environmental regulation result in the loss of jobs, the creation of jobs, or is this the wrong question to ask? 
• How does the changing balance of international power, such as the rise of the BRICS, affect the prospects for reducing environmental damage? 

For updates on the conference program, please visit the program page. For a flyer announcing this call for workshops, click here.

Introductory Essay for Newsletter of Marxist Sociology Section of ASA

Below is the introductory essay that I wrote for the recent relaunching of the newsletter for Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association, which can be seen here.

Over the years, the intellectual agendas of critical social scientists have taken a decidedly pluralist turn. Leading thinkers have begun to move beyond established alternative paradigms opening up new lines of analysis, manifesting a turn to a more cross fertilization of ideas, which seemingly suggests that the once powerful embracement of Marxism by the infamous Radical Caucus has waned. The relaunching of the newsletter of the Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological Association is a testament to the fact that this supposed decline in radical scholarship is certainly not the case. On the contrary, the praxis of the Sociology Liberation Movement carries on as unquestionably substantive in the assessment and articulation of pertinent contemporary and historical social, political, economic, and environmental problems.

Hence, the ambition of the newsletter is to accentuate the perseverance of Marxist social scientific enquiry, especially since it is quite clear that in today’s day in age the oppressive forces of capitalism perpetually act as battering rams that subject humanity to a “dis-embedded” social world, in which collective action problems ensue persistent socioeconomic inequity. We wish to make palpable how the insights of Marxism widely make apparent how the global socioeconomic system does not automatically generate efficient situations whereby unique organizations of production, exchange, and distribution guarantee the attainment of maximum social welfare.

The idea that humans are simple instrumentally rationalists, who supposedly oscillate like a homogenous globule of Hobbesian brutes, is conclusively a fiction. The radical political economy of Karl Marx is ripe to concretely expose the underlying complex fractures embedded in capitalism, which limit the capability of humans to safeguard social assets, social claims, and social ties requisite for sustaining an institutional nucleus of society for human survival. It is our goal to embrace first-rate scholarship that evinces capitalism’s impingement upon the accruement and management of resources vital for catholic cogitation, and realization, of conscious desires for humans to reach their full potential.

The relaunching of the newsletter is thus an attempt to make clear how the Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association offers not only the effective communicative space, but matchless intellectual tools, capacities, and resources that enable radical social scientists to formulate the methodological lenses that critically challenge the nature of current world dynamics. The general inclination is to pave that tortuous royal road to an emancipated sociological imagination.

Innagural Issue of Marxist Sociology Section of American Sociological Association Newsletter

 

Colleagues,

I am sure many of you would be interested to know that the Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association has relaunched its monthly newsletter, of which yours truly is a co-editor (and wrote an introductory essay). Our inaugural issue can be seen here. Our website is here.