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Marxian Economics

This course provides a working foundation in the core concepts of Marxian economic theory – necessary and surplus labor, labor power, surplus value, exploitation, capital accumulation, distributions of the surplus, capitalist crises, and the differences between capitalist and other class structures. In addition, these core concepts will be systematically used to understand current social problems (including political and cultural as well as economic problems).

Capitalism Hits the Fan Movie

Watch as Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown.

Capitalist Crisis and the Return to Marx

Marxian analyses are now resurfacing in public dialogues about economy and society. A generation of marginalization is fading as a new generation discovers the diverse richness of the Marxian tradition’s insights. Just as an economic crisisin 1848 helped to provoke and shape Marx’s original insights, today’s crisis helps to renew interest in Marxism.

In the century before the 1970s, the victims of capitalism’s recurring crises and its critics increasingly turned toward Marx’s and other Marxists’ works.

Capitalism Hits the Fan Screening at the New School

On March 3rd, 2010, the Graduate Program for International Affairs at the New School hosted a screening of Capitalism Hits the Fan. Here you can watch as Professor Wolff answers some questions from the audience after a screening of his film.

 

Capitalism and the Useful Nation State

The nation state is once again proving its special usefulness as a vehicle for managing capitalist crisis.  Partly, this follows from the renewal of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies.  Other key dimensions of state usefulness include its more direct provision of financial guarantees to private enterprises and its over-priced purchase of "toxic" assets (those that have suffered drastic losses) from their private owners.

Lessons from the Housing Disaster

  Of the roughly 56 million homes in the US today with mortgages, one in seven is "delinquent." That is over 7 million homes more than 30 days behind in mortgage payments.  Those homeowners face foreclosure procedures likely leading to evictions.  Very high (and still rising) unemployment levels guarantee rising mortgage delinquencies.   Mass media and political statements about government and banks helping people avoid foreclosures ("mortgage modification") are often misleading.  Relatively few have been helped and the help has been too little.

The Stakes in "Punishing" Greece

  Global capitalism imploded in 2007.

Chronology of Capitalism

  From the National Radio Project:   "It’s a time of economic transition, and systems that may have seemed stable over the past few decades are proving to be far from it. But how did we get here? And how can we learn from the past, to build a more fair and just system in the future? While many politicians and pundits claim that no one saw the current economic collapse coming, in fact, we had plenty of warning, depending on who we listened to.

Rising Income Inequality in the US: Divisive, Depressing, and Dangerous

The gap between annual incomes of the top 10 per cent of US citizens and what the other 90 per cent gets has been widening sharply for the last 30 years.  The nation's economic development has been increasingly divisive.  Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, a leading expert, summarizes the facts on his website, from which the graph below is gratefully taken.   This graph shows how the top 10 per cent of income earners in the US took home, after the 1970s, an ever more outsized share of the total national income.

The so-called Crisis in Greece

2010 marks year #3 of this crisis in global capitalism. This is a systemic crisis with extreme symptoms in different places at different times: now Icelandic banks, then US homeowners being foreclosed, now Mexico losing emigrants’ remittances, then Greece’s government bonds, and so on. Capitalist hegemony cannot admit or deal with the disease of capitalism as a system. Instead, the focus shifts from symptom to symptom to press local institutions to shift the costs of crisis onto workers. Capitalism’s systemic crisis is no mystery.
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