Radical Political Economics

In recent decades, there has been a growing literature dealing with the empirical estimation of the rate of profit and other Marxian variables in several countries. Nonetheless, there has been a paucity of econometric research about the impact of those Marxian variables on the growth rate in developing countries. This article seeks to evaluate the rate of profit and the rate of accumulation as determinants of the growth rate in Colombia during 1967–2019, using a generalized vector autoregressive model. We find that both variables are statistically significant and, in concordance with Marxian theory predictions, affect positively the growth rate. We also identify direct impacts of the growth rate over the profit rate and the accumulation rate as well as an economic relevant relationship between these latter variables. JEL Classification: B51, C22, O54

This paper argues that the future of capitalism depends mainly on the rate of profit. Updates of previous estimates of the rate of profit are presented which show that the rate of profit has recovered only about 40 percent of the prior decline in the rate of profit during the 1960s and 1970s, thus suggesting that the current stagnation in the U.S. economy is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. It is argued that the main reason for the lack of a more significant increase in the rate of profit is a continued increase in the relative proportion of unproductive labor.

It has been a long association of over 40 years with him, during which the personal, political, intellectual and professional dimensions of our lives overlapped, intermeshed and, at rare occasions, even conflicted with each other. This tribute, therefore, reflects those intermeshing dimensions and may appear to be rather personal in some ways. When I heard the news of his death, I was in Moscow as a Visiting Professor at Moscow State University, and I felt miserable that there was no one there who knew him to whom I could talk about the emotional turmoil I was going through and share my sorrow and sense of loss. Writing this obituary is an experience of going through that turmoil again but with a difference that I have had ample opportunities now to talk to friends and colleagues who worked with him, and in that sense, it is also a therapeutic experience. Prof Bhalla, as my supervisor, taught me from scratch how to narrow down and frame a research question, how to read academic literature, how to report on and synthesise what is read, how to do econometric exercises on empirical data and how to analyse the econometric results and reach conclusions. He had my dissertation examined by another eminent economist Prof Y. K. Alagh and when it was awarded a first class/distinction mark, it was such a deep sense of satisfaction to find him looking even happier than I was. For a student, nothing is more satisfying than to realise that one's teacher is happy with one's efforts and performance. Prof Bhalla and his wife Sheila Bhalla (a Canadian whom he met while they were PhD students at the London School of Economics) joined the economics faculty at PU, Chandigarh in 1969. Many of us, their students, were at that time drawn towards the Maoist/Naxalite movement. We organised a condolence meeting to pay homage to Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 and the only faculty members who joined this meeting were the Bhallas. Until that time, we students did not know about their left-wing intellectual and political orientation. In a very silent way, we felt greatly encouraged by their participation in the condolence meeting. We soon came to know that Prof Bhalla was sympathetic to the Communist Party of India (CPI), and as the pro-Moscow CPI was ideologically hostile to Maoism, we were not sure how the Bhallas would view us. However, they did not even once criticise any left wing activity we students undertook. There came to develop an unsaid understanding between us that since the Left in general was weak in the university, we needed to support each other irrespective

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that mainstream liberal economics is intrinsically contradictory to the democratic ideal. The first stage of this demonstration concerns the deconstruction of the naturalization process of economics, in other words the process through which putative economic laws became equivalent to natural laws, which transformed economic decisions into technical issues supposedly free from democratic debate. The second stage concerns the ways in which the market has managed to legitimize its hegemony in society and the reasons why this contributes to the erosion of democracy. JEL classification: A13, B00, P10

This paper critically evaluates the "new solution" to the transformation as presented by Foley and Dumenil and others, from the perspective of the author's "macro-monetary" interpretation of Marx's theory. The main issue emphasized is the method of determination of the inputs of constant capital and variable capital in Marx's theory-whether these inputs are taken as given as quantities of money capital or derived from given quantities of physical goods.