How the West was Lost

How the West was Lost Acceptance Speech for the Marxian Economics Award of the World Association for Political economy Alan Freeman Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba. afreeman@iwgvt.org; https://geopoliticaleconomy.academia.edu/AlanFreeman; https://ideas.repec.org/e/pfr102.html; www.geopoliticaleconomy.org. , 15 June 2018 Introduction I am honoured and grateful to the World Association for Political Economy and to Professor Cheng Enfu. To distinguish the contribution of an individual to a collective endeavour is always a trial; When the individual is oneself, it is impossible. I begin with my comrades precisely because, without them, no-one, least of all I, will make sense of anything I have done. Acknowledgements In his introduction to Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’, Andrew Kliman wrote The ideas in this book emerged through years of extensive collaboration and dialogue with other proponents of the TSSI, especially Alan Freeman. In many cases, I have long since forgotten whether it was Freeman, or I, or someone else, who came up with a particular idea or formulation. Thus, I cannot take full credit for this book…in a sense, they are the book’s co-authors. Nevertheless, I must take full responsibility for the views expressed herein, and for any errors I may have made. I can improve on these words in only one way, by substituting Andrew Kliman’s name for my own. The intellectual spine of any rational understanding of world history and political economy today is the work of Karl Marx. As with any thinker, we can engage with Marx only if we strive to understand his actual ideas, not the ideas that other thinkers attribute to him. To this end I have worked collectively, for thirty years, to develop the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx and thereby reclaim Marx’s value theory. In addition to Andrew Kliman, I must acknowledge the many scholars who influenced TSSI discoveries, of whom I record only those who most directly influenced my own thinking: Jesus Albarracin, Daniel Ankarloo, Margaret Andrews, Phyllis Atwell, Rob Bryer, Mick Burke, Guglielmo Carchedi, John Ernst, Anders Ekeland, Emmanuel Farjoun, Hector Guillen Romero, Paolo Giussani, Michel Husson, Robert Langston, Moshe Machover, Fred Moseley, Michelle Naples, Anitra Nelson, Eduardo Maldonado-Filho, Ernest Mandel, Ted McGlone, Robin Murray, Nic Potts, Alejandro Ramos, Adolfo Rodriguez, Pierre Salama, Sungur Savran, and Julian Wells. For the last ten years I have worked intensively with Radhika Desai, originator of Geopolitical Economy and co-director of our Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) and co-editor of our two book series, to whose authors recognition is also due. Desai has shaped my outlook on all issues of the world economy, and profoundly influenced my thinking on value, money, and the world order. Our joint debt in this sphere to Russian Marxists is especially great, notably Boris Kagarlitsky and Alexander Buzgalin. I have worked extensively and productively with Victoria Chick on the relation between Marx and Keynes, to whom my debt cannot be overstated. My work on pluralism has been a joint effort also with Victoria Chick, Andy Denis, Fred Lee, George DeMartino, Wolfram Elsner, Edward Fulbrook, Serap Kayatekin, and other dedicated scholars from the Association for Heterodox Economics, Rethinking Economics and the World Economics Association who, I am happy to say, are too numerous to mention, since this testifies to the avalanche that became of a tiny snowball that, I like to think, Kliman and I set rolling with our 1996 guidelines for the International Working Group on Value Theory (IWGVT). My work on creative labour, which this paper addresses only tangentially but is nevertheless fundamental to my thinking on value and on the world economy, has been profoundly influenced by my time at the Greater London Authority particularly Hasan Bakhshi, Peter Higgs, Redmond O’Neill, Bridget Rosewell, John Ross, Carol Turner, Jude Woodward and, not least, Ken Livingstone. I have drawn on the generosity and work of many Chinese scholars, in particular Cheng Enfu, Wang Guijin, Zhu Kui, Meng Jie and Shuanping Dai I cannot but acknowledge the lifelong influence of my father Christopher Freeman, pioneer and arguably founder of the theory of Science Policy. With all that said, the greatest influence in my life has been the courage of Doreen and Neville Lawrence. I owe more to them than any other. If I have missed anyone out, I leave it to historians to correct the record. The most practical way to explain sixty years of political activity, the rationale for my theoretical work, is to address the tasks we jointly face, at a point in history when the possibilities for peace, justice and human emancipation are exceeded only, paradoxically, by the dangers facing us. China’s Marxists China’s economic advances prove that there are alternative paths of development to those which the so-called ‘advanced’ powers try to impose on the world. Yet the threats of nuclear annihilation, ecological disaster, and fascism hang over us. The need to develop, understand, and promote Marx’s ideas, have therefore never been greater. Chinese scholars are well-placed to contribute. China’s economic achievements create the opportunity to verify many of Marx’s key ideas which, until now, remained either untested, or disputed because of the difficulties facing early socialism. Marx, in short, provides the means to explain China’s success; Western economic theory does not. Yet Western Marxist scholars have not lived up to the responsibilities required of a genuine world partnership; they have not explained the economic failure of their own countries. They have instead grievously misinterpreted Marx’s theory, reducing it to an academically respectable variant of Competitive General Equilibrium, the apologetic core of the neoclassical paradigm. They thus present to the world a version of Marx which cannot explain the two most compelling features of the world economy today. These are: First, the world is polarised into two completely disparate blocs. Over 80% of humanity lives in poor countries, and a small minority lives in a small group of rich countries. Membership of these two groups has hardly changed since Lenin first described them. Second, a prolonged, deep and intractable stagnation or ‘Great Depression’ grips these rich countries, dating certainly from the 1974 Recession and arguably earlier. The Western Academic Marxist tradition, which TSSI scholars term ‘Marxism without Marx’, has failed to explain these facts. It opposes and dismisses Marx’s own explanation, without advancing in its stead any viable alternative. This does more harm than good. These are blunt words. However, they have been proven, and scholars may consult many works where this is done. Marx never hesitated to be blunt when it was needed. In respect for his tradition, when we differ, we should maintain comradeship but also have our differences out. Those whose only concern is the future of the capitalist class can afford politeness; we take responsibility for humanity. revolutions in economic thought The failure of ‘Marxism without Marx’ to explain the crisis accompanies its failure to capture a mass audience. This contrasts harshly with the last two such ‘Great Depressions’: that of 1871-1893, and that of 1929-1942. Both depressions provoked revolutions in economic thought because the orthodox theories of the time could not explain such deep and long periods of stagnation. As a result, millions embraced alternative views. These were hence real revolutions: they became the mental property of vast numbers of people. The revolution of the 1870s brought the ideas of Karl Marx to the unchallenged forefront of economic theory: they explained what ordinary people could see with their own eyes. They were adopted by millions of workers and their parties, over whom a failed, academic orthodoxy held no sway. The revolution of the 1940s, led by John Maynard Keynes, also explained what contemporary theory could not. However, the victories of the workers’ movement had divided the world into Communist and Capitalist camps, and Keynes carefully distanced his theories from Marx’s to get the attention of the ruling capitalist elites. These same elites gratefully awarded sole credit to their new guru, ignoring both his debt to Marx and what the two had in common. Yet Keynes’s most important proposals are hard to distinguish from those of the Communist Manifesto, not least the ‘euthanasia of the rentiers’ and the ‘socialisation of investment’. His explanation for crisis was, Victoria Chick and I have shown, theoretically identical to Marx’s. This, and the war, is why Keynesianism succeeded. Science cries out for a new such theoretical revolution. I propose that it must come from a source other than Western scholarship. This is the sum and substance of what I have to say. With what must such a revolution grapple? I suggest starting from four irreducible, key elements, of previous such revolutions. These were: a recognition that capitalism generates, from inside itself, a persistent and ever-growing failure to invest; that this, beyond a certain point, undermines capitalist industry’s capacity to produce; that the market in capital cannot rectify the failure; therefore, unless the state, on a large scale, overrides the private investment mechanism, social disintegration will occur. Therefore, Great Depressions are only overcome when the state, or more generally public institutions, suppress and override the capitalist investment mechanism using measures described in the Communist Manifesto as ‘despotic inroads into capitalist property’. However, history shows this may happen in one of two ways: by advances towards socialism, or through the barbaric retrogressions of fascism, war and conquest. Here lies the importance of China’s Marxist scholarship. China’s experience shows there is a road out of Depression other than war and fascism. Therefore, Chinese and Western scholars should jointly strive to furnish, publicise, and secure, rigorous theoretical explanations for this success, and for the failure of all other solutions other than those involving catastrophic human cost. Marx’s own theory is the best place to start, not because of any cult hero-worship, but because it provides the best explanation so far known. The bare facts of depression Where to begin? Let us start with basic facts. At the end of this piece are some charts that illustrate amplify these facts, and a list of my sources. Between 1987 and the 2008 crash, sixty percent of the capital accumulated in the UK comprised financial assets. Only forty percent of UK-owned capital was engaged in domestic production. Over this same period, eighty percent of the private capital accumulated in the US consisted of financial assets. Gross fixed capital formation in the UK fell from 25% of GDP to 15% of GDP. In the USA it fell from 24% to 18%. In China it rose from 32% to 45%. Private domestic investment in the US fell from 17% of GDP to just 11%. Net investment, obtained by subtracting capital consumption, had by 2009 fallen to just 2%. In short, the US economy ceased accumulating domestically. This was not a short-term phenomenon. Between 1970 and 2016 net capital investment fell with a clear trend from a cyclic average of 9% of GDP to a cyclic average of 4%. All other indicators of recession have fallen in since the late 1960s, including real GDP growth, capacity utilization and underemployment, if this is measured correctly. Yet over the twenty years preceding the 2008 crash, the US price-earnings index on financial assets doubled, from 10 to 20. As Shiller insists, this is irrational. The missing piece of the puzzle is the flow of funds. It is a common misconception that because the USA is running a deficit, it cannot export capital. To the contrary, measuring capital properly as the sum of Foreign Direct Investment, Portfolio Investment and Other Investment, US capital exports rose from near zero in 1970, to $600 billion in 1987, to $10 trillion in 2007, before collapsing after the crash, only to bounce back to $5 trillion in 2010. US capital seeks, in short, to extract profit from the rest of the world to solve the problems of its own, self-created, long-term and intractable domestic decline when actually, it can only be solved by suppressing the prerogatives of its own capitalists. This single fact explains Donald Trump, his trade war, the systematic military escalation of the NATO powers, and the dissolution of the existing international order. These are nothing more than ingenious attempts to solve the US crisis without attacking its capitalists. All the above can be explained by the decline in the rate of profit – the return on capital – caused by the accumulation of capital: the most decisive and persistent long-run tendency in capitalism, recognised by Smith, Ricardo and Mill, and clearly explained by Marx and subsequently Keynes. When we calculate this properly by including financial capital in the denominator, we see that in the USA it has declined exponentially since the 1950s, except for a short blip in the 1960s, from a high of 12% to its current level of 5%. What explains the facts? The theories of Marx and of Keynes offer very similar explanations for the above facts. As the return on productive investment declines, capital investors begin to hoard money. Obviously, they prefer forms of money that yield a return, that is to say, monetary instruments. But such instruments are a monetary form of capital, interrupted at the ‘M’ stage of Marx’s circuit of capital. Capital, instead of flowing back into production, accumulates as monetary instruments. A contradiction now emerges: as the profit rate falls, investors stop deploying money in production and turn to financial instruments, which is to say, titles to the revenues of others. This contradiction explodes in spectacular crashes which do not, however, resolve the problem of the declining profit rate, since they only re-align asset values with the revenue yielded by productive capital, without revaluing the productive assets themselves. Many other factors come into play in any specific crisis, but these fundamental causes are not only present in all crises but are responsible for many of the secondary effects. To elevate these into primary causes is like saying that a man who falls off a cliff has died of heart failure. Many actions are needed to put things right, not least raising consumption (including education, health, housing and cultural development) to a level which can release human creative talent currently suppressed by capitalism, unleashing the potential of a vast, green technological revolution based on this talent. However, cause should not be confused with remedy. An infection may be cured with antibiotics; however, the infection is caused by bacteria, not the lack of medicine. A massive rise in income is needed to exit the crisis; however, the crisis is not caused by poverty. Several Latin American left-wing experiments have learnt this to their cost. The accumulation of money hoards is explained in the Critique of Political Economy, at length in the early chapters of Volume 1, and in copious detail in Volume III. It is there, in Marx’s work, for anyone to see. The declining profit rate is clearly explained in Volume I, Volume III and, for good measure, Theories of Surplus Value. All this is thus not new, has been publicly stated, and flows directly from Marx’s analysis; furthermore, no superior alternative has come forward. Why don’t Western Marxists accept Marx’s theories? counterevolutions in economic thought This failure is puzzling only if we suppose that science always moves forward. Actually, when scientific knowledge threatens a class whose dominion is historically limited, this knowledge is suppressed. Catholicism proscribed Galileo until 1992. The word ‘revolution’ comes from Copernicus’ work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestum. The most dangerous truth for capitalism is scientific political economy. When Marx was seven years old, the ‘Ricardian Socialist’ Hodgskin had already used Ricardo’s theory of rent to demonstrate exploitation. If economics were a science, this would have been welcomed. Instead James Mill, a firm opponent of trade unions, started a decades-long retreat from Ricardianism, remarking that “if such ideas were to spread they would be subversive of civilised society.” From Senior’s ‘last hour’ to the ‘abstinence’ theory of capitalism, the ‘vulgar economists’ strove to put Ricardo’s genie back in its bottle. The background to Marx’s research, during the golden age of the Victorian natural sciences, was therefore a profound general retrogression in the social sciences. Marx is detested by orthodox economics because he put an end to its retrogression. He did not just overcome Smith and Ricardo’s mistakes, but recuperated their scientific conclusions. The contrast is obvious: every modern economics student knows the Invisible Hand and Comparative Advantage – yet who is taught that labour alone is the measure of value? Further historical study shows that economic thought normally goes backward once a revolutionary new idea has taken hold; this is the key to the second great counter-revolution in economics which arose early in the 20th Century. Its architects were steeped in hostility to Marx, not just as scholars but as political actors. Böhm-Bawerk, who defined the anti-Marx canon almost single-handed, was Austria-Hungary’s Minister of Finance and who imposed an austerity programme that ultimately led to the downfall of the Imperium. Weber, who, as Desai shows, redefined the social sciences to isolate economics from all other fields of study, wrote in 1918 that “We have this [German] revolution to thank for the fact that we cannot send a single division against the Poles. All we see is dirt, muck, dung, and horse-play—nothing else. Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens.” These critics met with little more initial success than the anti-Ricardians. They left the way open for Keynes’ rise for similar reasons that Marx rose in the 1870s – the Depression and the war drove millions of people to reject orthodoxy and support Keynes’s conclusions. Yet they cleared the way to a third counter-revolution in thought, through which we are now living, with an altogether different character. The first two counter-revolutions were content to propose alternatives to scientific political economy. The third counter-revolution proscribed science. General Equilibrium: the third economic counter-revolution This is the background to the third, and most successful economic counter-revolution: General Equilibrium or ‘comparative statics’, which has dominated economics since World War II. It is distinguished by two features. First, it is not a theory but a method; it is a way of conceptualising economic magnitudes that applies to each and every school. Economics is thus not just divided vertically into ‘schools of thought’ but horizontally into two great methodological approaches: the equilibrium approach, and the temporal approach. Equilibrium is everywhere on top: Equilibrium Marginalism, Bastard Keynesianism, Marxism without Marx, the ‘new’ Institutionalism, and so on. It resurfaces every time an innovation exposes a contradiction in capitalism: thus, within a few years of the theory of adaptive expectations, rational expectations theory swept the field. There is thus no ‘correct’ or ‘superior’ school; wherever it prevails, the imposition of Equilibrium methodology stops every school from understanding capitalist crisis. The reason is simple: Equilibrium assumes that capitalism reproduces itself perfectly. Of course, it is then logically impossible to deduce that it doesn’t. Second, retrogression now manifests itself not as a reaction against Keynes, Marx or Veblen, but within Keynesian, Marxist or Institutionalist thought. It produces a ‘tame’ variant of Keynesianism focussed only on demand management, and ignoring finance and investment, a ‘tame’ institutionalism in which all institutions manifest themselves identically throughout eternity: and a ‘tame’ variant of Marxism, imposing a requirement alien to Marx, due to Böhm-Bawerk’s close collaborator, the Austrian economist Ladislaw von Bortkiewicz. This requirement is the ‘Marxian’ equivalent of supposing that capitalism reproduces perfectly: it states that prices of production at the end of a period must be equal to those at the start. Marx never adopted such an absurd assumption, and nor could he, since it implies that the purchasers, at the start of the next period, pay less money for the goods they buy than the producers receive when they sell the same goods at the end of the previous period. Not only does this wipe out historical costs that, actually, the capitalists still bear, but if prices are rising, value is then created in exchange. The misreading reverses Marx’s attempt to understand how capitalism reproduces itself. In Volume I of Capital he studies the commodity, and deduces all its characteristics without once assuming that capitalism ‘works’. Then in Volume II, he shows how a commodity economy can in fact survive and reproduce itself – become a ‘mode of production’. This puts things in the correct logical order, since reproduction is a consequence of private production and exchange, not the other way around. And of course, reproduction can, and does, fail: indeed, by studying the conditions for it to work, Marx uncovers how it can go wrong. The Equilibrium reading inverts this logic, first supposing that the economy cannot possibly go wrong and then deducing the commodity relation from this requirement. It is hardly surprising that in such a reading, crisis is theoretically impossible, just as in Mediaeval European Theology, evil could not be the work of God because God was by definition perfect. If Marx had intended this ridiculous idea, he would have published Volume II first and called it Volume I. Yet this misreading of Marx then became the ‘standard’ interpretation. Since it is also logically inconsistent, Marx was successfully discredited as a failed ‘minor Ricardian’ and dismissed from Western curricula. Anyone with a fresh mind who wants to study Marx’s ideas now encounters a great mass of learned books and journal articles, written by ‘Marxists’, and devoted to explaining his mistakes by misrepresenting him. Their function is not to advance knowledge, but the careers of the writers, by associating them with Marx’s reputation whilst carefully distancing them from his dangerous conclusions. This was a new type of reaction, which served not to simply to present theories other than Marx’s (which is perfectly legitimate) but present such theories as the only legitimate possibility by misrepresenting and thereby discrediting Marx. It succeeded where the two previous counter-revolutions failed, because even though it offers self-evidently false accounts of observed reality, these can now be defended by pretending there is no alternative. It constitutes, in short, censorship. ‘Marxism Without Marx’ does not promote Marx but substitutes, for Marx’s ideas, the ideas of his interpreters, in order to avoid confronting Marx’s own ideas. There is a small problem: these ideas cannot explain crisis. Let us conclude by asking why. Money, money, money: say’s fallacy and the collapse of the neoclassical school General Equilibrium has a precursor: Say’s Fallacy. Economics calls this Say’s Law, but only an economist would use the word ‘Law’ to designate something that does not happen. Adopted by Ricardo but excoriated by Marx, and the starting point of Keynes’ critique of orthodoxy, this fallacy, as Marx notes, says the economy behaves as if ‘goods exchange against goods’ – everything produced must be exchanged for another thing that is produced. This gives rise to three key theoretical consequences, on which all successful apologetics rest. The first is market clearing: once the supply of, and demand for every good is accounted for, there can be nothing left over. Second, goods must exchange at prices such that perfect reproduction takes place. And third, money is a mere numéraire, a measure of price. Money hoards are literally inconceivable – that is to say, they cannot be theorised – because these systems have no theoretical place for it. It is the third of these theoretical consequences – that money doesn’t matter – which rendered Western Marxism unable to explain the great financial crash of 2008; without a theory of money, how can a Marxist hope to explain finance? Money is a real thing, a materialised social relation. Its materiality is at the heart of the two greatest advances in economic thought yet seen. Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, both began from an absolute and total rejection of Say’s Fallacy. This is because, as Marx clearly states, goods do not exchange for other goods, but for money. It is not only possible, but normal, for exchange to be interrupted at the money stage; capitalists sell their products, and then hang onto the proceeds. This then accumulates everywhere as hoards of unused money. Credit, properly mobilised, reduces these idle funds by directing unused money in one owner’s hands to finance another owner’s purchase of productive resources. But it is a two-edged sword. Once credit instruments become marketable, they become a form of money: they provide a new way to accumulate idle resources, not just as means of exchange such as currency or bullion, but as interest-bearing capital. This occurs because money itself acquires, as Marx state, a ‘second use-value’ – its use-value as capital, in which form it attracts interest, a share of value produced elsewhere. In this form, it takes flight. The price of financial instruments or ‘fictitious capital’ is not determined by their value-creating capacity but by an independent market in money which capitalises the income they appropriate. As the profit rate falls, more and more capital accumulates as financial instruments, creating a demand which inflates their price. The price-inflation then becomes a source of income in its own right, and the build-up to the crash is under way. This is why Marx himself was, from the outset, a monetary theorist. As early as 1845 he was already grappling with the fact that money concentrates, in itself, all the highest contradictions of capitalism; he turned to the study of value precisely because he realised that, to understand money, it was necessary to penetrate beneath its surface appearance and trace it back to its origin in labour. Most of the Grundrisse is about money. More than half of Capital’s precursor – the Critique of Political Economy – is about money. The first five chapters of Capital Volume I contain an extensive analysis of money, and more than half of Capital Volume III – which presents a fully-developed theory of banking, money-capital, and not least, financial capital – deals with money. It is quite extraordinary, and a testimony to the ideological power of the third economic counter-revolution, that Western Marxists see no problems in presenting von Bortkiewicz-Sweezy-Morishima-Steedman systems as an interpretation of Marx, given that, since they are Says-Fallacy systems, money is logically absent from them. This exegetical contradiction is all the more mysterious in the hands of writers, such as Value-Form and Uno school theorists, who, to their credit, take Marx’s theory of money seriously – yet interpret his value theory using simultaneous equation systems from which money is logically absent. This gap in thinking explains, most clearly, the failure of Western Marxism to explain the present crisis. This is neither a mere monetary crisis, nor a mere crisis of value production, but a combined crisis of the two. Both aspects of Marx’s theory are needed. His analysis of the labour process leads to his explanation of the falling profit rate; his analysis of money-capital shows why under the impact of this decline, capital accumulates as idle money. His analysis of interest finally shows why money, as capital, loses its connection with value production and appears as an independent force – for which it is mistaken by both bourgeois and Marxist writers alike – only to be brought back down to earth with a rude bump, in financial crashes. Marx thus rigorously developed a science which the first Great Depression made it impossible to ignore. Today, a third and even more intractable Depression again makes truth, if spoken, impossible to ignore: what remains is to speak it. Consciousness, all good Marxists know, is part of the superstructure. It, too, appears as an independent force but as Marx reminds us, is determined by Being. Its autonomy from crude materiality is even greater than that of finance capital, so that the ‘rude bump’ of the financial crash has yet to bring political economy down to earth. In consequence it has inflicted on us the rude bump of Donald Trump. Our response and our responsibility, as Marx said of Hegel, is to set Marxist theory back on its feet: by returning to the study, not of ‘Marxism’, but of Marx. Selected Charts Chart 1: UK Investment as share of GDP Chart 2: acquisition of financial assets compared to productive assets, and net investment as share of GDP Chart 3: US Net investment as share of GDP (same as chart 2 but isolated for study) Chart 4: Gross Capital Formation as share of GDP, China and US compared Chart 5: US profit rate, corrected to include financial assets in the denominator Sources US Profit rate and investment Financial Assets: www.federalreserve.gov; US flow of funds, Series all sectors, credit instruments, liabilities(series FL894104005.Q) Productive Assets: NIPA Table 1.1 (Current-Cost Net Stock of Fixed Assets and Consumer Durable Goods); series: non-residential fixed assets GDP: United Nations Statistical Service, series ‘Gross Domestic Product’ downloaded from interactive site Investment: United Nations Statistical Service, series ‘Gross fixed capital formation (including Acquisitions less disposals of valuables)’ downloaded from interactive site Consumption of Fixed Capital: St Louis Fed (https://fred.stlouisfed.org) series COFC Net investment = Investment – Consumption of Fixed Capital Profit: NIPA Table 11000Ann (Composition of Gross Domestic Income), series ‘Net operating surplus of Private Enterprises’, code W260RC1, line 12 UK GDP: UK National Accounts, reference QNA/BKTL Gross Domestic Product at market prices Investment: UK National Accounts, reference UKEA/NPQS, Gross non-residential fixed capital formation China Investment: United Nations Statistical Service, series ‘Gross fixed capital formation (including Acquisitions less disposals of valuables)’ downloaded from interactive site GDP: United Nations Statistical Service, series ‘Gross Domestic Product’ downloaded from interactive site Selected reading I’m frequently asked ‘what should I read?’ on the Temporal Single System Interpretation. Below, I list the the core, or foundational material, and below that ‘supplementary reading’ which extends to, but does not fully cover, the topics touched on in my introduction. The COPE/IWGVT website, at http://copejournal.com/ contains a comprehensive selection of TSSI and related material, and is regularly updated. It also contains the IWGVT guidelines. The Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) maintains a website at www.geopoliticaleconomy.org and a news analysis site www.newcoldwar.org. Scholars who work collaboratively should feel free to contact me with questions. I cannot always guarantee to answer them, but I will try. Core reading on the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx Freeman, A. 2010. [2010c]‘Marxism Without Marx: notes towards a critique’. Capital and Class 34, vol 1. pp84-97, December 2010. ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/48618.html Freeman, A. and G. Carchedi. 1996. Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996. academia.edu/304345/Marx_and_Non-Equilibrium_Economics Freeman, A., Andrew Kliman and Julian Wells. 2001. [2001c]. … The New Value Controversy in Economics: Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Kliman, A. and N. Potts. (eds) 2015. Is Marx's Theory of Profit Right? The Simultaneist–Temporalist Debate. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Https://www.academia.edu/19588751/No_Longer_a_Question_of_Truth_The_Knell_of_Scientific_Bourgeois_Marxian_Economics_and_a_Positive_Alternative Kliman, A., A. Freeman, B. Cooney, N. Potts, and A. Gusev. 2018. [2013q]"The Unmaking of Marx’s Capital: Heinrich’s Attempt to Eliminate Marx’s Crisis Theory”. Submitted to Capital and Class June 2018 Kliman, A.. 2006. Reclaiming Marx’s Capital: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency. Lexington Books, U.S. Kliman, A. 2011. The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. Pluto Press (UK). Maldonado-Filho, E. 208. The Circuit of Industrial Capital, Price Changes and the Profit Rate. http://copejournal.com/the-circuit-of-industrial-capital-price-changes-and-the-profit-rate-by-eduardo-maldonado-filho/ Ramos-Martinez, A. 1995. ‘The Monetary Expression of Labour: Marx ́s Twofold Measure of Value’. http://copejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Ramos-The-Monetary-Expression-of-Labour-Marxs-Twofold-Measure-of-Value.pdf Supplementary and related reading Chick, V. and A. Freeman. 2018. ‘The Economics of Enough: a future for capitalism or a new way of living?’. In Dow, S., J. Jespersen and G. Tily. Money, Method and Post-Keynesian Economics for the 21st century. Edward Elgar Desai, R. 2012. Geopolitical Economy: after Globalization, Empire and Hegemony. Pluto Press. Desai, R. and A. Freeman [2011b] ‘Value and Crisis Theory in the “Great Recession”’. World Review of Political Economy. Vol 2 No. 1, Spring 2011. Pp 35-47. ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/48645.html Freeman, A. 2007. [2007b]‘Heavens Above: What Equilibrium Means for Economics’ in Mosini, V. (ed) Equilibrium in Economics: Scope and Limits, London: Routledge. https://www.academia.edu/13033069/Heavens_Above_What_Equilibrium_Means_for_Economics_with_an_Appendix_on_Temporality_Equilibrium_Endogeneity_and_Exogeneity_in_Physics_and_Economics Freeman, A. 2010. [2010e]‘Trends in Value Theory since 1881’. World Review of Political Economy. Vol 1., No. 4. December 2010. ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/48646.html Freeman, A. 2010. [2010d]‘The Economists of Tomorrow: the Case for Assertive Pluralism in Economics Education’. American Journal of Economic Sociology vol. 69(5), pages 1591-1613. November 2010, Wiley Blackwell. ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ajecsc/v69y2010i5p1591-1613.html Freeman, A. 2012. Presentation on the Creative Industries to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. https://www.academia.edu/4394566/What_are_the_Creative_Industries_Presentation_to_Chinese_Academy_of_Social_Sciences_on_Creative_Industries_October_2012 Freeman, Freeman, A. 2012. 'The Profit Rate in the Presence of Financial Markets: a Necessary Correction'. Journal of Australian Political Economy, Number 70, Summer 2012, pp 167-192 https://www.academia.edu/36856958/The_Profit_Rate_in_the_presence_of_Financial_Markets_A_Necessary_Correction_The_Profit_Rate_in_the_Presence_of_Financial_Markets_a_Necessary_Correction Freeman, A. 2014. 'Schumpeter’s theory of self-restoration: a casualty of Samuelson’s Whig Historiography of science'. In Freeman et al (eds) Whig History and the Reinterpretation of Economic History. Special edition of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 38 Issue 3 May 2014 [2014d]Freeman, A. 2014. 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