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Transformation Problem
In 20th-century discussions of Karl Marx's economics, the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule by which to transform the "values" of commodities (based on their socially necessary labour content, according to his labour theory of value) into the "competitive prices" of the marketplace. This problem was first introduced by Marxist economist Conrad Schmidt and later dealt with by Marx in chapter 9 of the draft of volume 3 of ''Capital''. The essential difficulty was this: given that Marx derived profit, in the form of surplus value, from direct labour inputs, and that the ratio of direct labour input to capital input varied widely between commodities, how could he reconcile this with a tendency toward an average rate of profit on all capital invested among industries, if such a tendency (as predicted by Marx and Ricardo) exists? Marx's theory Marx defines value as the number of hours of labor socially necessary to produce a commodity. This includes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence. Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as '' The German Ideology'' (written 1846) and the '' Grundrisse'' (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labour Power
Labour power (; ) is the capacity to work, a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do the work, i.e. labour power, and the physical act of working, i.e. labour. Human labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly. The general idea of labour-power had existed previously in classical political economy. Adam Smith's ''The Wealth of Nations'' and David Ricardo's '' On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation'' already referred to the "productive powers of labour". However, Marx made the concept much more precise, critically examining the functions of labour-power in production, how labour-power is used, organized and exploited, and how it is typically valued and priced in bourgeois society. Under capitalism, according to Marx, the ''productive powers of labour'' a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wassily Leontief
Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief (; August 5, 1905 – February 5, 1999) was a Soviet-American economist known for his research on input–output analysis and how changes in one economic sector may affect other sectors. Leontief won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1973, and four of his doctoral students have also been awarded the prize (Paul Samuelson 1970, Robert Solow 1987, Vernon L. Smith 2002, Thomas Schelling 2005). Biography Early life Wassily Leontief was born on August 5, 1905, in Munich, German Empire, the son of Wassily W. Leontief (professor of Economics) and Zlata (German spelling ''Slata''; later Evgenia) Leontief (née Becker). Wassily Leontief Sr. belonged to a family of Russian old-believer merchants living in St. Petersburg since 1741. Evgenia (Genya) Becker belonged to a wealthy Jewish family from Odessa. At 15 in 1921, Wassily Jr. entered Petrograd State University in present-day St. Petersburg. He earned his Learned Economist degree (equiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz (Russian language, Russian Владислав Иосифович Борткевич, German language, German ''Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz'' or ''Ladislaus von Bortkewitsch'') (7 August 1868 – 15 July 1931) was a Russian economist and statistician of Poland, Polish ancestry. He wrote a book showing how the Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, can be useful in applied statistics, and he made contributions to mathematical economics. He lived most of his professional life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University (Privatdozent, 1895–1897) and Berlin University (1901–1931). Life and work Ladislaus Bortkiewicz was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia, to two ethnic Polish parents: Józef Bortkiewicz and Helena Bortkiewicz (née Rokicka). His father was a szlachta, Polish nobleman who served in the Imperial Russian Army, Russian Imperial Army. Bortkiewicz graduated from the Law Faculty in 1890. In 1898 he p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Makoto Itoh
was a Japanese economist who was considered internationally to be one of the most important scholars of Karl Marx's theory of value. He taught at Kokugakuin University, Tokyo, and was a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo. Itoh belonged to the school of economic thought founded by Kozo Uno and was one of the few Japanese Marxian economists who published widely in English-language journals such as Science & Society, Monthly Review, Capital & Class, New Left Review and Ampo The more commonly known as the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty in English and as the ''Anpo jōyaku'' or just ''Anpo'' in Japanese, is a treaty that permits the presence of U.S. military bases on Japanese soil, and commits the two nations to defen .... He published 24 books, of which 6 are in English, and 5 are translated and published in Chinese. Itoh died from a heart attack on February 7, 2023, at the age of 86. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anwar Shaikh (Economist)
Anwar M. Shaikh ( Sindhi: انور شيخ) is a Pakistani American heterodox economist in the tradition of classical political economy and Marxian economics. He is Professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at The New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1972. Early life and education Shaikh was born in Karachi into a Liberal Sindhi family in 1945. He traveled extensively at an early age and attended schools and lived for various lengths of time in Ankara, Washington, D.C., New York City, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, and Kuwait. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1961, received a B.S.E from Princeton University in 1965, worked for two years in Kuwait, and then returned to the United States to study at Columbia University, from which he received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1973. In 1972 he joined the Economics Department at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Temporal Single-system Interpretation
The temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI) of Karl Marx's value theory emerged in the early 1980s in response to renewed allegations that his theory was "riven with internal inconsistencies" and that it must therefore be rejected or corrected. The inconsistency allegations had been a prominent feature of Marxian economics and the debate surrounding it since the 1970s. Andrew Kliman argues that charges of inconsistency serve to legitimate the suppression of Marx's critique of political economy and current-day research based upon it as well as the "correction" of Marx's inconsistencies. Proponents of the temporal-single system interpretation of Marx's value theory claim that the supposed inconsistencies are actually the result of misinterpretation; they argue that when Marx's theory is understood as " temporal" and "single-system", the internal inconsistencies disappear. In a recent survey of the debate, a proponent of the TSSI concludes that "the ''proofs'' of inconsistency ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels" ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, political theorist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's lifelong friend and closest collaborator, serving as the co-founder of Marxism. Born in Barmen in the Kingdom of Prussia, Engels was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer. Despite his Bourgeoisie, bourgeois background, he became a staunch critic of capitalism, influenced by his observations of industrial working conditions in Manchester, England, as published in his early work ''The Condition of the Working Class in England'' (1845). He met Marx in 1844, after which they jointly authored works including ''The Holy Family (book), The Holy Family'' (1844), ''The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium. Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university. During World War II, while still a teenager, he joined the Belgian Trotskyist organisation alongside Abraham Leon and Martin Monath. He twice escaped after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and surviv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simultaneous Linear Equations
In mathematics, a system of linear equations (or linear system) is a collection of two or more linear equations involving the same variables. For example, : \begin 3x+2y-z=1\\ 2x-2y+4z=-2\\ -x+\fracy-z=0 \end is a system of three equations in the three variables . A ''solution'' to a linear system is an assignment of values to the variables such that all the equations are simultaneously satisfied. In the example above, a solution is given by the ordered triple (x,y,z)=(1,-2,-2), since it makes all three equations valid. Linear systems are a fundamental part of linear algebra, a subject used in most modern mathematics. Computational algorithms for finding the solutions are an important part of numerical linear algebra, and play a prominent role in engineering, physics, chemistry, computer science, and economics. A system of non-linear equations can often be approximated by a linear system (see linearization), a helpful technique when making a mathematical model or computer s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Competitive Equilibrium
Competitive equilibrium (also called: Walrasian equilibrium) is a concept of economic equilibrium, introduced by Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu in 1951, appropriate for the analysis of commodity markets with flexible prices and many traders, and serving as the benchmark of efficiency in economic analysis. It relies crucially on the assumption of a competitive environment where each trader decides upon a quantity that is so small compared to the total quantity traded in the market that their individual transactions have no influence on the prices. Competitive markets are an ideal standard by which other market structures are evaluated. Definitions A competitive equilibrium (CE) consists of two elements: * A price function P. It takes as argument a vector representing a bundle of commodities, and returns a positive real number that represents its price. Usually the price function is linear - it is represented as a vector of prices, a price for each commodity type. * An allocation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rate Of Exploitation
In Marxian economics, the rate of exploitation is the ratio of the total amount of unpaid labor done (surplus-value) to the total amount of wages paid (the value of labour power). The rate of exploitation is often also called the rate of surplus-value. Divergence of the two rates Marx did not regard the rate of surplus value and the rate of exploitation as necessarily identical, ''insofar'' as there was a divergence between surplus value ''realised'' and surplus value ''produced''. Thus, the quantity of surplus labour performed by workers in an enterprise might correspond to a value higher or lower than the surplus value actually ''realised'' as profit income upon sales of output. The implication is that if the gross profit volume was related to wage costs to establish the rate of surplus value, this might overstate or understate the real rate of labor-exploitation. Although this is a subtle point, it has sometimes played an important role in wage bargaining negotiations by tra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
