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Starting from the two correct positions that, compared to the form of capitalism that preceded it, neoliberal capitalism has generally been more harmful to working people, and that in it finance plays a greater role in both scale and scope, some political economists argue that in neoliberalism financial capital is parasitic on nonfinancial (or "productive," or "industrial") capital. The central argument of this article is that, to the contrary, financial capital serves all capital through the various ways that it allows for neoliberalism to increase its appropriation of surplus value. To concretely support this position, the article considers a particular financial relation, debt, and indicates seven specific ways debt expansion facilitates neoliberalism's pursuit of increased appropriation of surplus value. Secondarily, this article rejects any stated or implied policy implications from the parasitic financial capital thesis that present "productive capitalism" as the desirable alternative to the deleterious effects of financialized capitalism. JEL Classification : G00, G51, H63 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of evaluation of any existing or proposed policy only has meaning in relation to some goal. Further, if the goal used for the evaluation is not the actual goal of the actor involved, any conclusions about the effectiveness or appropriateness of the policies are irrelevant for that actor. It is very common for people around the world to evaluate the economic policies of Cuba relative to claimed effects on the rate of growth of Gross Domestic product (GDp), followed by discussions on what the real effect on the GDp of the policies has been or will be. Given that Cuba has very explicitly stated that its economic goal is a prosperous, sustainable socialism, such considerations cannot constitute economic evaluations of policies for the country. A proper evaluation is, however, complicated by the multi-dimensional nature of the Island's economic goal. This article considers six of Cuba's most fundamental and commonly discussed economic policies as examples, to argue that in practice it is very often, though not necessarily always, possible to design policies in such a way that their evaluation relative to all the dimensions of Cuba's economic goal does not involve the potential problem of the "trade-off between dimensions" inherent to any multi-dimensional goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the end of the Cold War, the number of books and articles written about Russia dropped greatly, with writing on its economy falling particularly sharply. How Russian workers perceive their wages relative to countries they compare themselves with is one important component of their contentment and perception of well-being, which play such important roles in determining a country's political economy and economic development. This article draws on Russian statistical sources to add to the meager English-language empirical literature on Russian wages. Statically, it presents their level and inequality relative to the natural comparison countries. Dynamically, it presents their growth, and changes in inequality. The conclusion summarizes the seriously problematic situation of wages in Russia, and presents two political economic conclusions these empirical results suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Weisskopfian approach has dominated empirical studies of the US rate of profit for the last thirty-five years. Forty-five years earlier, Michal Kalecki developed a different frame suitable for empirical profit rate studies, which had the potential to give different, but complementary, insight into the profit rate analysis based on the Weisskopfian approach. This paper first presents a development of the Kaleckian frame. It then applies this frame to the US economy and presents some preliminary empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maintains that after a decade as a poster-child for neoliberal growth, (1) Turkey has definitely fallen from its former impressive growth performance, (2) the cause is exactly the rupture of its foreign capital-led growth model, just as its fragility critics warned, and (3) given the state of both external and internal economic and political factors, there is very little chance of Turkey returning to its strong growth over the next several years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the aspects of the relation of Cuba's economic reforms to the project of building socialism. It focuses on the economic effects of various norms with debated issue in Cuba. It mentions that the supporters of Cuba's started building socialism fear, and updating process in capitalism.

Despite a decade of strong growth, mainstream economists and financial markets have recently escalated their discussion of Turkey's economic ‘fragility’. Contrary to their focus on ‘excessive current account deficits’, the key to understanding Turkey's condition is the foreign capital inflows that facilitate and promote these deficits, and the extent of hot money in the inflows. This paper documents this central fragility and its current explosion. It also contributes to the debate with a detailed economic and operational definition of hot money in Turkey, not present in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A significant number of left political economists hold that the U.S. Great Recession and subsequent lethargic performance are a crisis of over-capacity that resulted from over-investment. Kotz (2011, 2013) has recently attempted to provide empirical support for this position. Despite sharing an understanding of the crisis very similar to his, the authors find in this paper that a careful examination of his evidence does not support considering this to be a crisis of over-investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the 43rd edition of the journal "Cuban Studies" edited by Alejandro de la Fuente.

This work contributes to the almost nonexistent literature on the profit rate of the financial sector. It updates the single study to include financial variables to cover the past decade, compares this profit rate to the (almost unpublished) Weisskopf and NIPA financial profit rates, compares the financial and nonfinancial sector rates, and details the procedure to construct the profit rate in the financial sector including relevant financial variables which capitalists consider to make profit-rate decisions.JEL Classification: B50, E11 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Independent of whatever other advantages it might have for the workers, worker ownership has repeatedly demonstrated in the real world that it is no guarantee for worker participation in management. The participation of workers in management as a first step toward worker self-management requires institutions and practices that will both allow such participation and promote it. This paper considers, in the frame of four standard issues in worker self-management, six specific institutions and practices common to the collection of co-ops that constitute the Mondragón complex that have generated meaningful worker participation in management in this large corporation.JEL classification: J54, L29, M19 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the most recent aggregate profit rate data for the United States. It then makes five arguments. First, the new data reinforce the rejection of "neoliberalism as successful capitalist restructuring that could possibly restore or surpass the pre 1970s rate of profit." Second, when the new data are viewed together with the rest of the post-WWII data, it reinforces the appearance of the fall in the rate of profit as a one-step fall between an earlier and a later period. Third, this result argues against understanding the fall in the rate of profit in terms of an increasing organic composition of capital. Fourth, the one-step fall understanding is consistent with understanding profit rate dynamics in terms of the change of economic regimes between the "Keynesian compromise" period and the neoliberal period. These first four results are all consistent with, though certainly not broad enough to claim to be a proof of all of, the recently reformulated social structures of accumulation theory by Kotz and Wolfson. Finally, when the new data are considered together with several now widely held general beliefs about the near-term performance of the U.S. economy, this paper makes arguments about some likely characteristics of the behavior of the aggregate profit rate over the next business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is widespread discussion both within and outside Cuba concerning what direction the Cuban economy will go under its new interim president, Raúl Castro. This very short paper is intended to contribute one piece of information that is needed to intelligently discuss that issue: where Cuba's economy stands today. Its intention is to compactly provide as much current statistical information on a number of longstanding contentious economic issues in Cuba, as is allowed by its short length. It concludes that the evidence supports that there indeed has been real and meaningful accelerated improvement in the Cuban economy in recent years, and at the same time, Cuba remains far from being able to meet many of its citizen's economic needs in accord with its own principals of human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1979, Tom Weisskopf found that the crucial late-expansion period of the business cycle, in which the output continues to expand but the profit rate begins to fall, was best explained for his 1949-1975 U.S. data as a result of increasing real wage gains higher than real productivity gains. This led to a profit share decrease that was the primary cause of the cyclical decline in the profit rate. In this work, we extend Weisskopf's analysis through 2001 and find an important change. Although the fall in the profit share continued to be the key to the fall in the profit rate, unfavorable shifts under neoliberalism in price ratios replaced his earlier (real) wage squeeze. This result is consistent with and supports the generally accepted economic stylized fact of decreased power of workers under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a commentary on the book "Beyond Capital," by Michael Lebowitz. He argues that the book "Capital" by Marxism co-founder Karl Marx is not a complete presentation of Marx's theory of capitalism, but rather a onesided presentation. Capitalism considered only from the viewpoint and the logic of capital, and the corresponding one-sided understanding of Marx's theory by the large majority of his disciples has yielded a Marxism that cannot achieve its self-declared goal of explaining capitalism.

Examines the mathematical and logical consistency of the Marxist approach to the transformation of surplus values into prices of production. Traditional formulation of the labor theory of value; Consideration of the role of money wage in the transformation process; Problems in the monetary expression of surplus values.

Gives a presentation on the transformation of the `new solution,' an economic theory. Response from critics to the `new solution'; Details on Karl Marx's approach to a solution.

The article introduces papers published within the issue which were presented at the 6th Annual Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) in Amherst, Massachusetts in May 2011, including one on state-owned enterprises (SOE) in China, another on the implications of the need to prevent major climate change for the developmental strategies of China and India and a paper on the influence of neoliberalism on the reform of emergency services in Great Britain.

This paper is a case study of a particularly important and well known experiment in participatory economic democracy, participatory budgeting (PB) in Porto Alegre under the Workers’ Party. Its intention is to draw both positive and negative lessons from this experience. There are three fundamental parts to the paper. The first part sets the frame for understanding this experiment by reviewing several relevant considerations of participatory democracy in general, and then describing the institutional structure of Porto Alegre’s PB. The second part is an empirical investigation for this case of three central issues in participatory economic democracy: participation, the nature of choices, and the resulting redistribution. A third part considers a number of limitations of the PB process as it occurred in Porto Alegre from the perspective of economic democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The partisan split in Congress over health reform may reflect a broader divide among the public in attitudes toward the uninsured. Despite expert consensus over the harms suffered by the uninsured as a group, Americans disagree over whether the uninsured get the care they need and whether reform legislation providing universal coverage is necessary. We examined public perceptions of health care access and quality for the uninsured over time, and we found that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to believe that the uninsured have difficulty gaining access to care. Senior citizens are less aware than others of the problems faced by the uninsured. Even among those Americans who perceive that the uninsured have poor access to care, Republicans are significantly less likely than Democrats to support reform. Thus, our findings indicate that even if political obstacles are overcome and health reform is enacted, future political support for ongoing financing to cover the uninsured could be uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]