First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia - 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated. Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija. This work became a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz-Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth). In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies. According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital". (wikipedia.org)

The contributors to the book were asked to give their assessment of how the messages of Schumpeter's famous tract "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" have stood the test of time. Much as happened in the forty years since Schumpeter wrote the book. Is it possible to say that events have tended to confirm or refute the author's provocative prognoses? Each contributor provides a different and nuanced answer to these questions. The continued importance of those questions has ensured that a century after Schumpeter's birth, scholars take his writings seriously, treating them as living contributions to contemporary debates.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour is one of the major texts of post-war Marxist theory. A tremendous influence on the central figures of the Frankfurt School, with ongoing relevance to current debates about value, abstraction, and domination, Sohn-Rethel's ideas are here presented at their fullest scope and with their greatest theoretical clarity. Out of print for many years, this Historical Materialism edition contains a new introduction by Chris O'Kane, an afterword by Chris Arthur, and a compilation of the responses to Intellectual and Manual Labour published in the Italian journal Lotta Continua, including a substantial article by Antonio Negri.

This text relates the inside story of the sleaze that pervades the corridors of power in Moscow. The coups, power struggles and gallery of characters surrounding Boris Yeltsin are covered.

"Dilorenzo and Block have rendered an invaluable service to scholars and students interested in Public Choice, Austrian Economics and Liberalism. Their critical analysis of Public Choice from the Austrian perspective is timely and relevant to clarify important misconceptions about both schools of thought that although in some aspects are complementary in many others offer a significantly different and even opposite approach. This is a most welcome book that was very necessary and fills an important vacuum in the literature." - Jesús Huerta de Soto"I congratulate DiLorenzo and Block for writing this important and courageous book chastising Public Choice. Austro-Libertarianism and Public Choice are to some degree complements; both veer in the direction of support for private property, fee enterprise and capitalism, and against government involvement in the economy. But they are also substitutes, in that the former is a consistent underpinning of the free marketplace, where the latter is not." - Han-Hermann Hoppe

What determines the rate of growth, the distribution of income, and the structure of relative prices under capitalism? What, in short, makes capitalist economies tick? This watershed treatise analyzes the answers to these questions provided by three major theoretical traditions: neoclassical, neo-Marxian, and neo-Keynesian. Until now, the mutual criticism exchanged by partisans of the different traditions has focused disproportionately on the logical shortcomings of rival theories, or on such questions as whether or not input-output relationships can be described by a continuous-substitution production function. In this book, these are at best secondary issues. The real distinguishing features of the theories, for Stephen Marglin, are their characterization of labor markets and capital accumulation. For clarity, Marglin first sets out the essential features of each theory in the context of a common production model with a single good and a fixed-coefficient technology. He then formalizes the different theories as alternative ways of closing the model. In subsequent chapters he examines the effects of relaxing key simplifying assumptions, in particular the characterization of technology and the homogeneity of output and capital. And although his primary emphasis is theoretical, he does not ignore the problem of empirically testing the theories. Finally, he synthesizes the insights of the neo-Marxian and neo-Keynesian models into a single model that transcends the shortcomings of each taken separately. Marglin anticipates that partisans of the different traditions will agree on one point: each will allow that the book reveals the shortcomings of the other theories but will insist that it fails utterly to reflect the power and majesty of one's own particular brand of truth. Growth, Distribution, and Prices will be controversial, but it will not be ignored.

The notion of citizenship is complex; it can be at once an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and responsibilities; an elevated and exclusionary status, a relationship between individual and state, and more. In recent decades citizenship has attracted interdisciplinary attention, particularly with the transnational growth of Western capitalism. Yet citizenship's relationship to gender has gone relatively unexplored--despite the globally pervasive denial of citizenship to women, historically and in many places, ongoing today. This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by a well-known group of scholars, including Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, this book examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at the issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examine problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish women's citizenship in various parts of the world.

First published in 1980, The Articulation of Modes of Production is primarily concerned with the concept of articulation of modes of production and with the analysis of a number of different social formations utilizing this concept. The emphasis is on the relationship between capitalist and other modes of production and on accounts of specific social formations which demonstrate the analytical power of the concept, but at the same time reveal a number of as yet unresolved problems. The introduction to the collection takes these problems at its starting point, and through a discussion of the theoretical literature, provides the basis for a more rigorous and complete analysis of social formations. This book will be of interest to students of economics, social policy, and history.

2012 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. If Mises has an unheralded masterpiece, "The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science" is it. There are two senses in which this book is indeed ultimate: it deals with the very core of economics as a science, and it is the last book that he wrote. For that reason, it is a real milestone in the history of his work. In this volume, Mises argued that economics is a science because human action is a natural order of life and that it is the actions of humans that determine markets and capital decisions. Since Mises believed these links could be proven scientifically, he concluded that economics, with its basis on that human action, is indeed a science in its own right and not an ideology or a metaphysical doctrine.

The Free Market and Its Enemies is a classic work of economic theory, written by one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Ludwig von Mises argues that the free market is the only system that can effectively allocate resources and create prosperity, and he exposes the fallacies of socialism and other rival economic systems. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Mandel's essays are a spirited affirmation of internationalism, macropolitics, political economy, and class analysis. Unashamedly committed to progress, he rightly refused to ignore capitalism's myriad victims or to scrap what Marxism and Leninism offer to the struggle for emancipation; such spirited engagement is a remarkable and welcome achievement.

In this new condensed version of his masterpiece, Capitalism, Arthur Seldon explains why, despite its apparent imperfections, the market system is infinitely preferable to the alternatives. The market system has, since the eighteenth century, brought enormous gains in living standards, in contradiction to the Marxist theories that predicted capitalism's collapse. The institution of property rights has facilitated trade and investment, whilst the price mechanism has enabled people to benefit from dispersed knowledge about individual preferences. Yet politicians, needing to win votes in the short-term, have largely failed to recognise the benefits of a market system with the minimum of government intervention. The development of the welfare state has been disastrous, almost destroying the voluntary provision of health and education, whilst creating institutions that serve producer interests at the expense of consumers. Seldon's message is clear; if capitalism is to yield its best results the political process must be confined to the minimal duties of the state. This condensed version of Capitalism includes a foreword by the late Milton Friedman, an introduction by John Blundell and Philip Booth, and commentaries by James Bartholomew and D.R. Myddelton.

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason . Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the 'traditional values' of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, 'fundamentalist' projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time. Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism's historical project—which, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.

After Ludwig von Mises's death in 1973, his wife, Margit von Mises, went through his unpublished and out-of-print essays and selected twenty-one of the essays for publication. The result was Money, Method, and the Market Process, published in 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers and the Ludwig von Mises Institute and reissued now by Liberty Fund. In his introduction to the book, Richard Ebeling describes it as a "convenient composite of Misesian economics.'" He says that the essays here touch on "almost every aspect of economic and social theory that Mises considered of paramount importance. The essays were written over a period of forty years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, so they serve as a wide sampling of Mises's thought on a wide range of subjects, and they are arranged thematically. The three essays in the first section, on "Method," discuss the differences between the social and natural sciences and include some of Mises's thoughts on the science of human action. The essays in the next section, on "Money," discuss inflation and money in economic exchange, and they include Mises's analysis of why stabilizing the price level will not necessarily stabilize economic activity. This leads readers to the section on "Trade," where Mises warns of the danger of international conflict in a world without free trade. There are seven essays on "Comparative Economic Systems," and they include detailed studies on capitalism versus socialism, the cooperative movement, the Russian Reform Movement, and equality and inequality. Under the heading of "Ideas," the final two essays are "The Role of Doctrines in Human History" and the well-known piece called "The Idea of Liberty Is Western". --

"In the last two decades especially, we have witnessed the rise of 'celebrity' forms of global humanitarianism and charity work, spearheaded by entertainment stars, billionaires, and activist NGOs (e.g. Bob Geldof, Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Bill Gates, George Soros, Save Darfur, Medeçins Sans Frontières). This book examines this new phenomenon, arguing that celebrity humanitarianism legitimates, and indeed promotes, neoliberal capitalism and global inequality.Drawing on Slavoj Žižek's work, the book shows how celebrity humanitarianism, far from being altruistic, is significantly contaminated and ideological: it is most often self-serving, helping to promote institutional aggrandizement and the celebrity 'brand'; it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to 'activism'; and it contributes to a 'postdemocratic' political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites"--

This book breaks new ground in exposing some of the crucial political processes and struggles which shaped the reciprocal development of Apartheid and capitalism in South Africa. The author's compelling analysis debunks the orthodoxy in the literature, which presents apartheid as the product of a single "grand plan" created by the State in response to the pressures of capital accumulation. Using a case study of influx control during the first phase of apartheid (1948-1961), Posel shows that apartheid arose from complex patterns of conflict and compromise within the State in which white capitalists, the black working class, and popular movements exercised varying and uneven degrees of influence. -- Publisher description

Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French theory and new American fiction. Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.