Marxian Economics
Rooted in Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867). Analyzes capitalism through surplus value extraction, class struggle, and the contradictions that drive systemic crises.
Sub-topics
Das Kapital (1867) analyzed capitalism as a system of surplus value extraction. Historical materialism views economic relations as the base determining all social, political, and cultural superstructure.
The difference between the value workers produce and the wages they receive. For Marx, this is the source of profit and the mechanism of capitalist exploitation — the engine of class conflict.
Marx's theory of history: the mode of production (economic base) shapes the superstructure (law, politics, ideology). Societies progress through feudalism, capitalism, and eventually socialism.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles — bourgeoisie vs proletariat under capitalism. The contradiction between labor and capital drives historical change.
Raul Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank argued that underdevelopment is not a stage but a product of global capitalism. Rich core nations exploit poor peripheral nations through unequal exchange.
Immanuel Wallerstein's framework (1974): the global economy is a single capitalist world-system with core, semi-periphery, and periphery zones locked in structural inequality.
G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer applied analytical philosophy and rational choice theory to Marxist concepts. Rigorous micro-foundations for class exploitation without labor theory of value.
Capitalism generates recurrent crises through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, overproduction, and underconsumption. Crises are not accidents but structural features of the system.