Why Quantitative Marxism?

Freeman, Alan (1991): Why Quantitative Marxism?

Abstract

This paper was presented at a special conference of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE, publishers of Capital and Class) in 1987, on the topic of Quantitative Marxism. This eventually gave rise to an edited collection (Dunne 1992) in which this paper was developed (Freeman 1992) into a fully-worked out empirical presentation of a set of national accounts in value terms for the UK economy.

The paper arose from the work of an international group established after the publication of Marx, Ricardo, Sraffa in 1984 to work on poverty in Europe. This led to work on the social wage which resulted in an unpublished chapter on the social wage in Germany, originally intended for Shaikh’s book on this question.

A number of themes in later work appear in it: a pluralist concept of discussion on National Accounts, which later matured into the ‘datapedia’ concept of data organisation on the one hand, and the pluralist approach to economics that first surfaced in my collaborative work with Andrew Kliman as ‘Beyond Talking the Talk’ (Freeman and Kliman 2005). There is an early discussion of circuits of revenue which deals specifically with social reproduction, and a detailed treatment of unproductive labour including interest and merchant’s capital.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Institution: The University of Greenwich
• Language: English
• Keywords: Liquidity; Value; Quantification; MELT; MEL; Money; Labour; Marx; TSSI; Temporalism
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B12 - Classical (includes Adam Smith); B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B14 - Socialist ; Marxist; E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E0 - General > E01 - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth ; Environmental Accounts

References

Bank of England (1978). ‘Factors relating to the rate of profit in 27 British Industries’. Bank of England Working Paper

Dunne, P. (ed.) (1992). Quantitative Marxism. Cambridge: Polity.

Freeman, A. 1992. ‘National Accounts in Value Terms: The social wage and profit rate in Britain, 1950-1986’ in Dunne, P.(ed) (1992). Quantitative Marxism. Cambridge: Polity.

Freeman, Alan and Kliman, Andrew (2005): Beyond talking the talk: towards a critical pluralist practice. Published in: Post-Autistic Economics Review No. 40 (1. December 2006): pp. 26-53.

Marx, K. (1969). Theories of Surplus Value. Vol. I, Chap. VI, p344, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

ONS: The Blue Book (1986).

Rosdolsky, R. (1976). The making of Marx’s Capital, Chapter 3 'Karl Marx and the Problem of Use-value in Political Economy’. London: Pluto Press.

Shaikh (1984). ), ‘The Transformation from Marx to Sraffa’ in Mandel, E. and A. Freeman (eds) (1984) Ricardo, Marx Sraffa. London: Verso.