Search

Alain Parguez, together with Bernard Schmitt and Augusto Graziani, is one of the founders of the modern theory of the monetary circuit. Parguez was making his first forays into monetary circuitism in the 1970s, in the years of my formation, when I came in contact with Augusto Graziani. Graziani's and Parguez's reflections were independent, but converging. In the article, I consider the parallels and divergences. I will recall some elements of Alain Parguez's early version of the theory of the monetary circuit. Like Graziani, Parguez was in stark opposition not only to neoclassical theory and 'bastard' Keynesianism, but also with a significant part of the post-Keynesian strand. Parguez's thinking was against the streams (plural): not only the mainstream, but also much of the so-called alternative approaches. In the late Parguez, an undeniable (but limited) connection with Modern Money Theory was emerging. It might seem that over time Parguez reached conclusions dissenting from Graziani, and his own earlier version of the circuit. I will try to give some arguments for my view that this is only partially true, and that some differences are overstated. I will also address some of Parguez's views on economic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hence, starting with the original Maastricht Treaty and the various binding treaties of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) that ensued, according to Alain, this constraining structure imposed on national governments a "market" discipline that would destroy the "real" economy. Like Marx, Alain saw the state in its predatory role in favouring the private wealth accumulation of the economically powerful, and like Keynes he also saw the state in its role as a potential source of stability in reducing social anxiety and predation by promoting genuine social progress. Alain, on the contrary, fully embraced a theory of endogenous money, and as Lavoie ([4], p. 13) suggests, Alain was close to the horizontalist view of money as defended by Basil Moore ([5]). We have lost a truly special friend, Alain Parguez, who passed away peacefully on 5 April 2022, in Paris, at the age of 81. [Extracted from the article]

The economic policy reaction to the Covid-19 crisis has been considered from different angles. Here I will remind only the positions by Draghi (looking at this historical conjuncture comparing it to 'war times'), Tooze (seeing in it the definitive closure of the 'political economy of inflation' as well as 'the first crisis of Anthropocene'), Kregel (proposing 'central controls for social provisioning' as the pertinent macroeconomic policy). The pandemic could inaugurate a game change in European economic policy; and even unlikely quarters suggested in the last year a retreat from neoliberalism as we knew it. However, the health crisis is not an exogenous shock: it is inherent in the capitalist social form of production and consumption. The pathological state of affairs that takes our breath away reveals the hidden reality of the society where we work and consume. Confronting the current and future virus outbreaks (as well as climate change) obliges us to go back to the founding themes of macroeconomics, which needs to consider not just the level of employment, but also what employment is for. In this logic, we are forced to radicalise the notion of the 'socialisation of investment' into that of a 'social production economy': the challenge in front of us is indeed about the 'how', 'what', 'how much' and 'for whom' to produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper goes back to the origins of the theory of the monetary circuit in its Italian incarnation. Focus is on the evolution of Augusto Graziani's thinking between mid-1970s and mid-1980s, considering: (i) how Graziani connected (positively or polemically) with Keynesianism and Post-Keynesianism, both in its Cambridge and US incarnations; (ii) how Graziani interpreted the contributions of Keynes proposing a continuity between the Treatise on Money, the General Theory, and the articles on finance published after the 1936 book; (iii) how beneath the research programme of Italian circuitism (Graziani) we may recognise a peculiar Marxian inspiration, later on pursued for a while by some participants to the Seminar in Monetary Theory that Graziani coordinated in Naples (1981–85). Since the mid-1970s Graziani — who already had a profound knowledge of Neoclassical Theory; and who was deeply aware of the role of institutions — developed more and more his heretical stance into what we may label as a 'structural Keynesian' approach, inserting Keynes' views about finance to production and effective demand into a Schumpeterian vision of the capitalist process, and leading to Marxian conclusions about value and distribution. The early forays into circuitism by Graziani were not only critical towards the Neoclassical Synthesis, Monetarism, or New Classical Macroeconomics. They were also grounded in an intense confrontation with other contemporary heterodox currents. The outcome was the construction of an original scheme of thought which amounted to nothing less than a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue tries to answer two questions. Is the Marxian theory of crises, in its original formulation, useful to understanding the current crisis? Can the current crisis help us rethink Marx's theory of crises? The most widespread readings of Marx's theory of crises are the "tendency toward a fall in the rate of profit" and an underconsumptionist view concerning "realization crises." These two interpretations have been central in Marxist analyses of the "Great Recession." In fact, most of the articles included in this issue refer to these lines of thought, and understand financialization accordingly. To set the context of the discussion, a short survey of Marx's thoughts on the crises is provided, as well as a quick reminder of the central tenets of "financial Keynesianism" (a label that here includes the "circuit theory of money" and the "financial instability hypothesis"). I argue that financialization was a real subsumption of labor to finance coupled with centralization without concentration, which produced a recovery in the rate of profits since the 1980s and turned monetarism into a paradoxical privatized Keynesianism. "Money-manager capitalism" was unsustainable, however. Its collapse opens the door to "socializing investments" and requires policies based on permanent, "good" public deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a general overview of the structural transformations marking the "new capitalism" and analyzes the contradictions of European neomercantilism within the Great Recession. In the past two decades, neoliberalism turned into a paradoxical sort of privatized financial Keynesianism based on the triad of traumatized workers, manic-depressive savers, and indebted consumers. It argues that the present European economic and political situation is deeply rooted in linking capitalist accumulation to the attainment of export surpluses, a situation in which, as is the case in Germany, most of the net external balances, are realized within Europe itself. It shows that such a process has led to the rise of strong neomercantilism (in Germany) and to weak neomercantism (in Italy). The recent crises, including those in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, are discussed in this framework. It concludes by observing that in light of the ongoing contradictions, the challenge for the Left is the question of the socialization of the banking system, of investment, and of employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes an alternative economic policy for the European Union countries. The following are the requirements to provide better provision of social needs: macroeconomic expansionary policies fueling internal demand, financial market regulation and taxation, strong structural determination of the content of effective demand, supply-side orientation of industrial and banking sectors of the economy, higher social welfare and public services and a defense of the public nature of the social security system.

The aim of this paper is to show that Marxian labour theory of value can be consistently interpreted in terms of the monetary circuit model, where firms need initial finance to start production and where the money supply is endogenous. In contrast to the recently revived Marxian monetary models, in particular the New Interpretation, it is argued here that although the money wage is bargained for on the labour market, the real wage is determined by firms' choices, since firms autonomously determine the structure of production and hence real consumption for the working class as a whole. This does not mean that firms are able to set the real wage without economic and social constraints. Starting from our circuitist reading of the labour theory of value and distribution, a model is developed in order to determine the level of employment and income distribution, on the assumptions that (i) the industrial reserve army affects wage bargaining and labour effort and that (ii) workers react to the failure of their expectations on the real wage by reducing their work intensity. In this context, it is shown that firms may increase their share of profits over time only be means of innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this article first analyzed the accounts of Claudio Napoleoni and Marco Lippi on the concept of labor of Karl Marx. He then considers how Karl Marx sets up the relation of the human being to nature, which is fundamental for the two thinkers discussed. The definition of abstract labor as the expression of a contradiction depends on Marx's treatment of the concept of labor, which is itself connected to a vision of the essence of the human being. He shall then examine the consequences of his reading of the theory of value. In particular, he will look at the relation between exploitation and capitalism, and at how to clarify the relations between Marx and Piero Sraffa.

This essay will show how the Marxian labor theory of value can be consistently set out in terms of the model of the monetary circuit. In particular, that model allows the authors to give a more general account than Marx offered of the extraction of surplus value by lifting the restrictions implicit in the first volume of the book “Capital” concerning the fulfillment of firms' expectations of sale and workers' expectations of real wages. The authors shall refer to the simplest and most powerful model of the monetary circuit - that developed in the writings of Augusto Graziani.

The essays collected in the volume 27, number two, summer 1997 edition of the periodical “International Journal of Political Economy” belong to a peculiar phase of the Italian debate about Marxian theory. They center on a reading of the theory of value as a macroeconomic picture of the class conflict between capital and wage labor and a reading in which money is first of all money capital buying labor power on the labor market. To help the reader understand these papers, and to clarify their novelty, they must be set against a twofold background: on the one hand, the rise and fall of Marxism as critical political economy in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s; on the other, the international debate about the so-called transformation problem.