Economics
Economics[a] is a branch of social science that studies the relations of production or the specific aspects of production relations in a given sphere of social production and exchange.
As a field of human knowledge, economics entails (1) the study of the objective laws governing the economic structure of society within the framework of the socioeconomic formations that regularly follow and replace one another, (2) the theoretical analysis of the processes and phenomena in the various spheres and branches of the national economy, and (3) the elaboration of practical recommendations with respect to the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Economics is one of the social sciences. The economic sciences are the product of long-term historical development. The establishment of a system of economic knowledge was directly tied to the advent of political economy as a science.
Works by classical bourgeois political economists laid the scientific foundation for the development of the economic sciences; such works investigated many important socioeconomic processes in the capitalist economies. The consolidation of the capitalist mode of production, the increasingly antagonistic opposition between hired labor and capital, and the transformation of the bourgeoisie from a progressive into a reactionary class contributed to the emergence of vulgar bourgeois political economy, which supplanted the analysis of the internal laws of the capitalist economic system with the description and systematization of externally perceived economic processes and phenomena.
The possibility of creating a genuinely scientific system of economic knowledge arose with the advent of Marxist economics, which incorporated the highest achievements of previous economic thought and creatively reworked them in accordance with materialist historical principles.[2]
Terminology
The sphere of inquiry now known as economics was historically referred to as political economy, a term coined in the 17th century from the Greek politikós ("related to a polis") and oikonomía ("management of a private estate"), a natural name for the study of material production and exchange applied to a whole society. Prominent figures in the development of economics, including Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Malthus alike, used this term by default to refer to their discipline. In the 1870s, however, bourgeois authors like William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Alfred Marshall argued for a new paradigm in which production and exchange were seen as a natural force separate from political affairs and whose behavior was reducible to differential equations and mathematical models. Marshall and Jevons both advocated for the use of the term economics to differentiate their new framing from the explicitly socio-political works of Smith and Ricardo. They succeeded: the term became so hegemonic to refer to the discipline that this original school is now known as neoclassical economics to differentiate it, and political economy as "classical economics". Hence, the use of the term economics, while Marxists may find it convenient for the sake of clarity and specificity, still betrays the bourgeois apolitical view which encourages the technocratic, anti-democratic management of "scientific" economic affairs.
Marxist or Marxian economics is, strictly speaking, only one element of what Marx called his critique of political economy, which overhauled the already political and social discipline to challenge underlying assumptions which caused gaps in the theories of Smith and Ricardo and added historical and even evolutionary insights.
Marxist economics
Marxist economics is focused on the functions of capitalism. According to University of Toronto Professor John H. Munro: "In Marxist theory, the inevitable fall in the rate of profit would lead to a fundamental crisis in capitalism and then to revolution; but in the fully developed Marxist-Leninist theory, late 19th-century European capitalism sought to avoid this problem of falling profits and to avoid its inevitable fate and destruction, by seeking new and overseas sources of economic exploitation: in essence by exporting capital abroad. According to this Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, fully mature industrial capitalism was necessarily forced to export more and more capital; and the export of capital to underdeveloped regions was itself, ipso facto, a form of Imperialism, with or without outright political and military control of such regions receiving these capital exports."[3]
Works
Books
- Das Kapital, Karl Marx
- Super Imperialism, Michael Hudson
- Killing the Host, Michael Hudson
- J is for Junk Economics, Michael Hudson
See also
References
- ↑ "economics", etymology. Wiktionary.
- ↑ "Economics". Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
- ↑ https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/MARXECON.htm