Whilst terms like ‘law of the tendency’, ‘tendency law’ and „tendential law‟ appear in Marxist political economy, their meaning is unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies buried in these terms and disambiguates them. Part one differentiates three conceptions of law: (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency and (iii) tendency. Part two focuses on (i...

Scholarly interest in Marxist philosophy has fluctuated dramatically in the past fifty years. Before that, there was little scholarly work in Britain on Marxist philosophy or on Marxism more generally. In the nineteen fifties there were important contributions by economic theorists and social historians but academic discussion of Marx's philosophy or even of his political theory was minimal and...

In this paper I intend to contrast the ‘falling rate of profit’ crisis theories of the 1970s with the ‘underconsumptionism’ of the orthodox Marxist tradition. The central argument is that in rejecting traditional underconsumptionist theories of crisis contemporary Marxism has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, with unfortunate theoretical and political consequences. A more adequate critiqu...

Henryk Grossman was the first person to systematically explore Marx’s explanation of capitalist crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to place it in the context of the distinction between use and exchange value. His The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system remains an important reference point in the Marxist literature on economic crises. That l...

This essay will attempt, first and foremost, a definitive exposition of Marx’s theory of productive and unproductive labour.1 This theory is presented in the three volumes of Capital and in Theories of Surplus Value—Marx’s projected historico-critical fourth volume.2 This seems useful and necessary for several reasons. First, as one of the most suspect legacies of classical political economy, i...

This paper surveys four game-theoretic models of politics, to offer an introduction to the analysis of political institutions. The first two models focus on electoral competition, to show how successful candidates' equilibrium strategies may differ under different electoral systems. The other two models probe the consequences of legislative bargaining under different constitutional structures. ...

An economic crisis in capitalism is a deep and prolonged interruption of the economy-wide circuit of capital. Crises emerge from within the logic of capitalism’s operation, and are manifestations of the inherently contradictory process of capital accumulation. The Marxist tradition conceptualizes two types of crisis tendencies in capitalism: a crisis of deficient surplus value and a crisis of e...