The market and exploitation in Marx's economic theory: a reinterpretation

Adopting the view that Marx's notion of 'commodity' has a widerreach than is usually supposed, and that it is this notion,rather than a 'labour theory of value' that is the cornerstoneof his economic theory, this paper shows that Marx's accountof capitalist exploitation is one that accords equal priorityto the production and market domains. Central to this demonstrationis an unorthodox explanation as to why Marx posits two alternativerules of prices in Capital.     

The colonization of the future: An alternative view of financialization and its portents

Financialization is generally interpreted by heterodox economists to be a dysfunctional and thus historically transient outgrowth of contemporary capitalism: dysfunctional because it is seen to be driven by attempts to escape production and profit realization constraints in the real economy, transient because these attempts are seen to be ultimately futile. This article proposes the contrary argument that financialization is a functionally useful feature of contemporary capitalism that is entirely in keeping with the latter’s continuing development as a commodity system. Specifically, it will be argued that just as globalization represents the extension of the commodity principle along the axis of geographical space, financialization represents the extension of this same principle along the axis of time: the future is being colonized so as to make it take the overspill of the pressures on organizations operating in the present.     

Globalisation as commodification

While recognising that most pre-capitalist formations exhibitedelements of commodity exchange, Marx argued that capitalismdifferentiates itself as a genuine commodity system by virtueof two interdependent processes having reached a critical stageof development: a ‘stretching’ of commodity relationsto the point where production for the market displaces subsistenceproduction as the primary form; and a ‘deepening’of commodity relations such that these encompass not only goodsand services but the capacities for producing them. This paperargues that globalisation can best be understood as the culminatingstage of these stretching and deepening processes: the formerin the sense that commodity relations now embrace the entireplanet and the latter in the sense that they cover not merelygoods, or the capacities for producing goods, but also everyother type of capacity and every other type of outcome.