VALUE AND THE WORLD ECONOMY TODAY: PRODUCTION, FINANCE AND GLOBALIZATION; ED. BY RICHARD WESTRA

Value and the World Economy Today brings together a diverse group of globally renowned scholars of international political economy and critical economics to examine the relevance of value theory for understanding the world economy today. The book is unique in the way that it connects literatures that have for the most part developed in isolation from each other and therefore brings questions of theory to bear directly upon the problems of analyzing current global trends and formulating responses to them. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Value Theory and the Study of Contemporary Capitalism: A Continuing Commitment....Pages 3-22 Front Matter....Pages 23-23 The Rationality and Irrationality of Money....Pages 25-39 Value, Finance and Social Classes....Pages 40-56 Bridging Differences: Value Theory, International Finance and the Construction of Global Capital....Pages 57-70 Front Matter....Pages 71-71 Globalization: The Retreat of Capital to the ‘Interstices’ of the World?....Pages 73-90 When Things Go Wrong: The Political Economy of Market Breakdown....Pages 91-118 Value Production and Economic Crisis: A Temporal Analysis....Pages 119-136 Production and Management: Marx’s Dual Theory of Labor....Pages 137-157 Marxian Theory of the Decline of the Rate of Profit in the Postwar US Economy....Pages 158-167 Front Matter....Pages 169-169 Some Critical Reflections on Marx’s Theory of Value....Pages 171-187 What Do We Learn from Value Theory?....Pages 188-204 Marx’s Value Theory and Subjectivity....Pages 205-224 Back Matter....Pages 225-246 This volume offers a unique cross-fertilization of two of the most important literatures in critical political economy: debates over the theory of political economy and the concrete analysis of the world economy today. In meeting this challenge, the volume assembles innovative and original work from leading scholars who have written extensively on both topics. Together, the contributors bring a rich variety of intellectual traditions and perspectives to bear on this historical turning point in the global system. The issues they address include transformations in the technical and social organization of production, the rise of global finance, the changing character of globalization, the anatomy of economic crisis and market failure, the impact of consumerism on human subjectivity, and the desperate need for alternatives to mainstream economic analysis. This text brings together a diverse group of globally renowned scholars of international political economy and critical economics to examine the relevance of value theory for understanding the world economy today Controversy has raged over Marx's labor theory of value from the time that it was first put forward.