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Okishio’s theorem plays an important role in modern discussions of Marx’s argument on the long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Even though there is substantial literature dealing with Okishio’s theorem, there has been little discussion of Okishio’s theorem from an empirical perspective. This paper makes an attempt to empirically test Okishio’s criterion of technical choice, which is an important assumption of Okishio’s theorem. By using the World Penn Tables data on selected OECD countries, I will consider how well Okishio’s criterion of technical choice predicts the evolution of actual capitalist economies.

Different from Marx's analysis of the dialectical relationship between the production and realization of surplus value, the Okishio theorem only shows one aspect of the contradictory movement of the total social capital, that is, the reverse effect of the realization of surplus value on the production of surplus value.

The production of surplus value and the realization of surplus value are simplified into one process. This simplification eliminates the contradiction between the production and realization of surplus value, and the antagonistic contradiction between accumulation and consumption and the antagonistic production-distribution relationship in capitalist society are naturally covered up.

Therefore, it cannot explain the actual expansion way of the falling general rate of profit as the historical development law of capitalism. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the Okishio theorem places the analysis of the general rate of profit back into the social reproduction model with department equilibrium, which points out the significance of wage income to the realization of surplus value and outlines the macro mechanism of the realization of surplus value reacting to the production of surplus value. It also strongly promotes the research progress of the law that the profit rate tends to decline.

The mistake of the Okishio theorem is that the exchange process in the labor market forms the real wage rate. It determines the production price of wage goods, which thereby determines that the production price of capital goods and general rate of profit, the production of surplus value and realization of surplus value are simplified into the same process, and only the value that can be realized is the real value.

While many inconsistencies can be found in Marx's theory if one chooses a view of reality in which time is absent, these inconsistencies disappear if the view is taken that time is an essential component of that theory. The debate is thus between the simultaneist and the temporalist camp. This article sides with the temporalist approach but at the same time it argues that both sides have focused mainly on quantitative and formal logic aspects. This is the limit of the debate. The debate should move on from being only a critique and counter-critique of each other applying only formal logic to the issue of consistency to showing how and whether the different postulates (a time-less versus a time-full reality) and the interpretations deriving from them are an instance of a wider theory of radical social change. From this angle, simultaneism implies equilibrium and thus a view of the economy tending toward its equilibrated reproduction. Capitalism is thus theorized as an inherently rational system and any attempt to supersede it is irrational. This is simultaneism's social content. Temporalism, if immersed in a dialectical context, reaches the opposite conclusions: the economy is in a constant state of nonequilibrium and tends cyclically toward its own supersession. Capitalism is inherently irrational and any attempt to supersede it is rational. Simultaneist authors should now show how their approach to the issue of consistency fits into a broader theory furthering the liberation of Labor.

To choose a dialectical view of temporalism is thus to take sides for Labor.

Dumenil-Levy and Foley (DLF) attempt to show that the falling rate of profit can be induced by applying Okishio's criterion of technical choice to DLF's framework on the evolution of potential technical change. This paper examines what would happen if Shaikh's criterion is applied to DLF's framework on the evolution of potential technical change. The following result is derived: while both criteria induce the K/L (capital-labor ratio) — increasing falling rate of profit at a sufficiently high wage share, only Shaikh's criterion induces the K/L — increasing falling rate of profit under a constant real wage (or a low wage share).

To many economists, not to mention all central bankers, inflation is considered to be public enemy number one. This paper seeks to understand why inflation should be so despised. To escape from simultaneous restrictions a temporal single system (TSS) approach is employed. Firstly a simple illustration of the TSS approach is considered. In order to focus on distributional issues a positive wage and a class of rentiers are built in. Rentiers hold money stocks, past accumulated value in money terms. Rentiers are assumed to lend to productive capitalists, i.e. we have finance capital. Once we build in money stocks we find that appropriate price increases can potentially hide the effect of falling exploitation of labour, transferring the cost of reduced exploitation from productive capitalists to rentiers. Finally, conclusions are drawn.

To challenge the validity/usefulness of teaching mainstream neo‐classical/new‐classical economics, by contending that Marx provides a superior understanding of the essential nature of the capitalist system.

To explain Marx the hermeneutic issue of which Marx must be addressed. Simultaneous and dualistic interpretations of Marx question Marx's key conclusions, suggesting that Marx's value theory is inconsistent. In contrast the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx contends that all of Marx's key conclusions/results hold if one adopts a sequential and non‐dualistic methodological approach, restoring Marx's central message/power.

Explains how Marx endogenously accounts for the inevitable cyclical behaviour of capitalism, its tendency to concentrate and the development of the financial system. In short, Marx can explain the tendencies observed in the globalising world, whereas it is contended that mainstream analysis is hampered by prioritising an ideal simultaneous equilibrium and investigating how it might be exogenously disturbed.

If, as is contended, Marx's economics provides a superior understanding of the world, then research into Marx and analysis based on Marxian foundations should be prioritised.

Marx should be widely taught to improve students' understanding of the economy.

Quite simply challenges orthodoxy by rediscovering value.

Research in the temporal single-system (TSS) interpretation of Marx's value theory has refuted the Okishio theorem, which had supposedly disproved the law of the falling profit rate. In response to critics who confirm the correctness of the TSS refutation but, curiously, still uphold the Okishio theorem, this paper clarifies what the theorem actually asserts and why that assertion is false. It also shows that TSS results do matter: the contradiction between value and use-value, and the difference between temporal and simultaneous valuation, are crucial. Finally, the paper examines the role the Okishio theorem has played in suppressing Marx's work.

Below we use data from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) and Fixed Assets Tables of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA); and the Flow of Funds Accounts of the Federal Reserve (for financial variables and tangible assets). We consider the U.S. non-financial corporate sector for which appropriate data is available (and the U.S. domestic private economy for a comparison with Park’s calculation).

This chapter challenges the denial of “underconsumption” – the role of consumption demand in capitalist reproduction and its paucity in crises – in contemporary Marxism. At stake are better understandings not only of crisis theory but also, inter alia, of imperialism, “reformism,” and Marx's intellectual legacy. The chapter shows how the centrality of consumption demand is underlined in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, and goes on to discuss the origins, weaknesses, and persistence of this denial. The chapter also shows that Marx did not regard underconsumption as a moralistic argument about unfulfilled need. The denial originates not in Marx but in productionism, the idea that capitalism is a system of “production for production's sake.”

Originating in the overkill of Tugan Baranowski's refutation of the Russian populists’ view that capitalist development was impossible in Russia due to lack of a home market, productionism is based on his attempt to force Marxism into the marginalist and the general equilibrium framework. Despite its antipathy with Marxism, most contemporary Marxist economics are based on it. Inevitably its adherence to Say's Law – the denial of the possibility of gluts in the market – infects the tendency to assume that capitalism's contradictions do not lie in circulation. Productionism's denial of the importance of consumption demand also rests on nonsequiturs, nondialectical thinking, and an underestimation of the contradictions in capitalism Marx identified, other than the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The chapter ends by showing the centrality of demand in the recent historical evolution of capitalism as reconstructed by Robert Brenner, followed by a discussion of whether underconsumption is “reformist.”

The purpose of this paper is to assess Marx's enduring significance in the center of his thought, the first volume of Capital. In Capital and related writings, Marx systematically works out his theory of value. Although Marx's value theory has been widely thought to be internally inconsistent, the “myth of inconsistency” in reclaiming Marx's “Capital” has been recently refuted by Kliman.

Based on Kliman's refutation, a logically coherent interpretation of Marx's theory is on hand. The paper therefore aims to bring out the philosophical character of Marx's critique of political economy, to which the terms and relations of value theory are essential. It is rooted in the abiding humanism he first discovered through his critical appropriation and transformation of Hegelian philosophy.

Following Raya Dunayevskaya in Marxism and Freedom, this paper interprets Marx to have founded a new critical science of society “that was at the same time a philosophy of history.” Hence Marx's use of ontological categories in Capital (“substance,” “essence,” “appearance”) is fully methodologically self‐conscious and deliberate. Categories derived from Hegel's Science of Logic (as Lenin rightly grasped) explain the “bewitched and distorted world” of capitalist social relations.

This paper shows that, thinking historically, Marx works out the “notion” of capital from the standpoint of its negation. As if seen through a camera obscura, capital is the domination of alienated, past, objectified, abstract, and dead labor over living labor power. In conclusion, emphasis is placed on the subjective as well as the objective condition necessary to the revolutionary transcendence of the law of value.