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Considering that the rate of profit constitutes a key indicator for the analysis of the evolution of capitalist economies, this chapter proposes to study the case of France from 1896 to 2019, that is, over 124 years in total. From a series of stock of productive capital reconstructed for the occasion, a rate of profit is calculated at the macroeconomic level within a conceptual framework faithful to Marx. Over this period of more than a century, three successive long waves are identified, as parts of a secular trend toward the fall in the French rate of profit. The latter, however, recovered several times during these three subperiods, but finally reoriented downwards, with fluctuations of an amplitude tending to decrease more and more and a deployment in a decreasing spiral of French capitalism. This long-term downward trend is mainly due to the rise in the organic composition of capital.

This chapter aims to shed light on the hidden benefits and losses of US-China trade within the framework of unequal exchange theory. After presenting the evolutions of the trade balance between China and the United States, we propose two methods for measuring the unequal exchange between them: one considers the labor content directly incorporated into the exchange; the other focuses on the international values with input-output tables. This allows to present a synthesis of sectoral analyses. Our results show a significant unequal exchange in US-China trade over 1995–2014, the United States being actually the main beneficiary of this trade. Both methods exhibit the inequality in exchange tending to decrease over time; China's disadvantage has been gradually reducing from the 2000s. We finally suggest that the relative decline in the hegemonic status of the United States in this bilateral unequal relationship could help explain its decision to launch its trade war with China.

This study first calculates a profit rate for China’s economy over the period 1952–2014; the rate shows a downward trend in the long term but also exhibits cyclical fluctuations. Then, structural vector autoregressive models are used to examine the Chinese economic structure and, thanks to impulse response functions, the role of the profit rate in investment, capital accumulation, and GDP growth rates. Then, based on a priori constraints relative to this structure, the study tests whether these assumptions are verified over the period studied in the context of the transformations of China. The impulse response functions are further examined by using Bayesian analysis. Finally, the authors conclude that the period from 1952 to 2014 should be divided into several sub-periods with distinct structural characteristics.

This chapter aims to demonstrate how the colonial legacy in general, and in its monetary area in particular, has been one of the major obstacles to African countries' ability to mobilize financial resources for their development. In fact, the monetary systems inherited from colonialism serve as an instrument to plunder African resources and extract surplus for capital accumulation in former colonial powers. One of the best examples is found in the relationships between France and its former colonies in West and Central Africa. The monetary system imposed on those countries is essentially perpetuating the Colonial Pact, under which the role of the colonies is to serve the political, economic, and strategic interests of the colonial power. For African countries, the monetary arrangement, illustrated by the use of CFA franc as their currency, has been a major obstacle to capital accumulation, productive capacity building and effective structural transformation of their economies. Unless African countries break free from the CFA monetary system and reclaim their sovereignty, there will be no development. The struggle for monetary sovereignty in former French colonies is now part of a broader continental struggle to reclaim Africa's sovereignty over its resources and the formulation of its development policies.

This chapter is a radical critique of the neoclassical growth theory, justifying ways out of mainstream economics. It has three parts. The first one analyzes growth theories from the Classical representation to the endogenous growth models. The second part demonstrates that the “new growth theory” is not a break with Solow's formalization. To prove it, we build an original Solowian endogenous growth model. Then, this neoclassical macrodynamic framework is technically, deeply critized in a third part. We show that both exogenous and endogenous neoclassical models prove to be incapable to explain growth in the long period. We concentrate on the ambiguities surrounding the hypothesis of single agent, as well as on the role of the state, in particular when it is considered as a “planner” by the neoclassicals. Endogenous growth models do not correspond to macrodynamization of the Walrasian general equilibrium, nor have solid microeconomic bases. We advocate in favor of rehabilitating state's intervention in social areas and of reactivating Marxist theoretical reflections regarding social planning and class analysis in the current time of structural crisis of the capitalist world system.

The concept of productive/unproductive work is relevant for better understanding the current capitalist economy. As the contradiction between production and the appropriation of surplus value by financial capital becomes more pronounced as it expands, it exerts intense pressure on the appropriation and redistribution of the surplus value. It puts different factions of capital into growing conflict with each other and defines the boundaries of the current geopolitical map of power. The maximization of profits in the productive sector carries on until the possibilities of greater profits are exhausted and the rationale of the capitalist system of exploitation becomes virtually meaningless. The current level of technology with Artificial Intelligence eliminates at the same time any technical impediment to planning an economy. It also has the potential to create the objective conditions for making the move to the most democratic forms of participation in planning.

The author provides us here with a rare and original testimony about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, from the trips he was able to make there and the many contacts he had there. He focuses the readers’ attention more particularly on his interpretation of Juche’s thinking, the principles of which contribute to find the development strategy of this country. The emphasis is primarily on the imperative of autonomy for the economy and the society.

The purpose of this chapter is to characterize fictitious capital and fictitious profits as extreme expressions of the fetishism of capital. Considering the incessant search for valorization and allowing for fictitious forms of capital, the subject of this study is at the center of the dynamics of recent capitalist accumulation, especially when we take into account the capitalist crises over the last four or five decades. Its mechanism of fictitious valorization (M – M′), a decisive dimension of contemporary capitalism, is contradictory, based on the growing obstacles to the extraction of surplus value on an expanded scale, and therefore the real valorization of capital. At the same time, we support the idea that this mass of overaccumulated capital produces profits unrelated to surplus value, that is fictitious profits, further intensifying the fetishistic and contradictory nature of capitalism.