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This essay is a response to Zak Cope’s defense of the “labor aristocracy” theory of working class reformism and conservatism. Specifically, the essay engages Cope’s claims that British colonialism, imperialist investment, and transnational “monopoly” corporations have accrued “surplus-profits” that have underwritten the existence of a “labor aristocracy” historically, and that “unequal exchange” today has transformed almost the entirety of the working classes of the global North into a labor aristocracy. We conclude with a presentation of an alternative explanation of working class reformism and conservatism.

The term reformism has been in frequent use by leftist critics who have seen reform as the biggest enemy of the revolution. If the capitalist system were proved to be in danger of collapsing under its own weight, then intervention by the “bourgeois” state to reform the system and to make concessions to, say, labour, then the system would continue essentially unchanged. Examples of reformism are, therefore, free elementary and secondary education for all, the welfare state generally, trade union legislation permitting collective bargaining and so on. The main philosophical ideologist of such reformist strategy was originally John Stuart Mill, simultaneously a classical economist and utilitarian and proponent of reformist tendencies and government intervention. The term reformism is also applied to the political process whereby socialism might be implemented through parliamentary means. The working-class interest could be introduced into a parliamentary system via the electoral process and lead to reform progressively that would result in steps or increments to a socialist society. This was very much the view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their Fabian followers in the Britain. One of the main opponents of reform or social reform, as she put it, was Rosa Luxemburg who saw such a process as leading to the death knell of the German socialism and, by extension, of socialism everywhere (Howard, 1971, p. 52).

Professor Boris Ischboldin has devoted a lifetime of productive scholarship to economic science. By virtue of his native gifts and a highly cultured background he has attained to a breadth of scholarship which is reminiscent of that giant of modern economics, Joseph Schumpeter. Ischboldin's linguistic skills have enabled him to acquire an uncommon familiarity with the works of economists that is truly international in scope, and that is one factor which prompts me to compare him with Schumpeter. Among the results of his efforts are an approach to, or school of, economics which he chooses to call the School of Economic Synthesis. It involves, among other things, a synthesis of various approaches to analysing economic realities—approaches whose various practitioners often tended to regard their own as the one correct and only legitimate method. In less skillful hands, or perhaps because of less charitable hearts, diversity often resulted in a kind of tension that was not always creative, as well as a mutual exclusiveness and even scholastic in‐tolerance which put an unneeded burden on the progress of the science. With Professor Ischboldin and the co‐founder of the School of Economic Synthesis, Arthur Spiethoff, variety became instead the basis for complementary creativity! Thus, such disparate figures as David Ricardo and Wesley Mitchell, or Leon Walras and John Commons find themselves embraced into a single schema that Ischboldin calls, “a theory of economic laws and methodology”.

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.”

Although neo‐classical economics has undoubtedly driven the global pension privatization reform agenda, it does not provide an adequate framework for the reform of retirement income protection. Indeed, it poses salient decision risks for policy‐makers because of its naturalist epistemology and agency ontology, which deny both the value of hermeneutic knowledge and the existence of structural imperatives. When confronted with the challenge of income maintenance for those in retirement, policy‐makers must necessarily tackle strategically important, values‐laden questions. This requires them to engage in policy discourses that are informed by competing welfare ideologies. Reflecting these discourses, national governments have adopted three reform approaches to public pension privatization. All are consistent with values of community solidarity, social cohesion and citizenship rights, which are seen by national governments to be preferable to the values that underpin neo‐classical economic analysis, namely, individual responsibility, freedom of choice and contractual rights.

The reformist processes of glasnost and perestroika exacerbated an existing crisis in education in the Soviet Union. Although Mikhail Gorbachev′s initiatives did not elicit a strong response among educators before early 1987, they provoked strong discord over the extent of desirable change in national educational policy thereafter. This conflict merged with a wide‐ranging debate over the rewriting of the nation′s history, especially the version to appear in secondary school textbooks. Seizing both issues, classroom teachers and lowlevel administrators made a sustained effort to increase decision‐making authority at the bottom of the educational apparatus, including at the classroom level. By 1989, these differences had settled into a pattern of ongoing, implacable disagreement.

There have been times in recent years when it has seemed that the US economy, in particular, has defied economic gravity. This was certainly the case in the late nineties of the twentieth century. Many heaved a sigh of relief when the Nasdaq and the Dow responded to the pull of economic gravity and fell to earth in the early part of the twenty first century. The Earth at the time, in 2002, appeared to be indices of around 8,000 for the Dow and 1,250 for the Nasdaq. These measures still indicated huge wealth in terms of saleable bits of paper as well, indicating the underlying huge capacity of the real economy for creating surpluses. Both indices climbed back, though the Nasdaq was a long way from its astronomic former heights before the next (2007) crisis hit. True to the cyclical record of modern capitalism, however, by 2006 the US and the world stock markets were booming again. The nominal value of shares traded worldwide in 2006 by some estimates was nearly $70 trillion (Bogle, 2005). In 2007, another crisis appeared, ushered in supposedly by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States; subsequent events took their toll in economic and financial terms not only in the United States but worldwide in most of the major economies. The terms “credit crunch” and “sub-prime” had become so pervasive within a few weeks of the onset of the latest economic crisis that by July 2008, the Concise Oxford Dictionary provided definitions for them. While these terms are now embedded in the language of economics and everyday speech, inevitably the affected economies will recover from the crises and continue to grow. While there is no shortage of reasons posited for the latest crisis and those preceding it, far fewer explanations have been forwarded to tell us why economies survive economic shocks and, despite dire predictions and expressions of gloom, recent crises have not been as disastrous as was once the case, notably as in the Depression years of the 1930s. During the Depression of the Thirties, production fell by a third between 1929 and 1933, unemployment reached 13 million and even by 1938 one person in five were unemployed. No economist has predicted these dire consequences even for the crisis of 2007–2009. In 1999, Paul Krugman published his short book: The Return of Depression Economics in which he not only reminded us of the 1930s Depression but suggested that the then economic crises bore an “eerie resemblance to the Great Depression.”¹ He retreats within a few pages and describes the events as the Great Recession because the global damage has been “well short of Depression levels” (Krugman, 1999). A decade later, Krugman, by then a Nobel laureate for economics in 2008, began his 2009 revised edition of Return of Depression Economics thus: “The world economy is not in depression: it probably won't fall into depression (though I wish I could be completely sure about that)” (Krugman, 2009). By early January 2009, he surprised other economic commentators by using the term “depression” in his New York Times column.

The New Economic Society was formed in 1973 to promote the aims of the School of Economic Synthesis. Economic synthesis, since its early formation in the 1930s, has sought to integrate historical economics with social and neo‐classical economics. As the academic movement toward economic synthesis broadened, a more formal organisation became necessary. The New Economic Society (International School of Economic Synthesis) is an interdisciplinary association open to economists and others who are interested in developing a more social and humanistic economics, and a more realistic and scientific understanding of modern developed and less developed societies. The membership includes persons from numerous academic disciplines in many countries; formal chapters of the Society exist in the United Kingdom, Germany, India and Israel. At present, the membership is developing on an informal basis and no dues are requested. Membership information may be obtained from the following persons.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dichotomy of radicalism and reformism in the corporate social responsibility (CSR)/sustainability literature, where the reform position is described as mainstream, where sustainability is delivered by governance mechanisms, regulation and planning, internalising costs, and redesigning industrial processes. Radical critiques of this position argue that reformists have “claimed” the CSR debate and therefore disempowered those who would bring about more fundamental changes. The alternative radical position is described as a countercurrent, an ecocentric approach requiring change in economic and political systems.

The paper reviews some of the thinking in this area to assess whether a truly radical position is possible to affect change or whether the forces of incrementalism allow gentle resistance to the status quo, which will be more effective in closing the sustainability gap.

The paper maps some of the models described within it to assess where each lies in the radical‐reformist continuum.

The findings should allow an assessment of the possibilities for CSR to become more radical in approach. However, this needs further empirical testing.

The mapping is an original contribution to the area.