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This chapter offers the first full translation from Russian to English of the Balance of the National Economy of the USSR, 1924–26’s first chapter. Involving 12 authors and composed of 21 chapters, the Balance is a collective work published in June 1926 in Moscow by the Soviet Central Statistical Administration under the scientific supervision of its former director, Pavel Illich Popov (1872–1950). In this first chapter, titled ‘Studying the Balance of the National Economy: An Introduction’, Popov set the theoretical foundations of what might be considered as the first modern national accounting system and paved the way to multisector macroeconometric modelling.

This chapter provides a presentation about Chapter 1 of The Balance of the National Economy, 1923–24, edited by Pavel Illich Popov. The Balance was issued in June 1926 by the Central Statistical Administration (CSU or TsSU) of the USSR, which Popov had headed from July 1918 to January 1926. In the first part of our chapter, we show how Popov’s work on the balance of the national economy was rooted in the specific scientific and political culture of zemstvo statisticians inherited from the Tsar. Statistical inquiry was considered an objective scientific process based on international standards. Furthermore, like zemstvo statisticians, CSU statisticians developed great autonomous political power. The balance of the national economy was built according to these principles, which met harsh criticism from revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. In the second part, we analyze the contents of Popov’s Chapter 1, especially the theoretical foundations of the balance and its connection with Soviet planning. In the third part, we discuss the balance’s significance in the years 1926–1929, years which ended the NEP and launched the first Five-Year Plan, so as to understand how CSU’s balance didn’t become a standard Soviet statistical instrument and was discarded as a “bourgeois” device.

The theory of the monetary circuit, as developed in its most powerful form by Graziani (1989), has made a significant contribution to the analysis of credit money in Marxian economics. A key issue is the extent to which circuit theory fails to take into account the relationship between sectors producing capital and consumption goods. In Marx’s reproduction schema, how much money do capitalists need to advance in order for exchange between sectors to balance, and for the circuit to be closed? The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by examining different models of the monetary circuit, each of which has a textual grounding in Marx’s often contradictory musings in Capital, Volume 2.

Alongside alternative conceptions of the circuit of money, different interpretations exist about the role of the multiplier, which can be nested in Marx’s reproduction schema. The problem, from a Marxian point of view, is that in the existing literature investment is usually confined to the capital goods sector. It can be argued that Marx, for the most part, viewed investment as involving accumulation in both departments of production. Using a multiplier framework, derived from input-output technology, this wider treatment of investment is considered as an alternative way of modelling the circulation of money. In addition to contributing to Marxian analysis of the money circuit, this approach could also be more accessible to a wider Post Keynesian audience, since a scalar Keynesian multiplier is employed.

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.”

In the current literature, there is little systematic research on the relationship among adjustment of the income distribution, change in economic structure and improvement of macroeconomic efficiency.

This paper expands Marx's reproduction schema into the “Marx–Sraffa” three-department structure table comprising fixed capital, general means of production and means of consumption and employs China's input–output table from 1987 to 2015 to portray the relationship between income distribution and macroeconomic efficiency under investment-driven growth.

This paper calculates the wage–profit curve of China's economy and evaluates the space of macroeconomic efficiency improvement in China based on the deviation between actual and potential income distribution structure.

The results show that there is a downward trend of the profit rate, which meets Marx's theoretical prediction, and the decline in the profit rate is mainly attributed to an increase in the organic composition of capital arising from the rapid growth of fixed capital investment under extended growth. The analysis of macroeconomic efficiency shows that the space for improving macroeconomic efficiency is extremely limited under traditional growth pattern and that China must transform its economic development pattern and foster new economic growth drivers.

This is the first English version of Karl Kautsky’s essay “Theories of Crises,” originally published in 1902 in Die neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Kautsky’s essay was a review of Michael von Tugan-Baranowsky, Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Handelskrisen in England (Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England), published in 1901. Kautsky’s review of Tugan-Baranovsky’s book is divided into five sections: (1) “Introductory Remarks”; (2) “The Decreasing Tendency of the Rate of Profit”; (3) The Explanation of Crises by Underconsumption; (4) Tugan-Baranovsky’s Theory of Crises; and (5) The Changes in the Character of Crises. We have translated in full the Sections 3 to 5.

In The Accumulation of Capital (2015a), Rosa Luxemburg emphasises the importance of demand realisation in Marx's economics. First, by studying the history of political economy a refutation is provided of the suggested harmony between production and consumption (what came to be called Say's Law) first proposed by Say and J. Mill. Second, in her analysis of Marx's reproduction schemes, Luxemburg identifies the key role of demand constraints, set in the circulation of money. Central to this analysis is how the specific peculiarities of capitalism, such as constraints on the demand for commodities by wage labour, serve to intensify problems associated with Say's Law. The main purpose of this chapter is to consider how a refutation of Say's Law can be established in Luxemburg's treatment of the reproduction schemes that featured in Polish discussions of economic reproduction.

This analysis builds on the examination of Say's Law provided by Trigg (2020) under the confines of simple commodity circulation. Luxemburg's simple reproduction scheme provides a useful starting point for extending this refutation to the arena of capitalism. Core to this approach is how commodity money undergoes wear and tear as money circulates: a phenomenon that is considered by Luxemburg introducing a new department of production for the money commodity. By developing this system, and drawing on Marx's writings in Theories of Surplus Value, part 2 (Marx, 1968), the analysis will provide a systematic exploration of Marx's inevitability theory of crises under capitalism, as an extension of the more established possibility theory of crises under simple circulation.

Kōzō Uno (1897–1977) was a unique Marxist economist in Japan. The Uno's three-stage theory of the capitalist economy, in a certain sense, was a typical framework in the system of Marxist economic theory. But the method in Uno's Principles of Political Economy (“Principles”) is different from Marx's method in “Capital” and systematic critique of political economy. Since Uno rejected a methodological character of “capital in general” in Marx, Uno's “Principles” was a closed system in a circle. The stage theory of capitalistic development, therefore, had no connection with his general theory (“Principles”). Sekisuke Mita (1906–1975) was a severe critic of Uno's methodology. Mita, a Hegelian philosopher, criticized Uno that the methodology of his “Principles” was Hegelism, and pointed out that the method of Uno's stage theory was positivism. Mita not only criticized Uno, but also criticized orthodox views of Marxian economists who had been influenced by Stalinist views. Mita asserted that the rational dialectic in the logic of “Capital” was founded on the analytical method. The central problem is a methodological meaning of the relationship between the universal and the particular. This article describes the points of rational dialectic in the methodology of Marxian political economy, overcoming Hegelism and positivism.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of French School Regulation theory for questions of relevance to researchers and practitioners working in the field of information policy in general and public librarianship in particular.

The paper is divided into two parts. Part one outlines Regulation theory's twin analytic tools of Fordism and post‐Fordism and its value for questions about the evolution of the public library. Part two provides an example of the approach's explanatory potential when applied to a series of public library planning documents produced by the Government of Ontario, Canada from the 1950s.

An interpretation of the evolution of the identity of the library user from patron to customer to information producer‐consumer is proposed at the intersection of the neoliberal state's austerity in social spending, the ubiquity of the new information and communication technologies, and fundamental changes in libraries as sites of waged‐work.

The research facilitates the development of a political economy of the contemporary public library of potential value to the international public library community. Also, conceiving of the public library as first and foremost a site of productive work forces one to re‐engage with the meaning of shifting relations between the library user and the institution on working conditions.

The applicability of a relatively under‐utilized theoretical framework is modelled that enables one to ask new questions of relevance to the field of library and information science.