This tribute to Ann Davis highlights briefly three key themes of her wide scholarship: the logical and historical understanding of money as a social institution, the pervasive role of public-private divide in capitalism, and the significance of fetishism, reification, and abstraction in obscuring and legitimizing capitalist social relations. JEL Classification: B51, B52, G10, G20
This article examines Chile’s growth regime between 2000 and 2022 by combining post-Keynesian demand and growth regime analysis with a comparative political economy framework centered on dominant social blocs linked through the concept of growth strategies. Using national income and financial accounting decomposition, it identifies three phases: a weakly export-led regime in 2000–2008, a crisis and adjustment phase in 2009–11, and a debt-led private demand regime consolidating from 2012 onward. The article argues that this shift was a functional transformation within neoliberal continuity. It traces a causal sequence from institutional configuration and regime exhaustion under changing external conditions to bloc destabilization, bloc recomposition, policy recalibration, and macro regime transformation, showing how domestic conflicts and external constraints reshaped Chile’s growth trajectory, including the declining capacity of core business associations to veto redistributive reforms. JEL Classification : B50, E12, O54, P16
High debt levels in the nonfinancial corporate sector are a stylized fact of major economies. Orthodox economic theories offer incomplete explanations for debt issues, but Marxian and other heterodox traditions provide frameworks that emphasize the endogenous nature of debt within the debt-growth nexus. This article advances the Marxian circuit-of-capital analysis of the debt-growth relationship by demonstrating how both components interact within its core mechanisms: First, changes in exogenous accumulation conditions simultaneously affect growth and debt. Second, rising debt stocks increase the diversion of profits into interest payments, which subsequently dampen growth. Third, growing debt stocks alter accumulation conditions, further influencing economic growth. By establishing this simple framework, this study contributes to a more systematic understanding of the debt-growth nexus. JEL Classification : B51, E12, E44
This tribute commemorates the life and academic legacy of Ann E. Davis (1947–2025), a distinguished radical political economist, feminist scholar, and institutionalist affiliated with the Union for Radical Political Economics. Davis’s signal contribution is a transdisciplinary methodology that conceptualized capitalism as a multifaceted system encompassing economic, social, ecological, political, and reproductive dimensions. By synthesizing radical political economy, feminist economics, institutional analysis, and monetary theory, she systematically dismantled disciplinary silos and demonstrated the necessity of integrated frameworks for confronting capitalism’s systemic inequities and power dynamics. In an era of intensifying specialization and political discord, her legacy remains a vital model of rigorous, inclusive, and critical scholarship, one in which inquiry is not merely a methodological choice but an ethical and political commitment to collective social transformation. JEL Classification: B31, B51, B52, E12, P16
This article serves as an introduction to a brief tribute section on the life and work of Ann E. Davis, a lifetime URPE member and contributor to the Review of Radical Political Economics .
This article reconstructs Marx’s theory of extra surplus value (ESV) and develops a framework clarifying its role in uneven development. We precisely define ESV and decompose it into two components: value creation, arising from productivity differentials, and value transfer, arising from the maintenance of prices above social value through monopoly power. This decomposition reframes the long-standing theoretical bifurcation between production-based and exchange-based explanations of global inequality, demonstrating that the divide reflects the dual mechanisms generating ESV. Applying this framework, we show how their interplay shapes the digital economy paradox—driving productive efficiency while entrenching information rents—and the bifurcation of industrial policy between technological upgrading and rent preservation. By situating uneven development within the production and accumulation of ESV, the article identifies structural conditions through which capitalist technical change and monopoly power jointly reproduce global disparities. JEL Classification : B51, F63, O33, D46
This article offers a critique of the technofeudal hypothesis and theories of digital capitalism, identifying areas in which these two rival theories share common concepts. Countering the argument that the technology industry’s revenues constitute rents rather than profits, the article presents a theoretical discussion of Marx’s theory of ground rent to argue against Mandel and others’ extension of this category to “technological rents” as a proxy for a theory of surplus profits. The article establishes a preliminary framework for understanding the sources of surplus profits in the technology industry, finding that Big Tech’s revenues span the categories of both industrial and commercial profit, linked to the development of American capitalism in the postwar era. The article highlights the instances of value creation that take place in the tech labor process, relating this to the tech workers’ organizing movement. JEL Classification: B5, L630, N720
Much of economic theory suggests that the interests of workers run afoul of environmental regulations and conservation. Supposedly, environmental regulations often impose additional costs on firms; they tend to reduce incentives to hire labor, reducing wages and employment. This essay seeks to challenge this conventional view by showing how empowering labor is a tool for mitigating pollution using a bargaining framework. Thus, the interests of labor and protecting the environment can align depending on the characteristics of production and the behavior of pollution with respect to output. JEL Classification: J00, Q52, Q57
If a legal system based on equal concern for all is favored, what sort of economic system should be favored? Ronald Dworkin argues that society should be based on what he labels “equality of resources.” Rather than challenge Dworkin’s dedication to equal concern for all or equality of resources, within this article I critique Dworkin’s claim that equality of resources entails a society based on equality of private property and argue that a common-ownership legal framework is instead more fitting. Furthermore, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory planning approach to production should be considered by people who hold to the equality of resources principle. JEL Classification : K11, P14, P27
Our current environmental policy options are often described as a choice between (a) reducing material living standards and (b) stimulating future technological innovations that promise to enable continued economic growth without irreversibly damaging the environment. This policy choice is a false one; it serves as a stalling tactic by the capitalist interests that benefit from the exploitation of nature. We actually have many better choices that we can implement immediately. We already have the technologies to stop global warming, species losses, loss of natural resilience, resource exhaustion, soil and water degradation, and most of the other forms of ecological deterioration that we are experiencing. Given our true policy options, it is clear that US President Trump’s reversal of environmental policies is a political decision, not an optimizing economic decision. But since we are now in what Foster calls absolute capitalism , a system in which governments themselves behave in accordance with market principles as they serve the capitalist market system, it will become increasingly difficult to again restore the environmental policies of the past. Humanity thus faces more frequent economic crises as real capitalist accumulation clashes with ecological constraints. The threat of a rise in political dissent triggered by these crises will lead capitalists to tolerate, if not support, repressive right-wing political forces that promise to protect and sustain capitalists’ surplus. Veblen warned a century ago that such a rightward political shift will end up destroying the liberal conditions under which capitalism thrives, and humanity will be left with the authoritarian governance of an impoverished planet. JEL Classification: B51, O44, P17.
Latin America offers a fruitful breeding ground for producing radical thought and practitioners. With a millenarian history of peoples who developed extraordinarily rich cultures, the Spanish conquest and independence movements wreaked havoc that only now is being overcome by peoples who are now recuperating their heritages and societies. Submerged into this setting, my formation as a radical confirmed Marx's late musings: Those societies that were able to retain and strengthen their communal organizations and mutual responsibilities to themselves and their territories were most likely to be the successful examples of the revolutionaries he struggled to support during his lifetime. This essay offers a glimpse at the path I fashioned during more than one-half century that is spawning some of the new worlds to which radicals must contribute.
This work argues that a particular instantiation of the global homo neoliberalus (HN) must be contemplated in the emergence of the Ghanaian Neoliberal Capitalist State in the last forty years: the Ghanaian HN. This Ghanaian HN labors under a particular psychic regime that is presented in classrooms of both public and private universities. Confronting and unsettling this psychic regime has profound implications for an approach to teaching and learning interested in alternatives to the globally hegemonic capitalist political economy. The work shows how such awareness and orientation was pursued through deliberate decolonial curricula interventions at the level of theory and practice in the pursuit of this prefigurative anti-capitalist political economy vision. JEL Classification : B51, P16
