Marx’s law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall, formulated in Capital Volume III, is central to his critique of capital. A logical re-examination defends his core claim — that rising capital composition (reflecting mechanization and productivity growth) coexisting with a constant rate of surplus value necessarily yields a declining general profit rate. The claim holds when real wages rise proportionally with labor productivity — a historical possibility contingent on working-class organized strength. Not only Marx’s law holds under constant exploitation, but it extends to more general conditions: even when exploitation rises, profit rates fall if capital composition growth outpaces exploitation growth (assuming stable variable-capital turnover). Turnover slowdowns exert additional downward pressure. These relations highlight the law as expressing the tendency of capital to revolutionize the productive forces of labor while subordinating them to surplus valorization imperatives. An Appendix presents the mathematical formalization as well as an illustrative decomposition of global profit-rate trends using macroeconomic data. While not an empirical test, the illustrative exercise demonstrates the law’s analytical value for interpreting historical profitability tendencies. The analysis reaffirms the internal coherence of Marx’s proposition against criticisms questioning its foundational logic.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has emerged as a significant heterodox challenge to neoclassical orthodoxy, arguing that sovereign currency-issuing governments face no intrinsic financial constraints and can use fiscal policy to achieve full employment. MMT offers important critiques of austerity and captures genuine operational realities of contemporary monetary systems. A systematic theoretical examination of its foundations, analytical coherence, and policy implications from a Marxist political economy perspective is therefore required. MMT’s framework exhibits four interconnected limitations: a methodological ahistoricism that universalizes historically specific monetary forms; absence of a value theory capable of explaining what money quantifies beyond state authority; insufficient attention to capital accumulation dynamics; and an underdeveloped theorization of class relations and state power within capitalism. MMT tends to mistake money’s form for its substance, circulation for production, and state capacity for class power. While MMT’s policy proposals carry progressive intent, their primary effect is to stabilize rather than transform the capitalist order. MMT thus remains within the historical lineage of monetary reformism. Marxist Political Economy is therefore essential for understanding money and state finance in contemporary capitalism.
The conceptual coherence of market socialism is examined through engagement with Maxi Nieto’s claim that it represents an “impossible” form of socialism. While proponents argue that market socialism—through its retention of the allocative function of markets—preserves the efficiency of markets while eliminating capitalist exploitation, critics like Nieto assert that markets and capital are inseparable, with the latter perpetuating domination, inefficiency, and inequality. Building on Nieto’s thesis, this article advances a functionalist critique, arguing that even under “worker self-managed” models like David Schweickart’s Economic Democracy, competitive markets inevitably lead to the subsumption of labor under capital. On a functionalist interpretation of capitalist relations of production, labor can be subsumed to capital even through mere exchange. Analyzing the form of capitalist value shows that that surplus-labor extraction—and hence exploitation—can persist independently of formal ownership arrangements. The persistence of the law of value indicates that market socialism remains governed by capitalist social relations, which calls into question its compatibility with socialist commitments to equality, sustainability, and human development.
This paper argues that elite Western scientific philanthropy, exemplified by programs such as the MacArthur Fellowship, operates as a sophisticated instrument of neocolonial control. Using the 2025 MacArthur “genius grant” awarded for a cultural research project in Madagascar integrating “embodied practices, like dance, into research and climate science” as a case study, this analysis deconstructs the power dynamics inherent in such philanthropic endeavors. We contend that by centering Western academic methodologies, defining research agendas, and anointing individual “geniuses,” these grants perpetuate the economic and epistemic dependency of the Global South. This diverts critical resources and attention away from structural solutions, such as resource sovereignty and debt relief, towards academic projects that primarily serve Western epistemological interests. This dynamic constitutes a form of “epistemic rent-seeking,” where Northern institutions extract cultural and intellectual capital from the South under the guise of benevolence. The paper concludes that achieving genuine scientific equity requires a fundamental shift away from the model of elite philanthropy and towards a framework of reparative justice and direct, unconditional funding for autonomous Southern institutions, recognizing that true liberation can only be achieved through political struggle, not charity.
This piece addresses some common questions and concerns regarding the recent special issue on China as well as the Chinese political economy in general. I argue that what unfolds in China may well mark the beginning of a new phase in the global decline of capitalism and a worldwide revival of socialism.
