The Competitiveness of Nations

in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy

January 2003

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Gautam Sen

MEN AND THINGS

Inaugural Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on March 7, 1985.  I am grateful to George Catephones and Gail Wilson for comments on an earlier draft.

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Pity poor Henry Hutchinson.  There is not a room in his honour in these buildings nor as far as I can recall a portrait of him anywhere in the LSE.  But in some sense he had as much to do with the foundation of the school as others whose names are more easily recalled as founders.  Hutchinson was the lonely unknown man who shot himself in 1893 and in his will left a large sum to the Fabian society so that they might apply the money “to the propaganda and other purposes of the said society and its socialism and towards advancing its objects in any way they deem advisable…” [1]  Sidney Webb was the person trusted along with some others to administer the bequest.  Sidney Webb was casting around at that time for some money to start his favourite School of Economics.  The delicate question of course was could the teaching of economics be said to have anything to do with the propaganda for socialism?  It was obviously necessary to fudge the issue.  So Webb extended the interpretation of the donor’s wishes to cover the promotion of the study of Socialism, Economics or any other branch or branches of social science or political science or towards the propagation or advocacy of socialistic or economic or political teaching.

Despite this nice turn of phrase the school was not called the London School of Socialism, Economics and any other branch or branches of Social Science or Political Science.  The Economics

[1] This account of the rounding of the LSE is taken from Janet Beveridge, An Epic of Clare Mark.

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and Political Science survived and social sciences were only taught.  The bit about Socialism was just an embarrassment.

Bernard Shaw clearly saw that this was a fudge.  He thought that what Sydney Webb wanted to do was “an atrocious malversation of the... bequest”.  He wanted W S Hewins, the person nominated to be the director “to speak as a collectivist and make it clear that the school of Economics will have a coliectivist bias ... The collectivist flag must be waved and the Marseillaise played if necessary to attract fresh bequests.”

Shaw tried his best to change the Fabian Society’s mind on this but did not win.  Webb assured Haldane, who had confronted him with some legalistic queries, that (a) he remained a socialist and (b) he believed that the more that social conditions were studied scientifically and impartially the stronger the case for socialism became.  That seemed to settle the legal problem.

There were a couple of snags.  No economists could be found initially (or dare one say since) who could make the connection between a scientific study of economics and socialism obvious.  It was difficult to find teachers as Beatrice Webb said of “a science that does not yet exist”.  But though the science did not exist, it had to be taught.  It was also going to be taught without the socialist connection pressed too far as Hewins as the first Director made clear in his fund raising visit to the London Chamber of Commerce he promised “the school would not deal with political matters and nothing of a socialist tendency would be introduced”.

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At least the living donors were given promises that were fulfilled; the dead .man was best forgotten.  LSL has been teaching Economics and assorted social sciences for ninety years now but the case for socialism is neither transparent nor has it been advanced much thereby.  One may even say that if anything Economics, not least the way it has been taught here, has-done nothing to further the cause of socialism.  Shaw was right to suspect the worst.

My purpose here is to correct partially and a bit belatedly after ninety years “the atrocious malversation” and talk of socialism.  The case for socialism looks more embattled today than at any other time in recent history.  Sir William Harcourt who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in those days when Webb was spending Hutchinson’ s bequest said “We are all socialists now”.  It is hard to think of Nigel Lawson saying that.  Even the Shadow Chancellor may find himself pilloried for saying any such thing.  It would only lose Labour votes at the next election!

The cause of socialism has suffered a setback in many of the developed capitalist countries and even in some like China which profess it.  Even if we grant that behind the manoueverings of Webb and Hewins there was a subtle long run plan, it can now only be said to have been exposed as a failure.  Economics and economic theories have become the main ideological weapon in the strong revival of anti-socialist ideology that we have seen in recent years.

Ludwig Feuerbach hit upon the brilliant simplifying idea that human beings created gods as mental constructs only to end up by

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having these creatures become their masters.  Economics has been such a harsh god in being invoked as an excuse for not tackling major problems facing the world today.  The role of economics in our daily life is nothing short of mystical.

Consider the evidence.  We are now quite used to speaking of the rate of Unemployment as ‘natural’.  At one level this is dismissed as a mere label but the connection it invokes with the natural law philosophy is deliberate.  Once a thing is natural then any attempt to alter it is artificial, unnatural.  The Market looms about us as some suprahuman machinery.  The Market rules over our actions and any attempt to modify the workings of the market are thought to be futile and damaging.  We see across the Atlantic a movement gathering considerable political support which seeks to promulgate a constitution which once enacted will be immutable.  We see calls to denationalize money, to end all discretion in policy making and rely on rules instead.

What these various developments have in common is a deep suspicion of the human agency, especially a popularly elected government.  There is a desire to exorcise the demos from all economic life.  The closer the economy comes to being beyond human control, the better impersonal market rule can be established.

The paradox of course is that such doctrines arise from a subject which constantly speaks of choice and of the economic agent being free to optimize.  The outcome of all the various individual behaviour is said to be beyond the ability of any single agent to influence and undesirable for any group to modify.  If some say that the outcome is not as desirable as it could be; for example,

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that there are nearly 20 million unemployed in the EEC countries, the answer is clear; any market failure is a failure of the individuals for failing to search for jobs, for being rigid in their demands, for being tied to their homes and communities, for being risk averse, being unable to separate market signals from random noise, for not being able to get on their bicycles etc. etc.  Like the God of the Old Testament the Market visits its victims unkindly.  Indeed if there is one way to characterise the current debates on unemployment raging in economics it is to say that it is labour’s fault that it does not behave like all other commodities.  Its market fails to clear because people insist on behaving as if they have a mind of their own.  If men behaved like things, the Market would work better.

This juxtaposition of men and things was of course how Marx (using Feuerbach’s insight) characterised capitalism.  “It is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.  In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.  In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation with both one another and the human race”. (Marx (1867), p 31)

Having seen this inversion in the relation between men and things, socialism, at least for Marx, was to be the program which reestablished human social relations as free and transparent, unmediated and undominated by the things people had produced.  Engels looked forward to a stage when the government of persons will be replaced by administration of things as society’s only

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problem.  Political economy at that stage would lose all reason for its existence.

Marx called his work a critique of-political economy but nowadays political economy is a banner which unites many people who are unhappy with economics.  It seems somehow that political economy may offer more; perhaps, a way out of our present impasse; perhaps, a passport to socialism.  The label itself, to some, indicates disagreement with the economic orthodoxy, a flag to be waved, a call to battle.  Could political economy be a cure from the fetishism of economics?

I am afraid I must disappoint you.  Political economy is of course at one level only an old fashioned name for economics but even if it were not, there are other obstacles before we can endorse political economy as a battle cry.  For one thing the territory of political economy is a disputed one.  It is inhabited by the New Right which would ‘economize’ politics turning the political sphere into a mirror of the market as much as by Marxists who would ‘politicize’ economics.  It is occupied as much by economists such as Gary Becker who would recast social behaviour such as marriage and divorce, suicide and crime, family and child bearing in analogy with the markets for a commodity, say, for empty metal bottle tops as by those who would make the personal political.  Add to these, those in between for whom political economy is some uncertain mix of institutional economics, economic history, national and international politics, wars, revolutions, pestilence and death.  All life is here.

There is however a more serious obstacle than that of a disputed

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territory. [2]   This is that all schools of political economy including Marx’s, originate from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and a common thread that they all carry is that of the notion of the civil society - the notion that the economic life is the sphere of private interests and that despite the lack of any overall supervision, the free play of private interests guarantees the provision of those goods and services which we label as economic commodities.  The civil society is guided by an Invisible Hand; in its workings, it does not need the aid of the political society of its time.  The civil society is primary and analytically antecedent to the political society.  If anything, political society, the sphere of public interest, of zoon politokon rather than homo economicus is an interfering and parasitical appendage to the civil society.

The autonomy and the primacy of civil society - the theorem of the Invisible hand - forms of course the heart of economics.  Successive generations have stripped off from Smith’s original proposition all the historical and social connotations and refined and generalised their proofs.  Starting with Ricardo, through Walras to the present day Arrow Debreu economy, the equilibrium of the private economy without any outside interference is a jewel in the crown of economics or some might say the most elegant empty box ever devised.  Such has been the lure of this proposition and the glamour of mathematical rigour with which it was established that, in recent years, it has become for many the sole content of scientific economics.  It has commanded the loyalty of the best minds in economics and attempts to challenge it have found it hard

[2] In what follows I draw heavily on Desai (1979), (1983)

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to succeed.  The most spectacular attempt was of course by Keynes.  Unfortunately the brilliant edifice that he built, and in which some of us still would like to dwell, is alleged to be without (micro) foundations.  Joan Robinson used to quote the Cambridge economist Gerald Shove as saying that ‘Maynard never spent the half hour necessary to learn price theory”.  If true, that was a very expensive half hour from our present day point of view.

The Adam Smith proposition also forms the heart of the new political economy which is associated with the political choice work of Buchanan and his associates.  This group which seeks to study political processes in the same analytical way that economists study the operations of markets projects the Smithian proposition back onto the state.  Thus not only can the private economy attain an equilibrium without outside interference but any political process that is to exist side by side with an economy can only claim desirability to the extent that it conforms to the ways a market process works.  Thus the political is not only subsequent and subordinate to the civil society but it is required to fashion itself after the senior partner.

While these propositions about neoclassical or new classical economics and the public choice theory will be accepted by most, surely they will protest that Marxian political economy does not fall in this category.  They may also add that the pursuit of analytical rigour is clearly a diversion behind which real issues are obscured (Marxists argue almost entirely by italicisation).  On both counts I must disagree and as this will be contested allow me to elaborate on this.

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It is best perhaps to start with an account of how Marx came to spend much of his life in the study of economics.  He was trained in a subject which at that time in German universities was the most demanding and flourishing subject - philosophy.  He was also of the generation of the young Hegelians who were riding high on the recent Hegelian revolution in philosophy.  It was somewhat like being a young physicist when quantum theory had just burst on the scene or one of the young turks in the Anglo-Saxon world after Keynes’ General Theory.  Marx proceeded however to challenge and overturn Hegel from a left perspective once he had picked up the clue from Feuerbach that to reconstruct the world rationally it was best to turn everything, especially Hegel, upsidedown, or, as Marx was to say later, rightside up.

It was in the course of his first book (written on his honeymoon no less) which was the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that scholars believe Marx formulated the germ of what was to become his life’s research programme. [3]   Hegel had inherited the notion of civil society from the Scottish tradition of Ferguson and Hutchinson which culminated in Adam Smith.  To Hegel the private sphere of civil society was the domain of man’s narrow particularistic existence and the state represented the public, universalist side of man’s nature.  How was the conflict between the private and the public to be reconciled in a higher unity?

Not being a Hegel or Marx scholar, I am relying in what follows on the excellent Introductionn by Joseph O’Malley to his edition of Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (CUP, 1977).  1 am aware that Hegel’ s theory of the state is much wider and broader than what Marx undertook to criticise.  See Avineri, S., Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (CUP).

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In line with eighteenth century thought, Hegel accepts the proposition that private property is a condition for freedom.  He approves of landed property and a system of entailed inheritance so that the property would stay in the family and pass on through the eldest son.  Landed property, the clergy and the town burghers would form the Estates.  The Estates thus represent the civil society in the legislature.  But they are likely to be prey to their selfish quarrels.  The bureaucracy exists however which can identify its interest with the state itself.  The bureaucracy rises above private interest and stands for selfless public spirit.  Above all is the monarch.  Since the monarch comes to the throne by birth, he is independent of factions and not subject to the corrupting influence of public pressure.  The monarch mediates in the private quarrels of the estates, and with advice from the public spirited bureaucracy, achieves the higher unity that Hegel seeks.

To this triad of property, bureaucracy, and monarchy, Marx applied his inversion formula.  Private property far from being a guarantee of freedom was a restriction on the ability of those without it to lead a free social life.  Indeed it divided and isolated the person from his social role as it divided families where primogeniture antagonised the younger sons left without anything.  Bureaucracy was as much a creature of the propertied estates as the clergy and unable to stand above the conflicts of private interests.  Democracy rather than monarchy was the true universal principle.

Thus Hegel’s higher unity was hollow and full of inner logical problems.  Marx posed in its place universal democracy and

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abolition of private property as conditions required to supercede both the civil society and the state in a better social outcome.  But who would bring these conditions about?  Since the monarch, the bureaucracy and the estates were all enmeshed in private property relations they had no interest in overcoming the conflict between the public and the private.  Marx found his answer- soon after writing the Critique.  It was the proletariat, ‘a class in civil society but not of civil society’. [4]  Since the proletariat had no property, it had no representation in the estates.  Its interests were universal since it would represent the majority.  It could only enter the political sphere by abolishing the system of estates which was based on private property.  The freedom of the proletariat was in the abolition of the state and of the civil society based on property and its replacement by a higher order

But having arrived at this conclusion, Marx-had to understand the ways in which the proletariat was formed.  Why in an age of tremendous technological advance in material production did there exist a class of property-ess people?  Why in the age of free contract without overt compulsion did men work for the employer who made profits while they stayed poor?  What in essence determined the reproduction of social relations of workers as workers and employers as employers?  The key to these questions was in political economy, the new science of Marx’s time.

My concern here is not with the details of Marx’s value theory or

[4] 1t was in the Introduction to A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right which was published in 1843 that Marx arrived at the central importance of the proletariat.  For the lntrocuction see O’Malley, op. cit.

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his theory of accumulation.  In Marx’ research programme from the very outset the autonomy of the civil society was accepted.  Indeed in fashioning his critique of political economy he accepted this separation between the state and civil society.  Neither in his value theory nor in this theory of accumulation does the state play any role whatsoever. [5]  Over the course of his life he did write a number of analyses of actual political situations in which the political sphere was discussed but these works were not accorded the same status by him as his major work Capital.  This is because Marx too wanted to establish his case for socialism scientifically, i.e. on basis of rigorous economic theory.  His insistence on rigour was such that Marx, the historian and the philosopher, preferred Economics in the bloodless version of Ricardo to the rich historical argument of Adam Smith; Economics separate from politics, the civil society primary to the state.

Trained as a philosopher, Marx used the method of immanent criticism both with respect to Hegel as with respect to Ricardo.  This meant that he accepted the theory he was criticising as valid to begin with and then he undermined it from within.  It did riot occur to him to say that Hegel’s theory of the state was factually, empirically untrue.

[5] There are in Capital Vol 1, accounts of Factory legislation, the history of the struggle over the length of the working day, and many other sections which speak of the political.  But the heart of the theory for Marx was the analytical demonstration of surplus value, accumulation and crisis in their interdependence.  It was this problem that he took up again in Vol 3 and which forms the transformation problem.  Thus while there is a ‘historical/political’ Capital, the economic/analytical one has always had priority in Marx’s work.  I am grateful to George Catephores for asking me to elaborate on this point.  See Chakravarty, S., (1984) for a similar view to the one taken here.

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In Economics as well, Marx did not challenge the empirical, factual validity of the invisible hand theorem.  He pointed out that value categories were historical and hence specific to capitalism but while we were in the capitalist mode of production the market works just as well for Marx as for Ricardo.  Generations of Marxists have chided other socialists for softheadedness and lack of scientific rigour when they pointed out the problems and miseries caused by the market.  Marxists almost take pride in pointing out how harsh the market can be.  They are drier than the driest Tory.

But my concern is not with Marxists but with Marx and political economy.  In the critique of political economy which formed the core of his life’s research work from 1851 to the day he died, the state plays no role.  I would like to argue that this dichotomy between the state and the economy at the theoretical not the descriptive level, is crippling to the construction of political economy.  It leads us to a political economy without politics.  Various attempts have been made to marry the political and the economic; the Hilferding-Lenin Theory of Imperialism, the Post-Keynesian/Kalecki theory of conflict over distribution of income - but these attempts have lacked the completeness and the rigour of the classical political economy which still dominates all the schools of political economy.

We must therefore reconstruct political economy.  We must challenge the classical political economy not immanently as Marx did but radically, i.e. at its roots.  To reconstruct political economy one must question the autonomy of the civil society, the theoretical, historical and operational validity of The Invisible

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Hand Theorem.

But the challenge and the reconstruction must be rigorous to be universally persuasive.  But rigour does not imply that the critique be an immanent one, that we accept the methodology of the classical political economy.  Thus the a priorism of economics must be confronted by empirical method.  There is a confusion between empirical and empiricist in many minds; constant apologies are made for letting facts intrude upon the discourse of political economy.  The empirical method is the method of science, the method of Charles Darwin whom Marx admired so much, it is the method which B.P. Thompson has recently championed in the battle against Althusser and Marxist Theologians. [6]

That is however for the future.  At present, let me sketch the ingredients of the challenge to classical political economy.

“It was Adam Smith’s genius to have seen the probability of the isolation of civil society from the political sphere (the state), its capacity for self regulation if left unhindered, its potential for achieving a state of maximum benefit for all participants left free to pursue their own interests, and hence the philosophical desirability of bringing about such a state of affairs, in which civil society could become independent of the sta e (Desai (l983) p 376)

What Adam Smith could not have done and did not do was to demonstrate that such a civil society, autonomous and self regulating, actually existed either in eighteenth century Britain or anywhere else.  His arguments were based on little empirical evidence, indeed the actual historical conditions were far from one

[6] Thompson The Poverty of Theory

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where a civil society had already emerged.  Hence his polemic against the various existing practices and institutions.

So let us examine the theoretical argument first.  The fragility of the I.H. Theorem has been explored by Arrow and Debreu’s work on general equilibrium.  There is no doubt that theirs is a -very riorous construction of the conditions required for a competitive general equilibrium to exist.  But as Frank Hahn has passionately argued on several occasions it will not do as a descriptive account of how the economy works. [7]  Indeed it is obvious at a glance that many of the conditions required are not and could never be fulfilled.

The problem is not only that various types of market failure could occur and do even in this rarefied world.  But that it requires all possible economic transactions for all actual and contingent circumstances to be completed in the one single original instant before clocks start ticking and time brings with itself uncertainty and possibilities of change.  The exercise defies rules of physics by requiring computations to be made by infinitely lived individuals at speeds in excess of that of light.

This is not the way politicians understand the proposition that the market works.  But the rough and ready way in which the principle is supposed to work has never been demonstrated to anyone’s satisfaction.  For every time the real world is allowed to intrude rudely on the gossamer structure of the Arrow Lebreu economy it plants a fatal kiss on the scheme of things.  I will not list the

[7] Some of the essays in which he has done this are in Hahn (1984)

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variety of reasons for which market failure can occur but only reveal the scandal of all scandals - there is no way we can understand how the use of money can be fitted into this Invisible Hand Theorem.  This is not news.  Hayek knew about this when he came to the School in 1931.  The problem still remains as lively as ever. [8]

There is however a further puzzle.  A free market economy obviously did not exist in 1776.  How did Smith think it could be brought about?  To the best of my knowledge, theorists who do these sorts of things find it difficult enough to give plausible stories of how to get back to an equilibrium if displaced from it, but there is no story of how to transform an economy with myriad points or contact between the state and the economy into a competitive one.

To the extent that history ever provides answers to such general questions, British history in this respect gives an interesting answer.  Most people are agreed that if a free market economy existed ever anywhere it was first in mid nineteenth century England.  The Ricardian years were years of war and the accompanying inflation followed by post war deflation, hobbled by eighteenth century arrangements to which restrictions on corn trade had been added.  It took the Great Reform of 1832 and a strong state - the new Bourgeois state - which established the conditions for the Invisible Hand Theorem to flourish.  Through poor laws, banking legislation, a strong executive backed by a substantial parliamentary support created in late 1840’s the conditions for a

[8] Hayek (1931); Desai (1982) ‘The Task of Monetary Theory: The Hayek-Sraffa Debate in a Modern Perspective’ in Baranzini, M., (1982) Advances in Economic Theory (Oxford, Blackwell)

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free market. [9]  The analogy with present day could not be more obvious.  The poor law is once again being reformed in the attack on the welfare state and on trade unions, restrictions on capital exports have been repealed, local government is being reformed and in effect scuttled - all by a strong executive with a large parliamentary support.

But it is not only that the state establishes again and again the conditions under which the nature of the civil society is determined.  It is a fallacy to separate the two so sharply or antagonistically.  In the day to day working of the civil society, certain public goods are necessary.  These are meta-goods such as the very process of exchange on which we rely or the system of property rights; money itself is a public good which like language only gains currency from the fact that other people use it.  But going further, the isolated individual maximising utility over a set a goods and activities is not just a simplification; it could be a hindrance to a proper analysis of social existence.  We live in a world where public goods and externalities are pervasive, where our actions and perceptions are made in context of households, factories, clubs.  We fail to understand phenomena such as poverty, famines and the provision for social security if we view them from the angle of the isolated individual. [10]

The attempt to view the justification for the state from the

[9] See on this Steadman-Jones (1983)

[10] Attempts to break beyond the confines of the individualistic model have been made in various articles by Amartyn Sen; see Sen (1984).  For a community based approach to the measurement of poverty, see Desai and Shah (1985).

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individualistic vantage point drives us into the cul-de-sac which Arrow pointed out long ago. [11]  But Arrow’s classic argument is not for me about the impossibility of democratic politics.  It is about the poverty of economic theory to tackle the fundamental problem of politics and how to reconcile the public and the private spheres of interest.  The dynamic elements in politics are provided by political parties, by ideologies which seek to aggregate and mould preferences whereas electoral and legislative processes legitimize these attempts of parties and ideologies to aggregate.  In a parliamentary democracy at least, politics is the continuous, dynamic and dialectical process of which the economists’ social welfare function is a pale shadow.  If the economist cannot see any consistent way of constructing a SWF except the dictatorial one it is because he looks no further than beyond his own study.  He is the dictator as he is the only player in the ersatz political process he constructs for himself.

It is obvious the civil society is not primary to the state.  The state is necessary for the civil society to emerge in a form in which it can be autonomous.  Not any state but a state determined to bring about its chosen version of civil society.  The nineteenth century state brought about the conditions for a free market capitalist economy.  A different state is needed to bring about socialism.  The case for socialism, is then not argued solely via an objective economic investigation as the Webbs thought, it is primarily via political action to create a state which will bring about the supersession of the present dichotomous relations - those where men are merely things.

[11] K. Arrow Social Choice and Individual Values

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But we cannot stop at overturning the state/civil society dichotomy if the society we wish to create is to promise universal freedom.  Having said that social relations between men take the form of relations between things, Marx himself succumbed to fetishism in his analysis of social relations.  He looked at exploitation only in the sphere of exchange, in the money/commodity circuits.  Exploitation in his scheme takes place in the process of production but only in production for the market.  In the day to day reproduction of social relations (of daily life) it is the workplace which takes the pivotal place.  The household and the networks of inter household cooperation/conflict are entirely ignored.  All social relations are subsumed by the capital/labour relation in the production process.  This subsumption is held to be valid not only for capitalism.  In all modes of production, it is the relationship defined by ownership of means of production, of things, that dominates.  We are literally down to relations between men and things.  A large dimension of social relations important in the reproduction of daily life, the sphere or women’s work, is ignored.  If we are to cure this lapse, we have to downgrade value relations to an appropriately modest place in the scheme of things.  Not all work can take the commodity form of labour power embodied into value and creating surplus value.  There is a lot of work which never enters the production process but is vital to the process of reproduction of daily life.  This work does not acquire its meaning solely as an input to the production of labour power.  To marginalise it with respect to paid work is to marginalise those who do unpaid won k. [12]  This is done in all schools of political

[12] I am obviously drawing here on the large body of recent feminist {literature.  See, especially, Delphy (1984).}  HHC: bracketed displayed on page 21 of original.

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economy which identify the civil society with the sphere of market relatiois.  The point about the sphere of work is that it is simultaneously not a market relationship but is influenced by it.  To cast it in the mirror of paid labour no matter howsoever revolutionary a language, is to fetishize social relations.  Marx’s political economy deserves to be liberated front its own fetishism.

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REFERENCES

Arrow, K. (1951), Social Choice and Individual Values (New York, Wiley)

Avineri, S., (1972) Hegel’s  Theory  of  the  Modern  State (Cambridge, CUP)

Beveridge, Janet (1960) An Epic of Clare Market (London, Bell)

Bottomore, T., et al (eds) (1983) The Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford, Blackwell)

Desai, M., (1979) Marxian Economics (Oxford, Blackwell)

(1983) ‘Political Economy’ in Bottomore, T (1983)

Desai, M., Rudolph, S. and Rudra, A., (1984) Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia (Delhi, CUP)

Chakravarty, S., (1984) ‘Power Structure and Agricultural Productivity’ in Desai, Rudolph, and Rudra (1984) pp 345-374

Desai, M., and Shah, A., (1985) ‘An Economic Approach to the Measurement of Poverty’ (LSE, unpublished)

Delphy, C (1984) Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression (London, Hutchinson)

Hahn, F (1984) Money and Equilibrium (Oxford, Blackwell)

Marx (1984) Capital Vol. I

O’Malley, J (1977) Editor’s Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, CUP)

Sen, A K (1984) Resources, Values and Development (Oxford, Blackwell)

Steadman-Jones, G (1983) Language of Class (Cambridge, CUP)

Thompson, E. P. (1978) The Poverty  of  Theory (Merlin Press)

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The Competitiveness of Nations

in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy

January 2003

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