The General Theory Of Labor Management Market Economics

Monograph presenting an economic theory in support of a new economic system based on workers' self-management (workers participation) - covers the equilibrium of a competitive enterprise and changing market conditions, the decentralization of decision making, labour supply functions, economic policy problems, 'income sharing' (wages) and wage incentive, the allocation of economic resources, legal aspects and basic institutional forms of the labour-managed economy, etc. Diagrams and references.

This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

Keynes was an elitist and pro-capitalist economist, whom the left should embrace with caution. But his analysis provides a concreteness missing from Marx and engages with critical issues of the modern world that Marx could not have foreseen. This book argues that a critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. To understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, Dunn explores him in the context of the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy, and his politics. By offering a detailed overview of Keynes’s critique of mainstream economics and General Theory, Dunn argues that Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy. The book develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights, arguing that a Marxist analysis of unemployment, capital and the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The point is to change the world, not just to understand it. Thus the book considers the prospects of returning to Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that have come to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and the limits of the theoretical traditions that have made claim to his legacy.

In this original and powerful work, John Roemer proposes a general theory of exploitation that provides a game-theoretic framework for expressing any conception of exploitation--feudal, capitalist, or socialist--in a standardized and explicit way, thus permitting a clear comparison of different ethical conceptions.