Open research questions in Political Economy and Marxism
123 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 11,651 Political Economy and Marxism papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927) was an early twentieth-century writer who engaged Marxist theoreticians and conventional American sociological theory in his writings, but he remains unknown to social theorists and histories of American social science.
Indeed, the editors argue that their work and its reification of the individual sheds light on what they deem “the understudied ties between radicals in the European and American contexts” (14).
Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries · 2024 · DOIThis paper proposes a Euclidean minimum spanning tree-based evolutionary algo- rithm, denoted ETEA, to solve multi-objective optimization problems. ETEA explores the characteristics of EMSTs and the distance relation among individuals to guide the search during the evolutionary process. On the one hand, ETEA defines a density es- timator ETCD which not only reflects the crowding degree of individuals but partly implies their relative orientation and position in the population, and combines it with several properties of EMSTs to maintain diversity in fitness assignment and archive trun- cation. On the other hand, ETEA considers the neighborhood of individuals formed by their distance to the obtained trade-off surface, and adjusts their fitness according to the number and position of individuals in the neighborhood. Systematic experiments have been performed by making an extensive comparison of ETEA with five state-of-the-art EMO algorithms (NSGA-II, SPEA2, IBEA, (cid:2)-MOEA, and TDEA), and its predecessor (MST-MOEA). Thirty-two test problems and two pop- ular quality metrics are chosen to assess performance of the selected algorithms. The results reveal that ETEA can provide a good balance in finding a well-approximated non-dominated set, keeping the uniformity of solutions, and extending the distribu- tion range along the optimal front. ETEA performs significantly better than the other algorithms in terms of uniformity, and is competitive in convergence and spread. The results of ETEA with respect to the comprehensive performance also achieve the best among the tested algorithms for the majority of the test problems. Furthermore, the contribution of different components of the proposed algorithm has been experimentally investigated. The results show that the newly introduced archive truncation is most influential to the performance of ETEA, followed by the fitness assignment, fitness adjustment, and density estimation. In addition, the study on runtime indicates that although ETEA generally requires more computational time than the other algorithms, it can be improved by several efficient methods. One area for subsequent work is to obtain a deeper understanding of the algorithm behavior. In this context, the effects of the population size and the number of variables will be investigated. In addition, applying ETEA to some constrained MOPs and real- world scenarios is also an important aspect of our further research.
Importantly, Alter demonstrates the reach of the farmer-labor bloc well into the 1920s, a relatively understudied period of farmer and labor organizing, through the Nonpartisan League, Robert La Follette's 1924 presidential campaign, and the support from aging agrarian radicals that helped make Franklin D.
Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas · 2023 · DOIThe Covid-19 virus has shocked the world to its core, but it remains to be seen whether it has brought about a paradigm shift or it has merely accentuated some of the past problems, while also triggering a kind of forced nostalgia for the apparent normality of a system that was already ridden with issues.
“What Ghosts are Haunting us Today?” Slavoj Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto in Post-Pandemic Capitalist Realism. The Revolutionary Subject and Work · 2021 · DOIBy means of this contextualization I show that Foucault’s sympathetic response to Becker is limited to the domain of penal practices, specifically concerning the question of how to resist their rationality of normalization, and thus it involves no broader commitment to neoliberal economic theory or its political implications.
It has not understood the fundamentally theological idea of order; it has ignored human rights and coloniality; its statist foundations cannot enable genuine reform of the world ecological order; its understanding of a global economic order committed to the protection of the already wealthy is nugatory, besides which it uses the unreflexive male pronoun throughout.
On the flip side, in addition to arguing that a proper understanding of some of Marx’s most fundamental commitments requires us to fight not only for human but for non-human animal liberation, I also argue that genuine animal liberation requires the radical disruption of capitalism and that the more common, less radical animal liberation movements are insufficient for bringing about this end.
Non-human animals within contemporary capitalism: A Marxist account of non-human animal liberation · 2016 · DOIBut, in the derisive words of so many disciplinary forebears and overseers, is this properly “anthropological”? The prospective convergence of genuinely critical sociopolitical inquiry with the techniques and insights of anthropology must remain for us the locus of an urgent problem—an open question on an open horizon.
This article intends to fill this gap in the literature by illustrating that useful lessons can be learned from Bourdieu and Boltanski’s critical investigation, as it provides crucial insights into the principal characteristics and functions of ideologies, including the ways in which they develop and operate in advanced capitalist societies.
The main goal of the paper is, therefore, threefold: first, to bridge the gap in the literature dealing with the Volume Two of Capital; second, to provide a re-definition of several Marxian concepts in the light of the role played by the rate of turnover of capital; third, to analyse the effect of the developments in the banking & finance industry on the turnover rate and, thereby, on the general rate of profit.
Capital’s humpback bridge: ‘financialisation’ and the rate of turnover in Marx’s economic theory · 2014 · DOIIt is in this spirit that I will consider Said's uneasy relationship with Marxism, one which has attracted frequent commentary, even if a larger study addressing the incompatibility of his own eclectic historiography with the totalizing explanatory method integral to this tradition remains to be written.
Whether a focus on the Marxist intellectual origins for the dictatorships in Italy and the Soviet [End Page 146] Union will be adequate for Gregor to repel the argument of the scholars in, for example, the recent Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick volume, Beyond Totalitarianism, remains to be explored.
Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism by A. James Gregor (review) · 2013 · DOIFor a long time, a significant limitation on the extent of his renown was the USSR where, during the era of “actually-existing socialism,” his works were never translated or published.
While she thought that the young Marx's celebration of labor had “lyrical accents,” she ultimately believed that Marx had neglected his own insights, embracing a blind worship of mechanization and a theory of history and revolution that was insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of workers.
Benjamin appeals to the significance of theology for historical materialism in order to overcome one of the decisive reasons why Marx's unique theoretical project, in its positivistic interpretations, was not understood with the necessary radicality and had been in danger of losing its explanatory power and revolutionary impulse.
In this paper, we respond to two central arguments made by Vernengo, and stand by our earlier arguments that (1) heterodox economists hurt themselves by self-labeling themselves as heterodox because mainstream economics no longer is limited to a neoclassical orthodoxy, and that (2) heterodox economists would be well served to spend less time writing about methodology and more time writing about policy issues.
The author goes on to suggest that while the LWL paradigm is a considerable advance on the Fixed Ability paradigm, and that it accords with this basic premise of Marxism, it is lacking in two respects: first, its inherent social democratic politics, and second, its lack of concern with the emancipatory potential of content in the curriculum.
This is borne out in the following critique of Fleetwood's contribution on the subject of labour markets, which, it is argued, is insufficiently attentive to recent developments in mainstream labour-market theory, considerably undervalues the contributions made from within the Marxist tradition, and offers an alternative that fails to specify the extent to which labour markets are inextricably linked to the political economy of capitalism.
The further point that I make remains an open question and regards the ideological motives that lead American analytic pragmatists to repeatedly try to institute such a misconstrued contact with Hegel - a contact that is necessarily bound to fail unless the historical dimension of Hegel’s philosophy is not only recognized but somehow integrated into the very idea of philosophy that one systematically practises.
It remains unclear to me whether we concur at this point as it seems to me that, on the one hand, Žižek argues that the “Real of desire,” that which one refuses “to integrate into one's symbolic universe,” and hence the unconscious, resides in knowledge, but, on the other hand, he designates the “belief” also as “unconscious” (231).
He detects a possible contradiction in my own view when he asks: how can Hodgson maintain at one and the same time that the scope of mainstream economics is not limited to any particular set of socio-economic systems and that its scope is limited to socio-economic systems in which and figure prominently? I welcome the opportunity to respond here.
Probably most common is an adversarial stance toward the profession itself, a belief that the mainstream theory that purports to capture the essential nature of economic processes and to assess these processes normatively is lacking somehow, unable to model what we strongly suspect is really there and equally defective in it prescriptive role.
The lack of consensus has only been aggravated by the general impression that Veblen's earliest and most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), says everything he has to say.
It is largely in terms of this system of metaphors that it becomes possible to understand how Marxism, which in its mature political economy was a critique of capitalism, could transcend this to become a gereralized theory of revolution, justifying revolu- tion at almost any time and any place in the modem world, even where there was scarcely any proletariat.
Most-cited papers in Political Economy and Marxism
- Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination · Economy and Society · 2020 · 185 citations
- An Assessment of the New Political Economy: Its Potential for the Social Sciences and for Sociology in Particular · Sociological Theory · 1985 · 147 citations
- Uneven and combined state capitalism · Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · 2021 · 136 citations
- Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism · Sociological Theory · 2020 · 135 citations
- Recent Theorizations of Corporatism: Reflections on a Growth Industry · British Journal of Sociology · 1980 · 121 citations
- Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism · Monthly Review · 2020 · 104 citations
- Exploitation of labor? Classical monopsony power and labor's share · Journal of Development Economics · 2021 · 95 citations
- The racial constitution of neoliberalism · Race & Class · 2021 · 80 citations
- On the necessity of prefigurative politics · Thesis Eleven · 2021 · 77 citations
- Meritocracy, Elitism and Inequality · The Political Quarterly · 2020 · 73 citations
Most recent work
- Socially Necessary Scholarly Labor: A Critique of the Labor-Knowledge Ratio in Contemporary Depth-Architecture Scholarship · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- The problem of knowledge in the Anthropocene · Globalizations · 2026
- Silvio Gesell: Beyond Left Versus Right · American Journal of Economics and Sociology · 2026
- Gesell: The Revolution Still Waiting to Happen Taking Stock of an Anarchistic Dream After 30 Years of Militancy · American Journal of Economics and Sociology · 2026
- Socialist Consumption Revisited: Paternalistic Policies and Consumer Needs during the Polish Crisis · The Historical Journal · 2026
- W. E. B. Du Bois and Economics: A Reappraisal · Journal of Economic Literature · 2026
- From Malthus to planetary boundaries: the genealogy of ‘carrying capacity’ as a political technology · Journal of Cultural Economy · 2026
- A Note on Karl Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts · World Marxist Review · 2026
- How Karl Marx Profoundly Influenced American Society · World marxist review. · 2026
- Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought · Constellations · 2026
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