Open research questions in Political Economy and Marxism
1,211 gap statements mined from Political Economy and Marxism papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 12,212 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.
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What the literature leaves open
The paper identifies a gap in the current debates on capitalism and violence in Latin America, which usually do not refer to capitalism in its postcolonial form. It highlights the need for a materialist analysis of necropolitics, focusing on the relationship between violence, capitalism, and exploitation.
The paper highlights the need to re-examine the status of economic theory in relation to labour issues.
The paper identifies the challenge of understanding the structural limits of paternalistic governance. The paper highlights the challenge of considering consumer needs in economic policy-making. The paper notes the challenge of analyzing the systemic logic of socialist consumption.
Socialist Consumption Revisited: Paternalistic Policies and Consumer Needs during the Polish Crisis · 2026 · DOIThe paper highlights the need to analyze the systemic logic of socialist consumption and the late 1970s debates on needs and rational consumption.
Socialist Consumption Revisited: Paternalistic Policies and Consumer Needs during the Polish Crisis · 2026 · DOIA gap is revealed between dominant macroeconomic narratives and everyday experiences of being dispossessed. The study identifies a lack of understanding of the emotional and social dimensions of economic transformation. The article highlights the need to consider the moral economy of self-management and workers' understanding of how they built their factories and communities.
FROM SELF-MANAGEMENT TO POSTSOCIALISM: INDUSTRIAL WORKERS’ SILENCED EXPERIENCES OF DISPOSSESSION IN SLOVENIA · 2026 · DOIThe paper suggests the need for further research on the concept of technofascism. It highlights the importance of analyzing the implications of technofascism for democratic societies. The paper suggests the need for research on resistance and mobilization against authoritarianism.
Les racines idéologiques du technofascisme: entre accélérationnisme néoréactionnaire et révolution papillon · 2026 · DOIIt highlights the need for further research on the implications of technofascism for democratic societies.
Les racines idéologiques du technofascisme: entre accélérationnisme néoréactionnaire et révolution papillon · 2026 · DOIHubert 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.
There is a lack of criticism of Bloch's work in the Czech environment. The article identifies a need to understand the differences between Bloch's conception of Marxism and Soviet-type Marxism.
Future research could explore the implications of simulacrum for our understanding of authenticity. The author suggests that further analysis of postmodern theory is necessary for developing a critical understanding of contemporary society.
When Simulacrum Reigns Supreme: Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield and the Utopia of Living Authentically · 2026 · DOIFuture research should explore the implications of Malthus' concept of effective demand for economic policy and decision-making. The study suggests that further analysis of the Malthusian scheme and its implications for distribution and development is needed.
The study highlights the need for a deeper analysis of the relationship between social structure and balanced development.
The paper highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the concept of solidarism in the context of sustainable development.
Solidarność i zrównoważony rozwój: współczesna interpretacja doktryny solidaryzmu Léona Bourgeois · 2026 · DOIFuture research could explore the development of a socialism from below-inspired alternative to conventional anthropology textbooks. Further study could examine the implications of this alternative for social justice and class struggle movements.
Contemplating Capitalism: How Introductory Anthropology Texts Depoliticize Class, Oppression, and the Climate · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies a gap in the conventional anthropology textbooks, specifically their lack of rigorous materialist analysis. The author argues that this gap has significant implications for social theory and practical politics.
Contemplating Capitalism: How Introductory Anthropology Texts Depoliticize Class, Oppression, and the Climate · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies a gap in the understanding of how value is created in networks. It argues that the current understanding of value creation is based on a flawed premise that every transaction has two sides that cancel.
Where Value Is Created - Marx's Circulation Problem, the Railway, and the Emergence of Information Exchange · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies a gap in the understanding of Quesnay's theory of value, which is often considered underdeveloped. The author notes that Quesnay's theory is often misunderstood or misrepresented in the literature.
It highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the concept of development and its relation to political economy, anthropology, and history. The paper also touches on the lack of attention to the material and cultural ambiguities of social transformation in development studies.
It also highlights the difficulty of balancing the need for institutional design with the risk of reproducing capitalist logics. The paper notes the challenge of navigating the tension between utopianism and Marxist conceptions of social relations.
The paper notes that the founders of social sciences sought to identify laws specific to a given type of society, while Bernard Lahire focuses on universally valid laws.
Lois d’évolution générales et lois d’évolution interne des sociétés: Une lecture croisée de Bernard Lahire et Alain Testart · 2026 · DOIThe author argues that existing theories of authenticity are inadequate for navigating contemporary society.
When Simulacrum Reigns Supreme: Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield and the Utopia of Living Authentically · 2026 · DOIThe discussion on Marxism was not only aimed at Marxism but also at classical liberalism.
The paper argues that the restriction to outputs in Hungarian is incoherent.
From Marx to Kant? A Note on Ádám Takács’s paper “The antinomies of man and the detotalization of thinking: escaping from Marxism towards Kant in Hungarian philosophy in the 1970–1980s,” Studies in East European Thought, September, 2025 · 2026 · DOIThere are many factors that motivate a reading and re-reading of Das Kapital. The book aims to provide a useful supplementary guide to the dense volume.
It argues that the current debate on utopia may be limited by its failure to articulate a horizon that truly transcends the proclaimed end-of-history.
Most-cited papers in Political Economy and Marxism
- Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital · American Journal of Sociology · 1988 · 21,104 citations
- Neoliberalizing Space · Antipode · 2002 · 3,073 citations
- The New Spirit of Capitalism · International Journal of Politics Culture and Society · 2005 · 1,875 citations
- Production, Consumption, Prosumption · Journal of Consumer Culture · 2010 · 1,548 citations
- Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology · American Journal of Sociology · 1999 · 965 citations
- Toward a Theory of Revolution · American Sociological Review · 1962 · 873 citations
- The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis · Comparative Studies in Society and History · 1974 · 796 citations
- Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction · Antipode · 2001 · 795 citations
- Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization · Economy and Society · 2009 · 750 citations
- The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets · Harvard Law Review · 1998 · 742 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 battle for plastic hegemony: the petrochemical historical bloc and the UN Global Plastics Treaty · Review of International Political Economy · 2026
- Geographies of subsumption · Dialogues in Human Geography · 2026
- Indonesian nickel sovereignty and global raced finance: the value of Element 28 in an age of ‘transition’ · Review of International Political Economy · 2026
- The problem of knowledge in the Anthropocene · Globalizations · 2026
- Regulation theory and socioeconomic metabolism to characterize economy-wide degrowth patterns: The case of Special Period Cuba. · Ecological Economics · 2026
- The fossil-AI nexus: petrostate capitalism, computing power, and the production of powered land · New Political Economy · 2026
- Alternative approaches to labor values and prices of production: Theory and evidence · Structural Change and Economic Dynamics · 2026
- From local site to global logics. Infrastructure, capitalism and violence · Political Geography · 2026
- The extractive foundations of Bretton Woods: gold, apartheid, and the racial politics of monetary order · Review of International Political Economy · 2026
Find a gap in your own Political Economy and Marxism sub-topic
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