The job guarantee as proposed by Modern Monetary Theorists would provide a publicly funded job with defined wage and benefits to anyone who desired one, with public spending on the program varying automatically and countercyclically in response to take-up of…
For Marx and many Marxists, money is based in a commodity; in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it is not, being based instead in a social relationship that holds more generally than just to commodity production and exchange. Even so, to…
Value, in Marxist theory, is an amount of abstract labor that is measured in hours of simple labor or a monetary equivalent. Marx argued that complex labor is reducible, for the purposes of commodity production and exchange, to amounts of…
While revisiting old files on Marx and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I came across an interesting discussion. In it, somebody raised an argument that seems worth addressing: MMT treats money as a public utility, while Marxism treats it as an…
An economy’s minimum wage equates a unit of the currency to an amount of labor time. For instance, in Marxist terms, a minimum wage of $15/hour sets a dollar equal to 4 minutes of simple labor power. At a macro…
Generations of economics students have been misled into believing that banks are reserve constrained. Even today, though most specialist monetary economists would likely cringe at the idea, there are widely used textbooks that teach this mistaken view to a new…
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) makes clear that, for currency-issuing governments, the macroeconomic constraint on fiscal policy is resource availability, not revenue. This is sometimes summarized as “the constraint on fiscal policy is inflation” in recognition of the link between resource…
Previously I have discussed how Marx’s well known aggregate equalities have been shown to hold under single-system interpretations of his theory of value. In the July 2018 edition of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, there is a noteworthy paper by…
A perennial question for Marxists is how to overturn capitalism. Will institutional changes that improve the lot of workers but fall short of ending capitalism immediately help or harm this cause? To the extent that social struggle is a learning-by-doing…
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) offers an understanding of sovereign (and non-sovereign) currencies that is applicable to a wide range of economic systems, including capitalist and socialist ones. Irrespective of the personal political preferences of its proponents, the theoretical framework in…
