John McDermott

Corporate Form: A Unitary Theory of Technology, Property and Social Class

In corporate form, the constituting feature of the modern corporation, a top management monopolizing capitalist functions per se controls through financial and policy mechanisms a middle element of supervisors, engineers and other technicians and professionals who in turn control by administrative/technological means a work force which simply labors. Corporate form is simultaneously an ensemble of productive relationships, a property form, and the dynamic structure of capitalist accumulation, hence embodies the main class relationships of contemporary capitalism.

Future Time in Microeconomics: An Alternate Approach to its Study

The article is an immanent critique of mainstream microeconomics, particularly of its treatment of time. In support of that, a behavioral microeconomic paradigm is formulated. The article includes an analysis of sets of transactions that require positive time intervals for their completion such that they are not comprehended within Arrow-Hahn general equilibria criteria. JEL classification: B21, B41, D50

Economics and Mis-Mathematics

There are at least two different infinites: countable ones such as the Integers, the Rational Numbers, and the Algebraic Numbers, and non-countable ones, such as for the Real Number continuum. These latter are required for the Calculus, Game and Probability theory, the Theory of Vector Spaces, and so on. But under “methodological individualism”, all competitive transactions must be individually discriminable, hence countable. Thus, it is a mis-mathematics to cast them, as has been the practice, in the continuum and to perform, as economists do, unrestricted Real Number operations upon them. The chapter explores the limits imposed when the Real Numbers must in the general case be restricted to only instrumental use, and not, as now, as embodying substantial truth in Economics.

From “Employees” to “Servants”

The past half century has seen a successful employer attack on worker rights and advantages everywhere in the world, threatening to re-establish the pre-modern “servant” in place of the modern “employee” and, out in the world of “globalization”, imposing new forms of labor bondage. This trend has been founded in the now baseless idea of a distinct, self-funding “private enterprise economy”. Thus the proposal, explored here, of extending full citizen rights—of assembly, speech, and so on—into the workplace itself.

We Invest More than They

From 1970 to 2010, public investment in the US economy outweighed the private variety by about 1.8 to 1. A stand-alone, self-generating “private-sector economy” is an ideological construct, not an analytical one. Most of this investment went to create, alter, and maintain a modern labor force. This reflects the world-historic shift in the late nineteenth century in Europe, North America, and Japan as the “spontaneous” generation of their labor forces gave way to producing and shaping them via massive, public investment in, especially, education and training. Bizarrely, modern Economics “science” conceives of the labor force as an “unproduced input” into the economy—a free gift of nature! Supporting data tables are appended at the end of the chapter.

The Paradoxes of Market Economics

For Adam Smith and his contemporary followers, an economy is comprised almost solely of individual transactions. This idea is called “methodological individualism”. For the theory based on this to be supportable, those transactions must be both price-competitive and be fully completed within instants of time, as if at an auction. But both these “system” requirements are strongly belied by the facts, as is shown.

Economic Science and Social Reform

Contemporary Economics theory prescribes “perfect” knowledge and “absolute” freedom from constraint on its economic actors. This triumph of the subjunctive prescription over the indicative description precludes treating Economics as in any way an empirical discipline on the model of the flourishing empirical sciences. Here Economics’ practitioners have fallen into (or retained) pre-modern habits of thought involving, as we have seen, both empirical arbitrariness and mathematical and other theoretical gaffes. Researchers have amassed troves of information and analysis about economic behavior, and this could—should—provide the basis for a socially reforming empirical Economics science stripped off its now omnipresent subjunctive and ideological trappings, as is here explored.

One hundred years of ???☆10

Abstract Marxian socialism has bequeathed contradictory ideas about the course of capitalist development. There is “the proletariat,” the anticipation that workers were being simplified into a uniform mass, living at the bottom of society, and “having no country of their own.” On the other hand, there is an historical tendency for the relations and even the forces of production to become more deeply social in character, ultimately to burst the confining integument of private property and capitalism itself. Modern socialism continues to be influenced by echoes of that proletariat, but has tended to ignore opportunities provided by the increasingly social character of our mode of production, assuming that those are tasks to be taken up on some distant tomorrow. If the decline of socialism is to be radically reversed, the proletarian echo will have to be muted even further, and the increasing socialization of the mode of production taken up as an existing threat and a striking opportunity. The expectation of a revolutionary proletariat neither can nor does function as the underpinning for socialist strategies of change. Of course, that is not the same thing as socialist sensitivity to the very poor and to inequality generally, but the two are often confused. If there were such a thing as proletarianization, then a realistic and ultimately dominant political movement could be based upon it, but contemporary socialist sympathy for the poor and the denied has much more morality than strategy to it, and to that extent does not supply a sufficiently acute political perspective. I am not saying, “Devil take the poor,” nor denying their permanence while capitalism still exists. But an anticapitalist transformation of society now requires a different socialist fulcrum.