Two-logic framework As Branko Milanovic has recently remarked, there are some famous books whose ideas have been so absorbed into social sciences that the books themselves are no longer read.
Reinvigorating Marx: A Critical Exploration of Value Theory in 21st-Century Capitalism
MARX’S VALUE THEORY IN A NEW ERA Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century Through the Prism of Value by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts aims to explain 21st-century capitalism through Ma
Foreign Direct Investment: The Opium for Development
A Marxist Take on Investment Hopes Last week I presented our research (with Boris Kagarlitsky) at the annual meeting of the Armenian Economic Association in Yerevan. The research takes the Marxist
Russia’s Delinking from the West: The Great Equalizer
In this post, I discuss the recent trend towards more income equality in Russia. Mainstream economics explain it by the country’s transition to war economy. I apply Marxist analysis to demonstrat
Dependency, Corruption and Prison
It is always a pleasant surprise when your research comes with unexpected results. Getting confirmation of your ideas is somewhat boring but unexpected results challenge you intellectually, prompti
Dependency Theory After 50 Years: Development, United Nations, War in Ukraine and the Global Fragmentation
This book by the prominent Argentinian economist Claudio Katz explores the contemporary relevance of the dependency theory: to what extent does it explain today’s world? Dependency theory: the fu
Economic lessons for 2024: Marxist perspective
As the year draws to a close, what are the economic takeaways? Global rate of exploitation increases The first big news: Marx is right. Some of us always knew it, but this year Tomás Rotta and Ris
In memoriam Walt Rostow
Walt Whitman Rostow died 20 years ago. His was a life of turns and twists, incredible career achievements and falls. Coming from the humble background of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, he did h
The uneasy balance of Western colonialism in Africa (Walter Rodney vs. Paul Bairoch)
This is not a real review; rather this is a homage to two great, but very different books, written 20 years apart: Walter Rodney’s How West Underdeveloped Africa published in 1972 and Paul Bairoc
What does Africa’s post-colonial history teach us about the war in Ukraine?
I should immediately apologize to the readers for the deliberately provocative and (somewhat) misleading title of this review. This is a review of Martin Welz’s book “Africa Since Decolonizatio