Paul Burkett
Biographic Data
| ID | 339883 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Burkett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Burkett |
| SIGNATURE | BURKETT P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 179 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
My Notes on 'The Return of Nature
In August 2020, ecosocialist thinker, MR author, and jazz musician Paul Burkett wrote to MR editor John Bellamy Foster about the latter's recent book, The Return of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020). Burkett's short correspondence revealed his deep understanding of the throughline tying the ecologically inspired thought of Marx and Engels to the later innovations of Roy Bhaskar, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, and others, all the way up to Fo…
Eleven Theses on Music
This lyrical vignette from the recently departed Paul Burkett is the author's final, posthumously published piece for Monthly Review. In it, the eminent ecological economist and jazz musician muses on the nature of creativity, technology, and the corporatization of music—and the struggle to decommodify it, freeing musicians and their craft from the confines of capitalism
Value Isn't Everything
The rapid advances in Marxian ecology in the last two decades have given rise to extensive debates within the left, reflecting competing conceptions of theory and practice in an age of planetary ecological and social crisis. One key area of dispute is the attempt by a growing number of radical environmental thinkers to deconstruct the labor theory of value in order to bring everything in existence within a single commodity logic. For many in Gree…
An Eco-Revolutionary Tipping Point
To solve the climate crisis, we need a system in which working people and their communities collectively and democratically regulate production and other interactions with their material and social environment. To deny that this crisis is hardwired into capitalism, and that we need a new system to deal with it, is just as misleading and dangerous as to deny the existence of human-induced global warming.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this…
Marx and the Earth
A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Fos…
On Eco-Revolutionary Prudence
But as Brecht explained in his “Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House,” it is irrational to cling hopelessly to a burning house, as the flames lick its walls and singe our brows, in sheer terror of
Lukács on Science
The rejection of the ‘dialectics of nature’ has long been thought of as the most fundamental factor distinguishing Western Marxism from official Soviet-style Marxism. Yet, in Tailism and the Dialectic , Georg Lukács – perhaps the most influential figure in Western Marxism – strongly endorses the existence of an objective dialectic in nature. A close examination of Lukács’s main writings on science shows, however, that he still in effect denied th…
Classical Marxism and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Today's understanding of the significance of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's work for the development of both ecological economics in particular and ecology in general has been hindered by persistent claims that Engels (and by imputation Marx) rejected the second law of thermodynamics. It is demonstrated here through textual analysis that Engels criticized not the entropy law itself but the extrapolation of this into the “heat death theory of th…
The Podolinsky Myth
The relationship between Marxism and ecology has been sullied by Martinez-Alier's influential interpretation of Engels's reaction to the agricultural energetics of Sergei Podolinsky. This introduction to the first English translation of Podolinsky's 1883 Die Neue Zeit piece evaluates Martinez-Alier's interpretation in light of the four distinct but closely related articles Podolinsky published over the years 1880–3. This evaluation also emphasise…
China, Capitalist Accumulation, and Labor
Most economists continue to celebrate China as one of the most successful developing countries in modern times. We, however, are highly critical of the Chinese growth experience. China's growth has been driven by the intensified exploitation of the country's farmers and workers, who have been systematically dispossessed through the break-up of the communes, the resultant collapse of health and education services, and massive state-enterprise layo…
Marxism and Ecological Economics
This book undertakes the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and shows how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. The analysis is developed in terms of four basic issues: (1) nature and economic value; (2) the treatment of nature as capital; (3) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (4) the concept of sustainable development. In each cas…
Total Factor Productivity
Total factor productivity (TFP) is a central concept in the mainstream analysis of economic growth. Using aggregate production functions, economists estimate the shares of economic growth explained by increases in capital, labor, and (in some applications) natural resource inputs. The residual of unexplained growth is then ascribed to “disembodied” technological advance or TFP. This article develops a radical ecological-economic critique of TFP a…
China and the Dynamics of Transnational Accumulation
Two Stages of Ecosocialism
Metabolism, energy, and entropy in Marx's critique of political economy
Toward A Green and Red Theory of Human Development
Toward a green and red theory of human development
Entropy in Ecological Economics
Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development
In developed capitalist countries, debates over the economics of socialism have mostly concentrated on questions of information, incentives, and efficiency in resource allocation. This focus on "socialist calculation" reflects the mainly academic context of these discussions. By contrast, for anti-capitalist movements and post-revolutionary regimes on the capitalist periphery, socialism as a form of human development has been a prime concern. A n…
Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism
This introduction to “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces” reassesses Sergei Podolinsky’s place in the history of ecological economics together with Marx and Engels’s reaction to Podolinsky’s work. The authors show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Podolinsky did not establish a plausible thermodynamic basis for the labor theory of value that could have been adopted by Marx and Engels. Moreover, Marx and Engels did not neglect nor abru…
Marx's reproduction schemes and the environment
On Ben Fine's Social Capital versus Social Theory
China and Socialism
The Chinese economic experience remains the source of important lessons about the challenges of building socialism. However, the current lessons are mostly negative. Tragically, the Chinese government's program of "market reforms," which was allegedly supposed to reinvigorate socialism, has instead led the country down a slippery slope toward an increasingly capitalist, foreign-dominated development path. The resulting domestic and international …
China and Socialism
China's post-reform rapid economic rise has led many progressives to view the country as a development model whose experience proves that there are viable alternative paths to growth within the existing capitalist world system. Significantly, although not widely acknowledged by most of these progressives, many mainstream economists have also embraced China as a development model.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where …
China and Socialism
We have argued that it is wrong to celebrate China as an economic success story or development model. But why is it so important how socialists and other progressives understand China? Is this all just an academic desire to properly interpret the Chinese experience, or a political sectarianism based on an a priori notion of "pure" socialism? The answer is no; the stakes are arguably much higher and more meaningful.This article can also be found a…
Metabolism, energy, and entropy in Marx's critique of political economy
A critique of "catch-up" theories of development
The Asian crisis has rekindled the debate between advocates of neoliberalism, left-wing neoliberalism, and developmental-statism over the best institutions and policies for achieving economic development. However, this debate continues to generate far more heat than light. One reason is that, despite their alleged differences, all three mainstream theories share a common conception of development as "catch-up." A second and even more important re…
Contradictions of Capitalist Industrialization in East Asia
According to most development economists, the economic "miracle" of the ASEAN-3, following the earlier experiences of Japan and the Asian NIEs, demonstrates the benefits of export-led growth. This conclusion is shared by neoliberals and structural-institutionalists, despite disagreements over the role of state intervention. Both views are represented in increasingly influential "flying geese" theories, which credit regional economic dynamics, in …
East Asia and the crisis of development theory
China and the Dynamics of Transnational Accumulation
Nature's ‘Free Gifts' and the Ecological Significance of Value
This article argues that far from containing an anti-ecological bias, Marx's ‘free appropriation’ category clarifies the contradictions between the true sources of wealth (the combination of nature and social labor) and capitalism's monetary representation of wealth as abstract labor time. On this basis, it is shown that some of the most popular ecological criticisms of Marx's value analysis fail to grasp Marx's basic demarcation of value, exchan…
Labour, Eco-Regulation, and Value
In an earlier article, I responded to Ted Benton's charge that Marx and Engels, upon realising the political conservatism associated with Malthusian natural limits arguments, retreated from materialism to a social-constructionist conception of human production and reproduction. I showed that Benton artificially dichotomises the material and social elements of historical materialism, thereby misreading Marx and Engels's recognition of the historic…
Nature and Value Theory
On some common misconceptions about nature and Marx's critique of political economy∗
The Podolinsky Myth
The relationship between Marxism and ecology has been sullied by Martinez-Alier's influential interpretation of Engels's reaction to the agricultural energetics of Sergei Podolinsky. This introduction to the first English translation of Podolinsky's 1883 Die Neue Zeit piece evaluates Martinez-Alier's interpretation in light of the four distinct but closely related articles Podolinsky published over the years 1880–3. This evaluation also emphasise…
A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism
Recent decades have seen a rethinking and renewal of Marxism on various levels, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s when New-Left movements in the developed capitalist countries combined with Maoist, Guevarist, and other Third-World liberation struggles to challenge the ossified theory and practice of Soviet-style communism and traditional social democracy. More recently, the rethinking of Marxism has been driven largely by the collapse of the Sovie…
Lukács on Science
The rejection of the ‘dialectics of nature’ has long been thought of as the most fundamental factor distinguishing Western Marxism from official Soviet-style Marxism. Yet, in Tailism and the Dialectic , Georg Lukács – perhaps the most influential figure in Western Marxism – strongly endorses the existence of an objective dialectic in nature. A close examination of Lukács’s main writings on science shows, however, that he still in effect denied th…
Two Stages of Ecosocialism
Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development
In developed capitalist countries, debates over the economics of socialism have mostly concentrated on questions of information, incentives, and efficiency in resource allocation. This focus on "socialist calculation" reflects the mainly academic context of these discussions. By contrast, for anti-capitalist movements and post-revolutionary regimes on the capitalist periphery, socialism as a form of human development has been a prime concern. A n…
Fusing Red and Green
Review of Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism by James O'Connor.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Value, Capital and Nature
Marx's critique of political economy is interpreted in terms of the contradiction between: (1) the necessary role of nature, along with labor, as a source of use value; (2) value's representation of wealth by the abstract labor time objectified in commodities. Capitalism's tendency to despoil its natural environment is constituted in the basic relation of capitalist exploitation and the corresponding value form of the products of labor and nature…
Poverty Crisis in the Third World
While free market ideology is on the rise, both in the developed countries and in the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, and China, the global capitalist system is entering the third decade of a profound structural crisis. The costs of this crisis and of the capitalist response to it—borne largely by the exploited and oppressed peoples of the periphery—are reflected in the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, here…
Entropy in Ecological Economics
Ecology and marx's vision of communism
(2003). Ecology and marx's vision of communism. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 41-72
Marx and the Earth
A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Fos…
China and Socialism
China and socialism ... during the three decades following the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), it seemed as if these words would forever be joined in an inspiring unity. China had been forced to suffer the humiliation of defeat in the 1840–42 Opium War with Great Britain and the ever-expanding treaty port system that followed it. The Chinese people suffered under not only despotic rule by their emperor and then a serie…
Progressive capitalism, crisis, and class struggle
Despite the recent upsurge of global economic instability and anti-capitalist protest, many left economists and progressive policy programs continue to draw their main inspiration from the purported equity and efficiency of particular varieties of capitalism. This tendency derives its legitimacy in large part from 'progressive competitiveness' interpretations of the postwar Japanese experience. Unfortunately, these interpretations and the politic…
Crisis and Recovery in East Asia
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
The Left-Liberal Consensus on Japan
Although most Americans are angry about the deterioration in their living and working conditions, mainstream analysts and decision-makers have nonetheless been remarkably successful in convincing them that only free-market policies can ensure the economic competitiveness required to achieve victory in the global marketplace and a reversal of negative trends. Many progressives have understandably responded to this successful ideological offensive …
Value Isn't Everything
The rapid advances in Marxian ecology in the last two decades have given rise to extensive debates within the left, reflecting competing conceptions of theory and practice in an age of planetary ecological and social crisis. One key area of dispute is the attempt by a growing number of radical environmental thinkers to deconstruct the labor theory of value in order to bring everything in existence within a single commodity logic. For many in Gree…
Interest rate restrictions and deposit opportunities for small savers in developing countries
This article argues that by forcing financial intermediaries (FI) to substitute implicit interest for monetary interest payments, deposit rate ceilings may increase the cost of savings mobilisation, especially from non‐wealthy households. This mechanism may partially explain the lack of small savers’ deposit opportunities in developing countries. A simple model is used to elucidate this mechanism, as well as the effects of financial technology, i…
Critical notes on the ‘free rider problem’ in collective action
(1986). Critical notes on the ‘free rider problem’ in collective action. Forum for Social Economics: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 29-43
A note on competition under capitalism
The author thanks Fiona Atkins and Michael Cowen for helpful comments, and Debbie Zamparello for typing this paper
Instrumental Justice and Social Econommics
*0034-6764/87/1201-313/$1050/0. **Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Miami, P.O. Box 248126, Coral Cables, Florida 33124. The author extends gratitude to two anonymous referees for helpful comments, and to Debbie Zamparello for professionally typing this paper. Notes *0034-6764/87/1201-313/$1050/0. **Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Miami, P.O. Box 248126, Coral Cables, Florida 33124. The author…
Financial innovation, Crises, and the contradictions of central bank policy under capitalism
This timely contribution to Marxian monetary theory focuses on investment fund money and explains its implications for financial markets, capitalist crisis and central bank policy
A Re-Examination of the Monetary Model of Exchange Market Pressure
Richard C. K. Burdekin, Paul Burkett, A Re-Examination of the Monetary Model of Exchange Market Pressure: Canada, 1963-1988, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 677-681
Poverty Crisis in the Third World
While free market ideology is on the rise, both in the developed countries and in the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, and China, the global capitalist system is entering the third decade of a profound structural crisis. The costs of this crisis and of the capitalist response to it—borne largely by the exploited and oppressed peoples of the periphery—are reflected in the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, here…
Some Comments on ‘Capital in General and the Structure of Marx's Capital’
Burkett provides a dialectical reading of the structure of Marx's Capital and criticises Heinrich's claim that the distinction between ‘Capital in general’ and ‘many capitals' broke down. Burkett further argues that his preferred reading provides a more satisfactory account of Marx's method and purpose in Capital
The Bankruptcy of Mainstream Economics
Review of The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s by Paul Krugman.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Development and Contradictions of U.S. Capitalism
Review of Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States by Richard Du Boff.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Forgetting the Lessons of the Great Depression
0034–6764/94/0301–60/$l.50/0. I extend gratitude to Paul Sweezy, Richard Du Boff, Richard Lotspeich, Richard Burdekin, two anonymous referees and the editor of this journal for helpful commentary on prior drafts, to Jim Devine for allowing access to his important work on the Great Depression prior to its publication, and to Jian Geng for research assistance. Notes 0034–6764/94/0301–60/$l.50/0. I extend gratitude to Paul Sweezy, Richard Du Boff, R…
Greenspan on Out-of-Control Money and the Future of U.S. Capitalism
Federal Reserve pronouncements usually yield little insight into the real functions and limitations of monetary policy or into ruling-class thinking on the prospects for U.S. capitalism. During financial crises, the Fed may affirm its "readiness as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system," as Chairman Alan Greenspan put it following the October 1987 crash. But even such emergency bulletins are more designed to allay pub…
The Strange US Economic Recovery and Clintonomics Historically Considered
Financial Transformation for What
Review of Transforming the U.S. Financial System: Equity and Efficiency for the 21st Century edited by Gary A. Dymski, Gerald Epstein, and Robert Pollin.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Capitalization verses socialization of nature∗
Value, Capital and Nature
Marx's critique of political economy is interpreted in terms of the contradiction between: (1) the necessary role of nature, along with labor, as a source of use value; (2) value's representation of wealth by the abstract labor time objectified in commodities. Capitalism's tendency to despoil its natural environment is constituted in the basic relation of capitalist exploitation and the corresponding value form of the products of labor and nature…
The Global Public Intellectual
Review of Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary by Samir Amin.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Left-Liberal Consensus on Japan
Although most Americans are angry about the deterioration in their living and working conditions, mainstream analysts and decision-makers have nonetheless been remarkably successful in convincing them that only free-market policies can ensure the economic competitiveness required to achieve victory in the global marketplace and a reversal of negative trends. Many progressives have understandably responded to this successful ideological offensive …
On some common misconceptions about nature and Marx's critique of political economy∗
Nature in Marx Reconsidered
Alfred Schmidt's contribution to the ecological interpretation of Marx is reassessed from the standpoint of Marx's value-form analysis of capitalism and Marx's historical and materialist approach to nature under communism. Although Schmidt provides some useful insights into the relations between class exploitation and ecological destruction in Marx's view, his interpretation ultimately lapses into an uncritical determinism similar to that of offi…
Democracy and Economic Transitions
In Economic Reforms in New Democracies, Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Jose Maria Maravall, and Adam Przeworski argue that the institutionalization of class compromise in state policy-making bodies and procedures is the key to sustained economic growth and to the consolidation of more representative-democratic forms of government in peripheral and former Soviet-type countries. The book's importance stems partly from its attempt to reinvigorate, for…
Labour, Eco-Regulation, and Value
In an earlier article, I responded to Ted Benton's charge that Marx and Engels, upon realising the political conservatism associated with Malthusian natural limits arguments, retreated from materialism to a social-constructionist conception of human production and reproduction. I showed that Benton artificially dichotomises the material and social elements of historical materialism, thereby misreading Marx and Engels's recognition of the historic…
A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism
Recent decades have seen a rethinking and renewal of Marxism on various levels, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s when New-Left movements in the developed capitalist countries combined with Maoist, Guevarist, and other Third-World liberation struggles to challenge the ossified theory and practice of Soviet-style communism and traditional social democracy. More recently, the rethinking of Marxism has been driven largely by the collapse of the Sovie…
Contradictions of Capitalist Industrialization in East Asia
According to most development economists, the economic "miracle" of the ASEAN-3, following the earlier experiences of Japan and the Asian NIEs, demonstrates the benefits of export-led growth. This conclusion is shared by neoliberals and structural-institutionalists, despite disagreements over the role of state intervention. Both views are represented in increasingly influential "flying geese" theories, which credit regional economic dynamics, in …
East Asia and the crisis of development theory
Economics (62 works) · Political science (59 works) · Sociology (53 works) · Law (50 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (41 works) · Philosophy (37 works) · Politics (32 works) · Neoclassical economics (31 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Political economy (26 works)