The Fundamentals of Marxism: Intro to Political Economy

Red Menace

Politics, Society & Culture, Philosophy, News

4.9 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2021

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Alyson and Breht introduce the core concepts of Marxist political economy by an analysis of the history of political economy, core economic concepts in Marxism, and much more!

Outline for this episode with timestamps

Political Economy:

[5:00] Definition: Political economy as the study of economics as played out in reality. Economics in relation to society, production, culture, politics, etc.
[12:28] History: Adam Smith’s development of economics in the wealth of nations, alongside Mill’s principles of political economy.
[20:05] So what does Marxism have to do with political economy?
[33:31] Critique of capitalist economics today

The Details and Concepts

1) [35:30] the Means of Production and Productive Forces

2) [43:20] Class as a relation to Production

3) [47:00] Value, Use, and Exchange

4) [58:05] Surplus Value and Wages

5) [61:09] Money, Capital, and the M-C-M Cycle

6) [68:35] Commodity Fetishism Closing Questions:

Questions:

[74:43] Why does this matter? If Marxism is about revolution, what's the deal with all this abstract economic analysis?
[78:13] Marxian economics vs Marxism: what's the difference, is there an issue with the former?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And then.
0:01.0	The Hello everyone and welcome back to Red Menace. So we've done a lot of current
0:20.7	event episodes last while because there's been a lot of current events
0:24.1	events happening but now we're sort of getting back to our roots and we're doing
0:29.1	a more classic Red Menace theory text episode, but instead of focusing on a singular text, we're doing
0:35.8	what we've promised for a few months now, which is to do another intro to Marxism episode,
0:40.6	this time focusing on political economy. Our last intro to
0:44.8	Marxism was very well received and we've got a lot of positive feedback on that
0:48.7	but it was really centered around historical materialism, dialectics, etc. We touched a little bit on political
0:55.5	economy but with no real depth. So afterwards we both agreed we needed to go in that direction
1:00.5	and that's what we're here to do today. Thank you as always to all of our
1:03.9	Patreon supporters if you have a little bit of extra money laying around and you want to
1:07.6	get access to bonus content that Allison and I do, you know feel free to join
1:12.0	our Patreon. If not money's tight for everybody we
1:15.3	understand something as easy as sharing this episode with a friend or
1:18.8	leaving a positive review on Apple Podcasts does a lot and it really is something we deeply appreciate.
1:26.6	But without further ado, let's get into this big sort of topic.
1:30.5	It was challenging in some ways, but hopefully, you know, we'll provide a solid introduction to this element of Marxism which can sometimes be overlooked or under-emphasized.
1:41.0	So with all of that in mind, Allison, what do we want to do? What do we want to accomplish with this episode overall?
1:47.2	Yeah, so again, this is kind of, you can think of it maybe as a compliment to the Marxism 101 episode that we did. So we did that
1:54.0	introductory episode and like Brett got at, we were really focused on dialectics and
1:58.7	historical materialism which kind of have some of the more kind of clear
	...

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