Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation,competitive markets,price systems,private property,property rights recognition,voluntary exchange,and wage labor. In a market economy,decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth,property,or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. It defines neoliberal capitalist policies that result in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land. Such policies are visible in many western nations from the 1970s and to the present day. Harvey argues these policies are guided mainly by four practices:privatization,financialization,management and manipulation of crises,and state redistributions.
Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy,but rejected Marx's stages of history,and economic history generally.
Leo Victor Panitch was a distinguished research professor of political science and a Canada Research Chair in comparative political economy at York University. From 1985 until the 2021 edition,he served as co-editor of the Socialist Register,which describes itself as "an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left". Panitch himself saw the Register as playing a major role in developing Marxism's conceptual framework for advancing a democratic,co-operative and egalitarian socialist alternative to capitalist competition,exploitation,and insecurity.
David W. Harvey is a British-born Marxist economic geographer,podcaster,and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
The history of capitalism is diverse and the concept of capitalism has many debated roots. The history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms. Capital accumulated by a variety of methods,at a variety of scales,became associated with much variation in the concentration of wealth and economic power. Capitalism gradually became the dominant economic system throughout the world.
Peter B. Evans is an American academic. He is a Faculty Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and Professor of Sociology emeritus at the University of California,Berkeley.
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist,sociologist and world-systems analyst,from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Sam Gindin is a Canadian intellectual and activist known for his expertise on the labour movement and the economics of the automobile industry.
Amiya Kumar Bagchi is an Indian political economist.
Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology,where he directs the Centre for Social Change. From 2020-21 he was professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-19,distinguished professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand Wits School of Governance. Before that,from 2004,he was senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,where he directed the Centre for Civil Society. His research interests include political economy,environment,social policy,and geopolitics.
Kees van der Pijl is a Dutch political scientist who was professor of international relations at the University of Sussex. He is known for his critical approach to global political economy and has published,amongst others,Flight MH17,Ukraine and the New Cold War. Prism of Disaster (2018),a trilogy on Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy;Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq (2006);Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998);and The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class.
Li Minqi is a Chinese political economist,world-systems analyst,and historical social scientist,currently professor of Economics at the University of Utah. Li is known as an advocate of the Chinese New Left and as a Marxian economist.
John S. Saul is a Canadian political economist and activist whose work has focused on the liberation struggles of southern Africa,from the 1960s to the present. In 2004,he was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,in 2010 was granted an honorary doctorate by Victoria University within the University of Toronto,and,in 2011,a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Association of African Studies.
Kenneth Alfred Francis Good was an Australian academic and formerly Professor of Political Science at the University of Botswana. He specializes in the analysis of the political economy of African and Melanesian nations. In 2005 he was ejected from Botswana for criticizing the government,later winning a favorable judgement from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’Rights.
In Marxist theory,society consists of two parts:the base and superstructure. The base refers to the mode of production which includes the forces and relations of production into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life. The superstructure refers to society's other relationships and ideas not directly relating to production including its culture,institutions,roles,rituals,religion,media,and state. The relation of the two parts is not strictly unidirectional. The superstructure can affect the base. However,the influence of the base is predominant.
Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.
Lionel R Cliffe was an English political economist and activist whose work focused on the struggle for land rights and freedom in Africa from the 1960s. He was Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds.
Sir Ronald Ormiston Sinclair,KBE,was a New Zealand lawyer and judge who served in the British Colonial Service.
Barbara Harriss-White is an English economist and emeritus professor of development studies. She was trained in geography,agricultural science,agricultural economics and self-taught in development economics. In the 1990s,she helped to create the multi- and inter- disciplinary thematic discipline of development studies in Oxford Department of International Development;and in 2005-7 founded Oxford's Contemporary South Asia Programme. She has developed an approach to the understanding of Indian rural development and its informal economy,grounded in political economy and decades of what the economic anthropologist Polly Hill called ‘field economics’.
