Radical Economics

RADICAL ECONOMICS. The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), founded in 1968, became the principal consortium of radical economists in the United States. Protesting against the war in Vietnam, the nuclear arms race, the persistence of poverty in the country, and racism, radical students and faculty saw little in mainstream economics that would help them understand these failings. A group of about sixty met a few weeks prior to the 1968 Democratic Party Convention and set out a plan to organize URPE. In December 1969 a handful of protesters interrupted the American Economics Association business meeting to present a statement denouncing the organization for being “contrary to the interests of the masses of people.” By the next year URPE sponsored the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE), a journal dedicated to "the development of radical political economic analysis of society and assisting individuals and groups working for radical change in American Society." Membership soon grew to 1,500 at the organization’s peak to become both the oldest and largest disciplinary group of leftists in the academy.

The founders of URPE proceeded to build the academic and political infrastructure for radical political economics. First, they defined their relationship to the neoclassical economic paradigm by rejecting its premise that capitalism is "the best of all possible worlds." Instead, they identified capitalism as a fundamentally unjust system that produced a wide array of social ills ranging from inequality and alienation to racism, sexism, and imperialism. Their critique of mainstream economics centered on its disregard of that unequal power relations that underpinned systematic forms of oppression. Second, radical economists defined their relationship to traditional Marxism, and early on reading groups formed to study Capital and pursue avenues of Marxist theory through periodicals such as Monthly Review.

Often marginalized within the academy, radical economists developed alternative support systems. In addition to publishing the RRPE, the annual URPE summer conference brought together radical economists to explore political economy, to hash out the political issues of the day, and to build a sense of community and the organization. The 1971 summer conference focused on Nixon’s “New Economic Policy” and culminated in an official statement from the organization. At this meeting, women formed their own caucus within URPE. Earlier, these women, many graduate students at the time, had pushed the American Economics Association (AEA) to form the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. In April 1972, the RRPE published the first of several special issues on the role of women in the economy. By the early 1980s, the Gay, Lesbian and Bi-Sexual Caucus had formed and sponsored workshops and panels on issues such as sexuality, family policy, and AIDS. In the late 1980s, the Third World Caucus was founded to bring a representative voice of people of color and from countries of the South. By this time, URPE had established a presence at various national economics meetings, sponsoring special sessions and presenting papers on research and ongoing projects.

By the mid-1970s, there were two well-established centers for graduate study in radical economics, largely staffed by URPE members, The University of Massachusetts-Amherst the New School for Social Research. These two centers, along with radical economists who had established a toehold at other universities, trained the next generation of radical economists. In addition to teaching, scholars also wrote textbooks that debunked orthodox economics, such as Economics: An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views; Understanding Capitalism; and Economics: A tool for Critically Understanding Society.

In the late 1970s, radical economists formed the Center for Popular Economics (CPE) in Amherst, MA. CPE brought labor activists and other progressives together over the summer for courses in political economy. In 1985 CPE published the Economic Report of the People that offered a radical alternative to the self-congratulatory Economic Report of the President. The CPE report debunked the so-called successes of Reagan’s economic policies and analyzed the devastating effects of Reagan’s first round of policy changes on everyday people. Weeklong and weekend programs provided forums for activists and interested individuals to share their understanding of “how the world works” from the perspective of the people affected by the workings of “the economy.” CPE, in its trainings and programs, also fostered a sense of solidarity.

Some radical economists made their way into Washington-D.C.-based think tanks that provided them a platform to engage in policy debates and eventually to serve on the Council Economic of Advisors. The largest think tank was the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) founded in 1986. EPI, dedicated to broadening discussions about economic policy to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers, published the highly influential annual, State of Working America. Radical economists also established the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), incorporated one year after EPI was founded. In the late 1990s the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) followed with critical analyses working people’s lives. At the same time, the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, provided another critical intervention into economic policy debates, including ecological welfare.

Pledged to activism, radical economists engaged with and supported progressive activist movements. They worked for years with the living wage movement, pushing cities across the country to adopt a living wage. Similarly, radical economists dedicated themselves to the ongoing movement for Medicare for All that emerged from the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. In addition, for years they played an important role confronting the existential threat of the environmental crisis and developing policies for the proposed Green New Deal. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd by the police once again brought police brutality and issues of racial inequality to the forefront, issues long studied by radical economics with its emphasis on poverty, power relations, and divisions within the working class.

A number of URPE members also helped to form professional associations that gave voice to and created space for the work of Black and feminist scholars. The Caucus of Black Economists formed in 1969, renamed the National Economic Association, began to publish the Review of Black Political Economy in 1977. In 1990, several feminist economists came together to form the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), dedicated to furthering “gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry” Five years later IAFFE began to publish the journal Feminist Economics.

Collectively, radical economists succeeded in finding their place in the academic. World and developing a popular political economy dedicated to serving radical movements. From 1975 to 1987, URPE published four "crisis readers" that unpacked the unraveling of the postwar boom in accessible language. But the first and perhaps most successful attempt to render radical economics accessible and serviceable for progressive social movements was the Boston-based Dollars and Sense(D&S) magazine. Founded in 1973 D&S aspired “to explain the workings of the U.S. and international economies and to provide left perspectives on current economic affairs.” The magazine gained a national readership that grew to about 8,000 at its peak in the late 1980s. D&S also published classroom readers that introduced undergraduate students to radical economic perspectives, especially its two most successful readers, multi-edition Real World Macro and Real World Micro.

Through these various organizations and centers, radical economists advanced research and theoretical formulation outside the mainstream. With the onset of stagflation in the mid 1970s and "the end of prosperity," for example, radical economists made a profound intervention by investigating the cause of the "economic crisis." Paul A. Baron and Paul Sweezy, writing in Monopoly Capital: An Essay on Economic and Social Order (1966), had identified a tendency toward stagnation brought about by monopoly pricing and a lack of demand as the chief law of motion of the post¬war US economy. Competing analyses of "late capitalism" relied more formally on the labor theory of value and located the cause of the crisis not in a lack of demand, but in an endangered profitability at the point of production brought about by a lack of "surplus value" and rising costs. Those crisis theorists argued that Keynesian demand-management policies and state action might temporarily arrest the instability of the capitalist economy, but were unable to alleviate the crisis of a falling rate of profit. At the same time, North American and European Marxist economists launched a study of the social regulation of the capitalist economy. In the United States these writers identified the social structures of accumulation that supported the "long wave" of expansion called the postwar boom and described the breakdown of those structures in the 1970s and 1980s. The key structures included capital’s reign over a period of relative labor peace, of its dominance of the global economy, and of public policy that managed the conflicts between the accumulation of profits and people’s demands for economic security.

Radical economists further extended Marxist perspectives into the study of the labor process and the segmentation of the labor market. They asked questions such as "What do bosses do?" and produced compelling studies of the degradation of work in the twentieth century. They explored how the labor market enforced inequality based on class, racial, and gender differences through segmented markets that dispensed more privileged jobs through a dominant primary sector and a subordinate secondary sector that handed out poorly paid jobs that offered irregular employment with little chance of advancement. Radical economists addressed the malfunction of twentieth- and then twenty-first capitalism as well. Through their analyses of “the fiscal crisis of the state,” they were able to distinguish the legitimization and accumulation functions of state policies. They used these insights to expose the devastating effects of the class-war budgets initiated under the Reagan administration, continued during the Clinton years, and intensified in this century with tax policies that enriched the wealthy and gutted the public sector. Of particular importance was the financialization of the economy. Radical economists documented the growth of the financial sector since the 1960s to a size well beyond that needed to support the functioning of the economy. They also exposed how the deregulation of finance had contributed to decades of economic stagnation that culminated in the global financial crisis of 2008. Radical economists made the case for policies that would “re-regulate” the financial sector and for the imposition anti-speculation turnover taxes that would reduce the size of the bloated financial sector and curtail its power so that it might serve rather than rule the economy.

Nor has the increased globalization of the economy escaped the attention of radical economists. Early literature focused on imperialism and forced the recognition of capitalism as a system of accumulation on a world scale and the understanding that the development of the center had produced the underdevelopment of the periphery. Focusing on financial market-led globalization, they argued that this development was not pre-ordained but a consequence of political choices that can be changed to enable countries to pursue alternative more democratic path of economic development.

The existential threat posed by an ever-worsening environmental crisis captured the attention of many scholars. Early on radical economists recognized that forestalling an “Ecological Armageddon” would require transforming the systems of production and technologies that had powered the postwar US economy. They debated the merits of “no-growth” versus “green-growth.” Economists at PERI strongly advocated green new deal policies and contributed to devising those plans.

Inspired by the work of the French philosopher Louis Athusser, some radical economists challenged on a more basic level the methodology of Marxism. They argued for a "nonessentialist," "non-determinist" examination of the structural aspects of capitalism and for a careful delineation of class and non-class phenomena. This tread followed the work of a group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who had formed the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) and, in 1988, began to publish Rethinking Marxism. Rethinking Marxism sought “to stimulate interest in and debate over the explanatory power of and social consequences of Marxian economy, cultural, and social analysis” and eventually established itself as a major quarterly.

Perhaps the most serious challenge to the class centric analytics of Marxist theory came from the study of patriarchy and gender. While early writings attempted to fit the study of the role of women into traditional Marxist categories, the initial union of Marxism and feminism produced what Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges aptly labeled an "unhappy marriage." The analysis of gender forced Marxists to broaden their focus on the production of commodities to include also the reproduction of capitalist and patriarchal relations through the family in the private sphere and to regard gender oppression with a centrality they assigned to class exploitation. These studies exposed the central importance of non-market household services and the systematic undervaluing of caring labor. They also explored the central role of women in economic development, the continued gender segregation of work and persistent gender pay gaps, the position of women of color, and gendered power relations and the division of labor within the home.

In September 2018, URPE celebrated its fifty-year anniversary with a major conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a special issue of the RRPE. For that issue, editor and contributor Marlene Kim interviewed numerous members of URPE, some of whom had been with the organization from the beginning. While URPE remained a heterodox organization, she was able to describe what radical economics had become in practice. Kim found these common elements in their answers she collected to the question “What is Radical Economics?” Fifty years later, the mission remained fixed: At the heart was a critique of capitalism and mainstream theory and an examination of power structure in the economy with a goal to change and linking with social movements.

Attewell, Paul. Radical Political Economy since the Sixties: Sociology of Knowledge. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984.

Cooney, Paul et al. Eds. Imperiled Economies: A Reader from the Union for Radical Political Economics. Boston, MA: The Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2018.

Henderson, Elizabeth, Luis Rosero, Bryan Snyder, and the Dollars & Sense Collective, Eds. Real World Macro (37th edition). Boston, MA: The Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2020.

Rob Larson, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr, and the D&S Collective. Eds. 2020 Real World Micro (27th edition). Boston, MA: The Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc.

Kim, Marlene, “What is Radical Political Economics,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 50, No. 3, Fall 2018.

-------------- “The Past, Present, & Future of Radical Economics: URPE at Fifty.” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 50, No. 3, Fall 2018.