The main theme of this study is to analyze the Soviet economic theoretical debate in the period 1985 – 1991. This period of reconstruction gave possibilities of a more free debate. In the period up to 1989/90 the directive from the Central Committee of the Communist Party was to defend the socialist economic system and its supremacy over market economics. However, certain market economic ideas were deemed as functioning methods also in a planned economic system. One of the conclusions in this thesis is that the Soviet economists failed to solve some central theoretical problems in the Soviet economy and as consequence their thinking failed to have a stabilizing effect on the socialist economic theory. The Achilles heel was how to apply the labour theory of value on a planned economy. In 1990 and 1991 the discussion was very free and now a transition to market economy was accepted by the economists. The main issue between the Soviet economists became now whether a gradual transition to market economy was to be preferred to shock therapy. The majority of the economists recommended a gradual transition. Scholars have emphasized that old stationary structures are important in Russian and Soviet history. A conclusion in this thesis is that such structures seemed to have played a role in Soviet and Russian theoretical thinking in the period 1985 – 1991.

La thèse présente une reconstruction de l’évolution de l’analyse marxienne de l’internationalisation du capital en lien avec les formations sociales précapitalistes, en se basant sur la nouvelle édition historico-critique des écrits de Marx et Engels, pour offrir les éléments d’une réflexion autour de l’actualité de l’œuvre de Marx, quant à l’analyse critique des processus actuels de mondialisation. Les deux premiers chapitres retracent l’évolution de l’analyse du marché mondial et de la mondialisation, du mercantilisme à l’économie politique classique et à Hegel. Le troisième chapitre identifie les éléments de rupture et de continuité de la critique marxienne au cours des années quarante du XIXème siècle. Le quatrième chapitre présente le contenu des cahiers londoniens, qui représentent une étape fondamentale de l’approfondissement de la mondialisation capitaliste, et qui marquent la fin de la vision passive des peuples non européens. Le cinquième chapitre présente enfin la synthèse que l’on retrouve de ces travaux dans les manuscrits et dans les œuvres de la deuxième moitié des années cinquante et dans les manuscrits de 1861-1863, et s’intéresse notamment au dépassement du concept de capital en général et au plan articulé en six ouvrages. Le premier livre du Capital inclurait certaines questions que Marx avait prévu de développer dans les ouvrages sur l’Etat, le commerce extérieur et le marché mondial. L’approfondissement des lois de développement combiné et inégal du capital lui a donné la possibilité d’échafauder une vision de la révolution internationale qui s’affranchisse progressivement des éléments encore « eurocentriques » de sa réflexion des années quarante. / This thesis studies the evolution of Marx's analysis of the internationalisation of capital in relation to pre-capitalistic social formations, drawing upon the new historical critical edition of Marx and Engels’ writings, with the aim of laying the foundation for establishing the relevance of their work to critical understanding of today’s processes of capitalist globalisation. The first two chapters follow the development of the analysis of the world market and globalisation from mercantilism to classical political economy and Hegel. The third chapter identifies the elements of discontinuity and continuity in Marx’s critique during the 1840s, while the fourth presents the content of Marx’s London Notebooks, showing that these represent a qualitative advance in his analysis of globalisation, in which he overcomes his previous vision of the passivity of non-European peoples. The fifth chapter presents the elaboration of these studies in the manuscripts and works in the second half of the 1850s and in the 1861-63 manuscripts, focussing in particular on his advance beyond the concept of capital in general and the six-book plan which corresponded to it. As a result, Capital Volume 1 integrated themes Marx originally intended for the projected volumes on state, foreign market and world market. The deepening of his understanding of the laws of capitalist uneven and combined development allowed him to articulate a vision of world revolution which overcame some of the “Eurocentric” elements still present in the 1840s.

<p> This thesis examines the theory of unequal exchange - an application of the labour theory of value to international freetrade - arguing that increased trade will harm rather than improve economic and social disparities between the developed and Third World countries. The theory as put forward by Arghiri Emmanuel is first presented and criticised. Assumptions of capital mobility and labour mobility on a world scale are than examined. As a result of these analyses unequal exchange is found to be a process the magnitude of which is mediated by the historical development of technology and the increasing mobility of productive capital. Unequal exchange does not provide a monocausal explanation of uneven development in capitalism as dependency-like interpretations would suggest, though it does make a significant contribution to a multicausal explanation. </p> <p>The existence of unequal exchange is shown, and its magnitude measured'i""' empirically on the basis of Morishima's value system. Input-output accounts for Canada and the Philippines are used for 1961 to produce estimates of commodity values per dollar. It is found that exports from the Philippines sold at prices that were almost five times lower than exports from Canada of the same value. Unequal exchange therefore, is a significant counteracting influence to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in developed sectors, reducing the rate of profit, and therefore the rate of accumulation, in less developed sectors of production. </p> <p> The results of this analysis provide for two policy suggestions. Firstly the need to extend the class struggle to an international scale. Secondly, whilst import substitution may not solve the problems of less developed countries, an increase in trade will only harm them further. </p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

La presente tesi ha due scopi paralleli. In primo luogo, intende essere una rilettura concettuale attraverso di `Structural Change and Economic Growth' (Pasinetti 1981), alla luce del chiarimento di alcune questioni sia metodologiche che concettuali, e della contestualizzazione dell'opera all'interno dell'intero percorso intellettuale che, dal 1962 al 1988, ha condotto Pasinetti alla definizione esplicita e rigorosa del concetto di settore verticalmente iper-integrato. In secondo luogo, fornisce una generalizzazione dell'intero schema teorico sviluppato da Pasinetti (1981), attraverso la reintroduzione dell'intero insieme delle relazioni inter-industriali, la riformulazione per mezzo di matrici partizionate, e la presentazione dei sistemi dei prezzi e delle quantità in termini di ricerca di autovalori e autovettori. La parte dinamica dell'analisi è stata generalizzata con la discretizzazione del tempo, originariamente continuo, e l'introduzione di saggi di crescita non stabili delle variabili esogene. Il primo e l'ultimo capitolo sono dedicati al raggiungimento del primo obiettivo; il secondo e il terzo a quello del secondo. / The present dissertation has two parallel aims. First of all, it intends to provide a conceptual excursus through Pasinetti's `Structural Change and Economic Growth', in the light of the clarification of some methodological and conceptual issues, and of the contextualisation of the book within the whole intellectual path, going from 1962 to 1988, which led Pasinetti to the completion of the explicit and rigorous definition of the concept of vertically hyper-integrated sector. Secondly, it performs a generalisation of the whole theoretical framework put forward by Pasinetti (1981), through the re-introduction of the whole set of inter-industry relations, the reformulation by means of partitioned matrices, and the restatement of the price and quantity systems as eigenproblems. The dynamic part of the analysis is generalised by the introduction of discrete, rather than continuous, time, and of non-steady rates of change of the exogenous variables. The first and the last chapters are devoted to the achievement of the first task; the second and the third to that of the second.