The Surplus Approach, Institutions, And Economic Formations

Abstract

The paper develops Pierangelo Garegnani’s notion of the ‘core’ of the classical theory of distribution to propose a wider integration of the concept of social surplus and institutions into economic thinking. Its main tenet is that the social surplus does not exist independently of the institutions (or social order) that oversee its production and distribution, starting from those that prevail in the sphere of production. In this sense, we supplement the surplus approach with important insights not only from the Polanyian approach, from economic archaeology and anthropology, but also from Sraffian authors and Sraffa’s manuscripts. Taking inspiration from Garegnani, this work is offered as a prelude to the design of different economic ‘cores’ for different stylized economic formations.

Prospek Komoditi Jahe di Sumatera Barat

“…Jumlah yang melebihi hasil biasanya atau berkelebihan atau sisa dari barang yang dihasilkan dari aktivitas produksi merupakan defenisi dari surplus [18].…”

Agency, functionalism, and all that. A Sraffian view

“…Various traditions in social analysis recognize that economic and social textures, formal and informal institutions, cultures, and ideologies represent the framework in which individuals as social and historical beings move. Related papers examined the approach to institutions that can be derived from the classical and Marxian 'surplus approach' as particularly recovered by Piero Sraffa (1951) and Pierangelo Garegnani (1960) [1]. The economic surplus is defined as what the community can freely dispose of without affecting the reproduction of the system at least at the current given levels of activity.…”

“…Ogilvie (2007) presents a closer view of institutions as regulating the social conflict over income distribution. The paper compares this approach to other main approaches, namely the Polanyian 'substantivism' and Douglass North's New Institutional Economics (NIE) (Cesaratto 2023b). While criticising some aspects of Karl Polanyi's theory, particularly his identification of economic analysis with marginalism, I picked up his recommendation that the economic analysis of the social surplus in specific socio-economic formation should be intimately tied to the analysis of the institutions that preside over its extraction and utilisation.…”

“…While Sraffa revived, in my opinion, the economic core of Marx's thought, historical materialism is not without problems which a century and a half of Marxist debates has brought to light. Within a possibly much longer list, I envisage two specific questions (Cesaratto 2023c).…”

“…(Remarkably, this topic is thus relevant also for the first issue, that of the dynamics of change [2].) Notably, criticism to Marxism for neglecting individual or class subjectivism in favour of objectivism has also come from within Marxism itself, and roughly overlaps with the clash between so-called historicists and structuralists (Cesaratto 2023c). Methodological individualism is the traditional alternative to organicist theories supported both by neoclassical and by (some) Marxist schools.…”