Exploring Marx’s Value Theory In Our Inflationary World: Why It Is Not Moseley’s Way Or The Highway!

My paper seeks to encourage pluralism in Marxian economics in general and in particular when attempting to understand value in our inflationary world. I first argue how an interpretation of Marx, such as Moseley (2016a), repeated by Park (2016), should not seek to rule out insights from other interpretations of Marx by taking unnecessarily inflexible positions that the other interpretations do not hold to, but could in fact easily adopt if they wished to. Secondly, in response to Park’s (2016) call for a model incorporating together growth, inflation, technological change and the monetary expression of labour-time (MELT), I report a model of mine developed in response to the 2008 crisis (Potts, 2009) that answers this challenge. My model shows how falling profitability makes investment in fictitious capital more attractive than investing productively. Finally I conclude, hoping that research in this critical area will proceed more fruitfully in the future through being more open-minded i.e. academic.