In 2018, the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, a team of Japanese Marxists and economists organised an international symposium on Marx in the 21st Century. This was the first time we had been able to visit Japan and an impressive event. Our association with Nobuharu Yokakawa and the journal ‘Japanese Political Economy’ dates from this event.
The conference also re-ignited the dormant debate on the so-called ‘Centre of Gravity’ claims, now advanced in a new form by Fred Moseley. This provoked me to prepare a definitive refutation of the claim, which, however, was (as was to be expected) staunchly resisted by the Marxist establishment, and was in succession rejected by Metroeconomica without submission to referees, and by CJE who took a year to issue a flat rejection. The paper remains unpublished, mainly because I have not had the time to submit it elsewhere.
This post includes the call for papers and two quite similar sets of slides, on the question of class. The text I presented was a variant of my chapter in the [Handbook of Marx]