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The world is facing major upheavals--political, military, ecological, cultural, and even spiritual. Clearly this includes a deep economic crisis, one that overlaps with all others. We need to understand the nature of the economic crisis if we are to deal with it.
When it comes to theories about the economy, the two main schools are both bourgeois, in the sense that they advocate capitalism. Both the conservative, unrestricted-free-market school (in its monetarist and "Austrian" versions) and the liberal/social democratic Keynesian school exist to justify capitalism and to advise the government on how to manage the capitalist economy.
The only developed, alternate economic theory has been Karl Marx's. His theory was a detailed and well thought-out guide for the working class, to help it understand the capitalist system in order to end it. Other radicals, particularly anarchists, developed certain topics relating to economics, such as the possible nature of a post-capitalist economy. But no one developed an overall analysis of how capitalism worked as an economic system as thoroughly as Marx. Therefore I will be focusing on Marx's work, even though I am an anarchist and not a Marxist (nor an economist for that matter). I do not accept the total worldview developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, even though I think much of their analysis is accurate.
When people write about "radical economics" they generally mean two interrelated topics. One is an analysis of the currently-existing capitalist economy. The other is the vision of a post-capitalist, post-revolutionary, economy. From these two topics, it is possible to develop a strategy for getting from one to the other. When it comes to an analysis of capitalist economy, Marx's economic theories are superior to others, including what there is of anarchist economic thinking. In An Anarchist FAQ, Iain McKay writes that there are "subjects anarchists have, traditionally, been weak on, such as economics" (2008, 13). Anarchists have certainly made contributions, but there is no coherent "anarchist economics" in this sense. While Proudhon may have come closest, neither he nor other anarchists developed his insights into a full system comparable to Marx's work. However, when it comes to presenting a post-capitalist vision, a socialist goal, then anarchism (with other, non-Marxist, libertarian socialisms), I believe, is superior to Marxism. This is not to deny that Marx made useful contributions, but nothing he or Engels suggested is as clear or coherent as the anarchist program. Taken together, the two theories are greater than the sum of their parts.
I make no claims for originality. When there are differing interpretations of Marx's theory, I may take a minority position, but I remain focused mainly on Marx's concepts, as expressed in the three main volumes of Capital, the Grundrisse, and a few other works, and in the work of his close collaborator and comrade, Friedrich Engels. I will not engage the Marxist theories of post-Marx commentators, many of whom disagree with fundamentals of Marx's views--rejecting, for example, his labor theory of value and his analysis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Many reject the idea that state capitalism is possible. In fact, most are de facto advocates of state capitalism, in the sense that most social democratic/reformist Marxists call on the existing state to intervene in the economy, in order to bolster capitalism, while most revolutionary Marxists seek to replace the existing state with a new state, replacing the bourgeoisie with state ownership--while maintaining the capital/labor relationship.
There are many introductions to Marxist economics, starting with Marx's own Value, Price, and Profit and his Wage-Labor and Capital, and including vast numbers of more sophisticated works on the topic. Very rarely, though, has an anarchist written one for anarchists and other libertarian socialists. I suspect it may be useful today.