ABSTRACT

For Marx, the task of establishing how a capitalist economy can reproduce itself is not limited to a particular period of production. The reproduction examples that he carves out in the final part of Capital, volume 2, show how balanced reproduction can take place over an extended number of years. Despite the limitations he faced, with a lack of formal modelling tools, computing power and waning personal health – the reproduction schemes were one of his last contributions to political economy – Marx was able to devise complex numerical examples, in which somehow a 10 per cent rate of growth is sustained in each period of production. It is not for nothing that he has been described as the father of modern growth theory.