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This article contends that Marxist economic analysis can shed more light on the likely effect of the euro on the EU economy, and the UK economy if the UK were to join, than conventional neo‐classical macroeconomic analysis. Accumulated wealth/rentiers are incorporated into a model of the economy, in order to analyse how inflation affects the distribution of total social wealth between rentiers and business. The model suggests that rentiers gain, and business in general loses, from a state of price stability. Goes on to concentrate on inter‐firm issues by developing a multi‐sector model of the economy. The model is employed to illustrate how leading firms are also likely to benefit from price stability in the euro zone to the cost of business in the euro zone in general.

If we accept the logic of mainstream free‐market ideology‐based macroeconomic theory, the European Central Bank should, to maximise economic efficiency, be independent of political influence. It is easy to forget that such an understanding of the economy was discredited by the great 1930s slump and banished from government policy in the “Golden Age” of capitalism, between 1950 and 1973. Proposes to move beyond the free‐market/monetarist/new‐classical consensus to consider if the row over who should head the ECB is as trivial as it seems. First considers the work of Michal Kalecki, which typically represents the Golden Age’s prevailing ideology of positive state intervention. Next considers how Europe’s post‐war economic performance can be consistently explained by Kalecki’s work. Then moves on to consider the development of the Single European Currency project with the insight that an alternative economic ideology provides.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast conventional economists' belief that human needs are optimally satisfied by the market, with Marx's view that capitalism has a narrow focus on money making, where satisfying human needs is at most a by‐product of the system's restricted purpose.

The paper explores conventional economics, then Marx's economics, focusing on the issue of saving the environment, as the most basic human need is having a viable environment.

Economists' focus on use‐value and optimality is explored. Marx's alternative explanation of capitalism is then introduced. The author explains why Marx thinks capitalism has a tendency to boom and slump and to produce rising levels of inequality and considers how, under capitalism, the environment could be saved, and concludes that both human needs and the environment are best secured in a more advanced social system than capitalism.

To properly understand capitalism, one must look to Marx's unsurpassed analysis of capitalism, rather than conventional economists' attempts to justify, but not actually explain, capitalism.

Saving the environment is likely to be far more difficult and disruptive to the economy than conventional economists imagine.

For society to actually focus on satisfying human needs, including, crucially, saving the environment, there needs to be a move to a more advanced social system than capitalism.

The paper challenges orthodox views by applying Marx's deeper understanding of the economy to the question of human needs/the environment.

To many economists, not to mention all central bankers, inflation is considered to be public enemy number one. This paper seeks to understand why inflation should be so despised. To escape from simultaneous restrictions a temporal single system (TSS) approach is employed. Firstly a simple illustration of the TSS approach is considered. In order to focus on distributional issues a positive wage and a class of rentiers are built in. Rentiers hold money stocks, past accumulated value in money terms. Rentiers are assumed to lend to productive capitalists, i.e. we have finance capital. Once we build in money stocks we find that appropriate price increases can potentially hide the effect of falling exploitation of labour, transferring the cost of reduced exploitation from productive capitalists to rentiers. Finally, conclusions are drawn.

Given the effective collapse of efforts to introduce the market economy in many former communist countries it is perhaps time to look beyond the recommendations of the pro‐market economics mainstream. This article seeks to clearly explain Dr Kalecki’s theory of growth under socialism and to fully explain his notion of perspective planning. It then considers why such rational planning failed to be implemented under Communism. Finally, after identifying the necessary political/social conditions for successful perspective planning, it contemplates whether Russia, or similar collapsing former communist countries, could actually successfully implement rational perspective planning today.

Examines Eastern Europe’s struggle to privatise since the end of Communism; in particular reports on the experiences of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia. The danger of fast privatisation without restructuring is demonstrated by Czechoslovakia’s experience. Poland shows the importance of employing tight budget constraints. Russia demonstrates that privatisation in chaos is unlikely to produce real change.

To challenge the validity/usefulness of teaching mainstream neo‐classical/new‐classical economics, by contending that Marx provides a superior understanding of the essential nature of the capitalist system.

To explain Marx the hermeneutic issue of which Marx must be addressed. Simultaneous and dualistic interpretations of Marx question Marx's key conclusions, suggesting that Marx's value theory is inconsistent. In contrast the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx contends that all of Marx's key conclusions/results hold if one adopts a sequential and non‐dualistic methodological approach, restoring Marx's central message/power.

Explains how Marx endogenously accounts for the inevitable cyclical behaviour of capitalism, its tendency to concentrate and the development of the financial system. In short, Marx can explain the tendencies observed in the globalising world, whereas it is contended that mainstream analysis is hampered by prioritising an ideal simultaneous equilibrium and investigating how it might be exogenously disturbed.

If, as is contended, Marx's economics provides a superior understanding of the world, then research into Marx and analysis based on Marxian foundations should be prioritised.

Marx should be widely taught to improve students' understanding of the economy.

Quite simply challenges orthodoxy by rediscovering value.

It is difficult to get an adequate account of human needs but there are known needs which, for hundreds of millions of people, are not met. Can the present economic system meet them? Can any economic system meet them? Is simple economic growth the answer? The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the questions, emphasizing the problems and paradoxes.

The paper looks at India where poverty is rampant despite recent gains, and at Bhutan which ranks low in economic production but quite high on the “happiness scales”. It also looks at questions of the relation of economic inequality to social problems, citing recent studies.

The paper focuses on how well the world's economic systems address, or fail to address, human needs.

This paper is written by a philosopher and writer on social economics (and Editor of International Journal of Social Economics (IJSE )) who works in a variety of fields: metaphysics and its epistemological relations, the theory of the history of philosophy (focusing on the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries), and moral, social, and economic philosophy and their relations to culture and religion. The paper then introduces the papers in this special issue of the IJSE devoted to human needs.