Education

Plekhanov Institute in Moscow

Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research

Career

Baran introduced the concept of "economic surplus" to deal with novel complexities raised by the dominance of monopoly capital. With Paul Sweezy, Baran elaborated the importance of this innovation, its consistency with Marx's labor concept of value, and supplementary relation to Marx's category of surplus value.

The actual surplus is the difference between what the society produces and its actual current consumption. The potential surplus is the difference between a society's actual output and what could be produced, given an improved social organization. Even the actual surplus is hard to measure, given that most econometrics is oriented toward capitalist goals. The potential surplus, as Baran admits, is even more speculative, given its dependence on a model of a non-existent (say genuinely socialist in the Marxian sense) production system.

Baran used the surplus concept to analyze underdeveloped economies (or what are now more optimistically called "developing economies") in his The Political Economy of Growth. Baran with Paul M. Sweezy applied the surplus concept to the contemporary US economy in Monopoly Capital.

Works

• economics

  • "The Political Economy of Underdevelopment" (1952), Manchester School

  • "Marxism and Psychoanalysis" (1960)[ pamphlet] Monthly Review Press

  • The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism (1975)

Connections

Economist:

Karl Marx