Power, Money and Production — Augusto Graziani for Our Times: A Symposium

This symposium revisits the contribution of Augusto Graziani to the analysis of modern capitalist economies, arguing that his work can be read through the closely connected themes of power, money and production. Power provides an original unifying interpretive lens across different areas of Graziani's research. In his monetary theory of production, it is reflected in firms' privileged access to bank lending relative to wage-earners and in the role of banks and firms in initiating and organising production. In his analysis of the Italian economy and the North-South divide, it emerges through the structural transformation and geographical organisation of production that shape uneven development. The contributions collected in the symposium develop these insights by examining the monetary circuit in financialised economies, the capitalist command over the scale and composition of production, regional dualism and industrial policy, and the role of power in economic policy and economic theory. Taken together, the papers highlight Graziani's continuing relevance for understanding capitalism as a monetary economy of production structured by power relations.