Professor Simon Mohun

Profile

Simon Mohun is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Queen Mary University of London. After undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, he joined the Department of Economics at Queen Mary College in 1973. He was Head of the Department of Economics for six years through the second half of the 1990s to 2001, and in 2002 he transferred to the newly created Centre for Business Management (now the School of Business and Management). Promoted to a chair in Political Economy in 2005, he retired from Queen Mary in 2011 to concentrate on his research.

He has also taught at the University of Southampton and Kingston University in the UK, American University and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in the US, Shanghai University in China and the University of Sydney in Australia.

Research

Research Interests:

My work is situated within the classical surplus-based tradition of Smith, Ricardo and Marx. While the 'transformation problem' was my original focus, I spent most of the 1980s trying simultaneously to retain its insights and to escape its incubus. I managed this to my own satisfaction by early 1992 shortly after the beginning of an extended stay in Sydney. I then concentrated on the macroeconomic history of developed capitalist countries from a surplus-based perspective, and I continued this on my return to Queen Mary in 1994.

In considering trends of contemporary capitalist development, common approaches have been either to abandon empirical investigation in favour of high theory, or to engage with the empirical world in a theoretically cavalier manner. This context of a divorce between high theory and empirical evidence has formed the background to my research, much of which has been concerned with the theoretically informed measurement, description and explanation of trends in aggregate profitability in developed capitalist economies since the 1960s, exploring trends in real wages and labour productivity, and the changing relation between labour productivity and capital intensity.

One of the consequences of this research has been an increasing focus on the extraordinary growth in income at the top of the personal income distribution in developed capitalist economies (especially the US and the UK), and much of my recent work is concerned with how to understand this within a class approach to political economy. This has entailed both exploring the quantitative dimension of class relations and reconsidering finance.

Considering how a surplus-based approach can be used to understand the recent history of contemporary capitalism involves inter alia an assessment of the contemporary relevance of empirical analogues of the categories of Marx's Capital. This does involve an interpretation of Marx's Capital, but my focus is on the usefulness of its categories today and not on issues of doctrinal exegesis in the history of economic thought (interesting though these sometimes might be).

For a list of publications since 2001 with downloadable papers, visit
https://simonmohun.com/

Journal Articles (since 2016)

Mohun, S. (2016), “Class Structure and the US Personal Income Distribution, 1918-2012 ”,
Metroeconomica, 67(2): 334-63

Mohun, S. (2016), “UK Crises: Historical Description and Theoretical Explanation”, Theory
and Struggle: Journal of the Marx Memorial Library 117: 114-20

Mohun, S. and R. Veneziani (2017), “Equal and Unequal Exchange in the Labor Theory of
Value: Comments on Moseley”, International Journal of Political Economy, 46(1): 35-42

Mohun, S. and R. Veneziani (2017), “Value, Price and Exploitation: The Logic of the Trans-
formation Problem”, Journal of Economic Surveys, 31(5): 1387-1420

Mohun, S, (2018) “A Celebration of the Labour Theory of Value”, Keizai Seminar, April:
24-30 (in Japanese)

Mohun, S (2019), “Britain: From the Golden Age to an Age of Austerity”, Catalyst, 3(2)
Summer: 65-109

Fiorio, C.V., S. Mohun and R. Veneziani (2021) “Class, Power and the Structural Dependence
Thesis: Distributive Conflict in the UK, 1892–2018”, Political Studies, 69(4): 985-1008

Book Chapters (since 2016)

Foley, D. K. and S. Mohun, (2016), “Value and Price”, in G. Faccarello, and H. D. Kurz,
Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis, Volume III: Developments in Major Fields of
Economics,  Cheltenham UK and Northampton MA USA: Edward Elgar

Mohun, S.(2016), “Inequality, Money Markets and Crisis”, in T. Subasat (ed.), The Great Financial Meltdown: Systemic, Conjunctural or Policy-created?, Cheltenham UK and Northampton MA USA: Edward Elgar

Mohun, S. (2021), “A Portrait of Contemporary Neoliberalism: The Rise and Economic Con-
sequences of the One Percent”, in G. Albo, L. Panitch and C. Leys, Socialist Register 2022: New
Polarizations, Old Contradictions. The Crisis of Centrism. London: Merlin

Public Engagement

I have served on the Editorial Boards of Capital & Class and the Review of Radical Political Economics, and have acted as convenor the annual Analytical Political Economy Workshop, and the

ESRC Political Economy Study Group.

I have acted as referee for Applied Economics, Bulletin of Political Economy, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Capital & Class, Contemporary Political Theory, Economy and Society, Empirical Economics, Environment & Planning A, Intervention, Journal of Australian Political Economy, Journal of Economic Surveys, Metroeconomica, New Left Review, Organization, Research in Political Economy, Review of Radical Political Economics, Review of Political Economy, Social Choice and Welfare.

I am currently an organiser of Workshops in Political Economy, run by the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE).