Abstract:
The inflationary phenomenon becomes relevant in the economic literature after the 1960s, from the moment when inflation turn into a problem of greater magnitude and with a deep rooting in the advanced capitalist countries. Marxism has built his explanations of the inflation based principally on the following approaches: i) conflicts over the distribution of income are, in short, the most significant cause of inflation; ii) inflation is linked to the growing power of monopolies, being reinforced by the interventionist policies of the State; and iii) the phenomenon is explained by the discrepancy between endogenous generated increases in supply and demand for credit money. The aim of this paper is to revisit these Marxist approaches, as found in Saad-Filho (2000), but emphasizing the methodological critique. More specifically, our goal is to perform a methodological critique showing the continued validity of Marx's method to understand the inflation phenomenon of post World War II.
Keywords:
theory of distributive conflict; theory of monopoly capital; theory of extra money; method of Marx