Marxist economics answers the question ‘how did the many start poor?’ with an analysis of primitive accumulation, the historical process of the dispossession of the toilers from the means of production and creation of a propertyless working class. We then go on to explain capitalist production as the production not just of commodities, but also of rich and poor. Reproduction is the reproduction not just of factories and offices, but of the capitalists who own them and the workers who labour in them.
The socialist calculation debate is usually regarded as beginning in 1920 with a challenge to the socialists thrown down by the right wing Austrian economist von Mises. He opined that rational economic calculation would be impossible in a socialist commonwealth. Unfortunately, the socialists who took up this challenge did not, with the sole exception of Maurice Dobb of the British Communist Party, regard themselves as Marxists.
When Meghnad Desai comes to discuss this aspect of Marx’s work, this is the area where his ‘equilibrium’ interpretation of Marx’s economics leads him most seriously astray. He seems to imply that Marx can be used to defend the idea of the long-term survival of capitalism, which is something alien to Marx. It is also an oversimplification of what Marx said.