Bio

I am a political economist and doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst, researching the geographically uneven development of global capitalism from a comparative-relational approach in historical perspective. My work bridges classical political economy and contemporary state theory, with special focus on Latin America in the shadow of U.S. imperialism. I build datasets, formal models, and digital archives—not just to understand history, but to contribute to transforming the present.

Talks and presentations

Joan Robinson: The Beacon of Cambridge Economics

December 12, 2025

Workshop presentation & discussion, Historical and Political Economy Workshop, Amherst, MA, USA

This talk was delivered by Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, a leading historian of economic thought and Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society, known for her work on Cambridge economics, Keynesian theory, and monetary thought. She serves as Honorary Professor of Political Economy at Sapienza, Università di Roma and has held leadership roles in major international societies for the history of economics. You can find more about her career on her professional website.

Demand and Accumulation in Long-Run Capitalist Development: Unbalanced Growth and Crisis

October 15, 2025

Workshop presentation, Graduate Student Workshop (First Session, Fall 2025), Amherst, MA, USA

This talk proposes a Marxist reformulation of demand-led growth in which balanced growth is not the norm but an exception. Starting from the question of how class conflict shapes the long-run co-evolution of accumulation, investment, and capacity under persistent technological imbalance, it develops a nonlinear macro framework with capacity formation governed by a transformation law where the only source of productive capacities is capital accumulation. The choice of technique is endogenized via a mechanization rule disciplined by distribution and institutions, while savings and import leakages are endogenous to distribution, defining the external constraint. The model shows that once Harrodian feedback is triggered and the elasticity of productive capacities to capital stock is endogenous to distribution, interior balanced growth collapses; dynamics instead partitions itself into stagnation, partial crisis, and accumulation-regime crisis. A “Marxist supermultiplier” organizes the crisis condition and separates policy-stabilizable episodes from those requiring institutional change. The contribution is a mapping from technology–distribution–institution configurations to regime stability, clarifying when macro-policy can tame divergence and when only a new set of institutional compromises can.

Revisiting the Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad Popular (1970-1973)

July 04, 2025

Conference presentation, VII National Economic History Congress (CNHE), Vina del Mar, Chile

The talk reinterprets the rise and collapse of Chile’s Unidad Popular (1970–1973) as a critical conjuncture shaped by global and local dynamics. Combining social and global historiography with historical political economy, it argues that a peripheral, hierarchical position constrained domestic development. After surveying major interpretations (neoliberal, neo-structuralist, institutional, dependency), the paper advances a causal hypothesis: shocks to U.S. capacity utilization—instrumented by the accumulation rate of defense assets—affected Chile’s terms of trade. Using local projections with an instrumental variable, the estimated impulse responses are positive in 1965–1966, fade and turn negative by 1968, and collapse by roughly 70 percent in 1973, consistent with a balance-of-payments crisis; 1974–1978 shows high volatility. The contribution integrates historiography and causal methods to foreground external constraint and unintended effects of U.S. “military Keynesianism.”

Industrial Patronage: The Labour Process in Chile in the Periphery of Atlantic Fordism

April 23, 2025

Conference presentation, International Labour Process Conference (ILPC) 2025, Santiago, Chile

This talk reconstructs Chile’s Fordist-era labour regime as a dependent adaptation shaped by the legacy of inquilinaje and urban paternalism. Working within labour-process theory, it traces how territorial discipline and a social wage combined to foster both workplace consent and grassroots organizing. Comparative contrasts with Atlantic Fordism highlight balance-of-payments constraints, disarticulated industrialization, and over-urbanization, culminating in the 1970-1973 crisis when nationalizations met a wave of strikes and external pressures.

Why Should Workers Understand Political Economy? (CUT Training Course)

November 19, 2024

Training course, Training Course for Trade Union Leaders, Santiago, Chile

The three blocks offer a worker-centered introduction to political economy that moves from critique, to macro dynamics, to strategy. Block 1 demystifies “neutral” economic talk by mapping class fractions (industrial, financial, commercial) and showing how expert discourse operates as an intelligence apparatus for hegemony; participants practice decoding frames such as fiscal austerity and labor “flexibility” and discuss who benefits from them. Block 2 links distribution and growth, highlighting wage–profit conflict, the demand–employment nexus across the cycle, crisis dynamics, the reserve army, and structural change via automation and digitalization; the takeaway is how income shares shape employment and how crises reorganize labor markets and bargaining power. Block 3 reframes unions as organic intellectuals capable of translating and contesting dominant narratives, building solidarity across divisions, and designing strategies that regulate distributive conflict in society-wide terms; a collective exercise consolidates proposals for action. Together, the sequence equips workers to identify who gains from policy proposals, anticipate employment effects over the cycle, and replace competitive fragmentation with organized collective power.

Revisiting the Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad Popular: The Twin Crisis of the Prebischian Populist National State and Global Fordism

July 22, 2023

Conference presentation, SASE 2023 - Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World, Windsor Florida Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This talk reinterprets the rise and collapse of Chile’s Unidad Popular through a global Marxist political-economy lens, positing a “twin crisis”: the domestic breakdown of the Prebischian Populist National State and the international crisis of Atlantic Fordism. Using a Variegated Capitalism framework extended to the periphery, it specifies “peripheral Fordism” in employment relations (industrial patronage), capital-circuit bottlenecks, and financial subordination, contrasting its institutional anchor in the PPNS with the core’s KWNS. An analytical schema organized around profitability, wage share, and markups periodizes Chile’s dynamics and locates crisis tendencies, linking shifts in distribution and accumulation to regime instability. The conclusion connects high structural dysfunction to state crisis and socialist revolution, and outlines next steps to trace channels from the U.S. profit squeeze to broader sociopolitical conflict.