Marx's Concept of the Transcendence of Value Production

2024

The return to Marx following the economic crisis of 2008 has been distinct from the renewed interest in his critique of economics. Many authors, in a whole series of newspapers, journals, books, and academic volumes, have observed how indispensable Marx's analysis has proved to be for an understanding of the contradictions and destructive mechanisms of capitalism. In the last few years, however, there has also been a reconsideration of Marx as a political figure and theorist. The publication of previously unknown manuscripts in the German MEGA 2 edition, along with innovative interpretations of his work, have opened up new research horizons and demonstrated more clearly than in the past his capacity to examine the contradictions of capitalist society on a global scale and in spheres beyond the conflict between capital and labour.

2018

the project of a ‘second’ MEGA , designed to reproduce all the writings of the two thinkers together with an extensive critical apparatus, got under way in 1975 in East Germany. Following the fall of the Berlin wall, however, this too was interrupted. A diffi cult period of reorganization ensued, in which new editorial principles were developed and approved, and the publication of MEGA2 recommenced only in 1998. Since then twenty- six volumes have appeared in print – others are in the course of preparation – containing new versions of certain of Marx’s works; all the preparatory manuscripts of Capital; correspondence from important periods of his life including a number of letters received; and approximately two hundred notebooks. ! e latter contain excerpts from books that Marx read over the years and the refl ections to which they gave rise. ! ey constitute his critical theoretical workshop, indicating the complex itinerary he followed in the development of his thought and the sources on which he drew in working out his own ideas. these priceless materials – many of which are available only in German and therefore intended for small circles of researchers – show us an author very different from the one that numerous critics or self- styled followers presented for such a long time. Indeed, the new textual acquisitions in MEGA 2 make it possible to say that, of the classics of political and philosophical thought, Marx is the author whose profi le has changed the most in recent years. The political landscape following the implosion of the Soviet Union has helped to free Marx from the role of fi gurehead of the state apparatus that was accorded to him there. Research advances, together with the changed political conditions, therefore suggest that the renewal in the interpretation of Marx’s thought is a phenomenon destined to continue.

In the twenty-first century, new debates over globalization, 'market society' and the crises of capitalism are leading to a resurgence of interest in Marx's ideas about politics, economics, history and human nature. This collection of articles brings together the latest work of some of the world's leading Marxist philosophers, along with that of a new generation of young researchers. Based upon work presented at meetings of the recently founded and fast-growing Marx and Philosophy Society, it offers a unique snapshot of the best current scholarship on the philosophical aspects and implications of Marx's thought. Contributors discuss Marx's moral and political philosophy, his critique of orthodox economics, and his relation to more recent trends in social theory. Although many diverse perspectives are represented, all share a commitment to careful historical scholarship and philosophical clarity and rigour.

Karl Marx’s writings provide a uniquely insightful explanation of the inner workings of capitalism, which other schools of thought generally have difficulty explaining. From this vantage point, Marx’s works can help to explain important features and economic problems of our age, and the limits of their possible solutions. For example, the necessity and origin of money, the growth of the wage-earning class, uneven development, cycles and crises, and the relative impoverishment of the workers, leading to debt and overwork. The Value of Marx demonstrates that: • Capitalist production necessarily involves conflicts in production and in distribution. • Competition is an essential feature of capitalism, but it often generates instability, crises and unemployment, showing that capitalism is not only the most productive but also the most systematically destructive mode of production in history. • Capitalist economies are unstable because of the conflicting forces of extraction, realisation, and accumulation of surplus value under competitive conditions. This instability is structural, and even the best economic policies cannot avoid it completely. The author critically reviews the methodological principles of Marx’s value analysis and the best known interpretations of his value theory. He develops an interpretation of Marx focusing primarily upon the processes and relations that regulate social and economic reproduction under capitalism. When analysed from this angle, value theory is a theory of class and exploitation. The concept of value is useful, among other reasons, because it explains capitalist exploitation in spite of the predominance of voluntary market exchanges. The most important controversies in Marxian political economy are reviewed exhaustively, and new light is thrown on the meaning and significance of Marx’s analysis and its relevance for contemporary capitalism.

2018

A strange anomaly dominates the current social, political and cultural climate. World capitalism has for over fifteen years been sinking into its worst systemic crisis since the 1930’s, and one which in its biospheric dimensions is much worse than the 1930’s. At the same time, the social stratum which calls itself the left in Europe and the U.S. is in full retreat. In many advanced capitalist countries, and particularly in the U.S., that stratum increasingly suspects the world outlook of Karl Marx, which postulates that capitalism brings such crises as storm clouds bring the rain, of being a “white male” mode of thought. Stranger still is the fact that the relative eclipse of Marx has been carried out largely in the name of a “race/gender/class” ideology that can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. What this “discourse” (to use its own word) has done, however, is to strip the idea of class of exactly that element which, for Marx, made it radical: its status ...

Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post Marxism, 2021

Did Marx develop a critique of capitalism as a global system? And does he provide us with tools for opposing imperialism, racism and gender oppression today? It has become commonplace to portray Marx as a Eurocentric thinker whose critique of political economy never transcended the boundaries of production on a national scale. In reality, Marx’s focus on production relations does not mean that he underestimated processes located outside the immediate process of production but rather attempted to grasp the links between different spheres within the process of total reproduction of capital. Marx’s analysis of capital reproduction in Capital further developed his initial insights on the materialistic conception of history by examining the process of capital accumulation as an inherently international process, deeply gendered and racialized. Marx’s critical analysis of exploitation shows the contradictions inherent in the development of productive forces within capitalism, thus disclosing the new spaces of resistance emerging within the system. Expropriation and state violence not only continue after the initial process of “primitive accumulation” alongside exploitation, they are also deeply shaped by it. The antagonism between wage labor and capital is a global, gendered antagonism in which struggles over wages, working conditions and the duration of the working day are organically linked to struggles over dispossession, social reproduction, ecology, imperialism and racism. Marx increasingly recognized the centrality of anti-racism and anti-imperialism for building the First International, and came to appreciate the importance of women and demands for gender equality and for the socialization of reproductive activities in the program of the communist movement. He sought to show to the global working class created by capital accumulation, torn apart by competition and divisions, that there is a deeper dynamic that brings them together, allowing them to re-appropriate their own collective power. Marx’s Capital thus provides us not only the most lucid analysis of the workings of the capitalist mode of production, but discloses the potential for a free society growing amid the misery of the present.