The communism of capital?

This paper talks about the evolution of capitalism starting with Adam Smith model of this system as a framework that improves opportunities for all.However, the majority of the paper covers Karl Marx insights about capitalism and several articles are discussed as well along the piece to support Marx's view. At the end the analysis about capitalism made by Marx is very realistic as he talks about the the deprivation of freedom, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the conflict existing between social classes. However, his argument can not be set as " the right way to see capitalism " as this one has proved to be way better his idea of socialism which has been already tried by several countries that up to date live in an endless poverty.

2019

2019

Drawn from a conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, these essays from a range of internationally established contributors offer readers a snapshot of debates about the book's current relevance across a variety of fields and contexts. The volume approaches Marx's Capital as an exemplary text in the continuation of the tradition of post-Kantian European Philosophy through transdisciplinary practices of critique and concept construction. The essays are grouped into four sections: Value-Form, Ontology & Politics; Capitalism, Feminism and Social Reproduction; Freedom, Democracy and War; The Poetics of Capital/Capital. Each section is accompanied by an image from the 2008 film by Alexander Kluge, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx - Eisenstein - Capital.

Lack of Marxist analysis of the causes of the power of the capitalist, 2022

On the occasion of the publication of the book "The Choice of Civil War, Another History of Neoliberalism", this article first offers a brief history of Marxist discourses on Capitalism: starting from Marx's first speeches, it mentions the Marxist speeches extending his analyses of value, surplus value, its extraction and hoarding. He then points out the tendency of current Marxists to consider "neoliberalism" (current capitalism) only through the prism of the state and the political sphere in general: like the work cited, the manifesto of the dismayed economists shows the same tendency by focusing only on finance vs. the state (and Europe), and more militant works such as that of B. Friot ("vaincre Macron") or ATTAC ("l'imposture Macron") illustrate this same tendency. To sum up, Marxist discourses describe and denounce what the power of the capitalist allows (the subjugation of populations and the state in order to "make money") but neither describe nor denounce the laws and procedures that ensure this power. Of course, the subjugation of the population and the state to "make money" reinforces and increases this power, but sufficient power is a prerequisite for these subjugations. By considering only the perspective of the capitalist to "make money", the chapter "Genesis and perpetuation of capitalism" tells a past and present story to show that the state and its organisations are only instruments in the hand of the power of Capital, whether this state is right or left. It also shows that the exploitation of workers and the monopolisation of surplus value is only part of the monopolisation: the main monopolisation is the exclusive monopolisation of the means of production, and it is this exclusive monopolisation which founds the power of the capitalist over the political as well as over those who only have their labour power. The chapter "Exit from capitalism" tells a possible future history, a "resolutely left" history since it breaks the capitalist's exclusivity to possess the means of production, a legal exclusivity which founds his power. Both stories are based on what we consider to be THE main characteristic of capitalism: the processes of appropriation of the means of production "for profit" by the shareholders alone, processes which make them the exclusive owners of these means whatever their contributions to them. It is therefore not the ownership of the means of production that is called into question but the exclusivity of this ownership. This article includes an analysis of the manifesto of the dismayed economists and the common theses mobilised in many articles of our research notebook, including this one.

2000

The notion that there is a unitary trajectory associated with capitalist industrialization is identified with many of the great theorizers of economic development in the twentieth century: Schumpeter, Veblen, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Keynes, Rostow, Gerschenkron, Chandler, Galbraith, and Schonfield. Each of these thinkers, while differing amongst themselves on a broad array of issues of theory, shared in common the view that there was an epochally specific social system of capitalism, founded on private property and free markets for labor power. In its early phases, this system operated according to a very specific logic of task-and product-specialization, guided by rational market exchange, that led to increases in the scale of production. This dynamic yielded a process of centralization and concentration in the organizational and property forms governing the social division of labor which, as the system matured, ultimately led to the displacement of market rationality by a rationality of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Naturally, these unitary theorists of capitalism held that different societies would experience this common process in different ways, owing to the contingencies of timing and the greater and lesser tractability of tradition. But that there was one process and that it had a single and determinable directionality was never doubted. Indeed, it was taken to be one of the great discoveries of modern economic science. This unitary view of capitalism and its trajectory of development was also a core part of classical social theory as it emerged in the first fifty years of the twentieth century-in particular in the work of Weber, Polanyi, Parsons, Aron, Bell and the neo-Marxian tradition of critical social theory represented most notably by Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock and Neumann.

History of Capitalism. Rutgers University , 2016

World Review of Political Economy, 2018

The capitalist mode of production has fulfilled a most astonishing 'historical mission' for the human species. It enabled an explosion of labor productivity gains and the discovery of new utility dimensions. But this progress came at the price of accompanying explosion of contradictions, of unequal benefits and burdens across global and local classes of humans. This paper sets out to explore what will happen if capitalism is finally ending, if its mission collapses. To do so a workable definition of the essence of capitalism is needed, I propose this to be the 'capitalist algorithm' – for a detailed treatment see [Hanappi, 2013]. The most interesting question then concerns the social mechanisms that might overcome – revolutionize – what currently dominates the behavior of large production conglomerates as well as their military arms on a global level. Following the tradition of Hegel and Marx it can be assumed that a large part of the capitalist algorithm simply will have to vanish. But as history shows there also always is a remainder of a mode of production that in an inverted form (Hegel: negation, German Marxism: 'Umstülpung') becomes part of the next progressive mode of production. To identify what 'Capital after Capitalism' could be, what has to be abolished and what might survive in which form – remember the double meaning of Hegel's concept 'Aufhebung' – is a central prerequisite for a proper understanding of the coming revolution of the current mode of production. Since each step on the ladder of global social evolution is also a step in social human consciousness, this step in understanding implies a direct impact in guiding the actions to accomplish this turnover.

Marxism After Modernity, 2006

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Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, 2018