Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx
()
About this ebook
This book critically introduces two compelling contemporary schools of Marxian thought: the New Reading of Marx of Michael Heinrich and Werner Bonefeld, and the postoperaismo of Antonio Negri. Each stake novel claims on Marx’s value theory, the first revisiting key categories of the critique of political economy through Frankfurt School critical theory, the second calling the law of value into crisis with reference to Marx’s rediscovered ‘Fragment on Machines’. Today, ‘postcapitalist’ conceptualisations of a changing workplace excite interest in postoperaist projections of a crisis of measurability sparked by so-called immaterial labour. Using the New Reading of Marx to question this prospectus, Critiquing Capitalism Today clarifies complex debates for newcomers to these cutting-edge currents of critical thought, looking anew at value, money, labour, class and crisis.
Related to Critiquing Capitalism Today
Related ebooks
The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKarl Marx's Capital Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClass Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTheory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black flags and social movements: A sociological analysis of movement anarchism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDemarcation and Demystification: Philosophy and Its Limits Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Monochrome Society Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Reader's Guide to Marx's Capital Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Companion to Marx's Grundrisse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCapitalism, Socialism, Ecology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man: "You can still die when the sun is shining." Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Soul and Form Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRevolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKarl Marx and World Literature Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Crisis of Theory: E.P. Thompson, the new left and postwar British politics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCritical Models: Interventions and Catchwords Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFinding Oneself in the Other Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rhetorical Foundations of Society Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBleak Liberalism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Struggle for Food Sovereignty: Alternative Development and the Renewal of Peasant Societies Today Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRadio Benjamin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Economics For You
Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capitalism and Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 3rd Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capital in the Twenty-First Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed: The Definitive Book on Value Investing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wise as Fu*k: Simple Truths to Guide You Through the Sh*tstorms of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Affluent Society Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works--and How It Fails Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Economics 101: From Consumer Behavior to Competitive Markets--Everything You Need to Know About Economics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Soft Skills for Succeeding in a Hard Wor Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5You Can't Lie to Me: The Revolutionary Program to Supercharge Your Inner Lie Detector and Get to the Truth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Getting to Yes with Yourself: (and Other Worthy Opponents) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don't Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Critiquing Capitalism Today
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Critiquing Capitalism Today - Frederick Harry Pitts
Part I
The New Reading of Marx
© The Author(s) 2018
Frederick Harry PittsCritiquing Capitalism TodayMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62633-8_2
2. Value, Time and Abstract Labour
Frederick Harry Pitts¹
(1)
School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter I will introduce the central themes of the re-evaluation of Marx’s theory of value conducted within the New Reading of Marx (NRM) . In so doing, I will run against the grain of traditional Marxism by reading labour and time through value rather than seeing the latter spring from the former. In this way we will start with the delineation of value and then seek its relationship with both the concrete and abstract guises of labour and their temporal measure to which workers are subject in the workplace. The relationship of this to the external context of the market , where value is ultimately arbitrated through commodity exchange , will be touched upon to be picked up again in more detail in Chap. 4. I will begin by situating the NRM’s approach to Marx within extant approaches. I will then briefly set out the classical political economists’ debates on value and labour – specifically those of Smith and Ricardo – as a foundation for understanding the significance of Marx’s critique in this regard. Following this, I will give an outline of the core basics of Marx’s theory of value, before turning my attention to the headline innovations of the NRM , posing them against the embodied labour theories of value found in the so-called ‘Ricardian ’ approach of its Marxist forerunners and competitors. This, we shall see, centres on Michael Heinrich’s theorisation of the ‘socialvalidation’ of abstract labour-time as the key principle for explaining how labour can be taken to result in a value-bearing commodity. This validation is harboured in exchange, which changes the way we think about how labour relates to value. Rather than direct labour-time , then, we see that the NRM stresses ‘socially necessary labour-time’ (SNLT), a retrospective abstract social relation between all labours mediated by commodity exchange . We end by considering why, then, if value is ultimately arbitrated in exchange, time is such a central focus of management control, worker resistance and capitalist competition. Drawing on the work of Chris Arthur and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, we can see that the exchange relation that constitutes value holds sway in production as well as circulation , contrary to critics of the NRM who associate it with too ‘circulationist’ a standpoint.
2.2 Value in the New Reading of Marx
One might restrict a chapter on the theory of value simply to the presentation of a patchwork of the thoughts of Marx himself on the topic. However, Marx’s work on the question of labour and value contains interlaced ambiguities which lend themselves well to varying interpretations, each with its own arsenal of quotations and passages to confirm its position. In this spirit, this chapter outlines some of the ways in which Marx’s LTOV has been interpreted in the Marxist tradition.
Following Marx’s advice that one can best understand the ape from the vantage point of its highest stage of development in the human being, Riccardo Bellofiore suggests that such a rule applies equally to reading Marx’s oeuvre: ‘the most developed is the key for the knowledge of the less developed’ (2009, p. 179). As such, in the three volumes of Capital (Marx 1976, 1981, 1992), one gains the greatest sense of the ultimate resolution of his life’s thought. It is upon these texts that the foregoing discussion will be based, although its details and ambiguities will often be paraphrased through the words and ideas of thinkers following Marx. As Alfredo Saad-Filho writes of his own approach to Marx’s work, selected quotations and evidence from Marx’s output are given second place to the presentation and critique of ‘other readings of his works’ which ‘may illuminate certain problems from different angles’ (1997, p. 458). In the context of the internecine struggle between competing conceptions of Marx’s thought, an approach claiming to be presenting his opinions and nothing else would only constitute the taking of one position or another in that struggle. The uncovering of numerous manuscripts, tentative notes and unpublished works have only served to reveal that Marx’s project was a mere ‘fragment’ of what was possible, and has exposed ‘Marxian theory as a radically open project’ (Endnotes 2010). It is this radical openness that allows us to be free of constant reservations based upon what Marx did and did not say on this or that issue, and to move the debate forward into virgin areas of investigation and critique whilst still remaining within in a rich and multifaceted Marxist