Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx

ISBN-13: 9783319626321 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 279 str.

Frederick Harry Pitts

Opis

This book critically introduces and compares two of the most compelling contemporary schools of Marxist thought: the German Neue Marx-Lekture, or New Reading of Marx, and Italian postoperaismo.

Recenzje

"The theory of value introduced in this book abandons the dialectic, and seems to justify the capitalist mode of production via a sort of Millian utilitarianism, where the concept of 'happiness' is replaced by 'social validation.' Eventually, the crises of overproduction - necessary within the capitalist mode of production - would be deduced from 'social validation,' i.e., from an effect, and not from intrinsic causal laws." (Dario Cositore, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 19 (4), December, 2020)

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Marxian Value Theory in New Times

1.1. New directions in Marxian value theory

1.2. The New Reading of Marx

1.3. The rise of postoperaismo

1.4. What does it mean to be critical?

1.5. This book’s contribution

1.6. Ideology critique as social critique

1.7. Chapter outlines

 

Part One: The New Reading of Marx

 

2.  Value, Time and Abstract Labour

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Value in the New Reading of Marx

2.3. Political economy and its critique

2.4. Outline of Marx’s theory of value

2.5. From traditional Marxism to value-form theory

2.6. The social validation of abstract labour-time       

2.7. Socially necessary labour time

2.8. Time in the circuit of capital

2.9. Conclusion

3. Money and the Exchange Abstraction

3.1. Introduction

3.2. A monetary theory of value

3.3. The Kantian schema

3.4. The capitalist schema

3.5. The social synthesis         

3.6. Non-empirical reality

3.7. Conclusion

4. Labour in the Valorisation Process

4.1. Introduction

4.2. Researching value in and beyond labour

4.3. Modes of existence

4.4. The workers’ inquiry tradition

4.5. The life trajectory of the commodity       

4.6. The labour process as carrier of the valorisation process

4.7. Why work?          

4.8. Conclusion

5. Class, Critique and Capitalist Crisis

5.1. Introduction

5.2. The negative dialectics of economic objectivity

5.3. The historical and logical premise of the value-form

5.4. Class and the commodity fetish

5.5. Contemporary confusions

5.6. Crisis and the class antagonism

5.7. Conclusion

Part Two: Postoperaismo

 

6. Immanence, Multitude and Empire

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Operaismo to postoperaismo       

6.3. From the refusal to the celebration of work

6.4. Immanence against dialectics

6.5. Perversion and productivism

6.6. Conclusion

 

7. The Fragment on Machines

7.1. Introduction

7.2. Fragment-thinking

7.3. The communism of capital

7.4. Too unlimited

7.5. Measurement and violence

7.6. Conclusion

 

8. A Crisis of Measurability

8.1. Introduction

8.2. Immaterial labour and the crisis of measurability

8.3. Critiques of immaterial labour

8.4. Within and against the labour theory of value

8.5. The novelty of immaterial labour

8.6. Concrete existence and immediate abstractness

8.7. Immeasurable productiveness

8.8. Conclusion

 

9. Creative Industries and Commodity Exchange

9.1. Introduction

9.2. Immaterial labour and the creative industries

9.3. The work of combustion and the form-giving fire

9.4. Creating commodities from products of labour

9.5. Creativity in crisis

9.6. Conclusion

 

10. Conclusion: From Postoperaismo to Postcapitalism

O autorze

Frederick Harry Pitts is Lecturer in Management at the School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, UK.

 

Blurb

This book critically introduces and compares two of the most compelling contemporary schools of Marxist thought: the German Neue Marx-Lekture, or New Reading of Marx, and Italian postoperaismo. In so doing, it radically updates our understanding of the key categories of Marx’s critique of political economy- including value, money, labour, class and crisis- in light of new and exciting theoretical developments. The New Reading of Marx reevaluates Marx’s Capital in the shadow of the first-generation Frankfurt School, finding an increasing uptake in the Anglophone world. Postoperaismo reconceptualises Marx’s work in the wake of the Grundrisse, its theories of immaterial labour and capitalist crisis finding growing favour beyond the radical fringe via recent bestsellers like Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism. Drawing on the first to engage in a pathbreaking critique of the second at a time of peak interest in its optimistic prospectus, the book brings into critical dialogue important modern thinkers such as Michael Heinrich, Werner Bonefeld, and Antonio Negri. In so doing, Critiquing Capitalism Today serves as both an introduction to each of these radical reinterpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy, and a contribution to continuing debates within and between these and other strands of contemporary Marxism. Advancing knowledge in the field by bridging recent scholarship with older material, including the works of Marx himself, Theodor Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, it relates theoretical disputes with their historical context in capitalist society itself, keeping an empirical focus that clarifies complex conceptual material for readers new to these cutting-edge currents of critical thought.