In this updated and expanded edition of Invisible Leviathan, Murray E.G. Smith critically explores and makes significant contributions to the debate surrounding Karl Marx’s ‘capitalist law of value’ and its corollary, the law of the falling rate of profit. A powerful case is presented that capitalism has exhausted its potential to contribute to human progress. Humanity confronts a fateful choice: to allow this obsolescent system – which necessarily measures ‘wealth’ in terms of ‘abstract social labour’ and money profit – to destroy human civilisation; or to make the leap...

By analysing the experience of Finland, Risto Alapuro shows how upheavals in powerful countries shape the internal politics of smaller countries. This linkage, a highly topical subject in the twenty-first century world, is concretely studied by putting the abortive Finnish revolution of 1917-18 into a long historical and a broad comparative perspective.

Beyond France’s own national historiography, the French Revolution was a fundamental point of reference for the nineteenth-century socialist movement. As Jean-Numa Ducange tells us, while Karl Marx never wrote his planned history of the Revolution, from the 1880s the German and Austrian social-democrats did embark on such a project. This was an important moment for both Marxism and the historiography of the French Revolution. Yet it has not previously been the object of any overall study. The French Revolution and Social Democracy studies both the social-democratic readings of the...

Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development seeks to explore and develop Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development. In particular, it aims to adapt the political and historical analysis which originated in Trotsky’s Russia for use within the contemporary field of world literature. As such, it draws together the work of scholars from both the field of international relations and the field of literature and the arts. This collection will therefore be of particular interest to anyone who is interested in new ways of understanding world literary texts, or interested in new...

This collection includes texts by Henryk Grossman that are primarily concerned with economic theory: monographs, articles, essays, letters and manuscript material. Many have never been published in English before, some in any language. The first in four volumes of Grossman’s works, it provides the basis for a deeper understanding of Grossman’s contributions to Marxist economic theory and critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn’s introduction explains the contexts in which the texts were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.

This is the first book written in English that tries to expose the “thing-in-itself (or inner logic)” of capitalism in a form homomorphic to Hegel’s Logic, following the method previously established in Japan by Kôzô Uno (1987-1977). Neither 'bourgeois-liberal' nor even 'conventionally-Marxist' economics possess a logical (hence objective) knowledge of capitalism as such, which is regrettable. The manuscript of this book was completed in typescript at York University, Canada, in 1983, then privately published in that form by the author in about 500 copies, which are by now...

Evald Ilyenkov is a unique figure among the many interesting (and many dull) Soviet thinkers that have recently been introduced to English-speaking readers. Although a thoroughly academic philosopher (both in the choice of his subject matter and in his institutional locations), Ilyenkov’s ideas are presented in a manner that one does not often find among academics. Texts selected for this collection are not the only texts dedicated to Hegel and dialectics but they are representative of Ilyenkov’s main themes and interests. It is hoped that this collection will continue to draw interest to...

In this important contribution to political theory, Massimo Modonesi develops the thesis that a Marxist theory of political action can be developed from the notion of antagonism, defined as a distinctive feature of struggle and of the political experience of insubordination. The author argues this central idea with close reference to the concept of class struggle. He advances a theoretical proposal based on the triad subalternity-antagonism-autonomy, as well as the uneven and combined character of the processes of political subjectification. At the center of this triad, the concept of...

In How Language Informs Mathematics Dirk Damsma shows how Hegel’s and Marx’s systematic dialectical analysis of mathematical and economic language helps us understand the structure and nature of mathematical and capitalist systems. More importantly, Damsma shows how knowledge of the latter can inform model assumptions and help improve models. His book provides a blueprint for an approach to economic model building that does away with arbitrarily chosen assumptions and is sensitive to the institutional structures of capitalism. In light of the failure of mainstream economics to...

In The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Grietje Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on the role of law in the global political economy. Closing a major gap in historical-materialist scholarship, they demonstrate how the corporation, capitalism’s main engine from city-state and colonial times to the present multinational, is a masterpiece of legal technology. The symbiosis between law and capital becomes acutely apparent in the question of ‘corporate accountability’. Baars provides a detailed analysis of corporate human rights and war crimes trials, from the Nuremberg...