Being a Leftist, I started reading Capital as a student, back in the 1970s.I was impressed by Marx's analysis, emphasizing that capitalist relations of power appear as money generating more money, as a “thing” that functions as capital; furthermore, that credit functions as the most drastic form of money, so that the financial sphere is not a “parasitic” appendage of the “real economy”, but a mechanism for enforcing the “rules” of the system. As Professor of Political Economy since the late 1980s, I enjoy revealing to my students the structural contradictions of the system we live in. E.g., that the standard of living of the social majority (of the wage-earners) is (labour-)‘‘cost” of capital.
I wrote
The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System: The Prevalence of an Aleatory Encounter
Capitalis still the most thorough analysis of the workings of capitalism.
Itinaugurated a major theoretical rupture in the social sciences. It defines a new theoretical system of concepts on the basis of which we can decipher the social and economic reality that surrounds us: capitalism.
That goes for every capitalism, and not just that of England in the nineteenth century, where and during which time Marx lived.
The object of Capital is, as its author explains, the “ideal average” of the capitalist system, the causal relationships that operate below the surface of each and every capitalism.
'A groundbreaking work of economic analysis. It is also a literary masterpice' Francis Wheen, Guardian
One of the most notorious and influential works of modern times, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis. Arguing that capitalism would cause an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production. Capital rapidly acquired readership throughout the world,…
In a vivid and comprehensible way, Heinrich outlines the historical, economic, and social conditions for the emergence of Marx’s theory, the “Critique of Political Economy”.
He addresses its methodological foundations, and introduces the most important terms and concepts.
What actually is capitalism, and what is Marx’s dialectic all about? How is surplus value created? What is fetishism, and how does it relate to politics and the state?
Beyond that, Heinrich also asks about the topicality of Marx’s thought and the possibility of a “society beyond the commodity form”.
The global economic crisis and recession that began in 2008 had at least one unexpected outcome: a surge in sales of Karl Marx's Capital. Although mainstream economists and commentators once dismissed Marx's work as outmoded and flawed, some are begrudgingly acknowledging an analysis that sees capitalism as inherently unstable. And of course, there are those, like Michael Heinrich, who have seen the value of Marx all along, and are in a unique position to explain the intricacies of Marx's thought.
Heinrich's modern interpretation of Capital is now available to English-speaking readers for the first time. It has gone through nine…
The book emphasizes the importance of Marx’s theory of value.
Rubin argues that Marx's mature economic writings provide an understanding of how labor is determined and limited by capitalist social relations, which appear as objective structures, that are being “reified” in the money existence of commodities.
The author further argues that the notion of simple commodity production does not characterize human societies since antiquity, as it is often argued by both Marxists and critics of Marx.
In Marx’s analysis, it constitutes the outer husk of the capitalist economy. Value and money are concepts which cannot be defined independently of the notion of capital.
They contain (and are also contained in) the concept of capital.
Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia – 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated.
Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to…
This book has given an important impetus to the critical discussion of Marx's work, by criticizing the mechanistic, historicist, and economistic legacy that still weighs on Marxism.
It marks a radical new beginning of the debate on Marxism and the thereof points of contention: What, in fact, is the scientific breakthrough that Marx made with his Critique of Political Economy in the field of the sciences of history and society?
In what sense does this scientific breakthrough provide indispensable foundations for a politics of overcoming the domination of capitalist mode of production in contemporary societies?
And finally: What contribution can critical philosophizing make to the development of genuinely scientific research and revolutionary politics as such, and to their assertion against all disruptions by dominant ideologies?
Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx's project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the Ecole normale superieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born.
The author develops what he calls a new dialectic by drawing on the way Marx appropriated in Capitalcertain schemas of Hegel’s reasoning.
His basic thesis is that the dialectic in question does not refer to a succession of social systems, but to the systematic development of categories, i.e of conceptualizing the relations that characterize the capitalist mode of production.
Thus, value, money, and capital are categories that decipher the interconnectedness of social relations in capitalism.
This book both argues for, and demonstrates, a new turn to dialectic. Marx's Capital was clearly influenced by Hegel's dialectical figures: here, case by case, the significance of these is clarified. More, it is argued that, instead of the dialectic of the rise and fall of social systems, what is needed is a method of articulating the dialectical relations characterising a given social whole. Marx learnt from Hegel the necessity for a systematic development, and integration, of categories; for example, the category of 'value' can be fully comprehended only in the context of the totality of capitalist relations. These studies…
The book is an inquiry into the origins of capitalism, and simultaneously a theoretical treatise on capitalism. The point of departure is Karl Marx’s theory, especially as developed in Capital. By endeavoring an investigation of the origins of capitalism, the analysis (re)produces a theory of capitalism as a system of class domination and exploitation. It also critically reviews an array of economic and historical literature, Marxist and non-Marxist, past and contemporary: from W.I. Lenin’s and K. Kautsky’s approaches to the analyses of the German Historical School and more recent investigations and controversies. Finally, it expounds the capitalist character of the Venetian social formation from the end of the fourteenth century until the final subjugation of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon in 1797.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
