Deciphering Capital

Alex Callinicos

Description

Marx's Capital is back where it belongs, at the centre of debate about Marxism and its purchase on the contemporary world. In recent years there has been an explosion of much wider interest in Capital, after the debate on Capital largely fell silent in the late-1970s. In Deciphering Capital, Alex Callinicos offers his own substantial contribution to the debate. He tackles the question of Marx's method, his relation to Hegel, value theory and labour. He engages with Marxist thinkers past and present, from Gramsci and Althusser to Harvey and Jameson.

Informations

• Publié par: Bookmarks
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909026704
• Langue: English

Extrait

DECIPHERING CAPITAL
Marx s Capital and its destiny
Alex Callinicos
In memoriam
John Callinicos (1920-2012)
DECIPHERING CAPITAL
Marx s Capital and its destiny
Alex Callinicos
Deciphering Capital: Marx s Capital and its destiny Alex Callinicos
Published 2014 by Bookmarks Publications
c/o 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE
Copyright Bookmarks Publications
Typeset by Peter Robinson
Cover image: Shabolovka Radio Tower (1998)
by Richard Pare
Printed by Halstan UK
ISBN print edition: 978 1 909026 68 1
Kindle: 978 1 909026 69 8
ePub: 978 1 909026 70 4
PDF : 978 1 909026 71 1
Table of contents
Preface
Guide to citations
Introduction
The return to Capital
The problem of relations
How to read Marx
1 Composition
The Marx problem
The fall guy
The long and winding road
In what sense is Capital unfinished?
2 Method, I: Ricardo
The logic of Capital
Marx s problem situation
The impasse of Ricardian value theory
Ricardo, Hegel and Spinoza
3 Method, II: Hegel
The Hegel problem
Rising from the abstract to the concrete
Competition, appearance and science
4 Value
Where to begin?
Value form and money
Production and exchange
5 Labour
Living labour and capital
Marginalising wage labour
The pseudo-subjectivity of capital
The subjectivity of labour
6 Crises
Crisis and revolution
Dimensions of crisis
Beyond crises?
7 Today
The modernity of Capital
The relationality of capital
Envoi
Appendix: Althusser s Detour via Relations
Index
Why then did I not answer you? Because I was the whole time at death s door. I thus had to make use of every moment when I was capable of work to complete my book to which I have sacrificed my health, happiness, and family. I hope this explanation suffices. I laugh at the so-called practical men and their wisdom. If one wanted to be an ox, one could, of course, turn one s back on the sufferings of humanity and look after one s own hide. But I should really have thought myself unpractical if I had pegged out without finally completing my book, at least in manuscript.
Karl Marx to Sigfrid Meyer, 30 April 1867
About the author
Alex Callinicos is professor of European Studies at King s College London. He has written widely on Marxist theory. His books include The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Bookmarks 1983), Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Polity 2009) and Bonfire of Illusions (Polity 2010). He is the editor of the journal International Socialism .
Preface
I feel I have been writing this book all my adult life. It originates in the challenge that Imre Lakatos threw down at me in the summer of 1973 to pursue a doctoral thesis under his supervision on the scientificity of Marxism. Alas, he died a few months later so I had only a brief, glancing encounter with this brilliant personality. But I wrote my thesis on Marx s method in Capital between 1974 and 1978 at Balliol College, Oxford, under the supervision of, first, Paul Streeten and then Frances Stewart. Elements of this thesis survive in this book. So I must thank my supervisors here, and also Leszek Kolakowski, with whom I enjoyed exchanging ironies in his rooms at All Souls. As he was throughout my time at Balliol, Alan Montefiore was a benign and supporting presence.
During my doctoral research I was in receipt of a fellowship from the Beit Trust. I am happy (as required under the terms of the fellowship) finally to acknowledge this support. The Trust s founder Alfred Beit was a close ally of Cecil Rhodes in his efforts to conquer southern Africa and its mineral wealth for British imperialism. As another Beit Fellow, Charles van Onselen, wrote at the beginning of Chibaro , his study of the exploitation of African mine labour under Rhodes s and Beit s successors in colonial Zimbabwe, this kind of support for Marxists is further evidence of the fact that there is no simple relationship between base and superstructure . The Marikana massacre in South Africa has shown that the black mineworkers struggle continues even under regimes that claim to have brought national liberation .
The outbreak of the Asian economic crisis in 1997-98 returned me to my studies of Capital as part of the effort led by my much missed friend and comrade Chris Harman to understand the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Amid many other projects, writing this book for a long time hovered as an all too distant goal. I was lucky that I revisited Capital at a time when there has been a much broader renaissance of the Marxist critique of political economy. I have more to say about this renaissance and the intellectual influences from which I have benefitted in the Introduction. Here I would to thank those who have given me more direct help. In particular, I am grateful to Sally Campbell, Joseph Choonara, Martin Empson, Fred Moseley, and Lucia Pradella, who all read the book in draft and made many valuable suggestions for its improvement. It is entirely my fault that I haven t always taken their advice. I have learned especially from Lucia Pradella, both in her comments on my manuscript and in the insights I have gained from her own research.
Finally, I must remember my father. My original research in the 1970s took place with my parents somewhat bemused but always loving support. My father s long life drew to a close as I was working on this book. In my memory, rereading the crowning part of Marx s work, Capital , Volume III, is inextricably interwoven with my vigil at my father s bedside during his last illness. It is therefore only right that I should dedicate Deciphering Capital to his memory.
Guide to Citations
To simplify citations, the following works are referred to as follows in the text:
C I: Karl Marx, Capital , I (Harmondsworth, 1976)
C II: Karl Marx, Capital , II (Harmondsworth, 1978)
C III: Karl Marx, Capital , III (Harmondsworth, 1981)
Con : Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London, 1971)
CW : Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (50 vols, Moscow, 1975-2005)
EW : Karl Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1975)
G : Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, 1973)
GL : G W F Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge, 2010)
MEGA 2 : Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin, 1975-)
R : The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (Piero Sraffa, ed, 11 vols, Cambridge, 1951-2)
The Penguin editions of the Grundrisse and Capital have become the standard translations of these works in English. Despite the high quality of the translations, I have sometimes felt it necessary to correct them, particularly to bring out more clearly the conceptual distinctions on which Marx is relying. This was also sometimes necessary for other translations, and particularly for the portions of the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 that were originally translated for the old Moscow edition of Theories of Surplus Value . When doing so I have normally relied on the online version of the Marx-Engels Werke , available online at http://www.dearchiv.de/php/mewinh.php . I should also pay tribute to the immense scholarly resource offered by the Marxists Internet Archive at http://www.marxists.org/ .
When, very occasionally, I have preferred the older translations of Capital by Progress Publishers, I have cited them as follows:
MI: Karl Marx, Capital , I (Moscow, 1970)
MII: Karl Marx, Capital , II (Moscow, 1970)
MIII: Karl Marx, Capital , III (Moscow, 1971)
I have made heavy use of Marx s correspondence and manuscripts. When, as so often, he breaks into English, I have indicated this by putting these words in bold. Interpolations of the German original are put in round brackets when they have been placed there by the translator and in square brackets when I have put them there.
Introduction
The return to Capital
Marx s Capital is back where it belongs, at the centre of debate about Marxism and its purchase on the contemporary world. Of course, this isn t the first time this has happened. The renaissance of Marxism in the 1960s and early 1970s was the product of a profound political radicalisation whose high points were marked by the worker and student revolts of May-June 1968 in France and the hot autumn of 1969 in Italy. 1 It involved an intense engagement with Capital , and not as a pious or scholarly exercise, but as a means of better understanding both the nature of the Marxist project and the dynamics of capitalism. The collective undertaking by Louis Althusser and his students at the cole normale sup rieure that produced Reading Capital (1965) was merely the tip of a much larger iceberg. 2
Althusser laid out a strenuous reading programme:
But some day it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text itself, complete, all four volumes, line by line, to return ten times to the first chapters, or to the schemes of simple reproduction and reproduction on a large scale, before coming down from the arid table-lands and plateaus of Volume Two to the promised land of profit, interest and rent. And it is essential to read Capital not only in its French translation (even Volume One in Roy s translation, which Marx revised, or rather, rewrote), but also in the German original, at least for the fundamental theoretical chapters and all the key passages where Marx s key concepts come to the surface. 3
Rather surprisingly, Althusser later claimed that, when he wrote these words, he knew nearly nothing of Marx , and indeed only read Volume I of Capital in 1964 for the seminar that resulted in Reading Capital . 4 But many others (myself included) did their best to follow his injunction, and the understanding of Capital was a main reference point in the Marxist debates of the time-not just in the immense controversy provoked by Althusser s reinterpretation of Marx, but also, for example, in the discussions among German and British Marxists about how to derive the state from the capital relation. 5
But, as