Reconstructing Marx's Critique of Political Economy from His London Notebooks

Abstract

<div class="bookreview">Lucia Pradella, <em>Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx's Writings</em> (London: Routledge, 2015), 218 pages, $160, hardback.</div> In 2012, the second section of the new historical-critical edition of Marx and Engels's complete writings, the <em lang="de-DE">Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe </em>(MEGA), was finally completed, and all the editions and manuscripts of <em>Capital</em> became available in order to trace Marx's own theoretical development and Engels's editorial works. The remaining three sections are, however, only halfway completed, and it will likely take at least another twenty years before all the work is finished.… What is more, a great number of them are Marx's journal fragments and excerpts, which have not yet been published in any language. In this sense, the distinct importance of continuing the MEGA project is the further publication of these unknown notebooks, which promise to reveal Marx's unfinished undertaking, the critique of political economy.… It is therefore no coincidence that a new trend has emerged in the last few years of scholars studying Marx's notebooks. Works like Kevin Anderson's <em>Marx at the Margins</em>, Heather Brown's <em>Marx on Gender</em>, and my own article on Liebig in <em>Monthly Review </em>have shown the underestimated theoretical dimensions of anti-colonialism, gender, and ecology in Marx's thought.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-7" title="Vol. 67, No. 7: December 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>