First Volume Of Capital Research Articles

Ibn Khaldun’s Labor Theory of Value and the Question of Race

In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx’s premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun’s (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun’s labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the “nondebates of the 1970s” and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx’s argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.

Subjects of Exchange: Between Lacan and the Neue Marx-Lektüre

This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel's account of the non-knowledge or “practical solipsism” of the subject under capitalism, critics have yet to bring a Lacanian perspective to bear on the unconscious dimension of commodity exchange. Likewise, although Lacan's early formalization of the knotting of the Imaginary and the Symbolic offers a nuanced account of the structural impersonality of the social order, its relevance for the NML theorization of the autonomization of value relations has hitherto been overlooked. Reading Lacan “with” the NML, this essay redresses these oversights through a discussion of Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of the problem of form and method in Marx and Freud, and of Michael Heinrich's exegesis of the exchange process as developed in the first volume of Capital.

Marx’s Pedagogies, the Party, and China: The Open Dialectic of Research and Presentation in Theory and Historical Praxis

While pedagogies emanating from the Marxist tradition have been proposed and debated, this essay argues that Marx had clear pedagogical logics of his own that he laid out by articulating the differences between inquiry and presentation or, said differently, between studying and learning. This essay presents these logics as they play out in Marx’s writing and research, focusing particularly on the Grundrisse notebooks and the first volume of Capital, each of which accord different primacy to inquiry and presentation. To show the political logics of Marx’s pedagogies in practice, the essay draws from Lenin’s conception of the Communist Party as an educational form tasked precisely with navigating between Marx’s pedagogies. A case study follows, of the historical and contemporary experiences of the Chinese Communist Party as it has directed and yielded to Marx’s pedagogies.

Creating New “Enclosures”: Violently Mimicking the Primitive Accumulation through Degradation of Women, Lockdowns, Looting Finance, War, Plunder

Starting from the analysis of Marx’s Chapter 26 of the first volume of Capital, this article describes Marxian emphasis on the extremely violent aspects—a list of the main cases is also provided—of the so-called “enclosures” as fundamental procedures that favored the “primitive accumulation”, that is, the first social and economic step that led to capitalism. The “enclosures” that characterized the primitive accumulation process, violently expropriating peasants, razing their cottages and dwellings, are illustrated in detail. At the same time, we will describe what we call the “moral bubble”, created by the narratives—morally edifying—about enclosures, only devoted to the emphasis on the positive economic and social outcomes: the moral bubble acts as a powerful conceptual device capable of concealing the violence that accompanies enclosures. The second part of the article stresses the fact that the mechanism of enclosures can be traced back not only to violently expropriating common lands in which the peasants flourished but also to the violent processes against women to have them basically reduced to machines for the production of new workers, in the framework of the new “patriarchy of the wage”. The importance of the so-called “new enclosures” is further delineated after having shown how enclosures express the historical and general tendency of capitalistic accumulation and not only of the primitive one. The violent aspects of primitive accumulation, and so of primitive enclosures, are described as the main characters of every phase of the recent capitalist globalization, marked by continuous and unprecedented assault (as smart social, political, and economic mechanisms for producing enclosures) on the commons, perpetrated by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, coronavirus lockdown and, currently, also by the paradoxical economic effects of the interplay between the green era and Ukraine war–global food and energy crisis. Finally, the last section provides insight on what we called the “terminal enclosure” related to the aggression of the ultimate common good: water.

Metaphor, Marx, Agamben and International Law: The Jamaican Quashee/ Quasheeba, the Necessity of Labour, and the Subjectivity of Emancipated Slaves

In the Grundrisse Karl Marx wrote of how what ‘was the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine’ and that ‘the appropriation of labor by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labor into itself – “as though its body were by love possessed”’. Marx drew this metaphorical quotation from Goethe’s Faust literarily describing a poisoned swollen-bellied dying rat. The line mattered enough to Marx (and Engels) to be present too in the first volume of Capital. What work this metaphorization does and how it indirectly relates to Giorgio Agamben’s enigmatic notion of inoperativity (also translated as inactivity, or inoperativeness and referencing human potential as incorporating both the capacity to do and the capacity not to do) is the central task of this paper. The paper argues that the abstracted notion of the emancipated slave who is not inclined to work for money but only works as is necessary was proffered by Marx, and is also proffered by Agamben, as an exemplary metaphorical model for general emancipation. If this is true, it would place the material conditions necessary for both Marx’s and Agamben’s theorisations in the concrete context of the Jamaican Quashees of the 19th Century Caribbean, and neither in classical antiquity (a fact relevant to the charge, unfounded or not, of Agamben’s Eurocentrism), nor in biblical exegesis (a fact relevant to the charge, unfounded or not, of Agamben’s mysticism).

Marx’s Argument for the Labor Theory of Value

In a Times Literary Supplement review of some recent literature on Marx and Marxism for a general readership, Jonathan Wolff claimed that Marx’s solution to the so-called “transformation problem” is “half-baked.” The aim of this paper is to challenge this complacent dismissal of some of Marx’s central economic ideas. In the process, I want to show that although the issues here are subtle and complex, Marx’s ideas retain a great deal of intuitive appeal, and his “solution” to the so-called “transformation problem” is neither conceptually implausible nor mathematically dubious. Crucial to this aim is to show that Marx viewed the categories of (what he called bourgeois) economics through a social lens, which is given in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital.

Marx, el espacio geográfico y el Estado

Este artículo pretende ser una modesta contribución a la antigua y nunca totalmente resuelta polémica acerca del papel del espacio en la teoría de Marx, entendiendo que existe, de manera implícita, un potente análisis del espacio geográfico en los últimos dos capítulos del primer tomo de El capital. Allí aparece una tensión entre “producción capitalista” y capitalismo que, a nuestro juicio, se zanja solo por la consideración de la clausura espacial operada, en general, por las fronteras de los Estados. Para observar ello hacemos un breve recorrido por la historia del Mediterráneo en los siglos XIV al XVI, y lo ponemos en correspondencia con el análisis de Marx sobre las colonias inglesas. A partir de dicha premisa indagamos sobre su implicancia en la expansión de la forma Estado-nación, y la funcionalidad que el mismo ha tenido en distintas etapas del capitalismo, incluyendo una reflexión sobre su función actual.

The unemployable and the generic: rethinking the commons in the communist hypothesis

One of the main points of contention in the current debates surrounding Marxism has been the problem of finding a concrete substrate, which would orient the recuperation of the communist political strategy. Are there impasses in our contemporary society which justify the use of such a polemical notion as communism? Most authors currently involved with this debate agree that it is the problem of the “commons" under capitalism, which calls for a new theory and practice of communism. Where they disagree is on what the “commons” are and on how they exist within capitalism itself. The present contribution seeks to intervene on this debate and spell out the categorial recomposition of some fundamental aspects of Marxist critique of political economy implicitly at stake in Slavoj Žižek’s theorization of the “antagonisms of the common”. Taking up the insight of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt concerning the new centrality of the enclosure of the commons in contemporary capitalism, Žižek has developed an alternative—more sober—view of the structural subsumption of these common spaces to the dynamics of Capital, where the very communal dimension of these domains only appear as common after they have been privatized. To extract the consequences of this assertion, we will first reconstruct the Marxist theory of enclosures in a comparative reading of the first volume of Capital and Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation. This will lead us to a broader discussion of the contemporary transformations in capitalism, with a focus on the crisis of value as primarily sustained by absolute surplus-value extraction. With an understanding of the idea of the commons and a historical background of our current predicament, we will be in position to follow Antonio Negri’s reading of how the enclosure of the commons leads to a new communist strategy and also to criticize it, using Slavoj Zizek’s alternative understanding of our contemporary social antagonisms. Following through Zizek's reading of the logic of enclosures, we come to the conclusion that, first, unemployment has the structure of an enclosure, one which is responsible for the very form of the work commodity—as it was already suggested by Fredric Jameson and others—and, second, that, from a certain philosophical perspective shared by thinkers such as Zizek and Badiou, this realization can lead us to an innovative recuperation of the Marxist theory of “generic being”, proposed by Marx in his Manuscripts of 1844.

TO THE ISSUE OF THE “VALIDITY” OF THE MARXIST LABOR VALUE THEORY

The paradox of the current state of the economic education is that many theoretical provisions taught at universities are based on a theory the use of which in the recent historical past led to a systemic crisis in the development of the country. The issue in question is the Marxist theory of the labor value that regards money as a “universal equivalent”. The lack of critical re-evaluation of this theory under modern conditions is not just to the detriment of the development of the country’s monetary and banking system, in fact it already has negative consequences. Hence the actual task is to show the “validity”, or rather, the failure of this theory not only for the current stage of market development but going back to its roots. This is the purpose of the paper. Methodology. This study is not a hasty impromptu but the result of many years of reflection on various aspects of the Marxist theory which in its final form was set forth by K. Marx in the first volume of Capital. Therefore, this source was the main object of research and, accordingly, citation in the paper. The basic research methods included the dialectical method, the method of organic sequences and a number of other general and special scientific methods. Results. The most important result of the paper is the critical re-evaluation of the Marxist theory of the labor value and the positioning of money as a “universal equivalent”. Conclusions. The Marxist understanding of a commodity as a unity of the use value and the exchange value is far-fetched. Commodities and money have nothing in common that would allow drawing parallels between them and carrying out market transactions on sort of an equivalent basis. Accordingly, money cannot be positioned as a “universal equivalent”. The Marxist understanding of the essence of money outlined in many student courses of today must be overcome. However, such overcoming should take place not through a ban or by simply ignoring the Marxist theory, which due to its specifics still has an almost hypnotic effect on the minds of many economists, but through a scientific analysis of its nature.

The Rule of Value and the Communist Alternative: A Response to Peter Hudis’ Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

A discussion of Hudis' <em>Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism.</em>

The Value of the Future: The Child as Human Capital and the Neoliberal Labor of Race

A is terrible thing to waste. But wonderful thing to invest in. This slogan greeted pedestrians during recent winter at bus stop on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The bus ad was for Better Futures, simulated stock option that capitalizes on meta-awareness of financial capitalism's role in the destruction of public education and the racialization of the achievement gap in the United States. The United Negro College Fund (UNCF), perhaps sensing need to adapt to the dominant funding arrangement of the neoliberal market, has jumped into the sphere of finance-or its careful simulation. In an effort to solicit investors, passersby are asked to make donations to what is the latest version of UNCF s historically important college-funding program, one adapted for the era of information capitalism by forecasting algorithm on its website that can tell potential investors exactly how many dollars of will be produced for each dollar spent. Suggesting, in turn, that investors imagine the viral proliferation of the campaign from bus stop to Internet, the ad asks friends to contribute through social media, so that the future dollars on the screen can multiply precisely and exponentially (United Negro College Fund 2013).Each share of Better Futures costs ten dollars and UNCF displays its simulated return value on its home page: 0.96% per dollar per annum. Despite marketing strategy suggesting that the developing minds of children of color are really worth more socially than monetarily, the efficient conversion of those minds into dollars in the calculator undermines any final distinction. The simulation achieved by UNCF coincides with Marx's (1978,335) basic formula for capital accumulation, which financialization fully reflects: M-M', money which begets The missing C here (M-C-M'), recall, is intentional. As Marx details in the first volume of Capital, the commodity can be removed to simplify the formula because its beginning and end is circulating money. Perhaps, though, the missing C might also be in this case the child. For Better Futures, the commodity is the cognitive capacity of children's neuroplasticity, their capacity to learn (the mind that is, according to UNCF's well-known slogan, a terrible thing to waste). This capacity is quantified by its projection into probable future, stretched out as financial speculation across the life span of the child and divisible into discrete spheres by UNCF's calculator that include not only eventual salary but also health savings, crime savings, and the nebulous other savings (United Negro College Fund 2013).In speculating on the value of the future by monetizing the body and of the child of color, UNCF suggests that the value of the child to neoliberal capital is not identical to the idealized modern concept of childhood as shelter from the labor market, one that took root as whiteness in the Progressive Era (see Macleod 1998). If the orphan Annie incarnates this child figure of American industrial capitalism, the vulnerable, white, and feminine future citizen who must be saved by the nation from the dehumanizing and immoral dangers of the market, she has likewise become in recent years the avatar of the reproductive futurism diagnosed as endemic to the social, most famously according to Lee Edelman, who unceremoniously declares in No Future (2004, 29), Fuck Annie. Reproductive futurism, for Edelman, signifies the centrality of the child figure to the social organization of time and its root value as political: the child is the emblem of the future in whose name the totality of society is contracted, precious resource governing the parameters of public politics and private sociality to secure the welfare of tomorrow in stable form (reproduction), consigning queerness to the purely negative. Edelman argues that only an affirmation of the fully negative, which would comprehend the annihilation of Annie and everything vouchsafed by her image, could possibly overcome the straitjacket of the future upon which she calls. …

Marx Is Dead, Long Live Marx’s Ideas

I have worked as a journalist for forty years, largely for left-wing and liberal publications, and in the last few decades, or until very recently, I may have heard Marx cited five or six times by people actively engaged in politics or shaping public opinion. I don’t know anyone under sixty who has read the first volume of Capital, let alone the second or third. I am sure there are professional historians or political scientists, even economists, who have done so, but that’s not my point. Until a recent burst of interest among young radicals in the wake of the Great Recession, Marx had become an irrelevant curiosity. Jonathan Sperber’s new biography reinforces this dim view of Marx. Aptly subtitled “A Nineteenth Century Life,” it is a portrayal of Marx, as well as his ideas, as the product of his time rather than ours.

Recognition in Capital

In this paper it is shown that in his conception of value, published in the first volume of Capital, Marx relies on Hegel’s concept of pure recognition to organise the relations between use- and exchange-value on the one hand and the relation between the social relations between things (goods) and actors (sellers) on the other hand. Establishing this thesis is important in three respects: Firstly it demonstrates that there is a strong continuity in the philosophical thought of Karl Marx, making visible an essential relation between his Economic-philosophical Manuscripts and his later writings. Secondly it helps to better understand Marx’s conception of value; and thirdly it shows that “recognition” is an important conception in his critique of political economy.

Understanding Accumulation: The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation in Media and Communication Studies

The aim of this article is to discuss and use Marx’s theory on primitive accumulation, outlined in the first volume of Capital, in relation to media and communication research. In order to develop Marx’s argument the discussion is revitalized through Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession. The article focuses on two different fields within media and communication research where the concept of accumulation by dispossession is applicable. First, the role of news media content, news flows and news media systems are discussed in relation to social mobilization against capitalism, privatizations, and the financial sector. Second, Marx’s theory is used to examine how communication in Web 2.0 and the development of ICTs could advance the processes of capital accumulation by appropriating the work performed by users of Web 2.0 and by increasing the corporate surveillance of Internet users. In conclusion, by analyzing how primitive accumulation is intertwined with contemporary expanded reproduction of capital, the article shows that Marx’s theory can contribute to critical media and communication research in several ways.

Understanding Accumulation: The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation in Media and Communication Studies

The aim of this article is to discuss and use Marx’s theory on primitive accumulation, outlined in the first volume of Capital, in relation to media and communication research. In order to develop Marx’s argument the discussion is revitalized through Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession. The article focuses on two different fields within media and communication research where the concept of accumulation by dispossession is applicable. First, the role of news media content, news flows and news media systems are discussed in relation to social mobilization against capitalism, privatizations, and the financial sector. Second, Marx’s theory is used to examine how communication in Web 2.0 and the development of ICTs could advance the processes of capital accumulation by appropriating the work performed by users of Web 2.0 and by increasing the corporate surveillance of Internet users. In conclusion, by analyzing how primitive accumulation is intertwined with contemporary expanded reproduction of capital, the article shows that Marx’s theory can contribute to critical media and communication research in several ways.

Kapitalfetisch: ‘The religion of everyday life’

The importance of the idea of fetishism in Marx's work hardly needs to be argued, especially in light of the famous passage in Capital concerning commodities. However, the extent of Marx's engagement with fetishism has rarely been explored in full. In order to re-examine this question, the paper is divided into two parts. The first sets Marx's discussion in Capital within the context of his lifelong interest in fetishism, from his earliest encounter with the idea in the work of Charles de Brosses (in the early 1840s), through his religious and economic transformations of the idea, to his late interest in its anthropological dimensions in the Ethnological Notebooks from the early 1880s. Included in this discussion is the most famous and well-known treatment of commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital. The second part explores the permutations of fetishism beyond this initial – and what will turn out to be a very preliminary – moment in Capital, focusing on his extension of the term to the whole of capitalism. In the extant section of the third draft of Capital and then in the third volume of that work, Marx first expands the idea of fetishism to include of the many-fold dimensions of capitalism, which ‘stand on their hind legs vis-à-vis the worker and confront him as capital’. Then he begins a process of distillation, gradually working towards the pure essence of M–M', interest-bearing capital. Here he coins a new word, Kapitalfetisch, capital-fetish. Thus, at the heart of capitalism is what may be called the ‘religion of everyday life (diese Religion des Alltagslebens)’.

The Parallax of Labor: Marx as a Moralist

This paper is an attempt to extrapolate an ethical paradigm from Marx's discussion of surplus value in the first volume of Capital. It sets out to put that discussion in conversation with certain “postmodern” approaches to ethics that focus on the ways in which particular acts of predation and violation are allowed to proceed precisely because they are invisible from the perspective of the prevailing legal-juridical discourses. It examines the Marxian notion of the nature of labor as a commodity by means of Slavoj Žižek's concept of a “parallax relation.” Ultimately, it argues that there is a fundamental affinity between Marx's analysis of labor and Lacanian ethics in that both rely on the location of a conceptual space in which the law coincides with its own transgression and that this is the space in which both (Lacan explicitly and Marx more implicitly) situate the ethical subject.

The enduring significance of the thought of Karl Marx

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess Marx's enduring significance in the center of his thought, the first volume of Capital. In Capital and related writings, Marx systematically works out his theory of value. Although Marx's value theory has been widely thought to be internally inconsistent, the “myth of inconsistency” in reclaiming Marx's “Capital” has been recently refuted by Kliman.Design/methodology/approachBased on Kliman's refutation, a logically coherent interpretation of Marx's theory is on hand. The paper therefore aims to bring out the philosophical character of Marx's critique of political economy, to which the terms and relations of value theory are essential. It is rooted in the abiding humanism he first discovered through his critical appropriation and transformation of Hegelian philosophy.FindingsFollowing Raya Dunayevskaya in Marxism and Freedom, this paper interprets Marx to have founded a new critical science of society “that was at the same time a philosophy of history.” Hence Marx's use of ontological categories in Capital (“substance,” “essence,” “appearance”) is fully methodologically self‐conscious and deliberate. Categories derived from Hegel's Science of Logic (as Lenin rightly grasped) explain the “bewitched and distorted world” of capitalist social relations.Originality/valueThis paper shows that, thinking historically, Marx works out the “notion” of capital from the standpoint of its negation. As if seen through a camera obscura, capital is the domination of alienated, past, objectified, abstract, and dead labor over living labor power. In conclusion, emphasis is placed on the subjective as well as the objective condition necessary to the revolutionary transcendence of the law of value.

Marx in the matrix. L'algebra del "lavoro vivo"

This paper provides a general overview on the recent interpretations of Marx’s analysis of value, money and income distribution. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 introduces the original Marxian formulation of labour theory of value, as it is outlined in the first volume of Capital. Section 2 reproposes the ‘transformation of values into production prices’, as it is developed in the third volume. Section 3 discusses the still open issues around Marx’s transformation procedure. Sections 4 and 5 provide an outline on the so called ‘Single-System Labour Theory of Value’ (SS-LTV), autonomously elaborated by Foley and Dumenil since the first half of 1980s. Such an innovative approach represents a macroeconomic monetary interpretation of Marx’s analysis, founded on the rediscovery of the ‘living labour’ concept. Finally, section 6 leaves behind the long-run analysis implied in the SS-LTV, in order to consider the effects of a change in the general price level (disregarding wage-earners expectations) on surplus rate.

Marx and `Modernization'

• Summary: Despite the marginalization of Marxism with social work, Karl Marx's Capital still provides a devastating critique of capitalism and remains a vital resource for social workers seeking to understand and develop strategies of resistance to neoliberalization. • Findings: Marx provides a number of `reminders' or `coordinates' which might help us to make sense of transformations taking place within the `world of work' today. More fundamentally, he illuminates aspects of `actually existing capitalism'. Furthermore, focusing on the first volume of Capital helps us to think about a constellation of connected factors, loosely referred to under the headings of time, toil (or labour) and technology, underpinning the `modernization' of social work and related areas of activity. The book also remains important because it reminds contemporary readers that capitalism is an exploitative economic system which damages bodies and minds. In this context, it is significant that Marx was perturbed and outraged by how the lives of children were being destroyed by the dynamic, unregulated power of capital. • Applications : It would be erroneous to assume we can mechanically apply Marx's work in manifestly different times and circumstances. Rather, we have to `do our own work', in our particular time, place, and professional field and ponder whether some of the ideas adumbrated by Marx, in the late 19th century, still have contemporary resonance and meaning within neoliberal modernity.