Beyond Marx And Market

Aimed at sixth formers and first-year undergraduates, this textbook aims to provide an unbiased assessment of the respective merits and demerits of the variety of economic systems that have existed in the 20th century.

A key figure in the Italian Autonomia Movement reads Marxs Grndrisse, developing the critical and controversial theoretical apparatus that informs the zero-work strategy and other elements so crucial to this new and heretical tendency in Marxist theory. A challenge to both capitalist and socialist apologists for waged slavery.

A wide ranging and deeply engaged examination of the role slaves and unfree workers play in the global capitalist economy.

Winner of The Deutscher Memorial Prize 2004. In a completely reworked edition of his classic (1991) volume, Michael A. Lebowitz explores the implications of the book on wage-labour that Marx originally intended to write. Focusing upon critical assumptions in Capital that were to be removed in Wage-Labour and upon Marx's methodology, Lebowitz stresses the one-sidedness of Marx's Capital and argues that the side of the workers, their goals and their struggles in capitalism have been ignored by a monolithic Marxism characterized by determinism, reductionism and a silence on human experience.

Beyond Marx and Other Entries is a truly original book by David Gleicher, author of The Rescue of the Third Class on the Titanic: A Revisionist History (Liverpool University Press, 2006). It explores deep areas of semiotics, joined with economics, anthropology, sociology, history and philosophy and political science, even Franz Kafka's literary works. These are communicated by entries, based primarily on Gleicher’s actual blog Looking through the crack from 2013 to 2017. No other book quite compares to it, but one might equate it to impressionist art, or the 'the one and the many'. Each entry is independent; nothing in one makes even an allusion to another. Readers, however, cannot help but to make connections themselves and develop their own understandings of dystopian possibilities.

In this innovative book, David McNally develops a powerful critique of market socialism, by tracing it back to its roots in early political economy. He ranges from Adam Smith’s attempt to reconcile moral philosophy with market economics to Malthus’s reformulation of Smith’s political economy which made it possible to justify poverty as a moral necessity. Smith’s economic theory was also the source of an attempt to construct a critique of capitalism derived from his conception of free and equal exchange governed by natural price. This Smithian forerunner of today’s market socialism sought to reform the market without abolishing the social relations on which it was based. McNally explores this tradition sympathetically, but exposes its fatal flaws. The book concludes with an incisive consideration of efforts by writers such as Alec Nove to construct a “feasible” model of market socialism. McNally shows these efforts are still plagued by the failure of early Smithian socialism to come to grips with the social foundations of the market, the commodification of labor-power which is the key to market regulation of the economy. The results, he argues, are neither socialist nor workable.

Marx in the Field is a unique edited collection illustrating the relevance of the Marxian method to study contemporary capitalism and the global development process. Essays in the collection bring Marx ‘to the field’ in three ways. They illustrate how Marxian categories can be concretely deployed for field research in the global economy, they analyse how these categories may be adapted during fieldwork and they discuss data collection methods supporting Marxian analysis. Crucially, many of the contributions expand the scope of Marxian analysis by combining its insights with those of other intellectual traditions, including radical feminisms, critical realism and postcolonial studies. The book defines the possibilities and challenges of fieldwork guided by Marxian analysis, including those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection takes a global approach to the study of development and of contemporary capitalism. While some essays focus on themes and geographical areas of long-term concern for international development – like informal or rural poverty and work across South Asia, Southern and West Africa, or South America – others focus instead on actors benefitting from the development process - like regional exporters, larger farmers, and traders – or on unequal socio-economic outcomes across richer and emerging economies and regions – including Gulf countries, North America, Southern Europe, or Post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Some essays explore global processes cutting across the world economy, connecting multiple regions, actors and inequalities. While some of the contributions focus on classic Marxian tropes in the study of contemporary capitalism – like class, labour and working conditions, agrarian change, or global commodity chains and prices – others aim at demonstrating the relevance of the Marxian method beyond its traditional boundaries – for instance, for exploring the interplays between food, nutrition and poverty; the links between social reproduction, gender and homework; the features of migration and refugees regimes, tribal chieftaincy structures or prison labour; or the dynamics structuring global surrogacy. Overall, through the analysis of an extremely varied set of concrete settings and cases, this book illustrates the extraordinary insights we can gain by bringing Marx in the field.

In Invisible Leviathan, Murray E.G. Smith refutes the main criticisms of Marx’s theory of labour value and argues that human civilization is imperilled by the capitalist imperative to measure wealth in terms of ‘abstract social labour’ and money profit.

Marxism has long been accused of economic determinism, reductionism and a silence on human experience. Beyond Capital argues that these problems can be traced back to Marx's failure to write his planned book on Wage-Labor. Added to the subsequent ignorance of Marx's method, the result has been a one-sided presentation of Marxism. By considering workers and their needs, Beyond Capital demonstrates the one-sidedness of such concepts as the value of labor-power and the theoretical inferences drawn from Capital. However, rather than rejecting Marx, Beyond Capital argues that his "political economy of the working class" and the process of struggle are central for going beyond capitalism.

These essays critically rethink Marxism in the light of the disintegration of communist regimes Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Containing essays from a group of internationally distinguished writers and intellectuals, this collection addresses Marxism as a cultural-political problematic. Contending that Marxism is deeply embedded in specific cultural practices, the contributors illuminate Marxism's contribution to discussions of labour in post-industrial capitalism, to controversies surrounding compulsory heterosexuality and queer theory, and to debates about the institutionalization and academicization of the "New" Left. In examining Marxism's relationship to cultural practices, the contributors make a case for Marxism's continued relevance. By combining a diversity of perspectives, these essays demonstrate that Marxism addresses urgent needs that are often forsaken by other political and ideological practices. They show how - now more than ever - Marxism's reaffirmation can serve as a sophisticated and cunning response to the latest global developments - and travesties.