Archivo
“Lliçons sobre el capítol sisè (inèdit) de Marx de Claudio Napoleoni”: Ivan Gordillo
“El capital, llibre I, capítol VI (inèdit). Resultats del procés immediat de producció”1 més conegut amb el nom d’Inèdit és un text escrit per Marx als voltants de 1865 que finalment no va incloure en la versió definitiva del llibre I de El capital que va aparèixer per primera vegada el 1867. Aquest text es pot trobar individualment en edicions en format llibre que no superen les 150 pàgines. És, per tant, un text de reduïdes dimensions si ho comparem amb altres obres del pensador alemany.
Tot i el caràcter de treball previ no definitiu, l’Inèdit és d’especial interès perquè conté gran part del contingut teòric essencial del llibre I de El capital. A més, està escrit en un estil força menys farragós que d’altres obres de l’autor pel que creiem pot ser de gran utilitat als lectors novells en el pensament de Marx o aquells que volen iniciar-se en la lectura de El capital.
“Things Fall Apart: Cosmovision under Capitalism”: Chris Gilbert
Capitalism has the dubious honor of being the first civilization lacking in a cosmovision. From original communitarianism forward, we encounter societies that see man as part of a more or less inviolable socio-natural order: these ordering systems range from the totemic structures of original communitary societies to medieval conceptions such as the “great chain of being.”
The best explanation for this nearly universal characteristic is that in all previous societies human beings were in the dominated pole of the society-nature dyad. As a consequence, there evolved rich mythological apparatuses. Myth served to mediate the relation to a natural world that could not be controlled or dominated.
Socio-natural ideas of order even informed practices of governance in as much as rulers inevitably sought to maintain – and were responsible for – a harmonious relation with nature. The classical scholar George Derwent Thomson refers to how Chinese emperors of the Zhou Dynasty were charged with maintaining a correct relation with the elements:
“If the emperor did not govern in harmony with the celestial movements – Thomson writes – bad omens would appear and society would fall into disorder. At the same time, the society’s good government was a necessary condition for maintaining the natural order.” [1]
In the modern world this type of relation is relegated to literature. For example, in the Elizabethan drama King Lear, the political crisis is linked to an environmental one. A real tempest runs parallel (with its “fretful elements”) to the political and social disorder unleashed in the kingdom.
“16 Tesis de Economía Política. Tesis III″: Enrique Dussel
“El ciclo equivalencial: valor de cambio, dinero y mercado“: tercera conferencia de Enrique Dussel sobre la crítica de la economía política de Marx de su curso ” 16 Tesis de Economía Política”
“16 Tesis de Economía Política. Tesis II″: Enrique Dussel
“El ciclo productivo, trabajo vivo y valor” segunda conferencia de Enrique Dussel sobre la crítica de la economía política de Marx de su curso ” 16 Tesis de Economía Política”
“La dialéctica del altermundismo y el anticapitalismo”: Wolfgang Fritz Haug
El eruptivo aparecer de un movimiento multiforme de críticos de la globalización en Seattle, 1999, que fuera celebrado como el “nuevo Aurora” (Ramonet 2000) no ha iniciado un vuelco revolucionario mundial. Sin embargo, la forma de volcarse contra los dominadores del capitalismo mundial, redirigió la mirada de los antiglobalizadores al globo en el sentido de nuestro mundo. Una dialéctica memorable los transformó en luchadores de una mundialización de abajo. En francés se llaman ahora los “altermondialistes”. Tras el trauma paralizador del fracaso del socialismo de Estado, este movimiento ha hecho aparecer el nuevo sueño de un mundo que no fuera capitalista, sin degenerar en la omnipotencia de un aparato de Estado. Desde entonces tienen resonancia progresiva consignas, no sólo críticas del capitalismo actual, sino en contra del capitalismo como tal. Junto con ellas crece la necesidad de clarificación.
“El fetichismo de la mercancía”: Reinaldo Carcanholo
“El carácter fetichista de la mercancía y su secreto”, una sección del primer volumen del “El Capital” (Carlos Marx, 1867) presentado por el economista brasileño Reinaldo Carcanholo.
“Beyond the Market: Radical Alternatives to Market Socialism”: David McNally
DAVID MCNALLY is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books: Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (1988); Against the Market: Political Economy Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (1993); Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation (2001); Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (2002; second revised edition 2006); and Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (forthcoming 2010). His articles have appeared in many journals, including Historical Materialism, Capital and Class, History of Political Thought, New Politics, Studies in Political Economy, and Review of Radical Political Economics. His book on the economic crisis, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance, will be published by PM Press in November. David McNally is also a long-time activist in socialist, anti-poverty and migrant justice movements.
“Un nuovo Marx. Filologia e interpretazione dopo la nuova edizione storico-critica (MEGA2)”: Roberto Fineschi
Introduzione
“Revisiting Marx’s Concept of Alienation”: Marcello Musto
I. Introduction
Alienation was one of the most important and widely debated themes of the twentieth century, and Karl Marx’s theorization played a key role in the discussions. Yet contrary to what one might imagine, the concept itself did not develop in a linear manner, and the publication of previously unknown texts containing Marx’s reflections on alienation defined significant moments in the transformation and dissemination of the theory.
The meaning of the term changed several times over the centuries. In theological discourse it referred to the distance between man and God; in social contract theories, to loss of the individual’s original liberty; and in English political economy, to the transfer of property ownership. The first systematic philosophical account of alienation was in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, who in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) adopted the terms Entaüsserung (literally self-externalization or renunciation) and Entfremdung (estrangement) to denote Spirit’s becoming other than itself in the realm of objectivity. The whole question still featured prominently in the writings of the Hegelian Left, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of religious alienation in The Essence of Christianity (1841) – that is, of man’s projection of his own essence onto an imaginary deity – contributed significantly to the development of the concept. Alienation subsequently disappeared from philosophical reflection, and none of the major thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century paid it any great attention. Even Marx rarely used the term in the works published during his lifetime, and it was entirely absent from the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914).
“Commodity fetishism”: Fredy Perlman
Fredy Perlman’s 1968 Introduction to I.I. Rubin’s “Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value“, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1973.
INTRODUCTION: COMMODITY FETISHISM
According to economists whose theories currently prevail in America, economics has replaced political economy, and economics deals with scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. In the definition of Paul Samuelson, “economics – or political economy, as it used to be called … is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources, which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society.”(1) According to Robert Campbell, “One of the central preoccupations of economics has always been what determines price.”(2) In the words of another expert, “Any community, the primers tell us, has to deal with a pervasive economic problem: how to determine the uses of available resources, including not only goods and services that can be employed productively but also other scarce supplies.”(3)
If economics is indeed merely a new name for political economy, and if the subject matter which was once covered under the heading of political economy is now covered by economics, then economics has replaced political economy. However, if the subject matter of political economy is not the same as that of economics, then the “replacement” of political economy is actually an omission of a field of knowledge. If economics answers different questions from those raised by political economy, and if the omitted questions refer to the form and the quality of human life within the dominant social-economic system, then this omission can be called a “great evasion”.(4)
“La dialéctica del trabajo abstracto, valor y precio”: Mario Robles L. Báez
Nuestra conceptualización del así llamado ‘problema de la transformación de los valores de las mercancías en precios de producción’ responde a un interpretación particular de la dialéctica de la inversión de Marx, es decir, de la negación de la ley basada en el valor y el plusvalor, que corresponde a la presentación del momento del capital-en-general donde “el precio” es “determinado por el trabajo”, por la ley basada en la libre competencia, que corresponde a la presentación del momento de la multiplicidad del capital donde “el trabajo” es “determinado por el precio” (G.2: 175). Con base en esta inversión, el ‘problema de la transformación’ de Marx es re-conceptuado como un doble movimiento inverso en él que, en el primer movimiento, se transforman los ‘valores’ de las mercancías en ‘precios de producción’ y, en el movimiento inverso, se transforman los ‘precios de producción’ a los ‘valores’ finales y definitivos de las mercancías. Como además concebimos que el ‘problema de la transformación’ y el ‘problema de la reducción’ del trabajo están dialécticamente relacionados, sostendremos que es precisamente por medio de la determinación de los ‘precios de producción’ y, por lo tanto, de los ‘valores’ finales de las mercancías en cuanto productos del capital que se resuelve la reducción de los diferentes tiempos de trabajos en sentido fisiológico-abstractos, directos e indirectos, de diferente complejidad e intensidad objetivados en la producción de las mercancías en las diferentes ramas de la producción a tiempos de trabajo social-abstracto puestos o validados socialmente por el capital productivo como un todo en la circulación.
“Aulas sobre o Capital de Marx”: Reinaldo A. Carcanholo
Curso de Reinaldo A. Carcanholo sobre El capital impartido para dirigentes sociales 2010-2011
“Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’”: Roberto Finelli
Abstract
This intervention concerns the different statute of abstraction in Marx’s work. By means of a critical confrontation with Chris Arthur’s work, Finelli presents his thesis of the presence of a double theory and fuction of abstraction in Marx’s work. In the early Marx, until the German Ideology, abstraction is, in accordance with the traditional meaning of this term, a product of the mind, an unreal spectre. More exactly, it consists in negating the common essence belonging to labouring humanity and projecting it, as alienated universal, into the idea of philosophy, into the state of politics and into the money of the market. In the later Marx, the nature of abstraction is, rather than mental, practical. It is directly related to the quantity without quality of capitalist labour, and it is the product of the systemic connection of machines to labour-power. In contrast to Arthur, Finelli maintains that practical abstraction in the Marx of Capital is not located in the zone of exchange and the market, where there is the mediation of money. On the contrary, it is located in the zone of production, which, for Marx, is a social ensemble not mediated by money but by relations of technological domination.
Keywords
abstraction, formal determination, presupposed-posited, opposition-contradiction, abstractionemptying out, dissimulation. The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital
“El proceso de aprendizaje de Marx. En contra de corregir a Marx con Hegel”: Wolfgang Fritz Haug
“No tengo nada que decir. Sólo que mostrar.”
Walter Benjamin, El Libro de los Pasajes
De los suabos se dice que sólo se vuelven “listos” pasada la cuarentena. Si hubiera que dar crédito a cierta literatura, con Karl Marx pasaría justo lo contrario. Poco después de cumplir los cuarenta, se dice, su inteligencia teórica empezó a decaer. Son principalmente las interpretaciones de orientación hegeliana de la crítica de la economía política las que consideran por norma retrocesos los progresos que hizo Marx desde los Grundrisse, pasando por la primera (1867) y segunda (1872) ediciones del libro I del Capital hasta su traducción al francés (1872-1875) y culminando en las Notas marginales sobre Wagner, pues de hecho todo esto fueron pasos que conducían más allá de la dialéctica especulativa de Hegel. Se afirma que, al popularizarlo, Marx debilitó el núcleo teórico de su pensamiento (véase Hoff 2004, 21-27). Particularmente Hans-Georg Backhaus ve –como antes que él, si bien de manera menos sumaria, Iring Fetscher- sobre todo en las reelaboraciones de la segunda edición del libro I del Capital una “vulgarización de su teoría del valor procurada por Marx mismo” (1997, 297). Asimismo, Backhaus transfiere al propio Marx una distinción que éste aplicó a Adam Smith, de suerte que Marx se desdoblaría en una parte “lógica, esotérica” y otra parte “historicista, exotérica” (1997, 294; análogamente Kurz 2000). La segunda parece que se relaciona con el Marx comprometido con el movimiento obrero, y sería el llamado “marxismo de movimiento obrero”, Arbeiterbewegungsmarxismus, como se suele decir con cierto desdén. En cualquier caso, desde el hundimiento del socialismo de estado de procedencia soviética en Europa, estos enfoques se han asociado, con agresividad creciente, al rechazo de todo tipo de marxismo.
“The Labour Theory of Value: Materialist versus Idealist Interpretations”: Andrew Brown
This paper presents a novel interpretation and affirmation of Marx’s initial arguments for the labour theory of value in Capital. The materialist principles that (i) powers are materially based, and (ii) ‘labour’ articulates nature and society, are developed so as to validate and emphasise Marx’s opening arguments. The argument is presented as a novel addition to existing critiques of ‘systematic dialectics’ and of ‘value form theory’. Though having some resemblance to critical realism, the materialist and dialectical underpinnings of the argument are drawn from the philosophy of E.V. Ilyenkov.
Keywords: Capitalism; Dialectics; Labour Theory of Value; Marxism; Methodology
Introduction
Amongst the current literature on Marx’s method, a group of authors including Arthur (e.g.
2002b), Reuten (e.g. 2004a), Smith (e.g. 1990) and Williams (e.g. 2001) have, in recent years, advanced our understanding of Marx and hence of capitalism very significantly. These authors have articulated the need to develop a comprehension of capitalism systematically from abstract to concrete with great clarity, drawing explicit inspiration from Hegel (Brown, Slater and Spencer, 2002). They argue, in different ways, that Marx tries to break free from classical political economy through the employment of this essentially Hegelian method of ‘systematic dialectics’ (despite Marx’s own critique of Hegel).
Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey
La Rosa Blindada
Revista Laberinto
Setmanari de comunicació Directa
