Abstract
This chapter seeks to show that Marx’s critique of capital, exchange value, and abstract universal labour time is grounded in an emancipatory vision of a post-capitalist society that has been overlooked by many of his critics and followers. While Marx never indulged in writing “blueprints of the future”—least of all on Capital, which is clearly aimed at delineating the logic of capital in capitalist society—the depth of his critique of its mystifying forms provides vital intimations concerning the nature of life after capitalism. Marx’s concept of the transcendence of value production goes much further than specifying the need to abolish private property and “anarchic” exchange relations. Revisiting Marx’s critique of political economy from the vantage point of what it suggests about a future communist society can assist the effort of working out a central theoretical challenge facing us today—developing a viable concept of the alternative to capitalism.
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- 1.
Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Revolution,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 150–1.
- 2.
Karel Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and the World (Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel), 115.
- 3.
For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).
- 4.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 6: 501.
- 5.
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 3: 168.
- 6.
See “Marx’s Law of Law of Value: A Debate Between David Harvey and Michael Robert,” Michael Roberts blog, April 2, 2018: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/marxs-law-of-value-a-debate-between-david-harvey-and-michael-roberts.
- 7.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 260.
- 8.
Ibid., 255.
- 9.
Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today (Lanham, NJ: Humanities Books, 2000), 138.
- 10.
Ibid., 55, 60.
- 11.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 165–6.
- 12.
Ibid., 169.
- 13.
See Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2010.
- 14.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 171–2.
- 15.
Ibid., 172.
- 16.
Georg Lukacs, The Process of Democratization, trans. Norman Levine (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 120–1.
- 17.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, trans. D. Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1978).
- 18.
Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 28: 108.
- 19.
John Holloway, “Read Capital: The First Sentence,” Historical Materialism 23, no. 3 (2015): 8.
- 20.
See Peter Hudis, “Political Organization,” in The Marx Revival, ed. Marcelo Musto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
- 21.
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in MECW (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 24: 85.
- 22.
Ibid., 86.
- 23.
Ibid., 95.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Karl Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), 329.
- 26.
See Raya Dunayevskaya, “A New Revision of Marxian Economics,” American Economic Review 34, no. 3 (September 1944), 533–7.
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Hudis, P. (2019). The Intimations of a Post-Capitalist Society in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. In: Gupta, S., Musto, M., Amini, B. (eds) Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24815-4_5
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