The gap between Marx’s theoretical writings on political economy and his historical writings arises out of certain limitations that Marx placed upon his political-economic enquiries. These limitations are outlined in the Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes between the universality of the metabolic relation to nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange, and the singularities of consumption. What an analysis of the content of Capital shows is that Marx largely confined his (...) efforts to identifying the law-like character of production to the exclusion of all else. While this allowed him to identify certain laws of motion of capital within any form of the capitalist mode of production, it did not and could not constitute a total theory of a capitalist mode of production. A better understanding of what it is that Marx can do for us through his identification of the general laws of motion leads to a far better appreciation of what it is that we have to do for ourselves in order to make Marx’s theoretical findings applicable to particular conjunctural conditions, such as those that have arisen throughout the economic crisis that began in 2007. (shrink)

Anievas and Nişancıoğlu’s attempt to shift the terms of the debate about early modern capitalism by a major widening of its perspectives is a welcome move. Accepting this, the paper suggests that their argument can be more forcefully made if the theoretical residues of earlier traditions of Marxist historical explanation are purged from the way they expound that argument. The most ambivalent of these relates to their continued use of the idea of a ‘coexistence of modes of production’. This permeates (...) the confused way they present Atlantic slavery. A second, comparable source of confusion concerns their description of the relationship between merchant capital and the absolutist state. The alliance between the modern state and mercantile capital is radically misrecognised thanks to an uncritical espousal of Anderson’s view of absolutism. The paper suggests that Anievas and Nişancıoğlu might have written a stronger book had they reconceptualised the economic history of capitalism by allowing for a whole epoch dominated by powerful groups of merchant capitalists. In conclusion, I argue that the commercial capital of the later middle ages/early modern period was the first form in which production began to be subordinated to capital. (shrink)

This article analyzes Thomas Piketty's latest book, Capital and Ideology (2020). We begin by placing the work in the context of the thesis developed by the author in his previous works, before pointing out a number of limitations. We first question Piketty's way of thinking about capitalism, before discussing his theory of ideology. Finally, we will try to define the scope and limits of Piketty's vision of overcoming capitalism, that is, his vision of a just society, a "participatory socialism", (...) as it is presented in the last chapter of the book. (shrink)

Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination dating back to the 1940’s, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. Our purpose here is to defend the Movement’s call for death penalty abolition in terms congruent with its claim that the death penalty in the U.S. is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” We first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., wherein courts have occasionally expressed (...) worries about racial injustice but have usually taken such evidence to warrant reform but not outright abolition. We argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in significant part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition, we contend, rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law. (shrink)

Tirana, immediately after it was declared the capital of Albania on 11 February 1920, has undergone many changes in its morphology and city context. The capital is located in the heart of the country. During its lifespan, Tirana has adopted four important regulatory plans starting from 1923. The Western ideologies of the time influenced drastically the city development. The influence of such ideologies was stopped immediately though the imposition of communist ideas, after the Second World War. Rational building (...) forms were created which could be standardized in order to reduce construction costs. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, this current was implemented during the 1920s, as a response to social problems. The communist regime established strict anti-urbanization policy that aims to foster the development of rural areas and the suburban industrial districts in order to control urban growth and demographic mobility. All the regulatory master plans of Tirana, climate data of the city, the actual situation of the specific neighborhood, its orientation toward north, are considered in order to gather information and to implement the correct bioclimatic eco-renovation in the area. A special attention will be given to the underground tunnels which were constructed during the communist regime all over the city (1945–1983) as a response to a hypothetic nuclear attack, in order to shelter the inhabitance against bombing. These reinforced concrete tunnels will serve not only as an area for water collection and recycling strategies but also for cooling with zero energy expenditure for the inhabitants as a consequence of differences in temperature and air pressure. This strategy benefits from the underground air temperature in both seasons (winter and summer). It envisages the handover of these tunnels by the community. Nowadays, such structures are abandoned and denigrated. The realization of these structures required large amounts of money from the state budget. Considering that fact they need to be vitalized and reused, using different methodologies and strategies as part of the city. After the communist regime in the city of Tirana, two other regulatory plans were implemented which observe the city from another perspective, determining and evaluating Tirana’s real values as a city of the future, but not defining yet Tirana as an Ecocity. The ecological potential of Tirana including its outskirts is to be considered. Its flora and fauna are very rich, containing a mixt of species and plants. Regardless, the city of Tirana is suffering from different kinds of pollution such as air and noise pollution which are above EU and WHO norms. Tirana benefits from a Temperate Mediterranean climate. Furthermore, the benefits of the solar radiation are enormous. Unfortunately, nowadays, the city of Tirana is not profiting much from it. This chapter is in search of an overall view of the city of Tirana, and its great potential discovering its underground and upper ground historical secrets. (shrink)

O'Brien provides a critical assessment of Ernest Mandel's 1975 monograph Late Capitalism. In so doing, he offers a historical narrative that puts into question Mandel's framing of 'waves' of capitalist development as a process of capital accumulation that was dependent upon uneven development in the Third World. O'Brien starts by problematising Mandel's argument that an initial concentration of money, capital and bullion in the hands of Europeans explains combined and uneven development. He goes on to demonstrate that Mandel's (...) notion of imperialism as a necessary conduit for the flow of surplus capital from industrialising Europe does not stand up to the historical evidence. In fact, O'Brien maintains an alternative thesis, namely that these marginalised regions were insuffciently penetrated by European capital. (shrink)

Volume I is one of the most influential documents of modern times, looking at the relationship between labor and value, the role of money, and the conflict between the classes. The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx's theories. The third volume was unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in 1894, (...) strove to combine the theories and concepts of the two previous volumes in order to prove conclusively that capitalism is inherently unworkable as a permanent system for society. Here, Marx asserts controversially that - regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists - any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a series of worsening, explosive crises leading finally to complete collapse. But he also offers an inspirational and compelling prediction: that the end of capitalism will culminate, ultimately, in the birth of a far greater form of society. (shrink)

I.Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1927; revised 1932 and 1933) has come to be widely recognized as a work of rare insight into the formative logic of the state. Much less apparent is that implicit within this theoretical distillation is a new type of political history. There is every indication—given the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic aspects of Schmitt's writings, no less than his overtly personal beliefs in this regard—that a history of the political relative to the (...) modern state, which is the focus of his historical interest, would entail more than the mere rarefaction of traditional, pragmatic…. (shrink)

Taking its departure from current debates over social capital, this article presents new textual findings in a backward-revealing conceptual history. In particular, it analyzes the texts and contexts of Lyda J. Hanifan who was rediscovered by Robert Putnam as having (allegedly first) used the term; it offers discoveries of earlier uses of the term and concept-most notably by John Dewey-thereby introducing critical pragmatism as another tradition of social capital; and it recovers features of the critique of political (...) economy in the nineteenth century-from Bellamy to Marshall to Sidgwick to Marx-that assessed "capital from the social point of view," especially cooperative associations. While it ends with Marx's use of "social capital," Dewey is its central figure. The article concludes by returning to the present and offering work, sympathy, civic education, and a critical stance as emergent themes from this conceptual history that might enrich current debates. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza el fenómeno migratorio intrarregional abordando dinámicas de inclusión social informal al interior del sistema laboral. A partir del análisis de 32 relatos de vida a inmigrantes peruanos que han ascendido laboralmente en Chile, se propone que la baja ubicación de peruanos en el sistema de estratificación social chileno, condiciona su grado de dependencia a una inclusión informal al sistema laboral. Sin embargo, como efecto de la regularización de su estatus migratorio, del mayor conocimiento del campo laboral y (...) de la formalización de su capital social, es posible el despliegue de reacciones agenciales en función de una trayectoria ascendente en el mercado del trabajo. (shrink)

In this Introduction I illuminate the importance of Nicos Poulantzas’s participation at a 1967 colloquium in Frankfurt commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Capital. This colloquium is the only published record of a dialogue between a representative of Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Marx and a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and thus casts light on the relationship between these two traditions of critical social theory. After contextualising the colloquium and summarising Poulantzas’s paper, I (...) outline some of the elements of the Frankfurt response to the Althusserian interpretation of Marx by referring to Alfred Schmidt’s contribution to the colloquium, including his reaction to Poulantzas’s paper. (shrink)

Reviews the history of the death penalty, traditional arguments for and against it, the contemporary debate including debates over whether it effectively deters, its constitutionality, and international trends in its use.

This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula’s remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own ‘geography lessons’, to interrogate how photographs of ‘man-altered landscapes’ give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the way that capital congeals ‘quantities of the past’ into dead labour with Andreas Malm’s diagnosis of our ‘warming condition’ allows us both to diagnose and (...) counter the temptation to a sublime inhumanity that so often haunts contemporary panoramas of ecological devastation. (shrink)

This introduction to Historical Materialism’s mini-symposium on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century places the three contributions by Husson, Mann and Roberts in the context of an exploration of the link between methodology and politics in Piketty’s economic history of inequality. Touching on the role of time and literature in Piketty’s argument, as well as on his difficulty in accounting for the relations of capital – especially ones originating in colonialism and empire – it approaches Piketty’s (...) book, and its success, in terms of its concerted effort to produce a cognitive mapping of contemporary capitalism that can serve as a prelude to its democratic reform. (shrink)

The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and, first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in (...) the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern: power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it continues to this day. (shrink)

Nations are the forms of political organisation which peoples construct for themselves. It is a commonplace to state that globalisation tends (for the better) towards the end of nations. However the history of capitalism shows that such a hypothesis is questionable. Globalisation is merely a stage in the development of capitalism, which has always leaned on certain nations to secure its deployment: England in the past, the US today. The real question is thus that of the hegemony of one (...) nation over other nations and, ultimately, the question of democracy, the sovereignty of peoples in the face of capital. (shrink)

Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, provides a monumental database for the history of capitalism. But the author’s interpretation of these data is based on an inconsistent theoretical framework that constantly oscillates between two definitions of capital: either capital as accumulated drawing rights on the value created; or capital as a factor of production in the neoclassical tradition. Capital as a social relation is forgotten and the history of capitalism appears as (...) an accounting mechanism. (shrink)

Offers a history of the philosophy of time and a comparison of the ways of conceiving the temporal, concentrating on European philosophy and its impact the connection between time and money in Western civilization.

In this article, I attempt to briefly clarify a number of issues regarding what I have tried to achieve in my book Capital and Ideology. I also comment on the many limitations behind such a project,whose main objective is to stimulate further research on the global history of inequality regimes, at the intersection of economic, social and political history. Lastly, I address some of the many stimulating points raised in the reviews, particularly regarding the nature of participatory (...) socialism and its incompleteness. (shrink)

In this article, I will describe the evolution of capital punishment and the influence that ideology had during the founding years of Romania’s communist regime, until 1958, when the legislation and application of capital punishment reached its highest peak. Starting with the punishment of war criminals and fascists, I will then describe how the death penalty was used for political motives in a period when the regime had to consolidate, legitimate and fight different enemies. With ups and downs (...) like The Death Penalty Law of 1949 and the abolitionist attempt in 1956, it reached its climax in 1958-1959 after the enactment of Decree no. 318/1958. (shrink)

The Internet is a huge form of social capital that is not reducible in its characteristics to other forms of social capital, such as ordinary networks of people who more or less know each other. It enables us to do many things with radically greater efficiency than we could without it. It can do some things better but other things much less well than traditional devices can. At both extremes, the differences are so great as to be not (...) merely quantitative but also qualitative. The things it can do better include things that can readily be checked and verified. The things that it often cannot do include securing commitments for action. A brief history of the forms of social cooperation suggests that relationships on the Internet are typically too thin to back trust and cooperation among those who do not have fairly rich relations hips off-line. (shrink)

In Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty poses the intriguing thesis that ideology, or ideas about how society should be governed, is a powerful determinant for how society will be governed-as long as we take advantage of historical switch points. In this review essay I challenge this thesis by pointing out that many powerful ideas have run aground because of countervailing institutional arrangements. Oftentimes, they are leftovers from earlier times that precede the change and are now strategically employed for reconstituting (...) private wealth. Clearly, ideology and institutions are deeply intertwined. I credit Piketty for putting ideology on the map of institutionalists in history, political sciences, sociology, and law. I therefore call for more research on the interaction of ideas and institutions. (shrink)

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology constitutes a landmark achievement in furthering our understanding of the history of inequality, and presents valuable proposals for constructing a future economic system that would allow us to transcend and move beyond contemporary forms of capitalism. This article discusses Piketty’s conceptions of ideology, property, and ‘inequality regimes’, and analyses his approach to social justice and its relation to the work of John Rawls. I examine how Piketty’s proposals for ‘participatory socialism’ would function not (...) only to redistribute income and wealth, but also to disperse economic power within society, and I discuss the complementary roles of redistribution and predistribution in his proposals, and Piketty’s place in a tradition of egalitarian political economy associated with James Meade and Anthony Atkinson. Having elaborated on Piketty’s account of the relationship between economic policy and ideational change, and his important idea of the ‘desacralization’ of private property, I develop ‘seven theses’ on his proposals for participatory socialism, examining areas in which his approach could be enhanced or extended, so as to create a viable twenty-first century version of democratic socialism. (shrink)

This book develops a comprehensive systematic economic theory, conceiving how the dynamic of market relations generates an economy dominated by the competitive process of individual profit-seeking enterprises. The author shows how, contrary to classical political economy and contemporary economics, the theory of capital is an a priori normative account properly belonging to ethics. Exposing and overcoming the limits of the economic conceptions of Hegel and Marx, Rethinking Capital determines how the system of capitals shapes economic freedom, jeopardizing the (...) very rights in whose exercise it consists. Winfield thereby provides the understanding required to guide the private and public interventions with which capitalism can be given a human face. (shrink)

This is a work of historical critical exegesis. It aims to establish the influence of the Science of Logic (SL) of G.W.F. Hegel on the Grundrisse of Karl Marx. It is the first work in the history of Marx Studies to demonstrate that the Hegelian logic guided Marx's doctrinal development, and that the ordering of the logical categories in the SL is reflected in the ordering of economic categories in the Grundrisse.

Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of different forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In this article (...) I want to show how the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it. (shrink)

InThe Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth Jennison’sThe (...) Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Gardeseeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle. (shrink)

This book is the joint work of a moralist, a sociologist and a psychologist arguing, as the sub-title indicates, for the abolition of capital punishment. Fr Tidmarsh’s essay provides the ‘Theoretical Framework’ of the discussion. He examines the notion of punishment as retributive, reformative and deterrent. He refuses to be drawn into the kind of detailed discussion that finds its place in the two essays that follow; but what he says is clarifying and indispensable. He points the difficulty of (...) formulating a ‘pure’ retributive theory of punishment; and the fact that ‘considerations of retribution may yield negative criteria—they may prevent our punishing the innocent and they may prevent our allowing considerations of expediency from too easily outweighing the general rule that the guilty are to be punished—but they have little, if any, positive contribution to make to the assessment of just punishments’. He remarks the different meanings given to reformation; does it mean the actual betterment of the offender’s frame of mind, or merely the fact that he refrains from crime in the future? And how, in fact, does punishment operate reform? And there is the paradox of the deterrent view of punishment—‘those crimes ought to be the more heavily punished that are the more difficult to refrain from committing, since it needs a greater motive for fear to restrain those tempted to them than is needed from those temptations more easily resisted. Passion, provocation, inadvertence, become not extenuating but exacerbating circumstances... ‘. (shrink)

This book is the joint work of a moralist, a sociologist and a psychologist arguing, as the sub-title indicates, for the abolition of capital punishment. Fr Tidmarsh’s essay provides the ‘Theoretical Framework’ of the discussion. He examines the notion of punishment as retributive, reformative and deterrent. He refuses to be drawn into the kind of detailed discussion that finds its place in the two essays that follow; but what he says is clarifying and indispensable. He points the difficulty of (...) formulating a ‘pure’ retributive theory of punishment; and the fact that ‘considerations of retribution may yield negative criteria—they may prevent our punishing the innocent and they may prevent our allowing considerations of expediency from too easily outweighing the general rule that the guilty are to be punished—but they have little, if any, positive contribution to make to the assessment of just punishments’. He remarks the different meanings given to reformation; does it mean the actual betterment of the offender’s frame of mind, or merely the fact that he refrains from crime in the future? And how, in fact, does punishment operate reform? And there is the paradox of the deterrent view of punishment—‘those crimes ought to be the more heavily punished that are the more difficult to refrain from committing, since it needs a greater motive for fear to restrain those tempted to them than is needed from those temptations more easily resisted. Passion, provocation, inadvertence, become not extenuating but exacerbating circumstances... ‘. (shrink)

The current post-workerist analyses of the crisis of financial capitalism are rooted in the declaration of inconvertibility of the Dollar in 1971 and the consequent collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. The experience of ‘Primo Maggio’, the magazine on militant history directed by Sergio Bologna, was determinant in developing a consistent explanation of the relationship between ‘money as capital’ and working class struggles. The transition from Fordism to Post-fordism, which begun in those years, coincides on the one (...) hand with the crisis of the labour value theory and, on the other, with the emergence of the financialization of capital. The advent of the debt economy, which led to the present crisis, reflects the destruction of the wage relationship and the de-substantialization of money. Beyond any objective measure of value, what is necessary is something that points to the subjectivity of struggles and to the forms of life that give them substance. (shrink)

This volume inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto School philosophy in relation to capitalist modernity.

This book promotes the original concept of "Moral Capital" as the key to analyzing the nature and function of morality in economic activities. The book is divided into three major sections. In the first, the author argues that the logical connections between morality and economy and those between morality and profit provide a concrete theoretical basis for the concept of moral capital. In the second, the author elucidates the concept, the form and the functional mechanism of moral (...) class='Hi'>capital. In the third, the author describes the economic ethics of traditional Chinese intellectual history, especially the main idea of morality's role in economics, which shows the historical narrative of this concept and provides resources on ideological history, helping businesses to establish their own moral capital approaches and accumulate moral capital. In the fourth, the author explores the special economic role of morality, and proposes an evaluation index system for assessing moral assets in enterprises, demonstrating the concept of moral capital's significance from both a theoretical and application-oriented standpoint. (shrink)

This paper explores the methodological foundations of Thomas Piketty's recent book Capital in the twenty-first century. The current literature on Piketty's work lacks consensus as to which paradigm of economic thought Capital fits into. In response to that literature, this paper argues that Piketty offers a new methodological direction for economic science in the form of an analytical 'new-historicism'. The central emphasis of this methodology is an analysis of general dynamic laws on three levels: distribution, institutions, and (...) class='Hi'>history. A new-historical methodological framework applies new analytical tools to old economic problems raised by Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and others. This distinguishes Piketty's framework from other contending paradigms or schools of economic thought, thereby alleviating confusion in the current literature surrounding Piketty's book. (shrink)

The concepts of habitus and capital are crucial in the research tradition of social and cultural reproduction. This article applies both terms to an analysis of aspects of the life histories of low-income African American men. In exploring how their past experiences relate to their present-day statuses as nonmobile individuals, this article also revisits and redefines the utility of habitus and capital as conceptual devices for the study of social inequality. It expands the empirical terrain covered by the (...) concept of capital to include that which allows low-income individuals to manage their existence in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities while also hindering their mobility in the broader social world. One implication of this approach is an improved cultural analysis of low-income individuals. The improvement lies in that their behavior can be better understood as reflections of their readings of social reality, which are based upon the material and ideational resources that they have accumulated throughout their lives, and not simply as manifestations of flawed value-systems or normative orientations. (shrink)