Author: Enrico Campo

Marx’s Capital After 150 Years is collection of seventeen papers presented at an international conference of the same name hosted by York University in Toronto in 2017. A number of the presentations can be viewed on the YouTube channel Marx Collegium, along with presentations by other conference participants whose papers were not included in the book.

Immanuel Wallerstein, who is among the latter, began his talk on the contemporary relevance of Marx by noting that the presenters at the conference could be roughly divided into two groups: those who point out an overlooked idea of Marx and ‘berate others for not having noticed’ and those who point out that Marx himself had neglected something and ‘should be somewhat revised to improve that’. Such arguments, he observes, could go on ad infinitum, whereas it is a desire to know ‘what to do now about the bad state of the world’ that really draws people to Marx today.

Borrowing those two broad categories of the ‘misunderstood Marx’ and the ‘mistaken Marx’ seems a useful way to organise this review of a book that contains such wide-ranging content related to Marx by so many authors. The book itself is organised into three parts (I. ‘Capitalism, Past and Present’; II. ‘Extending the Critique of Capital’; III. ‘The Politics of Capital’), but the content of the chapters does not fit very neatly under those headings.

The highly readable and informative introduction by Marcello Musto that opens the book shows how different the real Karl Marx was from the dogmatic image presented by his ‘adversaries and self-styled disciples’ by tracing the evolution of his critique of political economy from the 1857–58 notebooks (later published as Grundrisse) to the publication of the first volume of Capital and the writing of the drafts for the other two volumes. The story of Marx’s continual struggle to refine his understanding of capitalism is skillfully interwoven with scenes of his personal battles to survive amidst constant health and financial problems.

An outstanding contribution that also examines an overlooked aspect of Marx’s thought is Bob Jessop’s chapter on how the discoveries in cell biology in the nineteenth century influenced the decision to begin Capital with the analysis of the commodity, which is described as the ‘economic cell-form’ of the capitalist mode of production. Jessop explores this analogy and its limitations, as part of a consideration of Marx’s method of analysis and presentation in Capital.

Pietro Basso, in the chapter titled ‘Had Capital been written today’, also considers the starting point of Capital, but argues that Marx made the book unnecessarily difficult by beginning with the commodity as the elementary form of capitalist wealth, which presents the reader with a challenge compared to scaling a ‘seventh-grade mountain face, with no warming-up in advance’. Basso sees the choice of such a difficult beginning as Marx’s attempt to ‘settle accounts once and for all both with previous economic theories and with the last great production of philosophy, the rational kernel of Hegel’s logic, by incorporating their highest achievements in a dialectical exposition of the material of economics’ (209). A more reader-friendly approach, Basso argues, would have been to position the historical passage on the primitive accumulation of capital as the opening chapter.

Another would-be editor of Capital, but one who demands even more of the reader than Marx himself did, is Bertell Ollman, who regrets that Marx downplayed his dialectical method and theory of alienation in order popularise his presentation in Capital. In his chapter, with the twisted tongue-in-cheek title ‘Toward a Marxist revision of Marx’s revision of Marxism in Capital’, Ollman explores the resulting gap between ‘what Marx came to believe’ about capitalism ‘and how much of it he chose – for largely tactical reasons – to present to the public’ (277).

Leo Panitch, in ‘The Challenge of Transcending Capital’, critiques Engels’ description of capitalism as a ‘mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind’ (83) and ponders ‘how Marx’s Capital needs to be transcending in order to help figure out how to eventually transcend capital itself’ (88). More specifically, Panitch suggests the need to supplement Capital with a ‘further development of [an] historical materialist theory of the capitalist state’ (89), stressing the ‘importance of a socialist strategy for entering the state to the end of transforming’ (90) it. Setting aside the feasibility of this gradualist strategy for socialism, it seems worth pointing out that Marx had in fact planned to write a separate book on the state as part of his critique of political economy, so that the absence of an elaboration of the subject in Capital was certainly not an oversight on his part.

Gary Teeple, in ‘The Neglected Chapters on Wages in Capital’, considers the centrality to Capital of the ‘dynamic and contradictory relation’ (232) between surplus-value and variable capital by examining the chapters dealing with wages and wage forms, countering the view of Capital as concerning ‘the political economy of capital alone as if separate from a consideration of labour’. From this perspective, he dismisses as ‘difficult to fathom’ the suggestion of Michael Lebowitz that there is a ‘missing book on wage-labour,’ (234) which Marx had originally planned to write. There does seem to be evidence in the pages of Capital itself, however, that the analysis of wage labour was only to the extent necessary to elucidate ‘capital in general,’ such as the passage at the beginning of the chapter on time-wages where Marx notes that he will only briefly describe the two fundamental forms of wages because an ‘exposition’ of all the different forms belongs to the special study of wage labour. In any case, Teeple calls for a reading of Capital that unravels the wage form that ‘obscures the real relations of production’ and the various forms of wages that are employed to ‘defraud the workers of the value of their labour-power’, against the backdrop of capital’s ceaseless effort to ‘maximize the surplus extracted at the expense of wages,’ which the author sees as the ‘main thread of the argument of Capital’ (241).

William Clare Roberts, in ‘Reading Capital as Political Theory’, distinguishes three ‘different registers’ of Capital as a ‘critique of political economy’: as internal critique of political economy, a historical or historicizing critique, and as a political critique. In focusing on the third type of critique, which ‘rarely gets the attention it deserves’, Roberts shows how it differs from the historicizing critique to which it is often identified or reduced, insofar as a political critique reveals how ‘political economy justifies relations of domination by making them out to be relations of freedom’ (219).

Kevin Anderson, in ‘Five Explicit and Implicit Notions of Revolution in Capital’, examines different passages in the first volume of Capital that present different conceptions of revolution, revealing both the diversity of Marx’s conceptions of revolution, which center on ‘capital and labour’ but do not adopt a ‘reductionist manner that excludes factors like race, ethnicity, colonialism, the state and the relationship of non-capitalist social structures to modern capitalist ones’ (206).

Richard Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and YouTuber extraordinaire, discusses ‘Marx’s new concept of class,’ centered on the concept of ‘surplus’ (rather than surplus value) that he inherits from Paul Sweezy. Wolff argues that pre-Marxian concepts of class had centered on property or power relations instead of defining it in terms of the relationship to surplus production. Wolff says that Marx’s ‘new notion of class as a particular social process that occurs together with the physical labour process within the activity known as production’ (110) is identified ‘early in Capital, Volume 1’, but the chapter does not quote any specific passages from that work so it is difficult to know precisely what the author is referring to.

Kohei Saito and John Bellamy Foster, in separate papers, examine the largely overlooked ecological dimension of Marx’s critique of political economy. Saito, for his part, looks at differences between the ecological viewpoints of Marx and Engels, while Foster points to how Marx’s ‘ecological critique of political economy’ points the way to a ‘new conception of socialism as a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability’ (193).

Another topic addressed in the book by multiple authors is gender. Both Silvia Federici and Himani Bannerji point to the limitations of Marx’s understanding of the sexual division of labour of his own time. As she has presented at length in her books and articles, Federici points to the ‘under-theorization’ of reproduction which was centered narrowly on waged industrial workers at the expense of considering household labour. Bannerji, similarly, takes Marx to task for a view of ‘women as essentially reproducers rather than producers’, as compared to men who ‘transform themselves and nature, develop productive forces and revolutionize society’ (154).

Étienne Balibar, in his chapter, considers the famous line in Capital about the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’, describing as one of the ‘great puzzles in the history of modern socialism’ that this ‘“revolutionary conclusion” which marks the ‘achievement’ of Marx’s argument is ‘not at the end of the book’ (41). Balibar speculates that it may have been concealed in the penultimate chapter as a way of not drawing the attention of government censors. Neatly summarizing his entire chapter, which aims to subject the famous passage in Capital to ‘an exegesis at the same time literary, philological, philosophical, political and even theological’ (39), is unfortunately beyond the allotted space of the present review.

In a chapter on ‘the persistence of Marx’s humanism,’ Mauro Buccheri adopts a similar free-ranging style as Balibar, but with rather less stylistic success, it seems to me, as a snippet of the opening 12-line sentence may demonstrate: ‘In the ubiquitous swamp of Neoliberal capitalism, a time of pestilence and plagues, of zombies, vampires and other monsters of the market, of fuzziness and uncertainty, of religious fundamentalisms and solitary atheism, of violence and repressive tolerance, of Empire and Multitude, of globalization and right-wing populism, of culture wars, and abject poverty, failed and failing states’ (247). Epic list-making seems best left to the masters of the genre such as Henry Miller and Walt Whitman.

In considering the book as a whole, my own preferences as reader and reviewer was for the chapters that set out to examine a clearly defined aspect of Capital, as Marx in that work was nothing if not scrupulous in the way that he posed his theoretical questions. Before raising the question of what Marx should have done, certainly one needs to first be sure that what he actually did is adequately understood. Yet some chapters grouped here under the ‘mistaken Marx’ category did not seem to take Marx to task without always clarifying the exact theoretical question at issue or dealing with too many different questions at the same time.

York professor expands global understanding of Karl Marx and Marxism with seven books in three years
Marcello Musto, professor of sociology at York University is recognized as a leading global authority on the work of the German philosopher Karl Marx and on Marxism. An accomplished scholar, Musto has devoted his academic career to reviving the understanding of Marx’s ideas and their applications to the contemporary world.
Driven and passionate about the significance of Marx’s contributions in politics, sociology, the critique of political economy, and philosophy, Musto has delivered seven books within the last three years. Each of them focuses on a different aspect of Marx’s work and highlights his relevance for finding alternative solutions to the most pressing current issues of capitalism.
Musto’s newest book is entitled Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and presents a Marx that is in many ways different from the one popularized by the dominant currents of twentieth century socialism. This collective volume aims to generate a new critical discussion of some of the classical themes of Marx’s thought and to develop a deeper analysis of certain questions to which relatively little attention has been paid until recently. Among them there are Marx’s points of view about ecology, migration, gender, labor movement, globalization, social relations, and the contours of a possible alternative to liberalism. The chapters assembled in this book suggest that today Marx’s analyses are arguably resonating even more strongly than they did in his own time.
The anthology Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) offers an innovative reading of the theory of alienation, which occupied a significant place in the work of Marx and has long been considered one of his main contributions to the critique of capitalist mode of production. In this volume, Musto has concentrated his selection on the most remarkable pages of Marx’s later economic works, where his thoughts on alienation were far more extensive and detailed than those of his earlier philosophical writings. Additionally, the materials contained in this new book offer valuable insights about Marx’s conception of communist society and the fundamental role of individual freedom. The anthology includes an extensive introduction written by Musto dedicated to the birth and the development of the concepts of alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification.
Musto’s most recent monograph, The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford University Press, 2020), investigates Marx’s theoretical insights from the final, mostly unexplored years of his life. In what many describe as a definitive work on the last phase of Marx’s intellectual development, there are clear indications that not only he had not ceased to write, as it has been wrongly assumed for a long time, but, on the contrary, that he extended the range of his research into new disciplines and directions. Based on unfinished manuscripts that remain unavailable in English, on excerpts from his readings, and on letters of the period 1881-1883, Musto rests the myth that Marx was a Eurocentric and an economic thinker fixated on class conflict alone. In his final years, the revolutionary who lived most of his life exiled in London dedicated his attention on anthropological discoveries, analyzed communal forms of ownership in precapitalist societies, strongly opposed to colonial oppression in India, Algeria, and Egypt, and considered the possibility of revolution in noncapitalist countries. Musto argues that all this allows an interesting reassessment of some of Marx’s key concepts. Originally published in Italian, in 2016, this book has already been translated into 14 languages.
For those interested in gaining new insight into Marx’s renaissance all around the world, The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collection of 22 essays penned by highly reputed international experts of this thinker that have been compiled and edited by Musto. The book offers a comprehensive guide to the importance of the author of the Communist Manifesto in understanding the major economic and political issues of our times. The contributors argue that Marx, freed from the association with Soviet Union and updated considering the changes since the late-nineteenth century, has still a lot to teach us. Written in a clear form and accessible to a wider public, this volume brings together the liveliest and most thought-provoking contemporary interpretations of Marx and explains the reasons why his work is so relevant in today’s world.
The collective volume Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism (Routledge, 2019) arises from the biggest international conference held in the world to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Capital’s publication in 1867. The book is divided into three parts: I) “Capitalism, Past and Present”; II) “Extending the Critique of Capital”; III) “The Politics of Capital” and contains the contributions of globally renowned scholars who offer diverse perspectives and critical insights into the interpretation of such a seminal text and of the principal contradictions of capitalism. While pointing to alternative economic and social models, the authors of this volume reconsider the most influential debates on Capital and provide new interpretations of Marx’s magnum opus in light of themes rarely associated with it, such as gender, ecology, and non-European societies.
The edited book Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) is a collection which showcases a lot of the latest global scholarship on Marx and his legacy. It contains 16 chapters from multiple academic disciplines and is divided into two parts: I) “On the Critique of Politics”; II) “On the Critique of Political Economy”. The volume represents a source of great appeal for both expert scholars of Marx as well as students and general readers who are approaching his theories for the first time.
Finally, the monograph Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) reconstructs the intellectual trajectory behind Marx’s main sociological and political ideas from his youth to the militancy in the International working Men’s Association. Built on the most recent textual acquisitions of the MEGA² – the historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Friedrich Engels that has resumed publication in 1998 – this book offers an innovative examination of Marx’s ideas on post-Hegelian philosophy, alienated labor, the materialist conception of history, research methods, the theory of surplus-value, working-class self-emancipation, and class political organization. From this emerges “another Marx”, a thinker very different from the one depicted by so many of his critics and ostensible disciples.
More about Marcello Musto
In addition to his focus and extensive writings on Marx and Marxism, Musto’s research explores alternative socio-economic ideas, socialist thought, the history of the labor movement, and contemporary European politics. His writings – available at www.marcellomusto.org – have been published worldwide in twenty-five languages. Musto’s forthcoming books include Travels with Marx: Destinations, Encounters, and Reflections (Europa Editions) and The Routledge Handbook of Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Global History of Translation, Dissemination and Reception (Ed. with Babak Amini, Routledge), both scheduled for 2022. Stay tuned. Follow Musto on Twitter: @MarMusto.

The role of Marx today is an open-ended question because many theor- ists have begun to treat capitalism as if it is dying or already dead. McKenzie Wark, for instance, posits that capitalism is indeed dead and we are faced with something worse for which traditional Marxism may not be the best approach for dealing with the future. She argues that Marx is still relevant but his role is diminished by the loss of his primary adversary in the form of traditional capitalism. Other theorists have written about the near future as if capitalism cannot, or will not, survive long enough to completely destroy the planet and postulate a Marxian revolution but one retrofitted for a future that does not require Marxism to make sense of the post-capital- ist world. These various theories and theorists have made it more important and pressing to consider the relevance of Marxism in the current socio-political climate, and Marcello Musto has put together an excellent volume for delving into Marx making it possible to see in a new light the necessity of Marxist theory to the near future – perhaps especially given the situation of capitalism today. We continue to read and extrapolate from Marx today precisely because the form of capitalism Marx wrote about continues to re-present itself, changing and adapting to historical developments.
Marcello Musto’s The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpret- ations is not a typical engagement with Marx’s ideas. This book pro- vides readers with what they need to reassess the importance of Marx to our present and near-future socio-political circumstances while still providing the necessary historical and theoretical frame- works for understanding Marx both in his own time as well as our
own. The selected articles are not arranged around a historical pro- gression of ideas. Musto has chosen to allow the authors to focus on key ideas and concepts relevant to any serious discussion of Marxism today. The topics range from the central to the newly devel- oped and the historical is “baked in” to the presentation of the material in each contributor’s analysis of the concept in question. The end result is an excellent telling of Marx’s story while clearly analyzing critical misunderstandings as well as general faults of interpretation in Marxist scholarship.
Each contributor to the volume is a leading voice in Marxist scho- larship and their individual contributions focus on their area of exper- tise. Contributors include Alex Callinicos writing on class struggle, Heather Brown on gender equality, Michael Löwy on revolution, and Robin Small on education, to name but a few among a stellar list of authors. The 22 contributions range from what are capitalism, com- munism, and the various Marxisms that exist today to questions of pol- itical organization, migration, and the role of labor as well as delving into gender relations, globalization, and technology, among other topics.
While each chapter is worthy of close analysis there are a few that stand out for their relevance to the focus of the book – key concepts and new interpretations. For instance, Marcel van der Linden, focusing on the concept of the proletariat, raises serious concerns about how Marx developed an understanding of the revolutionary class. His analysis begins with a short history of the concept of the proletariat before breaking down Marx’s own understanding of this idea as well as its place in the broader framework of communism developed by Marx. Van der Linden pays special attention to the lumpenproletariat and chattel slaves, arguing that Marx failed to fully appreciate the role and relevance of these groups to capitalism. This raises serious ques- tions about Marx’s labor theory of value and, more importantly, leads to the conclusion that Marx’s concept of the proletariat is too exclusionary to be useful either to a proper understanding of the pro- letariat’s relationship to communism or to a practical application of the idea to class struggle today. Van der Linden concludes by arguing that what Marxism needs is a completely new conceptualization of the proletariat.
While the proletariat is central to an understanding of Marx, indeed to any understanding of Marxist struggle, John Bellamy Foster’s contribution focuses on a more recent development in Marxist studies – ecosocialism. Foster provides both a historical frame- work for the concept in Marx’s own works as well as tracing the
development of modern ecosocialism through the latter half of the twentieth century. He does so without burdening the reader with mere reproductions of his own work on the subject; instead, he describes how modern ecosocialism has developed out of close re- examinations of Marx’s works as well as parallel developments in modern applications of Green Theory to Marxism. The end result is both a rich history of the ecosocialist movement and a provocative reconsideration of the importance of Marx to environmental move- ments today. This is especially important in Foster’s recognition of the revolutionary possibilities that exist in environmental movements in the Global South. Though the connections are not made explicit by the authors or by Musto, it is important to recognize that Foster’s con- tribution is made more salient for new and experienced readers of Marx because of contributions like Van der Linden’s.
Though the contributions are not arranged historically or even clustered together thematically it is impossible to read the volume without encountering the crucial interconnectivity of the chapters and their relevance to deepening a reader’s understanding of Marx, especially in a modern context. There is little overlap or redundancy throughout the volume, and it provides a clear picture of Marx’s life, thoughts, and works. Each chapter begins by laying out the historical context for the concept being addressed. This is followed by an expli- cation of the concept’s historical place in Marx’s work and in the Marxist tradition. This sets up an engagement with potential new developments of ideas or new questions that need to be addressed in a twenty-first-century context. This construction of the book ensures that both beginners and those already familiar with Marx will find it useful and full of possibilities since each chapter is an invitation to consider Marx rather than a definitive statement regard- ing Marxism.
Challenging traditional ideas and interpretations of Marx, The Marx Revival contributes to the current critical discourses surrounding the decline of capitalism by arguing that Marx continues to be relevant to such discussions. Musto offers, through multiple chapters, a re- examination of rights and liberties in a bourgeois sense as compared to the abstraction of those rights and liberties from free markets and state capitalism. The goal of such an analysis is to extrapolate the exact means of democratic control necessary to “decommodify” life under capitalism in order to produce the conditions for the actual and eventual end of capitalism. This approach stands in stark contrast to the mainstream interpretations of capitalism and Marxism that dom- inate political discourse today.
The Marx Revival is not simply celebratory of Marx, Marxism, or Marxist ideas. The volume challenges us to think carefully about how we inherit Marx and what will be necessary for a successful Marxism to go forward. This makes the revival of Marxism not just a jubilee but a revision, a re-awakening – indeed, for some, an awa- kening – to the continued revolutionary prospects of the Marxist project.