Tag: English

Readers are lucky to finally have this English translation of Musto’s intellectual biography of Karl Marx’s later years. First published in Italian in 2016, this concise book offers both a biographical look into Marx’s last years and the changes that occurred in his theoretical views. Musto (sociology, York Univ., Canada) lists the many works that were published in disciplines not typically associated with Marx, for example, anthropology and ethnography, or in fields that he is often accused of misrepresenting, like the economic history of India. Readers learn much about Marx’s intellectual curiosity and interactions with activists and scholars in Russia, which occupied much of his later life study. Along the way, Musto clears up the many misunderstandings of Marx, conveying, for example, that Marx did not believe that interpretive frameworks based on Western European history should be slavishly applied to other contexts, and that he was not an economic determinist. Accusations of Orientalism also miss the mark when looking at Marx’s later writings. To read the Communist Manifesto in college and then readily dismiss Marx is a mistake, and Musto’s book explains why this is true.

This short chronicle of Karl Marx’s life and work during his last three years (1881–1883) sheds light on an unexamined period. Elegantly written, the book has been meticulously researched using the resources of the still emerging Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, unsent letters, notes, and other materials.
Musto guides the reader through Marx’s continued scholarly work during this period and also through his pains and losses, such as that of his wife and daughter, both named Jenny. Well received in Italy when it first appeared in 2016, the book has been translated into six languages, including the English edition.
Generalists who study social and political life will find the book to be of great interest. This work among others documents a moment when Marx’s reputation is in transition. As Musto writes, “of the classics of political, economic, and philosophical thought, Marx is the author whose profile has changed the most in the opening decades of the twenty-first century” (2).
Scholars now have both better texts and a more open approach to the
figure, newly emergent from the weight of the ideological commitments of editors and, indeed, nation states.
Musto’s book joins other new interpretations of Marx—most notably, those of Kevin Anderson, Michael Heinrich, William Roberts, and Kohei Saito—that look critically at the later years of Marx, albeit with different foci.
While Anderson highlights the anthropological material that Marx studied in this period, and Saito looks at his notebooks on ecology, Heinrich and Roberts study the thought of Capital, in particular.
Musto’s work about the last three years of Marx’s life shows how all of these topics are enduring themes right up until the very end. Marx remained interested in anthropology, including that of non-Western societies, and especially their property and gender relations. He continued his studies of the natural sciences and capital’s propensity to stretch the limits of the earth, and was interested, in 1880, expressly in the use of solar energy and Podolinsky’s claim that it was the form of energy most suited to the socialist political form (117).
Musto also offers a distinctive addition to the debates around Capital. One of the controversies for specialists is whether and how to treat Capital as a work. Famously, da Vinci carried around his paintings from residence to residence for years and sometimes decades, constantly making both large and small additions and modifying details. So too with Marx’s three-volume work Capital, only the first volume of which he finished, though this epithet is really appropriate only in comparison with the other two. In these debates, Musto thus lands firmly on the side of incompletion (78). But however incomplete, this work is not without contours. Musto sketches how Marx himself, dissatisfied with the French translation of Capital, rewrote the translation in 1878,
with additional material and significant modifications, especially regarding capitalist accumulation (93).
The most important contribution of Musto’s study to the ongoing reclamation of Marx as a figure is the discussion of Russia in chapter 2. A society’s conversion into a socialist political form is known in the literature as the transformation problem. Musto argues that in his later years Marx himself understood that this conversion was enormously complex. Marx paid direct attention during this period to the case of Russia, a country which, already in 1881, was experiencing significant political shifts. In the wake of these shifts, Marx corresponded
directly with the leading figures who sought to interpret them. Musto details the correspondence thoroughly.
The picture that emerges is neither that of the fatalist Marx dooming Russia to pass through capitalist development’s worst excesses before a socialist revolution could emerge, nor that of the nostalgic Marx waxing poetic about the natural socialism of the rural commune. Instead, Marx understood that political forms emerged in dialogue with an environment, and he eschewed both the grand philosophies of history and their romantic counterparts. As Musto writes, “Just as
Marx never showed a wish to envisage what socialism should be like, he did not assert in his reflections on capitalism that human society was everywhere destined to follow the same path or to pass through the same stages” (59).
Musto thus makes a strength of what is usually claimed to be a liability of Marx’s theory: that he does not sketch the communist future. Just as capitalism permeates different historical and geographical environments differently and at a different pace, albeit with some common features, Marx’s nimble historical understanding means that we are more likely to confront communist futures rather than a single monolith.
Musto also emphasizes Marx’s insistence on the progressive elements of the capitalist social form itself, especially in its unequaled productive powers (57) and in its advancement of equality in gender relations (58). Of course Marx was capitalism’s greatest critic, but he was also its poet and, in other ways, the first to describe it profoundly. Musto’s account portrays a polymath and polyglot at the end of his life, poised on the edge of a wide readership that would come only in the next century. Some of the popularizations of Marx’s philosophy that had begun
at the end of his life even irked him: he wrote, “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist” (121).
The book is full of other wonderful themes of Marx’s thought, including his continual attention to capitalist crisis (40); his discussion of how the colonial situation allowed savvy capitalists to pit foreign against native labor (89); and, of course, his enduring and unsullied commitment to a politics of antiracism (45). There is no part of the world Marx was not interested in, and during this period his studies included the United States, Ireland, India, and Egypt in addition to Russia. Musto is right, in the conclusion to the book, to highlight the continued relevance and explanatory power of Marx’s key concepts (125).
The book also has wonderful personal touches that make Marx come alive: the renewal he undertook late in life of his studies of chemistry and calculus; the piece of Leibniz’s wall he kept in his study (15); his enduring friendship with Engels; and a hilarious set of observations about the gambling he did while stranded, briefly, in Monte Carlo (113). For this reason, the book can be accessed by a general reader as well as an academic one

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.

There has been a gaping hole in studies of Karl Marx leaving out the last few years before his death in March 1883.

Despite the recent revival of Marx studies, this ‘forgotten chapter’ of his life has remained in the shadows, until now with Marcello Musto’s informative and well-crafted book, The Last Years of Karl Marx. (This English edition is an excellent translation, by Patrick Camiller, ‘with new sections and some changes’ (xii) from the widely translated Italian original of 2016.)

Musto’s book is an intellectual biography that fills gaps in Marx’s thinking, prompting new ideas, appreciation and understanding of Marx in his late life, while also casting light on important parts of his earlier work. Marx was not, as is often thought, a great man who withered away because of ill health and family deaths, but a genius who could not stop pursuing old ideas, sometimes in unchartered territory, in spite of those troubles. The book is about an ‘unknown Marx’ but also about an enriched and more fully understood Marx, whose lifelong intellectual work was, as Marx said, in the pursuit of ‘struggle’. (9) Musto does admit that his own work has ‘limitations’ because of the ‘complexity’ of Marx’s work in his final years.

Materials that have lately become available are used to advantage by Musto, but mostly he has used what has long been available to us all. There is no excuse for the neglect of this critical period in Marx’s research and thinking. (Musto does note, however, that ‘these new materials definitively refute the idea that he was mainly driven by a new philosophy of history, or that he had obsessive recourse to the dialectical method’ (151, n86).)

In The Last Years, we learn about Marx’s opposition to Eurocentrism, racism, rigid theorizing, economic determinism and historical schemas. Marx had a lively and intense way of thinking about the material world and diverse societies. As Musto observes, ‘[t]he critical spirit with which Marx composed his Capital reveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author […] that many presented to the world.’ (93) What can seem a kaleidoscope of thoughts comes from a constancy of thinking about human diversity, as we can see in this investigation of Marx’s late researches into the richness of science and the development of foreign countries.

The interest of Marx’s late intellectual life is heightened by Musto’s clear and sympathetic portrayal of the troubles and turmoil of Marx’s last years, including death and illness in the family. ‘The last period of Marx’s labours was certainly difficult, and often tortuous, but it was also very important theoretically.’ (137, n73) We hear about Marx’s desk and his study filled with books, notebooks and manuscripts; about his walks and visitors; and about his demeanor and personality (cf. 11-19). These interwoven observations of a personal biography provide a backdrop to the account of Marx’s intellectual vitality and depth.

Musto sets out to show that ‘Marx thought the study of new political conflicts, new themes, and geographical areas to be fundamental for his ongoing critique of the capitalist system. It enabled him to open up to national specificities and to consider the possibility of an approach to communism different from the one he had previously developed’ (5).

For Marx, the study of society was a science, an historical science. His ‘unquenched intellectual curiosity’ led him to extensive studies of chemistry, physics, physiology and geology (23), as well as his continuing investigations of political economy. But it was his interest in the social sciences that drove him to study the ways and developments of sciences generally. The perceived success in the nineteenth century of the natural sciences spurred on his investigation of the material world of society through political economy and history, following his materialist conception of history.

As Musto observes, Marx ‘escaped the trap of economic determinism’ and ‘did not share the rigid schemas suggesting an inescapable sequence of stages in human history. Marx spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone.’ (32f) Ideas from British, or even European capitalism, were also not to be simply transferred to India, Russia or elsewhere.

Musto is firm, but perhaps too cautious, in remarks against the strong currents that reject Marx’s nineteenth century materialist and scientific aspirations, apparently on the basis of pre-nineteenth century conceptions. What is shown is that Marx was strongly focussed on the material conditions, especially in production, for individual freedom and collective agency that drove the struggle for change. He studied the data about the economic conditions that provide ‘[s]cientific insight into the inevitable disintegration […] of the prevailing social order’ (37), as Marx said in correspondence in 1881.

Musto has many interesting observations in ‘New Research Horizons’ (ch. 1) about Marx’s prodigious work during his last years. He was thinking about international orgnizations and about a variety of countries, including the United States, Britain, France and Germany. There are also attacks on ‘panacea-mongers’ (39) and ‘stupidities such as a minimum wage fixed by law’ (45). There was familiar rhetoric right to the end.

His well-known and little understood interest in Russia was a central topic in his last years and is rightly given an important chapter in Musto’s study. We learn a lot about Russia in the late nineteenth century and about what Russian socialists were then thinking. Some of that thinking was misled by what became canonical, and allegedly, ‘Marxist’ thinking about Marx’s materialist conception of history. Marx, according to Musto, does not depict a methodology or schema or system – these were alien to Marx.

The canonical, so-called, ‘theory’ came from over-extending the use – not by Marx nor by Engels, but by others – of the ‘guiding thread’ that Marx mentioned in reflections on his work, which had been focussed on Europe. The guiding thread was a schema of progressive epochs with their distinctive structures of the base, the relations and politics. Marx was explicit about the five stages – Asiatic, ancient, feudal, modern bourgeois capitalism and then communism – while also being clear especially about the structure of bourgeois capitalist societies.

Marx regarded himself as engaging in a scientific analysis of Europe, and especially England, up to the mid-nineteenth century. He did not always say, but he was frequently explicit, that he was writing about Europe and not producing a system that would apply to all history and all societies. Marx’s materialist conception of history was not a theory, but an approach to history through material beings in the material conditions of their society. Not even the guiding thread for the studies of Europe was a theory but simply, and importantly, a suggested direction for those investigations.

In his last years, Marx looked at the literature on Russia in terms of his scientific investigation. This was not a shift to something like anthropology or journalism or just simple reading. Throughout his life he pursued scientific studies with a materialist conception of history and whatever guiding thread might fit the new material. There were not changes in Marx’s work, except for the change of application to other societies using the same materialist conception of history and perhaps different guiding threads.

There were those who agreed generally about Marx’s account and then supposed a small change in the canonical ‘theory’ with its path of history in five stages. At least three variations can be considered. One change is that the penultimate stage of capitalism could be greatly sped up, shortened and thus less damaging, because of lessons from developed capitalism elsewhere. This was probably Lenin’s view about Russia. Russia’s early phases of capitalism, in Lenin’s view, could be sped up to late capitalism and then early socialism.

Another change that has been contemplated is that a whole stage could be passed over and thus totally avoided. This might be thought of as a Maoist position about China jumping from agricultural feudalism to early socialism, avoiding altogether the intervening stage of capitalism. Stages can be sped up or completely eliminated.

A third change that can be contemplated is a change in the path itself. It appears, following Musto, that this was something that Marx contemplated. Some societies, Marx thought, may take the different path from collectivist economies (as in Russia) to modern collectivist production on a large scale.

The question from Vera Zasulich in 1881 that prompted this thinking engaged Marx in a variety of thoughts worked on in the multiple drafts of a letter of reply, as Musto relates in detail. Marx considered the possibility of a society with people’s communes (the obshchina) moving to a society with socialist or communist structures. Such possibilities would clearly also depend on the people’s relations and ideas. The very concepts of class, association and struggle would probably have to be adjusted to the times and conditions. Russia would not advance in the image of England, in the way that Marx seemed to have thought that Germany would.

This is a richer materialist conception of history in a way that is true to nineteenth-century (as well as, modern) scientific ways, not using Hegel’s (or other philosophers’) schemas, but instead collecting data and developing ideas. There may be some inevitability, but not rigid thinking. Like a true scientist, Marx constantly had doubts, not because he wanted certainty, but because he pursued clarity and depth of understanding.

Musto’s book is a valuable resource about Marx and his thinking in the early 1880s. But we also learn, in the course of this study, more about Marx’s earlier and most read work. Moreover, as Musto concludes, ‘[t]hose who look through Marx’s writings […] today […] cannot but be fascinated by the capacity of his socio-economic analyses to explain the world. Nor can they fail to be impressed by the message that radiates incessantly from the whole of his work: organize the struggle’ (125).

The essays collected in the book The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, edited by Marcello Musto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, comprehensively inclusive in its compass, offer the readers an invaluable array of theoretically rich tools to dispel the miasma, invoked globally after 1989, around Marx and his ideas.

To cite two such instances, Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that the era of ‘Common Marketization’ of the world, be it in politics, economics or ideology, has led to the ‘End of History’, leaving Marx confined to academic interest delinked from living reality. Similarly, Richard Rorty dismissed Marx and Engels with undisguised contempt calling their thoughts a ‘lucridious flop’ much like ‘what evangelical Christians call “becoming a New Being in Christ Jesus”’. The object of this systematically sponsored onslaught is simply to brush off as dead and barren what is living and profoundly fertile in Marx. What is encouraging, as against this, riding the upturn of interest in Marx especially since the Great Financial Crisis (2007-2008), the book seeks to make sense of Marx in the light of theoretical advances made in the last few decades, in particular. It is with this object in mind that it offers clarity in 22 short chapters surrounding ideas such as proletariat, class struggle, capital and value, communism, gender equality, to name but a few, and how they can be grasped in both theory and practice.
The discussion of the book would broadly follow seriatim the order in which the contributions have been arranged. To begin at the beginning.
The book opens with the study on the broad conceptual frameworks of socio-political systems supplemented by Marx’s critical thoughts. Michael R. Krätke’s chapter Capitalism, the focal point of Marx’s life-long theoretical engagement, argues that capitalist production is not just the subversive ‘rule of capital’ by the ‘law of value’ where the majority suffers from ‘soaring inequalities’ and ‘insecurities’. Ironically, capitalist production is the mirror holding unbiased images of the motion of its peculiarly contrasting features in their historical development. On one hand, through the creation of ‘abstract and concrete labour’, of fetishism of commodities, and exploitation of the working class, capitalism advances a ‘bewitched and distorted world’, and, on the other, through its capitalist vanguards, driven by private interest in the accumulation of wealth, it upholds the ‘universal and impersonal bondage’ of capital in-itself. On what is a contrasting topic, Marcello Musto in Communism justly affirms that Marx never considered communism to be an alternate specific moment to capitalism but a socio-historical progress arising from it. Marx initially understood communism in terms of ‘Hegelian dialectics’. As he progressed into Capital, he altered his theory radically. Communism as the abolition of private property and wealth, and of ‘surplus labour time’ is replaced largely by the concepts of ‘free time’ and ‘real human wealth development’ for all. Consequently, the workers as ‘freely associated’ and part of a ‘common labour force’ would, overcoming the divisiveness imposed on them by the production relations based on wage system, assume the responsibility ‘to walk by [themselves]’. Acknowledging the specific needs of individuals, Musto’s chapter concludes with Marx’s radical determination of rights in a communist society which ‘would have to be unequal rather than equal’! Ellen Meisksins Wood in Democracy addresses how economic domination, previously exercised by political authority, underwent a radical change with capitalism’s appropriation of the new ‘science of economics’, granting all individuals equal political status independent of their economic locations. This shifts the conflict-zone from the political arena to the ‘workplace’. Marx, while emphatically appreciating these liberties and rights, addressed the ‘formal’ nature of the state to prevent any political deprivation. Consequently, capital constructed a new economic space, abstracted from the political, to carry out exploitation. In laying bare this duality, the essay reminds us of the continued economic deprivation liberal democracy under capitalism practices even today.
The next part of the book deals with Marx’s concept of agency. For Marx, agency is not only individualistic but also collectively constituted, which the following four chapters unfold. Marcel van der Linden in Proletariat exposes the ambiguity in Marx’s classification of the term. As Marx never answered the question ‘what is a class’, this left an open interpretive space only conceivable by what he kept out of it: the ‘chattel slaves’ and the ‘lumpenproletariat’. Interpolating on the basis of historical instances and logical extrapolation, Linden argues, Marx’s concept of the proletariat is not holistic. He, therefore, proposes a more inclusive one based on all forms of commodified labour producing value, embracing varied categories of working people. Alex Callinicos’s chapter Class Struggle maintains that the historical conditions of social change are not developed solely by class struggle itself. Yet when the situations emerge, these struggles play the ‘executive role[s]’. Thus, changes are ‘effected’ through them, though they are not the ‘motor[s]’ of social change as the popular reading of Communist Manifesto would seem to suggest. In his deeper understanding of the Capitalist order, Callinicos places class struggle outside its apparent manifestation, that is inside the composition of ‘relative surplus value’. To extract more ‘surplus value’ the capitalists expand the working time or hours. Such expansions of time reach a critical point, when the workers, past their endurance, organize collective resistance, leading to political upheavals demanding a shorter ‘working day’. This in turn, compels the capitalists to invest in advanced technologies aimed at extracting higher productivities which would fetch more ‘relative surplus value’ within a given ‘working day’. What results from the tussle is, first, that there arises a significant change in the ‘organic’ composition of capital.  With increased investment in technology, the wage labourers, the only source of value, are pushed out of employment in increasing numbers and their compound effects give rise to ‘fall in the rate of profit’. Secondly, with the compulsion of ‘relative surplus value’ continual investments in the means of production keep altering the productive forces resulting in contradictions with the ‘relations of production’, which is also another way of conceiving class struggle. These discrepancies disrupt social relations and build conditions for radical social changes, when other contributing factors are aligned. At the same time, this struggle is not limited only to the economic sphere but flows into the political as well, generating new categories of knowledge and consciousness. Peter Hudis in Political Organization draws on Marx’s thoughts on consciousness, which cannot be ‘brought’ to the working class from outside; it must evolve from within as a ‘self-moving object’. This unified ‘self’ aspiring to ‘historical objectives’ is what, according to Hudis, Marx meant by ‘organization’. ‘Party’ as a political entity would emerge from this ‘organization’, which as its historically evolving political organ will address similar objectives. Consequently, ‘Party’ for Marx, claims Hudis, is ‘of’ the proletariat and not ‘for’ it, much unlike the idea of the party as a niche intellectually superior group as envisaged by Ferdinand Lassalle, and later, following him, Vladimir Lenin. Nevertheless, what remains unaddressed in Hudis is, as one may argue, some urgent and relevant questions: can the identity of the members of the working class be reduced solely to their being ‘wage labourers’? Will not the diverse kinds of overlapping social identities call into doubt the viability of such a monolithic construction of class and unified ‘self’?  The insights these three chapters above offer are assimilated in Michael Löwy’s chapter Revolution. He substantiates how Marx changed his theoretical views on the subject from, initially, reposing his faith only in the ‘philosopher’s brain’ as being ‘active’ and the masses being ‘passive’ to, later, recognizing the latter as being equally active. So for Marx, the revolution was not only a seizure of state power, but also a synthesis of the material circumstances with an ongoing self-emancipation in a ‘revolutionary praxis’, which, Löwy holds, is not a single historic instance, but a permanent condition for a continued dialectical enlightenment.
Ricardo Antunes in Work construes work as ‘conscious human activity’ creating social life. Work under capitalism, however, is increasingly transformed into a mere instrument of subsistence as ‘alienated wage labour’. In production, labour’s expenditure ‘in a special form and with a definite aim’ producing ‘use values’ – concrete labour – is subdued to its general index of producing ‘exchange values’ and valorizing capital – abstract labour. Insofar as work takes the form of ‘non-reflective’ abstract alienated labour, it objectifies human relations as ‘fetishzied’ commodity relations. To return to work as ‘self-determining activity’ it is thus imperative to overcome ‘abstract’ by conscious ‘concrete labour’. Moishe Postone’s chapter Capital and Temporality dwells on this phenomenon. With the subsumption of work, every productive activity must take the ‘commodity form’, characterized by a peculiarly dual determinacy of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ labour, which is a specific historical form unique to capitalism. Following Marx, Postone concludes that ‘value’, which is only produced by ‘abstract labour’, is the dominant form of wealth in capitalism. The substance of ‘value’ is a ‘self-mediating norm’ which is ‘socially necessary labour time’. With the dominant wealth form being principally labour time, there develops not only the supremacy of the ‘temporal form of wealth’ but also a ‘social domination’ governed by time. Interrogating value and its ramifications, Postone then constructs a ‘treadmill’ like ‘effect’ in capitalism: a rise in the ‘material wealth’ but no long-term increase in total value, as the temporary ‘higher levels’ of value produced per unit time, that is productivity, are continually ‘generalized’, and become the ‘base’ norm – however keeping the aggregate value always the same . In Technology and Science Amy E. Wendling looks at technology and science under capitalism, growing not independently, but along the norms of value and productivity. The contradictions in such a trajectory of development show up as the inverse relationship between ‘machinery’ and ‘labourers’ by ‘deskilling’ the labourers short of total annihilation, which at least corrodes their ‘political’ bargaining power and capabilities. The combination of technological development and ‘treadmill effect’, leading to the rise in material wealth, but no long term increase in value, causes ecological havoc. John Bellamy Foster in Ecology returns to value and not to sensuous nature being the dominant form of wealth. The value that comes from labour-power is treated as an internal cost to capital while the cost of material nature remains external to it, a ‘free gift’, thoughtlessly squandered, giving rise to a ‘metabolic rift’. After Capital III, Foster looks forward to the man in a future society, chary of despoliation, who arguably will be engaged in rational metabolic appropriation of nature.
Heather A. Brown and Kevin B. Anderson in Gender Equality and Nationalism and Ethnicity respectively decode capital’s influence on these social categories. With mechanized industry, Brown points out, physical deficit as an impediment is overcome; the labour market, now indifferent to gender frontiers, expands at a dizzying pace. This makes pre-existing family relations – between women and men – both vulnerable and prone to change, not so much for mechanization per se as for ‘similar needs and wants’. Such a shift in the gender structure of labour empowers women as possible revolutionary subjects. This expansion of capital indifferent to social frontiers and possibly equipping different social agents as revolutionary subjects explains why, as Anderson notes, Marx lent support to the national and ethnic struggles in Poland, Ireland and the Northern cause in the American Civil War for their possible revolutionary potentials.
Pietro Basso in Migration, and Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar in Colonialism trace the emergence of the ‘world market’ together with the gradually expanding scope of ‘primitive accumulation’. World scale conquests and the enslavement of populations led to their ‘forced migration’ into slavery, exodus, or mass unemployment of almost entire populations. The imposition of the rule of capital by extra-economic violence and ‘brute force’ created a new ‘geographical expanse’ and the ‘reserve army of workers’, which are the two fundamental pre-requisites of capital taking the final form, world market.
Capital expanding geographically and class being ‘riven’ with ‘gender’, ‘race’ and ‘national identities’, our engagement with Marx under rapid historical changes lays on us the duty of ‘reformulating’ the ‘Internationalist’ nature of the proletariat by discovering diverse revolutionary subjects. Thus, it is only fit to ask, should we not include along with the proletariat those individuals and social groups from various sections of society and colonial subjects as new potential forms of the revolutionary bloc?
All such elements are systematically articulated within the parameters of a capitalist state, whose nature Bob Jessop’s chapter State analyzes. In applying the theoretical insights derived from Marx, he identifies three accounts of the state – viz. as the ‘instrument of class rule’, as the ‘autonomous authority’ competently tackling class conflicts, and as the ‘alienated form’ of political organization based on the ‘specific separation-in-unity’ of the economic and political relations. Expanding the notion of ‘separation-in-unity’, he then decrypts the ‘formal adequacy’ – political equalities contra economic inequalities – of the state. The capitalist state formation, for him, is located along the line of separation between the ‘civil sphere’ dominated by bourgeois ‘self-interest’ and its ‘illusory reflection’ as ‘common interest’ in the ‘public sphere’. This is where the politics of power masquerades as undifferentiated public interest. This formation explains how and why the social relations of servitude may well continue without the dominant class commanding political supremacy, thereby removing ‘class’ itself from being an ‘immediate’ organizing force. The upshot of this is, the modalities of class conflicts remain not only economic but also become politically specific, to overcome the juxtaposition held within the political integration of the state. This conception of the state is crucial for the ‘world market’ that Seongjin Jeong and Benno Teschke elaborate in chapters Globalization and War and International Relations respectively. Drawing upon Marx’s insights pertinent to a globalized world, Jeong offers his views on how value finally peaks in terms of the vertical integration of inter-state matrix. In conformity to capitalism’s claims, the chapter looks into the consequences of the international norm of ‘socially necessary labour time’ that allow the expropriation of  ‘surplus labour time’ by the high-productivity countries from those characterized by low-productivity, which, as he persuasively argues, is ‘zero-sum’ and not the Ricardian positive-sum game. Teschke improves upon Jeong’s model. He points to ‘war’, a ‘horizontal geopolitical conflict’, as another vector of the modern inter-state matrix. Studying the historical developments and the emerging tendencies of ‘world market’, he asserts that the theory of ‘historical materialism’ needs revision in these two axes of horizontal and vertical paths to grasp properly what uneven progress in production, mediated temporally, would really amount to. In this connection, he claims for his hypothesis with regard to states and their agencies a high degree of applicability.
Gilbert Achcar in Religion captures Marx’s ‘materialist’ conception that is not delinked from his ‘political attitude’ towards it. The former co-relates ‘credit’ and ‘faith’, and ‘alienation of labour’ and ‘religious alienation’ converging into ‘mystification’ of human relations, which so long as religion in itself is determined by the ‘historical changes in production’ will remain similar to the process whereby capital fetishizes human relations. As a timely warning though, Achcar maintains that any ‘defence of freedom’ can come to naught if the ‘freedom of religion’ is attacked when religion becomes a ‘component of the fight for political freedom in general’. This aporia Marx believed can be resolved only with education and ‘emancipatory fight’ by the workers’ party.
Robin Small and Isabelle Garo in their chapters Education and Art respectively, uphold ‘real human development’. Small’s chapter builds on Marx’s substantive commitment to education as a means to build ‘personality and human development’ to overstep the incompleteness which division of labour and ‘vocational specialization’ conspire to impose. In a similar vein, Garo argues, though art is socio-historically determined, it cannot be wholly ‘alienated’ from the artist. This allows art to escape the entire loci of ‘abstract labour’ and ‘law of value’, thus opening a possibility of ‘dialectical human sense development’ between artist and aesthete.
Finally, Immanuel Wallerstein chronicles some really shaping historic experiences influenced by the Moor; and here naturally he alludes to the paradigmatic shifts – from the days of the ‘German Social-Democratic Party’, through the ‘Russian Revolution’, the ‘Cold War’, the ‘World Revolution’ of 1968, the collapse of existing socialism, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, right up to the Great Financial Crisis (2007-2008). Subsequently, without being named, Marxism did by no means part company with the new generations affianced to many forms of ‘global justice movement’ embodied in ‘World Social Forum’, ‘left-of-centre’ political parties, and the criticisms of mainstream policies since 2008-2009. With this hope, he expects Marxism of tomorrow to engage with Marx ‘carefully’ and ‘critically’. However, conspicuously missing in his chapter is the deserved focus on how Marx, subsequent to the discovery of Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and Grundrisse, sent shockwaves in the 1930s and 1960s, respectively, compelling powerful debates both within and outside of academia.
Overall, the book appreciably enriches our understanding of Marx’s conceptual paradigm, making it a valuable core text for academicians, enthusiasts, activists, and even the Sociology Departments of Universities. We, however, conclude with two critical remarks: To start with, the Marxian categories extensively analyzed here have been restricted primarily to a socio-political reading; thus their immense economic and philosophical significance has been either undervalued or ignored. If the financial crisis of 2008 is one of the reasons for Marx’s revival – even Francis Fukuyama admitting that ‘certain things Karl Marx said are turning out to be true’ (2018) – then we may well ask whether the meaning of financial capital, including market derivatives, can be grasped through his theory of value and the falling rate of profit? This having been said, we may then ask if, in view of the unreflective exploitation of natural resources, would it not make sense only if we widened the framework of the falling rate of profit? If such is the case, then to put a compelling limit on the heedless exploitation of nature’s warehouse, what is urgently called for is a reconstruction of our economic ontology that can effectively tackle the ever-growing clash between advanced economies and their rising rivals. Next, taking off from the second comment, to conceptualize such a reconstruction through Marx’s thoughts, does it remain restricted only to the far-reaching reconstruction of economic systems? Despite recurrent economic melt-downs since 1989, the fetishism of “productivity” continues to hold sway over the historical processes globally. This “productivity” is sustained by the two “living negation[s]” of capitalism – exploitation of youthful human labour and the previously mentioned inward invasion of nature. The question then remains; do these concerns also not extend to the much larger issue of the reconstitution of class consciousness in and for itself? At this point way of concluding query, by, a further thought suggests itself. Will Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) – the Nachlass of 15,000 pages of notes – not prove to be a watershed in interpreting the Key Concepts? With another world stagnation looming large, we must muster courage for – no, not a short-lived but – a sustained Revival!

The sesquicentennial of the publication of Marx’s first volume of Capital generat- ed renewed interest in his masterwork and resulted in the publication of numer- ous reassessments.

Musto’s (2019) edited volume offers a major contribution to this literature. It was born out of a conference with the same title, organized by Musto and hosted at York University in Toronto in May 2017. Drawing thirty speakers from ten countries, the present collection includes essays from roughly half of the conference presenters. The contributors are Kevin Anderson, Étienne Balibar, Himani Bannerji, Pietro Basso, Mauro Buccheri, Silvia Federici, John Bellamy Foster, Alfonso Iacono, Bob Jessop, Marcello Musto, Bertell Ollman, Leo Panitch, Moishe Postone, William Clare Roberts, Kohei Saito, Gary Teeple, and Richard Wolff. Musto deserves our thanks for encouraging these dis- tinguished scholars to contribute chapters and for curating the collection.

As with most edited volumes, the contributions are uneven in quality and top- icality. But most chapters are genuinely excellent, contributing a thematic reading of Capital, typically in the area of the author’s expertise. So, for instance, the chapter by Silvia Federici discusses wage labor and social reproduction in Capital; John Bellamy Foster summarizes Capital’s ecological critique; Moishe Postone draws on value theory to expose the roots of our current crisis; Richard Wolff offers an exposition on the theory of class in Capital; and so on. Herein lies the volume’s chief strength: it provides concise and relatively accessible intro- ductions to many of Capital’s key themes, written by Marxist scholars who have published specialized volumes on these matters.

Paradoxically, this is also the collection’s major limitation. Seven of the chap- ters are largely unoriginal, by my count, insofar as earlier (and more substantial) treatments of the same arguments have been published by the same authors. There is certainly virtue in publishing these chapters in a volume of this sort; they provide readers with a useful compendium of statements on Capital by im- portant scholars. But for those readers who are already familiar with these writers and their interpretations of Capital, these chapters offer little that is new. Rather than dwelling on these, I will offer brief remarks on two of the book’s most novel and interesting chapters.

Chapter 3, the book’s longest, presents Bob Jessop’s study of Marx’s use of the metaphor of the cell in Capital. A masterful exegesis, Jessop shows how analysis of capitalist social formations was deeply marked by Marx’s study of breakthroughs in cell biology during the 1850s. Jessop asks, why did Marx begin Capital with the commodity? This marks a clear shift from his early notebooks—including those that comprise the Grundrisse of 1857—which began the analysis of capital via money. To answer this question, Jessop examines Marx’s preparatory texts and statements on method (those written before and after Capital) to discern the timing and cause of the shift. Jessop shows that Marx’s study of cell theory between 1857 and 1867 led him to generate—consciously or not—a parallel theory concerning capitalism. To summarize briefly (see Jessop 2019, 66–71): just as all bodies are comprised of cells, the social body of capitalist society is consti- tuted from complex arrangements of the value form, of which the elementary form is the commodity. These commodities are both independent entities and also shaped by the whole of capitalist society, which presents itself as an “immense collection of commodities” (Marx [1867] 1976, 125). Just as cells arise from other cells, commodities are produced from other commodities. Cells persist through a lifetime of metabolic exchanges, which can be modified through cellular differentiation and can form organs and organisms; similarly, as the “cell form” (Zellenform) of capitalist society, commodities result from pro- duction and also modify the circumstances of future production. Under capital- ism, the whole social metabolism that defines human existence on Earth comes to be reorganized by the production and circulation of value through the use of the labor-power commodity. I could go on, but Jessop’s philological treatment of cell theory in Capital is both rigorous and critical, emphasizing the need to avoid naturalizing capital. As Jessop (2019, 74–5) notes: “Whereas cells are the uni- versal basis of organic life and operate through known universal chemical, phys- iological, and metabolic processes, the value form of the commodity as the economic cell-form of the capital relation is historically specific and its laws and tendencies are doubly tendential, in the sense that, they exist only to the extent that the contradiction-rife and crisis-prone capital relation is reproduced in and through social practices that are historically contingent and contested.” Marx’s use of cell theory to explain capitalism was methodological and metaphor- ical, not ontological.

In chapter 9, Kohei Saito reexamines the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels from an ecological perspective. Since Marx never published any books or pamphlets on nature, after his death Marxists turned to Engels’s writings—particularly his Anti-Dühring (Engels [1878] 1987) and his later manu- scripts in Dialectics of Nature (Engels [1873–1882] 1987)—to interpret ecology. This led to a narrow interpretation of Western Marxism that now “cannot develop a Marxist critique of ecology unless it admits its own earlier one-sided interpreta- tion” (Saito 2019, 167). By focusing on Marx’s later scientific notebooks, Saito cla- rifies Marx’s and Engels’s significant differences regarding their interests in science and views of ecology. Saito provides a powerful interpretation of a change Engels made to a sentence about metabolism written by Marx for the third volume of Capital. This edit consequently emphasizes Engels’s conception of metabolic rift (i.e., “the violation of natural laws of life would lead to a fatal con- sequence for human civilization”) at the expense of “Marx’s metabolic theory, which investigates how the law of value dominant in the social metabolism mod- ifies natural metabolism” (173). Saito implies that this editorial shift was partly mo- tivated by Engels’s rejection of Liebig’s conception of metabolism, Marx’s key source for this concept. More fundamentally, Engels’s ontology emphasizes the in- dependence of nature. Thus, he “was not able to fully recognize that Marx’s the- oretical leap” concerned “the interdependent process between social and natural metabolism,” which explains “how the metabolism between humans and nature is modified and reorganized through the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital” (174). By implication, Marx’s conception of the natural history of the economic forms of society—his stated method in Capital’s preface—was not the same as Engels’s.

Notably, both of these chapters address ecological themes. After decades in which no books about capital and nature won the Deutscher Memorial Prize, three recent winners examine this relation: Andreas Malm’s (2016) Fossil Capital, Kohei Saito’s (2017) Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, and John Bellamy Foster’s (2020) The Return of Nature. I do not think this reflects a fad. It rather indicates a renais- sance of original research built upon the foundation of Capital. Indeed, I believe that we will one day find in retrospect that much of the most original work in the Marxist tradition today responds to the planetary ecological crisis. Novel thought requires provocation.

Our planetary crisis, generated through the development of capitalist social re- lations, promises ever-greater disruptions and changes in the human relationship with the Earth. I am reminded of the passage from the conclusion of Marx’s ([1867] 1976, 637–8) chapter on machinery, where he notes that the urbanization of hu- manity both concentrates our social capacities yet also “disturbs the metabolic in- teraction between man and the earth … but by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontane- ous fashion, [capitalist society] compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race.” To avoid the total destruction of this metabolism, to refashion social existence in a form adequate to social dignity, the analysis provided by Capital remains critical. We are therefore indebted to Musto and this collection of writers for opening new paths through Marx’s text.

References

Engels, F. (1878) 1987. Anti-Dühring. In vol. 25 of Collected Works, by K. Marx and F. Engels. New York: International Publishers.

Engels, F. (1873–1882) 1987. Dialectics of Nature. In vol. 25 of Collected Works, by K. Marx and Engels. New York: International Publishers.

Foster, J. B. 2020. The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. New York: Monthly Review.

Jessop, B. 2019. “‘Every Beginning Is Difficult, Holds in All Sciences’: Marx on the Economic Cell Form of Capital and the Analysis of Capitalist Social Formations.” In Marx’s “Capital” After 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, ed. M. Musto, 54–82. New York: Routledge.

Malm, A. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. New York: Verso.

Marx, K. (1867) 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin.

Musto, M. 2019. Marx’s “Capital” After 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism.

New York: Routledge.

Saito, K. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review.

Saito, K. 2019. “Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship Revisited from an Ecological Perspective.” In Marx’s “Capital” After 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, ed. M. Musto, 167–83. New York: Routledge.