Immanuel Wallerstein
The Contemporary Relevance of Marx

​When the world-economy was more or less officially defined as being in a "financial crisis"; in 2008-2009, Marxist ideas suddenly became again a major focus of discussion, even in mainstream circles. Marxism, which had been proclaimed dead so many times, seemed once more to be alive – both analytically and politically. The question now is, what is this Marxism that is once more alive?
The writings of Marx continue to provide an enormously rich treasure of analytic and political insight. But Marx died in 1883. The world has begun to pose additional questions to those with which Marx himself wrestled and we must add to his theories subsequent writings of others, written in the same analytic, moral, and political spirit. The Marxism of tomorrow will be the product of further analysis and further praxis, but one of its basic requirements will be to read Marx intelligently, carefully, and critically. His oeuvre still provides the most ample source of historical social science, a resource we annot afford to ignore or distort.
Saskia Sassen
When the material becomes invisible.
​A Conversation with Marx materialities.

​The language of more --more inequality, more poverty, more imprisonment, more dead land and dead water, and so on-- is insufficient to mark the proliferation of extreme versions of familiar conditions. We are seeing a proliferation of systemic edges that, once crossed, render these extreme conditions invisible, no matter their often thick materialities. I will focus on this interplay between extreme moment and the shift from visible to invisible --the capacity of a complex system to generate invisibilities no matter how material the condition.
Etienne Balibar
Marx's Capitalism and Ours

​This paper will outline and substantiate the claim that, 150 years now from the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume One (the only volume completed by the author in his lifetime), the necessity of a ‘critique of political economy’ is more evident than ever, but requires a drastic new formulation. This is not to be conceived in the ‘historicist’ mode of rectifying Marx’s analyses in the light of ‘recent’ developments in the capitalist economy and its social conditions, but, more radically, in the form of a ‘critique of the critique’ that addresses basic epistemological obstacles in Marx’s conceptual apparatus, and a rethinking of the relationship of capitalism with historical time. It is meant to contribute to answering the vexing question: how to reinvent politics when the capitalist economy has produced a real neutralization of the political.

The re-reading of Capital suggested in this paper are based on three interrelated perspectives: 'epistemological obstacles' in the Marxian Critique, Marx's theoretical analysis of the ‘essential relation’ between labour and money that generates the accumulation of capital, and a historical analysis of capitalist mode of valorization not of capitalism per se, but of ‘historical capitalism’.
John Bellamy Foster
Marx's Capital and the Earth:
The Ecological Critique of Political Economy

​Marx’s Capital was a work of science as well as revolutionary praxis, one which in many ways superseded its own immediate historical context, precisely because it was an uncompromising critique of those very same historically specific conditions. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of the problem of the human relation to earth: both it in the sense of the relation to the soil and to the larger material-natural environment. The labor process itself was conceived by Marx as “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature.” Focusing on the growing rift in the human-nature metabolism evident in capitalist relations in his time, Marx developed a systematic ecological critique of political economy, which went deeper and further in the methodological bases of its critique of environmental disruption than any other political-economic work of its day. It is this underlying ecological critique in his analysis that has been recovered in recent decades by ecosocialists and that is having an extraordinary, revolutionizing effect on ecological movements around the world in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.
Bob Jessop
Marx on the Analysis of Social Formations

Marx wrote on pre-capitalist economic formations and capitalist social formations. For the latter, he described the commodity as its cell form (Zellenform), elementary form (Elementarform), or germ form (Keimform). As a follower of contemporary science, Marx could have learnt about stem cells within two decades of Das Kapital I (1867). He might then have described the commodity as the stem-cell form of capitalist social formations. Stemcells are vital to bodily renewal and embryonic stem cells differentiate into many kinds of specialized cell. Analogously, commodity circulation is vital to capitalist reproduction and the commodity form also differentiates [logically and/or historically] into special forms that are all essential to the capital relation. I explore four aspects of this suggestion: (1) its potential implications for Marxist analysis; (2) the limitations of the cell and stem-cell metaphors; (3) useful supplements to form analysis in describing and explaining capitalist social formations; and (4) the consequences of competing principles of societalization for the capitalist character of contemporary social formations.
Silvia Federici
Marx, Gender and the Reproduction of the Working Class

My essay contrasts Marx’s conception of women’s labor, gender relations and the processes by which labor is produced with the capitalist restructuring of them in England and the US in the last part of the 19th century. 
It asks: what was the impact of the capitalist redefinition of reproductive work on gender relations and the class struggle? Why Marx could not anticipate this process and what cost has Marxism paid for its limited vision of the capitalist exploitation of labor?
The theses underlining my argument are:
(a) By identifying waged industrial labor as the pillar of capitalist accumulation, Marx underestimated the strategic importance of unwaged work (in the homes, the colonies, the slave plantations) as an essential condition of capitalist production, and the destructive consequences of the labor hierarchies that capitalism has built through the differential between waged and unwaged work. (b) A re-definition of the terrain of the class struggle to include all the articulations of the reproduction of our lives is indispensable if Marxism is to contribute to the anti-capitalist struggle in the 21st century.
Richard Wolff
Marx’s Economics and Social Movements for Worker Cooperatives

​Marx's Capital focuses analysis on commodity production in capitalist enterprises that contain employers and employees as two differentiated groups of people. He shows how that production structure interacts with markets to generate the instability, inequality, and injustice characteristic of capitalism. Marx shows that the production and distribution of surpluses lie at the root of that system. Yet the capitalist enterprise's organization of the production and distribution of surplus also points the way, for Marx, to transcend capitalism. Worker coops acquire their post-capitalist potential when conceived as democratizations of enterprise organization that dissolve their capitalist organization of surpluses. In worker coops, instead of employers and employees, one singular group collectively produces and distributes surpluses, directs as well as performs the work. A new focus for socialism is entailed as such enterprise transformation becomes a primary, concrete meaning of socializing means of production and distribution. 
Moishe Postone
The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value

In the face of the overarching structural social transformations of recent decades, highlighted by the crash of 2008 and its aftermath, approaches to contemporary society that focus on capitalism have become more widespread. Nevertheless, it is not always evident in these various discussions how “capitalism” is understood and how that understanding helps illuminate the contemporary global crisis. This paper suggests that a fundamental reinterpretation of Marx’s Capital as a theory of a historically specific, abstract form of domination, grounded in value, a temporal form of wealth unique to capitalism, could illuminate the fundamental dual crisis of environmental degradation and the hollowing out of working society. At the same time, it might be able to contribute to the constitution of a new overarching framework for transformative politics. 
Kevin B. Anderson
Multilinearity, Colonialism, and Race in Capital

​At a textual level, it is possible to perceive many of the themes of the late Marx in ‘Capital’ Vol. I, especially the French edition of 1872-75. First, the issue of multilinearity is posed explicitly in ‘Capital’ Vol. I, in a passage added to the French edition, which states that the sketch of primitive accumulation is meant to apply to Western Europe alone, thus leaving aside Russia, India, and other non-Western societies. Second, the additions to the fetishism section made by 1872 add a comparison to feudalism not present in 1867. Third, the chapter of "Accumulation of Capital" contains a treatment of colonialism in Ireland that can be viewed alongside Marx's contemporaneous writings on Irish revolutionary movements. Fourth, the discussion of the U.S. and the Civil War in the "Working Day" chapter can be seen as a treatment of the dialectics of race and class in revolutionary and oppositional movements.
Bertell Ollman
Capital vol. 1 in Light of Marx's Unpublished Works
 
​Every student of Marxism is aware of the distinction Marx makes in the Preface to Capital Vol. I between Inquiry and Exposition, but on at least two other occasions he also mentions the important role that Self-Clarification plays in his work. Is it possible that the 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse of 1857-8, which were his main works directed to Self-Clarification and were never intended for publication, offer a more accurate view of Marx's actual thinking about capitalism and much else than Capital, which has gotten most of our attention? Maybe Marx never dropped or reduced his commitment to dialectics and alienation, for example, which play major roles in these unpublished writings, but only a small one -- and then usually disguised - in Capital. This made it much easier for his readers to misinterpret a good deal of what he had to say. 
Leo Panitch
The Challenge of Transcending Capital

​The celebration of Marx's great text 150 years after its publication needs to be tempered by an appreciation of the need to develop Marx's concepts today in such a way as to understand how and why capitalism could globally extend itself and so deeply penetrate social relations globally into the 21st century. This will also be necessary to develop strategic capacities to actually transcend capital in the future, even in the face of ongoing and newly emerging capitalist contradictions.
Ursula Huws
The Household in Marx’s Capital

​The household is rarely addressed directly in Capital but makes its appearance indirectly in several ways, some of which sit in tension with each other: as a site of primitive accumulation; as the space in which the reproduction of labour and of labour power takes place; but also as a site of consumption, or subsistence, and of ‘unproductive’ (or reproductive) labour. The concept of the worker’s cost of subsistence is crucially important for understanding the labour theory of value, but Marx and Engels are never entirely clear whether they mean by this just the cost of the individual worker’s own subsistence or include that of other household members. Engels, indeed, constructs women and children recruited into the workforce as ‘slaves’ of the male breadwinner in an attempt to resolve this contradiction. This contribution will attempt to develop a conceptual model of the household in capitalism.
Michael Kraetke
Why and in What Respects is Capital incomplete?

The ongoing work on the second MEGA, including the publication of many, although not yet all, unpublished manuscripts by Marx (and some by Engels) has provided one fundamental insight beyond any reasonable doubt: Marx did never manage to complete Capital as he intended it, and Engels never tried to fill the gaps and to deal with the many unsettled questions of Marx’ critique of political economy. Although allegedly “orthodox” guardians of a faith called “Marxism” deny this, Marx’ many manuscripts and the mountain of notebooks and other materials he left us, clearly show that he continued to struggle with major issues in his economic theory and never ever came to grips with them. What is today regarded as his penultimate words in some quarters (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), are just first drafts, written many years before his death. As a matter of fact – and very well supported by the available evidence – Marx kept working on these matters without finishing the job. That is why he refused to enter the fray of the first public debate on his theory of value, which raged in several socialist journals in the late 1870s. The notebooks and manuscripts from the period 1867 – 1883, from the publication of Capital, volume I to his untimely death, clearly show us, what he was focussing upon and which unsettled questions of his own theory he was actually trying to tackle. As Marx told his daughter, Engels should “make something” of his papers. Engels published them in a from in which their character as first drafts and partly still research manuscripts remains plain to anyone who can read. Accordingly, it is possible to draw up a list of unsettled questions of Marx’ theory of capitalism – and to indicate the direction in which a solution could and should (and actually has been) searched for. Inevitably, we will have to come back to some of the major works of the period of “classical Marxism”.
Terrell Carver
Performativity, Parody and Post-Marxism: Reading Capital All Over Again

​Reading Capital as a work of modern economics has never been successful. This is because ‘positive’ economics relies for its scientific status on a commonplace epistemology of empiricism, claims to a methodology of heuristic abstraction notwithstanding. Reading Capital as a parodic political intervention is closer to the text’s own terms and therefore more likely to make sense of it. Marx’s appropriation of idealism’s ‘active side’ presupposed his critique of ‘all hitherto existing materialism’. Thus his major concepts – commodity, value, money, capital – are all performatives. Performatives are discursive practices that enact or produce what they name; they have no ontological status apart from the activities that constitute their reality. It follows that other activities will constitute other realities, and Marx’s ‘critique of the economic categories’ works politically to that end. The ontological assumptions, as well as the political content, of even ‘Marxist economics’ are at odds with Marx’s quite different project.
Himani Bannerji
Reading Capital for Understanding Violence Against Women in the Era of Neoliberalism

Social and labour historians have shown the violence wrought by capital upon people’s lives and labour, particular on women. Marx, however, has been criticized by some feminist scholars for analyzing capital mainly in terms of economic production and largely ignoring social and biological reproduction, making women’s lives and labour immaterial to capital’s development. They claim that ‘labour’ and not gender has been Marx’s central analytical category, and have either dispensed with class and capital as central to a critique of gender/patriarchy or made attempts to bring gender and labour together in an intersectional or aggregational manner. The goal of this paper is to read outside the binary paradigm of production and reproduction, base and superstructure, and through the anti-ideological historical materialist method that Marx develops in Capital and other works demonstrate the interconstitutive relation between gender and labour, disclosing the intrinsic role of violence in the capitalist mode of production, particularly in its neoliberal phase.
William Clare Roberts
Reading Capital as a Political Intervention

Over the course of the century after his death, Marx’s Capital acquired for many the opacity and immediacy of formulas, self-explanatory or self-refuting, depending upon the party to which one belonged. Even now, the text of volume one is generally treated as either fundamentally didactic, in which case its rhetoric and form are reduced to matters of style, external to the real content of the book, or as fundamentally literary, in which case its arguments are submerged in its metaphors. I propose instead that Capital might be read as a political intervention in the context of the International Working Men’s Association. The primary object of Marx’s arguments, on this reading, is to transform the fund of critical concepts utilised by other socialists and labour activists. Read as such, Capital continues to work as a political text today.
Seongjing Jeong
Marx on Globalization

​It is now common sense that Marx anticipated globalization more than one and a half centuries before the birth of the term. Contrary to the common accusation that Marx dealt only with closed national economies or fell into Eurocentrism, I submit that the world market or ‘the global’ is intrinsic to Marx’s theoretical and political enterprises by rereading Marx’s texts on globalization, including The German Ideology, Manifesto of Communist Party, Grundrisse, Capital, etc., focusing on the following points. First, that the global perspective, epitomized as the ‘formula of world market-world market crisis-world revolution’, was sustained throughout his life, far from being discarded by the ‘mature’ or ‘late’ Marx. Second, I find Marx’s most advanced theorization of the world market in his theory of international value. Third, I argue that current Marxist theories of the world economy or globalization could benefit from absorbing Marx’s original theory of the world market.
Alfonso Maurizio Iacono
The ambivalence of cooperation in Marx’s Capital

Something seems to have changed today, after years of celebrating individualism, years in which the image of globalization was accompanied by the metaphor of the invisible hand. A small part of the attention has shifted away from a naive philosophy of the individual and towards an idea focused on the cooperative abilities of human beings. In a certain sense, what has come to the fore is the Aristotelian image of man as zòon politikón, of man as a social animal (this is the way Seneca and Thomas Aquinas translated it): an idea that Karl Marx fully espoused. From Sennett to Tomasello, up to Damasio, the social element has come to be viewed again as a constitutive element of the individual’s ethical, political, psychological and cognitive development.
In the first volume of his Capital (see part four) Marx forms his idea of planned cooperation between labourers and argues that it enables human beings to develop the species’ faculties. And yet, this conception is fraught with ambivalence: the ambivalence between the liberation of individual capacities through cooperative forms and the oppression, the despotic dominance, exercised by those who rule a collective organization. The power that determines planned cooperation between men is that very same power which can turn into a curse, because the person who wields power is the very same person who governs the organization and the planning.
Mauro Buccheri
The Persistence of Marx’s Humanism: From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital

In the contemporary swamp of Neoliberal Capitalism “the End of the Human” is taking place almost unnoticed. We were barely aware of our origins and of what we have become, and beginning to think about who we might wish to be, when the Event took place: the reduction of life itself into a commodity, life itself as surplus value. The Event had been preceded and accompanied by if not the demise certainly the eclipse of Humanism, even where – in the “Left Hemisphere” – it should have been housed and when historically necessary defended. A radical renewal is indeed now necessary, not only in the light of the tragic history of the Twentieth Century, but also of the vertiginous technological and scientific advances of the last thirty years in the fields of biotechnology and eugenics that threaten our very humanity. In short, a new Humanism is needed in this time of Neoliberal pestilence when all can be sold and bought. Nonetheless, there is the promise of a Way Out, of a remedy that lies within the history of Humanism and, in particular, of Marx(ist)’s Humanism seen in the light of contemporary philosophical, scientific and cultural theorizing. It is time to return to Marx’s Humanism (and to the Marxist Humanism of Fromm, Bloch and Marcuse) which I believe to be the foundation of all his works from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital and of all theorizing of Humanism.
Pietro Basso
Had Capital Been Written Today

According to Marx's Capital, the genesis of industrial capitalism in Europe is intimately linked to historical colonialism outside Europe, which was "the strange God" who proclaimed everywhere to coloured peoples "surplus value making [to be] the sole end and aim of humanity". Why, then, Marx explicitly deal with the crucial phenomenon of colonialism only at the end of the first volume of Capital? We can find the answer to this question through an examination of both Marx's different writing plans for Capital, and his uninterrupted and deep research on non-European countries and the pre-capitalist mode of production. The conclusion is amazing: had Capital been written today, it would probably not begin with the analysis of the commodity, but rather with the analysis of the historical genesis of capitalism as a world global 'system'.
George Comninel
The Political Theory of Capital: Fetishism of Commoditites
 
The prevailing view of Capital is as a work of economics, consistent with the view that Marx's ideas were grounded in economic determinism. Marx, however, was never an economic determinist, and his critique of political economy always was fundamentally different from the sort of social analysis offered by economists. Marx was born in the once free city of Trier, where widespread political liberalism was subjected to autocratic Prussia rule after the defeat of the French Revolution. This time and place had a profound impact on Marx's thought, shaping his lifelong commitment to the cause of human emancipation. His critique of political economy, which began in 1844, grew out of his broader analysis of the impact of alienation upon social existence. The inherent unity of Marx's work beginning in 1844 is revealed in considering Capital as a work of political theory, devoted to the task of human emancipation.
Paresh Chattopadhyay
​Dialectic of Negativity and the Genesis of Socialism

​The future society arises from the contradictions of the present society itself. This process is best understood by recalling the two methodological principles, derived respectively from  Spinoza and Hegel , which inform Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy’. In his first manuscript for Capital II, Marx completed  Spinoza’s famous saying  “all determination is negation” by adding  “and all negation is determination” Years earlier, in his 1844 Parisian manuscripts, while critically commenting on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit  Marx had observed that the latter’s  “greatness” lay in the “dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle”.  Marx shows how capital creates the material and subjective conditions of its own negation and, simultaneously, the elements of the new society destined to supersede it.
Gary Teeple
The Neglected Chapters on Wages in Capital

Despite the brevity of these chapters, Marx attributes considerable importance to the analysis of wages. That the price of labour power takes the form of wages, as if the price of labour, he writes, underlies ‘all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production.’ He adds that all the ‘illusions’ of justice and freedom, and apologies for the system can find their roots in the obfuscations arising from the wage form.
This paper will examine Marx’s analysis of how wage forms conceal many of the ways that the worker can be cheated of the value of labour power, and how these chapters cast light on minimum and living wages, wealth inequality, and the social implications of the rise and fall of wages. Marx’s notions of ideology and science, which lie at the heart of this analysis, will also be explored. 
Kohei Saito
The Dissemination of Capital in Japan

​Japan is a unique capitalist country where Marxism became quite dominant after WWII in the academia. Japanese scholars eagerly translated not only three volumes of Capital but also various editions of Capital and Marx's economic manuscripts. Although there are so many different translations of Capital in Japan, Itsuro Sakisaka (1897-1985) played an considerably important role: not only did he organize the prewar edition of Marx Engels Collected Works but also translated the most popular edition of Capital after WWII. Furthermore, he exercised considerable political influence within the left-wing section of the Social Democratic Party of Japan. Through his intellectual and political activities, I will describe how Japanese intellectuals and activists read Marx's Capital and generated unique interpretations in East Asia.
Paula Rauhala
The Dissemination of Capital in Nordic Countries

​I contrast the dissemination and reception of Capital in Finland with its dissemination in other Scandinavian countries. The translation of the first volume of Capital started to appear as booklets in the Grand Duchy of Finland under the Russian empire in 1913. The independence of Finland was declared in 1917 and the rest of the book was finally published in 1918, on the verge of the civil war. The second Finnish edition of Capital appeared in 1933 in Soviet Russia, Finnish being one of its official languages. In 1937–8, the editors fell as victims of Stalin’s purges and the whole edition of Capital was destroyed. Whereas the translator of the first volume was a bourgeois MP, senator, professor and chancellor, a communist leader Mauri Ryömä translated the second volume during the Second World War in jail. The third volume was published by Progress publishers in Moscow in 1976, as a response to a great interest in Marx among students.
Tomash Dabrowski
The Dissemination of Marx’s Capital in Poland

​There exists neither an English nor Polish language overview of the reception of Marx’s Capital in Poland. In part, this is attributable to the poor record-keeping in Poland. This article corrects this oversight by, for the first time, identifying all Polish language editions of Capital, overviewing their publication history, and reception in Poland. Capital was already known in Poland before its full publication in 1890, and became one of the most cited sociological works in the country until the period of Stalinization. After the purges of the 1950s, the quality of scholarship on Marx generally declined and the most original Marxist scholars devoted their attention to other political thinkers.
Babak Amini
Dissemination and reception of Capital in the United States, Britain, and Canada

The year 2017, which marks the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx's Capital, presents an occasion to review the history of one of the most influential books ever written. My presentation gives an overview of the dissemination and reception of Capital in the United States, Britain, and Canada over the last 150 years. This paper, which is part of a larger project of writing a global history of the dissemination and reception of Capital, seeks to illuminate the path forward in interpreting this important book by identifying how and why Marx's most piercing insights into the foundation of the capitalist mode of production have been receive, understood, misunderstood, or even ignored by his opponents and proponents in these three countries.
Marcello Musto
After Capitalism 

For many decades, Marx's writings were utilized as bible-like verses. Far from heeding his warning against “writing receipts […] for the cook-shops of the future”, he was transformed, instead, into the father of a new social system. Marx, a very rigorous critic, became instead the source of a most obstinate doctrinarianism. Always a firm believer that “the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the workers themselves”, he was entrapped in an ideology that promoted the primacy of political avant-gardes and party as proponents of class consciousness. An advocate of the idea that the fundamental condition for emancipation was the reduction of the working day, he was assimilated to the productivist creed of Stakhanovism. Convinced of the need for the abolition of the State, he was identified as its bulwark. Interested like few other thinkers in the free development of the individuality of human beings, his theories were inducted into a politics that neutralized the richness of the collective dimension of social life into the indistincyness of homogenization.
This presentation will include: 1) the reconstruction of Marx's conception of post-capitalist society, from Capital and its incomplete manuscripts; and 2) an analysis of Marx's profound originality in comparison with some of the other main socialist theories of Nineteenth century.
An attempt will be made to demonstrate that Marx's conception of socialism, freed from the shackles of Soviet-style 'Marxism-Leninism', may become again a point of reference for alternative economic and social systems.

Marx's Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism

May 24-26, 2017 - Toronto

Conference Organizer: Marcello Musto, The Marx Collegium - York University 
Info: marcello.musto at gmail.com -- b.amini86 at gmail.com