Marx and World History

A Bibliography Reflecting Karl Marx's Study of History, 2021

It is a partial and partially Cyberdiscursive Bibliography reflecting Karl Marx’s Encyclopedic Approach to the Study of History.

2014

The nature of the contemporary global political economy and the significance of the current crisis are a matter of wide-ranging intellectual and political debate, which has contributed to a revival of interest in Marx’s critique of political economy. This book interrogates such a critique within the broader framework of the history of political economy, and offers a new appreciation of its contemporary relevance. A distinctive feature of this study is its use of the new historical critical edition of the writings of Marx and Engels (MEGA²), their partially unpublished notebooks in particular. The sheer volume of this material forces a renewed encounter with Marx. It demonstrates that the international sphere and non-European societies had an increasing importance in his research, which developed the scientific elements elaborated by Marx’s predecessors. This book questions widespread assumptions that the nation-state was the starting point for the analysis of development. It explores the international foundations of political economy, from mercantilism to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and to Hegel, and investigates how the understanding of the international political economy informs the interpretations of history to which it gave rise. The book then traces the developments of Marx’s critique of political economy from the early 1840s to Capital Volume 1 and shows that his deepening understanding of the laws of capitalist uneven and combined development allowed him to recognise the growth of a world working class. Marx’s work thus offers the necessary categories to develop an alternative to methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism grounded in a critique of political economy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Marx’s thought and in the foundations of International Political Economy.

2018

The debate on the structure of Marx’s Capital, and on the probable explanations for the changes he made to the initial ‘six books plan’, has always been a relevant topic in Marxist studies. This article provides a more exhaustive account of the genesis of Capital, on the basis of a revisitation of Marx’s intellectual biography during the 1860s, and of the publication of all preparatory manuscripts of Marx’s magnum opus, recently appeared in the MEGA2, the historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels.

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1000-Word Philosophy, 2022

A concise introduction to Karl Marx's theory of history.

Thirty-Three Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, 2019

This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, the main differences between this manuscript and the published book are 1) one is digital, one is hard copy, 2) the digital version can be searched, 3) the hard copy version has a detailed index. Both manuscript and published book were revised versions of my online, illustrated "study guide" to Volume I of CAPITAL, accessible at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html

Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2022

In the preface to the first edition of Capital Volume I, Karl Marx wrote ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty’ (Marx 1990: 89). It is no wonder then that in the face of this difficult beginning, Louis Althusser famously encouraged the first-time reader to put Part I on ‘Commodities and Money’ aside and only return to it after the end of reading the rest of the book. And even then, to do so ‘with infinite caution, knowing that it will always be extremely difficult to understand, even after several readings of the other Parts, without the help of a certain number of deeper explanations’ (Althusser 1977: 85). In the anglophone world, many readers reached for David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital for such help. But this companion, its importance notwithstanding, exhibits what Nicola Taylor and Riccardo Bellofiore (2004: 4n4) call the ‘immaturity’ of English-language scholarship on Marx which to this day continues to remain in the dark about primary and secondary literature emerging from the historical-critical edition, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2).

Socialism and Democracy, 2010

Vol 1, pp.543 First published: in German in 1867, English edition first published in 1887; Source: First English edition of 1887 (4th German edition changes included as indicated) with some modernisation of spelling; Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR; Translated: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels; Transcribed: Zodiac, Hinrich Kuhls, Allan Thurrott, Bill McDorman, Bert Schultz and Martha Gimenez (1995-1996)

2013

This article aims at contributing to current debates on the ‘new imperialism’ by presenting the main results of a reading of Marx’s Capital in light of his writings on colonialism, which were unknown in the early Marxist debate on imperialism. It aims to prove that, in his main work, Marx does not analyse a national economy or – correspondingly – an abstract model of capitalist society, but a world-polarising and ever-expanding system. This abstraction allows the identification of the laws of development of capitalism and its antagonisms, and reflects the tendency of the capital of the dominant states, by making permanent recourse also to methods of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, to expand and increase the exploitation of workers worldwide, and, at the same time, the cooperation between them. What, for Marx, was later defined as imperialism is the concrete form of the process of ‘globalisation’ of the capital of the dominant states. With the development of his analysis, Marx became increasingly aware of the economic and political consequences of imperialism. In his activity within the First International, with regard to the question of Irish independence, he affirmed the fundamental importance of building a real solidarity between class struggles in imperialist countries and anti-colonial resistance in colonised and dependent countries. His examination of imperialism and internationalist perspective were downplayed, denied, if not completely reversed in the interpretation and systematisation of his thought by reformist leaders within the Second International. In their attempt to react against this tendency and develop an analysis and a political strategy adequate to the new phase of generalised imperialist expansion, increased inter-imperialist rivalries and rising anti-colonial resistance, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin reaffirmed the centrality of the critique of imperialism at the economic and at the political levels. Even if they were partially unaware of this, they thus developed and expanded on some aspects already present in Marx’s work.