Critiquing capitalism today. New ways to Read Marx
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Critiquing capitalism today. New ways to Read Marx Frederick Harry Pitts Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2018, x+279 pp., ISBN: 978-3-319-62632-1 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00351-x
In Critiquing Capitalism Today. New Ways to Read Marx, Pitts remains faithful to the English tradition inaugurated by Bacon. He has structured the text into two parts. The first is the pars construens while the second is the pars destruens. The text is also introduced by seven paragraphs not only about the topics covered by the research, but also about the mode of exposition. The first part takes into consideration, on the one hand, the Neue Marx-Lektu¨re/New Reading of Marx (NRM), a Marxist current in Germany that arouses opposition to MarxismLeninism and Social Democracy. The version of this ‘reading’ is rooted in the works of Bellofiore and Finelli (1998), Heinrich (2012), and Bonefeld (2010), and is based essentially on the concept of ‘social validation.’ On the other hand, postoperismo is introduced and, in part, the transition that Negri makes from operaismo to postoperismo. The latter embraces a Spinozist conception of reality, transforming the working class into a ‘multitude,’ while operaismo (Negri 1992), by contrast, relies upon the Copernican inversion accomplished by Tronti (1966). This is, to be sure, a position where ‘power’ is exclusively on the side of the working class. Both parts revise Marxism. However, the first remains critical, in spite of the fact that it stresses the negative side of dialectics. The NRM can therefore be defined as a Marxism a`-la-Frankfurt. To be sure, it is a theory of social validation that stems from the writings of the Frankfurt School. The second part absorbs directly the dialectic in Spinoza’s monism. The result is that Negri and Hardt transfer to ‘man’ the characteristics that Spinoza placed in God: a subject-predicate inversion that goes against the tradition of the subject-object dialectic that Marx discovers in Feuerbach. In the first part, Pitts explicitly aims to conceive value differently from traditional Marxism through the concept of ‘social validation’ borrowed by the NRM (p. 23). While the latter moves from work-time to value, Pitts starts from value to get to work and time. In other words, taking into consideration the Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
‘socially necessary labor-time’ (SNLT) of the first book of Capital, the NRM focuses on the social abstraction of concrete works mediated by the exchange of goods (p. 24). In this sense, value is not a certain amount of labor-time spent in production through concrete work, but is rather the SNLT through abstract labor (p. 27). The idea of this version of ‘value theory’ comes to him from the first book of Capital, whereas it is from the third book of Capital that the NRM reveals another typical tenet of Marxism: the critique of political economy as social criticism, and not merely as offering a distinct and alter
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