Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power suggests that conventional theories of capitalism, Marxist and liberal alike, are unable to answer the question: what is capital? They argue that the basic units of Marxist economics, abstract labour and value, are unobservable and immeasurable, and hence ‘non-existent’ and ‘fictitious’. Against Marxists, they argue that capital is not an ‘economic’ entity, but a symbolic quantification of power.This review contends that what Nitzan and Bichler present as a critique of Marxism as such pivots on (...) an incomprehension of dialectical thinking, and thus misses the mark. Furthermore, this absence in their readings of Marx is strictly correlative to the limits of their own theory-building. Capital as Power simply inverts the vulgar economism it finds in Marxist theories, presenting us with a theory in which capital is financial rather than productive, and symbolic rather than material. In doing so, it reproduces the one-sidedness it criticises, while discarding the possibility of analysing capitalism dialectically as a totality consisting of contradictory, but mutually presupposing, moments. (shrink)

In recent years, a series of key social, political and economic events has placed the critique of capitalism very much on the theoretical agenda. Responding to these developments, many have begun to express the need for a rapprochement between social criticism and the critique of political economy. The present essay represents a contribution to the recovery of the project that was once synonymous with critical theory itself via a critical engagement with the early writings of Jürgen Habermas. Not only is (...) Habermas’ explicit engagement with the critique of political economy among the most substantial to be found within the mainstream tradition of critical theory, his early social-theoretical insights into the emergent ‘primacy of the political’ in late capitalism can be taken as representative of a number of broader trends in late-20th-century thought which sought to go beyond the premises and categories of Marx’s economic works. Simply put, no reappraisal of the relationship between critical theory and the critique of political economy can succeed, I submit, without taking seriously Habermas’s path-breaking and wide-ranging innovations. (shrink)

The young Marx once remarked that political economy finds itself in an estranged form and is therefore in desperate need of a critical reconstruction of its object [Gegenstand]. He proposed a complete deconstruction of economic objectivity and its categories, hoping to recover the true species-life of man. In the article, we assert that contemporary economic theory remains confined by this estrangement, despite managing to ‘revolutionize’ itself out of the grip of classical political economy. The subjectivist-marginalist reliance on ‘measurable’ consumer preferences (...) not only solidified the discipline’s estrangement, but also wrested away any remaining basic principles of economics through neoclassical reconceptualization. A break with estrangement would require novel critical economic thinking that would do away with the discontinuity between classical and neoclassical economics. It would therefore need a rich enough framework to scrutinize its principal categories. We argue that Alain Badiou’s objective phenomenology possesses a complementary synchronic structure able to conform to basic economic tenets, allowing for a comparative and synthetic approach. This would then be the basis for a new model of economic theorizing. We conclude the article with Marx’s value form, seeing it as a possible central category of a newly proposed economic framework. (shrink)

This introduction outlines the importance that Hans-Georg Backhaus’s transcript of Adorno’s 1962 seminar on ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory’ has for shedding light on the relationship between Adorno’s critical theory and the critique of political economy. PartIsignals the importance of the seminar by assaying the Anglophone scholarship on Adorno. PartIIcontextualises the seminar in the development of his thought. PartsIIIandIVfocus on what the transcript tells us about Adorno’s interpretation of Marx and the importance this interpretation held for Adorno’s (...) critical social theory. PartVpoints to the influence this interpretation of the critique of political economy had on the formation of the New German Reading of Marx. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where humans take on (...) the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced. (shrink)