At the beginning of the third section of Book II of Capital, Marx distinguishes between the direct process of the production of capital and the total process of its reproduction. The former includes both the work process as well as the value-creating process. As we shall see, the latter includes both the process of consumption mediated by circulation, as well as the process of reproduction of capital itself. In the different forms assumed by capital within its cycle, and even more (...) in the different forms assumed by this cycle, the movement of individual capital turns out to be a part of the total movement of social capital. (shrink)

Today there is a great interest in reconstructing Lenin's thought concerning the relation between vangard and masses. Lenin's definitive theses on the problem are seen to have been outlined in his famous and much discussed work, What Is to Be Done? which, for some, remains the only scientific answer to the problem (not fully developed by Marx and Engels) of the passage from “class-in-itself” to “class-for-itself.” For others, this work, impregnated by intellectualism and idealism, is seen as a classic of (...) the Stalinist era and is held to be the root of all the bureaucratic deviations of the Soviet experience. (shrink)

The upsurge of interest in Hegel in France in the years immediately following World War II was linked with the question of Marxism, a link which was reinforced by the participation of the Communist Party in De Gaulle's government. Far from being a matter of historical or intellectual curiosity, the problem of Hegel was one of actuality. It was not so much Hegel himself that was at stake as the use to which his work was to be put; whether Hegel (...) was to be seen as leading toward Marxism or as the last line of defense against Marxism. Typical of this problematic is a statement by Alexandre Kojève, written in 1946: “Thus we can say that for the moment, any interpretation of Hegel, if it is more than idle chatter, is but a program of struggle of work (one of these ‘programs’ being called Marxism). (shrink)

Before World War II French intellectuals had paid little attention to Hegel. Only offbeat intellectuals like André Breton's surrealists and a circle of young Marxists in the 1920s paid tribute to the German dialectician. Among the reasons suggested by Alexandra Koyré for the lack of interest were the obscurity of Hegel's writing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the incredulity of the French toward Hegel's “strict identity of logical synthesis and historical becoming.” If this (...) was the situation, how can we account for the precipitous turn to Hegel in the 1940s? In the eyes of many converts to Hegel, the catastrophic defeat of France in 1940 had discredited liberal-bourgeois intellectual and political traditions, leaving France in a conceptual vacuum. (shrink)