kapital150

kapital150

Celebrating 150 Years of Karl Marx’s “Capital” in New York City

On September 14, 1867, the Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels informed the public of the publication of “Capital, Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital” by Karl Marx. Exactly 150 years later, on September 14, 2017, the New York office of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung celebrated the anniversary of Marx’s magnum opus.

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“Feminism Is for Everyone”

Perspectives for a Feminist Class Politics

2017 began with a global wave of feminist protests. Opposition to Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States was expressed most visibly by the Women’s Marches – and not only in the US itself. In Poland, resistance to restrictions on reproductive rights by the country’s right-wing government continued, while 8 March brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets from Buenos Aires and Istanbul to New Delhi. In Germany, as well, International Women’s Day witnessed demonstrations the likes of which we had not seen in decades.

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kapital150, marx200

Capitalism as a service – capital is going digital

Why digitalisation is not sounding the death knell for capitalism

In his 2015 book, Post-Capitalism, Paul Mason concludes that ‘the technologies we’ve created are not compatible with capitalism’. Regarding the 2008 financial crisis Mason writes that ‘although capitalism is a complex, adaptive system’ it has now reached ‘the limits of its capacity to adapt’. This is not crisis as usual, it’s the final one; we’re experiencing the advent of a post capitalist world order.

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The end of growth for global capitalism?

On our options to overcome the spectre of secular stagnation

In an article published on 17 July 2016 in the German weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Peter Bofinger, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts, argues that ‘a spectre is haunting the global economy – the spectre of secular stagnation’. As he writes, the phenomenon is based on a profound feeling of discomfort regarding the state of the global economy, which has been plagued by major dysfunctional issues for several years.

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History in Capital and Capital in History

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1. London: Penguin and New Left Books, Translated by Ben Fowkes, with an introduction by Ernest Mandel.

‘Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time’, Engels remarked in his graveside oration, because he discovered two things that struck at the heart of capitalism. Firstly, it was neither natural nor eternal. It rests on entirely unnatural historical processes forcibly or fraudulently separating the mass of humanity from its means of production, leaving it dependent on employment by the appropriators of those means. Such a contradictory and antagonistic social order had to end.

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How typical are atypical employment relations?

Why the erosion of standard employment relations in Europe and North America requires a new interpretation

Politicians, economists and sociologists – they all assumed until recently that in the long term capitalism produces certain »typical« employment relations that harmonize best with profitability and capital accumulation. Reality, however, is considerably more complex.

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kapital150, marx200

Even closer to the truth

Why we ought to read Keynes with Marx in mind, and why doing so can help us learn – from Keynes. A response to Michael Roberts

To many who subscribe to Marx’s theory and critique of political economy, the economist John M. Keynes is a provocation: aside from Marx, hardly any other scholar so fundamentally challenged the predominant economic theory of his time.

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kapital150, marx200

A Gap in Marx’s Work or the Ignorance of the Reader?

The metabolic exchange between nature and society in a mode of production based upon value

So many accusations have been levelled against Marx and, to an even greater extent, his friend and co-author Friedrich Engels in the 150 years since Capital was first published that the charges are almost too many to list. Unlike the political economists that came before him, Marx was supposedly unable to explain price formation. What is more, according to his critics, the predicted immiseration of the working class never occurred, and capitalism was not in a state of collapse, but has instead emerged victorious from the battle between competing social systems.

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kapital150, marx200

Getting to the Bottom of the Concept

What does "Critique" mean in the "Critique of Political Economy"?

The words “critique” and “criticism” are often used.  When we “criticize” something, we often mean that something is not as it should be.  For example, we criticize the fact that there are drastic differences between the amounts in people’s wallets, and that the profits of business are not adequately redistributed.

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Scientifically erroneous and without application to the modern world

Michael Roberts on Marx vs. Keynes and why Marx was closer to the truth

In 1926, John Maynard Keynes, already the most celebrated economist and political writer of his time, reviewed the competing ideas of conventional economics (which he called ‘laisser-faire’) and its revolutionary alternative (Marxism).  In his book, Laisser-faire and Communism, Keynes, a contemporary of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky, sought to dismiss the Soviet revolution that had shocked the ruling groups of the rest of the world just a few years before.

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Preserving Marx’s Thought without the ‘ism’

Why the search for an alternative development model does not work with Marx alone. But without him either.

With the dissolution of the socialist camp and after the implosion of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, Karl Marx was regarded as finished. Capitalism achieved a legitimation bonus. Francis Fukuyama spoke of the ‘end of history’. An entire decade-and-a-half later, the global financial crisis broke out, pulled the real economy into the abyss, and reinvigorated interest in the work of the one who had been declared dead.

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kapital150, marx200

„Here, a Light Turns On...“

The potential for politicisation in "Capital" - for both the reader and the author, and the subject of capitalism analysis itself as well.

The political aspect of Karl Marx’s Capital is rooted in the specific character of the ‘critique’ of political economy because the latter contains a potential for politicisation for both the reader and the author, as well as for the object of the analysis of capitalism itself.

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