Riccardo Bellofiore Books

In Marx’s Laboratory. Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse provides a critical analysis of the Grundrisse as a crucial stage in the development of Marx’s critique of political economy. Stressing both the achievements and limitations of this much-debated text, and drawing upon recent philological advances, this volume attempts to re-read Marx’s 1857-58 manuscripts against the background of Capital, as a ‘laboratory’ in which Marx first began to clarify central elements of his mature problematic. With chapters by an international range of authors from different traditions of interpretation, including the International Symposium on Marxian Theory, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of key themes and concepts in the Grundrisse, such as method, dialectics and abstraction; abstract labour, value, money and capital; technology, the ‘general intellect’ and revolutionary subjectivity, surplus-value, competition, crisis; and society, gender, ecology and pre-capitalist forms. Contributors include: Chris Arthur, Luca Basso, Riccardo Bellofiore, George Caffentzis, Martha Campbell, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Howard Engelskirchen, Roberto Fineschi, Michael Heinrich, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Guido Starosta, Massimiliano Tomba, Jan Toporowski, Peter D. Thomas, Joel Wainwright, and Amy Wendling.

Marx's most widely debated text, the unfinished manuscript the Grundrisse, is here discussed as the laboratory for his mature ideas.

Springing from a conference held in Bergamo University on the occasion of the centenary of the publication by Engels of the third book of Capital, the papers collected in these two volumes reinstate Marx's as the first genuinely evolutionary economic theory. In this, the capitalist process incessantly brings about states which will by themselves generate the next ones. Thus as Schumpeter remarked, Marx was the first to 'visualise what even at the present time is still the economic theory of the future for which we are slowly and laboriously accumulating stone and mortar, statistical facts and functional equations'.