How would Marx have understood twenty-first-century capitalism? For Buzgalin and Kolganov, the answer lies in a theoretical investigation of how and why the fundamental elements of capitalism– commodities, money and capital – have changed since the publication of Marx’s Capital more than 150 years ago.
Introducing the concepts of social creativity, markets for simulacra and virtual fictitious capital – Buzgalin and Kolganov offer a recovery and development of Marx’s understanding of social transformations. Twenty-first century capitalism not only demonstrates Marxism’s relevance to the core economic questions of our time and its superiority over neoclassical economics, but it leads English-language readers into the ‘undiscovered country’ of Soviet and post-Soviet critical Marxism.
How might modern Marxism respond to the contemporary challenges of the commodification of knowledge and information? And can it arrive at something resembling a Capital for the twenty-first century? This accessible and comprehensive account is essential reading for those wanting to understand the problems of the modern economy.
Table of Content
Foreword to the English edition
Part I: Methodology matters
1 The methodology of Capital: Karl Marx, Evald Ilyenkov, and the dialectics of the twenty-first century
2 From orthodoxy to the post-Soviet school of critical Marxism
3 Obsolete postmodernism: the dialectics of non-linear, multi-scenario social transformations
4 What drives the development of technology and the economy: production relations vs. productive forces, social creativity vs. activism
Part II: The market, money, and capital in the twenty-first century
1 ‘Late capitalism’: stages of development
2 The totalitarian market: networks and simulacra
3 Money in the twenty-first Century: financialisation as a product of virtual fictitious financial capital
4 Capital in the twenty-first century
5 Twenty-first-century reproduction: inequality and the ‘useless economy’
Conclusion – capital and capitalism: what has changed in the twenty-first century
Postscript: limits of the market and capital
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Aleksandr Buzgalin is Professor at the department of Political Economy and Director of the Center for Modern Marxist Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University Andrey Kolganov is Professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University and Principal Researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences
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