Introduction to Marx: Key Concepts

Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva

In the last 30 years we have witnessed an overall renaissance of interest in

Marxian work. This renaissance can be attributed to the following factors.
First, the systemic crisis of the neo-liberal accumulation regime of capital-
ism has profoundly intensified social and geographical inequalities, calling
into question the chances of survival of human beings on the planet. Social
movements need to equip themselves with a conceptual apparatus capable of
understanding the dynamics of the crisis and, at the same time, to acquire the
tools capable of facing it practically.
Second, the fall of the regimes of ‘actually existing’ socialism. The danger
of establishing a too easy correspondence between Marx’s thought and the
political trajectory of Eastern Europe after the Second World War can be now
definitely dispensed with.
Third, the renewal of Marxian studies originated from MEGA2, the new
historical-critical edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels. The
conclusion of the publication of the second section (containing Capital and the
preparatory works) has allowed us to read many new unpublished manuscripts
and Capital itself in a way that is much more articulated and stratified than that
which had emerged following the Engelsian edition of Volume 2 and Volume
3. The (still ongoing) publication of the fourth section (containing excerpts,
notes and marginalia) has allowed scholars to shed light on lesser-known
aspects of Marxian interests, in particular in relation to forms and modes of
production other than capitalism.
In the last few years, we note the release of a series of books that attempt
to take stock of the theoretical and political ferment we have mentioned
above, showing the new acquisitions and the new research directions that
have emerged. Our book fits into this publishing climate. Although organ-
ized according to thematic headings, it is not intended to give an account of
a process that has taken place and is historically situated ‘behind’ us as authors.
The individual chapters collected here aim to show the research in its making,
the theoretical possibilities not yet undertaken, the liveliness of the debate,

xi

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xii Marx: key concepts

the inexhaustible dialectic between our questioning from the present, and the
answers that could come from a Marxian approach and its latest developments.
The cover of the first 2023 issue of the German magazine Der Spiegel featured
a buoyant Marx with a question at the bottom: ‘Hatte Marx doch recht?’ Was
Marx right, after all? It is an interrogation recurrently proposed whenever
a systemic structural crisis appears in this day and age, and it looks as though
there is no way out. Even more so, when multiple crises are on the horizon.
Paradoxically, too often Marx is mentioned in support of perspectives willing
to save capitalism from itself. Instead of a deepening of the radicality of his
inquiry, the name ‘Marx’ becomes an empty signifier, which can be again and
again refilled with petitions in favour of state interventions in the economy,
of less social inequalities, of the conservation of the natural environment, and
against the perverse effects of capitalist production and consumption, and so
on. Marx is resurrected as a ‘classic’ thinker, just as valid as Smith, Hegel or
Keynes, in an anaesthetizing modality.
What appears undigestible and out of tune with our modernity is what we think
is instead more alive in his legacy: the insistence on, and the fight against, the
increasing exploitation of labour, the many forms of capitalist domination, the
widening class structure of society, and finally, the spectre of communism as
a possible superior form of social organization of production. The expulsion of
these themes from what it is deemed sensible to discuss makes any reference
to Marx useless.
Carlo Ginzburg reminds us in the field of historical research that asking anach-
ronistic questions, and thus looking at the past from the practical and theoret-
ical problems posed by the present, is an excellent heuristic method, once we
become aware that anachronism in answers is a mortal sin. It is because they
are convinced of the necessity to advocate a Marxian categorical framework
for understanding our present, at the same time pursuing radical answers, that
the authors have contributed to this book.
This book aims to provide a wide-ranging journey through some of the central
ideas of Marx, with a focus on a few key concepts that have defined his
thought. The book consists of 14 chapters that aim to cover the full range of
his critique of political economy: the method, the theory of value, the theory of
capital, confronting the classical and contemporary receptions of Marx in the
economic, sociological and philosophical debates.
The aim of Chapter 1 by Tommaso Redolfi Riva is to explain the concept of
critique of political economy in Marx’s mature work. Starting from the dif-
ferent meanings that critique of political economy assumes (as the analysis of
the conditions of possibility of an autonomous science of political economy;

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 Introduction xiii

as the presentation of the exploitation of labour-power; as the inquiry into

and naturalization of capital relationships based on the exchange of things on
the market), Redolfi Riva aims to explain the peculiarities of such a critical
project. In particular, he focuses attention on the critique of political economy
as a critique of capital as an objective‒subjective totality: on the one hand, as
a system of social production whose aim is the valorization of capital, based
on the appropriation of unpaid labour, and generating a system of socialization
of production increasingly becoming autonomous from the social agents which
establish it; on the other hand, as the place of constitution of the categories
of political economy, whose defects cannot only be brought back to the
methodological lack of the economists because such categories, as a part of
the capitalistic reality itself, are products of capitalistic social relationships.
What emerges from this perspective is that the critique of political economy,
as the presentation of the system of capitalistic relationships, is the critique of
a specific science put forth by means of the critique of its own specific object.
Chapter 2 by Stefano Breda provides a comprehensive analysis of materialism
and dialectics in Marx’s critique of political economy. A materialist under-
standing of the method followed by Marx in his critique of political economy
requires going beyond both the traditional logical-historical interpretation of
dialectics and the logical-systematic interpretation developed within the Neue
Marx-Lektüre, since both interpretations ultimately lead to an idealistic reading
of Capital, albeit in different ways. The dialectical exposition of the capitalist
mode of production should be conceived neither as a conceptual reconstruc-
tion of historical development, nor as an independent logical movement of
economic categories. Rather, it must be conceived as an immanent critique
of what is empirically given. All economic categories that follow one another
in the dialectical development are taken a posteriori by Marx. None of them
can be logically deduced from the previous one, but each category expresses
some necessary conditions for the existence of the phenomena expressed in
the previous category. The forward movement of the categories thus discloses
the structural connections between phenomena that are all taken as empirically
given, but necessarily manifest themselves as if they were independent from
each another.
The purpose of Frieder Otto Wolf’s Chapter 3 is to reject a Hegelian inter-
pretation of Marx’s dialectical method, and from this perspective, to lay the
basis for a development of Marxism as a ‘finite’ theory. Materialist dialectics
is neither an a priori method nor something that Marx had to abandon to reach
the purpose of the analysis of modern bourgeois society. Marx’s dialectical
method is coherent with the finite character of its object of investigation, as
can be seen following the very practice of Marx’s theoretical presentation in
which money, labour-power as commodity and landed property are assumed

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xiv Marx: key concepts

as historical contingent givens. Capital is not built upon the circular kind
of argument underlying Hegel’s logic; on the contrary, Marx’s dialectical
development is interrupted in certain points where historic-empirical elements
are introduced. Such interruptions and integrations must be understood in
accordance with the limits of a dialectical presentation. In Marx we can find
theoretical objects that cannot be fully constructed by the dialectical order of
presentation, and that must be introduced in a different way. If in Hegel the
development of the concept can be seen as an a priori process, this is no longer
possible in Marx, where the dialectical presentation needs to be preceded by
the process of research. Such a ‘finite’ character opens a space for a renewal
of materialist dialectics that has to be developed through gradual integrations
coming from different fields of research and political struggles.
In Chapter 4, Bob Jessop explores the neglected role of cell biology in the
constitution of Marx’s method in Capital. The point of departure is the 1857
Introduction and the two opposite methods of political economy that Marx
presents. Even if in this Introduction Marx seems to opt for a synthetic method,
The Wealth of Nations being a paradigmatic example, this is not consequently
followed in Capital. Instead of starting with exchange-value, money, capital,
as concretely occurs in Grundrisse, from 1859 Marx adopts the commodity
– the simplest, most elementary, most abstract element of capitalist mode
of production – as the starting point of the presentation. Commodity is the
elementary existence of the capitalist form of wealth and, as the 1867 Preface
explicitly states, it is the economic cell form. Marx’s choice of the commodity
as the point of departure for the presentation can be better understood if we
consider Marx’s (and Engels’s) interest in the development of cell biology.
From this perspective, what has always been read as a simple metaphor taken
from the natural sciences acquires a different argumentative importance. Six
key foundational principles of cell theory – taken from the texts with which
Marx was acquainted, directly or indirectly ‒ could have inspired Marx’s
profound shift in the choice of the starting point for his critique of political
economy between the 1857 Introduction and the 1867 first edition of Capital.
For Riccardo Bellofiore (Chapter 5) a (if not the) key concept in Karl Marx’s
critique of political economy is ‘absolute value’. This category has been lost
in the English secondary literature. Its specific meaning can be understood
by re-reading Marx’s confrontation with Samuel Bailey and David Ricardo.
Unfortunately, the available English translation of the Theories of Surplus
Value is seriously deficient. The chapter reconstructs this theoretical path,
whilst also considering his previous writings (Grundrisse, A Contribution,
Urtext), and provides a first survey of the relevant secondary literature (in
German, Italian, French and English). The adjective ‘absolute’ refers to
the two following, and entwined, circumstances. First, that the commodity,

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 Introduction xv

beyond being use value, is value as long as it materializes as exchange-value in

another commodity. Value within the commodity is separated (or ‘abstracted’)
from the use value of that commodity itself and enters a relation where
money becomes the ‘body of value’: ‘value embodied’. Second, the ‘unsocial
sociability’ between the isolated producers is separated (or ‘abstracted’) from
them, and controls them. ‘Absolute’ also stands for the development of value
into an ‘automatic subject’ as an overgrasping and self-reproducing totality.
Unfortunately, the foundation upon which Marx’s reasoning is erected is
fragile. The category of labour as the substance of absolute value is not prop-
erly grounded, and it maintains an internal necessary reference to ‘money as
a commodity’ which should be rejected. The answer to Marx’s question – what
is it that grounds the reference of value to labour? – lies in the ‘consumption’
by capital of the living bearers of labour-power: that is, in the use of their
labour-power, and hence in the (antagonistic) extraction of their living labour,
turning into the new value added. This outcome cannot be taken for granted in
capitalism’s historically socially specific situation, and that is why capitalist
production is nothing but labour. This is the ultimate foundation of Marx’s
(monetary) value theory of labour. The monetary imprinting must be given by
an ex ante validation of the living labour expended, by finance to production
(the buying and selling of labour-power).
In Chapter 6, Frank Engster focuses his attention on money and on the spe-
cific role it assumes in capitalism. In this specific form of production, money
becomes a measure that has to quantify pure social relations. Furthermore,
money itself in its measuring and quantifying function presents itself as
essential to the constitution of the same social objectivity and totality that it
mediates. To clarify this question, Engster borrows from quantum physics the
concept of entanglement. Engster concentrates his analysis on the develop-
ment of the different functions of money. Marx’s analysis of the form of value
shows in a logical way how a measure is given by the exclusion of one arbitrary
commodity; which, by its exclusion, fixes an ideal value-unit, while all other
commodities in turn are set in a quantitative relation as pure values. All com-
modities share an ideal value-unit as their common measure, but this sharing
falls into the practical realization of their relation in the exchange process.
Hence, what seems to be an exchange of commodities and money is the reali-
zation of the capital, and what seem to be exchange-values are the magnitudes
determined by the productive power of the valorization of labour-power and
capital. Money in its capitalist form measures a valorization process in which
money itself constantly enters. It is as if this form of self-measurement func-
tions for the capitalist society as the practical self-reflection of an ‘automatic
subject’.
Luca Micaloni (Chapter 7) examines the concept of ‘automatic subject’ used

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xvi Marx: key concepts

by Marx to describe capital’s process. First, Micaloni traces this Marxian

expression back to Hegel’s philosophy: ‘subject’ is self-reference, negation
of alterity, circular movement; ‘automatic’ entails the subjective prerogative
of being principle, cause, beginning and end of one’s own movement. In
the following paragraphs Micaloni shows how Marx’s characterization of
large-scale industry and of interest-bearing capital proves to be coherent with
the circular self-movement illustrated in the general formula. If manufacture
still rests on labourers’ artisan abilities, in large-scale industry it is capital itself
that elaborates and organizes the labour process, considering the worker only
as an element of the process. Technology, as an element of capital, is what
organizes the productive process according to valorization demand, and the
instruments of labour, instead of labour-power, are now the starting point of
the analysis of the process of production. The automation of the labour process
in large-scale industry represents for Marx an implementation of the general
formula of capital as ‘automatic subject’. In interest-bearing capital (D-D’),
where the process of production is hidden and capital presents itself as a thing
producing value, the automatic subject acquires its complete form. Finally,
Micaloni discusses the ‘homology thesis’ between Marx’s concept of capital
and Hegel’s logic.
Roberto Fineschi (Chapter 8) focuses on the notion of ‘reproduction’.
Reproduction has two fundamental meanings in Marx’s work. On the one
hand, it is accumulation, that is, the specific form in which capital produces
and reproduces itself. On the other, it is a general concept, pertaining to the
general trans-historical human reproduction. As accumulation, reproduction
has a key role in Marx’s Capital, and on it rests the logical validity of the
whole presentation. A dialectical theory must reproduce as its own results the
elements that at the beginning were assumed as presuppositions, not posited
by the theory itself. Only ‘posing its own presuppositions capital’ can properly
become a process. The moment of reproduction represents in Capital the
position of the presuppositions. Fineschi recalls the changes in the order of
presentation of ‘reproduction/accumulation’ that Marx thought would have
been necessary in the different drafts of the theory on the basis of the level
of abstraction (generality, particularity, singularity). He then outlines the
fundamental alteration concerning ‘accumulation’ in the different editions of
Capital Volume 1. Fineschi also deals with reproduction in a broader sense,
as a trans-historical category characterizing human beings living together in
their relation with nature: the object of the discourse is here the relationship
between general and historical-specific categories in Marx’s theory of histor-
ical process.
Sebastiano Taccola (Chapter 9) proposes a re-examination of Marxian ‘prim-
itive accumulation’. First, primitive accumulation is presented as a diachronic

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 Introduction xvii

process, capable of explaining the historical genesis of the capitalist mode

of production, especially as it took place in England (through the Enclosures
Acts, the clearing of the estates, and so on). Then, attention is focused on the
permanence of this kind of accumulation. Primitive accumulation cannot just
be seen as a process existing ‘behind the back’ of the production of capital,
as a mere historical presupposition. It also has to be understood as the con-
stantly expanding class separation reproduced in the accumulation of capital.
It is a lever that drives this on a global scale, the synchronic process playing
a crucial role in the reproduction of capital. Systemically and structurally,
primitive accumulation represents a pivotal articulation in the explanation
of economic, social and political phenomena typical of capitalism such as
‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey), ‘uneven development’ (Amin),
and so on. Finally, Taccola looks at the critical role that the category assumes
in Marx’s systematic presentation. This interpretation of primitive accumula-
tion is grounded on that inner genesis of categories which is immanent to the
Marxian critique of political economy and its method of presentation.
Chris O’Kane’s attention in Chapter 10 is on the concept of ‘domination’. He
pursues the standpoint proposed by Alfred Schmidt of a backwards reading
of Marx’s early critique of bourgeois society from the perspective opened by
the critique of political economy. After showing that Marx’s early critiques of
Smith, Hegel, Proudhon and bourgeois society are based on the anthropologi-
cal standpoint of estrangement and alienation, O’Kane moves to Marx’s later
critique of the historically specific constitution and reproduction of bourgeois
society. Where in precapitalist society personal domination was the basis of
power relations, in bourgeois society all personal relations of dependence are
dissolved in production. What arises is an objective and impersonal bond that
rests on (the accumulation of surplus) value. Value presupposes the separation
between subjective and objective conditions of production – the historical
process of constitution of classes built on conquest, enslavement, robbery,
murder; in short, force – that is constantly reproduced on a larger scale through
the production process of capital. We have here an objective and abstract form
of ‘domination’ (value) that expands the class division between the owners of
means of production and workers. In this social condition, state laws protecting
private property are not neutral, but an essential moment of the preservation of
capitalistic class relations. On the one hand, Marx’s theory presents a critique
of bourgeois society self-understanding: market freedom, division of labour
and the state are not institutions promoting social freedom, but forms of consti-
tution and perpetuation of capital domination. On the other hand, showing that
the condition of exploitation and misery to which the working class is forced
by an objective impersonal form of compulsion, Marx's theory is a critical
social theory of domination.

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xviii Marx: key concepts

Chapter 11 by Gianluca Pozzoni concentrates on the concept of ‘real abstrac-

tion’. Abstraction plays a crucial role in Marx’s theory. In early works, in
particular in his critique of Proudhon, the category has a methodological role
against the universalization and naturalization of historical social relationships
put forth by political economy. It is only when Marx’s methodological critique
evolves into a comprehensive scientific approach to political economy that
abstraction reveals its conceptual potential. In Marx’s critique of political
economy, abstraction is located in the social process of production: the abstrac-
tion of labour is not a mental generalization, but a practical process going on
within private commodity exchanges under a production system dominated
by an accumulation of capital resulting from workers’ exploitation. Pozzoni
emphasizes the fundamental role played in the critical theory of society by
real abstraction, especially in the reflections of Sohn-Rethel and Adorno, as
well as in contemporary critical social analysis. As Pozzoni shows, this notion
can serve to recast Marx’s critique of political economy as an ‘open’ research
programme rather than as a closed system.
In her Chapter 12, Kirstin Munro proposes a critical account of the concept of
‘social reproduction’ developed by Marx and used by Marxist-feminists as the
core of what is known as social reproduction theory. First, she distinguishes
the Marxian concept of social reproduction from its use in Bourdieusian soci-
ology. Marx’s concept is inextricably linked to the accumulation and reproduc-
tion of capital as a whole. Bourdieusian sociology refers to social reproduction
as the intergenerational transmission of culture put forward by the education
institutions. The conflation between the Marxian category and biological
reproduction is contested. If social reproduction presupposes biological repro-
duction, the former refers to the reproduction of capital relation, that is, the
reproduction of the separation between subjective and objective conditions
of production. Munro insists on the point of departure of the current social
reproduction theorists: the unwaged activities necessary for the reproduction
of labour-power. In such an approach there is a progressive shift of the analysis
from the reproduction of labour-power as a moment of the reproduction of
capitalist society as a whole, to the reproduction of labour-power as a separate
section in which are amassed all the ‘life-making activities’. Such activities are
presented by social reproduction theorists as not capitalistic. For this reason
they are often depicted as virtuous, and alternative to capital’s subsumption of
labour-power in production. What the appealing expression ‘life-making activ-
ities’ conceals is what emerges if the view is broadened to society’s reproduc-
tion as a whole. Such activities must reproduce a commodity (labour-power)
that has to be sold on the labour market, to be used by capital for the production
of surplus value. Building on Simone Clarke, Moishe Postone and Michael
Heinrich, Kirstin Munro emphasizes the necessity to understand class and

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 Introduction xix

power relations from the point of view of the all-encompassing law of capital
accumulation. From this perspective she presents a simple model of capitalist
society in which is highlighted the structural relationship going on between the
reproduction of labour-power and the reproduction of capital.
Vittorio Morfino (Chapter 13) develops a penetrating interpretation of the
notes of Capital Volume 1 in which Lucretius and Darwin are quoted. The
point is not to provide an additional reconstruction of the relation between
Marx and Lucretius or between Marx and Darwin. The purpose is rather to
discover the function of these authors in Marx’s presentation. After presenting
and commenting on the references, Morfino explains what is hidden behind
Lucretius and Darwin. Three different levels of analysis are suggested, going
from the more certain to the more conjectural. At the first level, Lucretius and
Darwin represent only ‘anti-finalism’ and a stance for reason and science. At
the second level, recognizing Spinoza behind Lucretius, the point is the denial
of anthropocentrism, and the positive affirmation of a kind of ‘materialism’
where complexity and historicity are interconnected and irreducible. At the
third and final level, building on Althusser and the problem of structural
causality, Morfino argues that Lucretius/Spinoza and Darwin stand for a form
of ‘mechanism’ in which totality still has a role, and an ‘organicism’ escaping
teleology.
Emanuela Conversano (Chapter 14) analyses the method and content of the
late Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks. An alternative interpretation from that
of Engels in his Preface to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State is suggested. Marx’s inquiries are neither a mere further development
of the 1840s historical materialism, nor a sudden anthropological turn in the
name of Morgan. It is necessary to go beyond these interpretations in order to
understand what is the actual legacy of these late Marx studies, and their role
in the contemporary world. The societies under examination – which are dif-
ferent from the Western bourgeois society in time and space – act as a ‘litmus
test’ for the understanding of capitalism as a historically (and geographically)
developed social form. By helping to recognize the ‘transient nature’ of the
capitalist mode of production, the topics of the excerpts are not to be conceived
as material for historiography or philosophy of history. They instead call into
question – even if not directly and explicitly – the conditions of possibility for
the revolution at the global level.

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