150 years Karl Marx’s “Capital” Reflections for the 21st century INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 14-15.1.2017 | Olympia Hall – Garden of Zappio Athens - Greece 2 150 YEARS KARL MARX’S “CAPITAL” 150 ΧΡΌΝΙΑ ΚΑΡΛ ΜΑΡΞ ΤΟ ΚΕΦΆΛ150 YEARSΆΙΟ KARL MARX’S “CAPITAL” 150 years Karl Marx’s “Capital” Reflections for the 21st century INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 14-15.1.2017 Olympia Hall – Garden of Zappio Athens - Greece CONTENTS PREFACE . 9 INTRODUCTION ◊ John Milios . 11 New Readings and New Texts: Marx’s Capital after MEGA2* Michael Heinrich. 15 Old readings ◊ New readings since the 1960s ◊ New insights from new texts in MEGA2 ◊ Not one, but two critical projects since 1857 ◊ The disparate character of Capital manuscripts ◊ Value theory ◊ The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall ◊ Crisis theory after 1865 Comments: Dimitris Papafotiou . 26 Money in Marx: from value-form analysis to an understanding of modern capitalism Spyros Lapatsioras and Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos . 35 1. Money, commodity, and value-form ◊ 2. Credit-money: money as a means of payment ◊ 3. The form of capital ◊ 4. Money as capital ◊ 5. Derivatives ◊ 6. Epilogue: the dynamics of contemporary capitalism ◊ References Comments: Christos Vallianos . 55 If you don’t understand the Second Product, you understand nothing about Capital Michael A. Lebowitz . 63 Capitalism as an organic system ◊ The fearful symmetry of hats and men ◊ Marx’s plan ◊ The missing second product Comments: George Economakis . 82 1. The ‘second product’ in Capital ◊ 2. Wages in Capital and the “symmetry” of hats and men ◊ 3. An initial critical commentary ◊ 4. The issue of the real wage as a set amount of means of subsistence in Marx and the ‘Ricardian Default’ ◊ 5. The Real wage and class struggle: an introductory comment ◊ 6. “Temporalities” and wage determination in Marx ◊ 7. The real wage ◊ 8. The value of labour-pow- er ◊ 9. The market price of labour-power ◊ References Marx’s capitalism and ours Étienne Balibar . 89 1. Epistemology ◊ 2. Theory ◊ 3. History Comments, References: Panagiotis Sotiris . 105 How to read Capital today: reflections from Latin America Marta Harnecker . 117 I. Latin America: a pioneer in the rejection of neoliberalism ◊ II. Actual correlation of forces ◊ III. Chávez’s role ◊ IV. A transition starting with the conquest of gov- ernment ◊ V. Other big tasks and the problems that have emerged Comments: Petros Psarreas . 138 Threads for the present and future in an era of crisis ◊ The State and socialist transformation ◊ Workers and the social majority at the forefront ◊ Eco-socialist transformation ◊ Epilogue The Law of Capital: Functions of the Legal System from Marx’s Capital, to the European ‘Debt Crisis’ Dimitri Dimoulis and Soraya Lunardi . 155 1. Positions of Marxist theory of law ◊ 2. The actuality of Marx’s positions on the law concerning case law in the European crisis Comments: Michalis Skomvoulis . 171 First point: the issue of the differentiation and uniformity of the capitalist mode of production ◊ Second point ◊ Third point ◊ Three practical conclusions ◊ References Capitalism as a social system and its origins John Milios . 181 1. Marx’s new problematique in Capital: from the “theory of productive forces” to “so-called original accumulation” ◊ 2. The primordial commercial mode of production ◊ 3. Brief notes on the emergence of the capitalist mode of produc- tion ◊ 4. Basic characteristics of capitalism as a social system ◊ 5. Some initial conclusions ◊ References Comments: Vassilis Droucopoulos . 197 References CONFERENCE PROGRAMME . 202 PREFACE INCE 2013, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Office in Greece has been host- S ing reading courses on Capital, seeing an increasing level of interest, es- pecially among young scholars. One hundred and fifty years after its first publication, Capital remains an important, if not the most important, anal- ysis of economic and social power relations, their driving forces and evo- lutionary trends. In January 2017, in collaboration with the Marxist jour- nal Theseis, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Volume 1 of Capital with a two-day international conference in Athens. Speakers from Canada, Cuba, Brazil, Germany, the USA, the UK and Greece and more than 300 participants discussed Marx’s theoretical system of the critique of polit- ical economy, reflecting on its currency and significance in the context of the current global economic crisis. The enthusiasm with which the conference was received encouraged us to publish the presentations (you can find the videos online at rosalux.gr) in a volume that seeks to have an effect on the international debate. With the present e-book, RLS is making available all presentations and commentaries in Greek and English, aiming at contribut- ing to an ongoing global discourse and making the perspectives of academ- ics from Greece accessible to an international audience. RLS Team Athens May 2018 INTRODUCTION HIS VOLUME comprises the seven contributions and their correspond- T ing commentaries presented at the conference 150 Years ~ Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’: Reflections for the21 st Century, organized on 14 and 15 January 2017 in Athens by the journal Theseis in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Through the different, at times converging and at times differing, ap- proaches of the main speakers and the discussants, the theoretical signifi- cance, along with the timelessness of Karl Marx’s major work, is revealed. Capital is not just a book. In essence, it is a research program launched by Marx without ever having been completed, and which is basically an ongoing project. Capital inaugurates a major theoretical rupture in the social sciences. It defines a new theoretical system of concepts on the basis of which we can decipher the social and economic reality that surrounds us: capitalism. That goes for every capitalism, and not just that of England in the nineteenth century, where and during which time Marx lived. The object of Capital is, as its author explains, the “ideal average” of the capitalist system, the causal relationships that operate below the surface of each and every capitalism. Capital allows us to understand, for example, that class relations of pow- er that characterize the capitalist system acquire on the economic level a necessarily ‘objectified’ form, that is, they appear as money generating more money, as a ‘thing’ evaluating other things and self-valorizing in its func- tion as capital. It also reveals that credit money is the most drastic and flex- ible form of money, so that the financial sphere is not a ‘parasitic’ or ‘specu- lative’ appendage of the “real economy”, but a structural element integral to the capitalist system, a mechanism for controlling and enforcing the ‘rules’ of the system: a system that consistently reproduces the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands, and which periodically sinks society into deep crises, the cost of which is always shouldered by wage labourers and, more generally, by the social majority. The standard of living for employees 12 150 YEARS KARL MARX’S “CAPITAL” is the (labour-) ‘cost’ of capital. A ‘cost’ that is compressed in an effort to “increase the competitiveness of the economy”. It is thus obvious that the theoretical analysis launched by Capital con- stitutes the basis for a radical critique and political questioning of capital- ism in light of the interests of the working class and other classes and strata subjected to capitalist power and exploitation. The texts contained in the present volume attempt to contribute to this radical critique of capitalism, being themselves a part of the critical-theoret- ical progression initiated by Marx. John Milios December 2017 14 150 YEARS KARL MARX’S “CAPITAL” New Readings and New Texts: Marx’s Capital after MEGA2* * The following text is a revision of the lecture I gave in Athens on 14 Jan. 2017. I endeavoured to keep the style of a speech and left out references to my many detailed sources. They can be found in a longer paper, titled “‘Capital’ after MEGA: Discontinuities, Interruptions, and New Beginnings,” Crisis and Critique 3/3 (2016): 93–138. Available online at http://crisiscritique.org/ political11/Michael%20Heinrich.pdf. Michael Heinrich ◊ OLD READINGS Speaking about “new readings” of Capital presupposes the existence of some older readings. The reading of classical texts of economic and social analysis such as Capital depends heavily on the historical conditions, on the state of class conflicts, on the political situation and on previous discussions about the subject. Below, I cannot sketch the whole history of the different read- ings of Capital, but I want to focus οn some issues that influenced the older readings and led to a dominance of a certain type of production-oriented interpretations. After publication of the first volume of Capital, it took nearly 30 years before the third volume was published. This very fact ensured that volume one, the analysis of the capitalist process of production, would dominate the reception of all three volumes for many decades. It seemed that in volume one we can find the core of Marx’s analysis, while volumes two and three present only some additional issues, mainly for specialists. Marx had planned four volumes: the final volume was to present a histo- ry of economic theory. Marx never wrote this book. Theories of Surplus Value is not at all a substitute for it. Theories presents the history of only one cate- gory, while Marx still struggled with some problems of his own conception: Theories is a part of Marx’s research process. The absence of a fourth volume means that we have no extensive mature formulation of the difference be- tween Marx’s approach and the theories of bourgeois economics. The many footnotes in Capital dealing with the history of theory give us some impor- tant hints, but a meticulous presentation is missing.