New Dialectics And Political Economy

Many of the leading thinkers on dialectics in the Marxian tradition have collaborated here to put forward and debate challenging new perspectives on the nature and importance of dialectics. The issues dealt with range from the philosophical consideration of the precise nature of dialectical reasoning, to dialectics and economic theory, and to more concrete concerns such as how dialectics can help us think about globalization, freedom, inflation and subjectivity.

Many of the leading thinkers on dialectics in the Marxian tradition have collaborated here to put forward and debate challenging new perspectives on the nature and importance of dialectics. The issues dealt with range from the philosophical consideration of the precise nature of dialectical reasoning, to dialectics and economic theory, and to more concrete concerns such as how dialectics can help us think about globalization, freedom, inflation and subjectivity.

Robert Albritton offers the most authoritative reassessment of Marxist political economy since Althusser. Original reinterpretations of thinkers including Hegel, Weber, Althusser, Derrida and Adorno cast new light on heated battles between Hegelian dialectics and deconstructivist criticism. The book makes accessible the sometimes daunting thought associated with both dialectics and deconstruction drawing upon insights from philosophy, sociology, political science and critical theory. Finding a non-essentialist way of using the immense cognitive power of dialectics - accepting a limited deconstruction but challenging further deconstructionist directions - represents a major breakthrough for political economy.

From the 1960s to the 1990s the ground-breaking Japanese economists Kozo Uno and Thomas Sekine developed a masterful reconfiguration of Marxist economics. The most well-known aspect of which is the levels of analysis approach to the study of capitalism. Written in Japanese, the Uno-Sekine approach to Marx's work is little understood in West. John Bell seeks to correct this, explaining how problematic elements of Marxian Political Economy such as the law of value and the law of relative surplus population can be solved by using a more rigourous dialectical analysis. Bell's clear and accessible synthesis provides economists with the tools to interrogate capitalism in a more powerful way than ever before.

This book argues that the dialectic of Marx's Capital has a systematic, rather than historical, character. It sheds new light on Marx's great work, while going beyond it in many respects.

This book demonstrates how Hegel's dialectic can be used in empirical research, and shows how one can do dialectical research in economics. It also shows how one can use dialectical thinking to interpret some personal or social or political problem and devise a possible solution.

Transcending the arid formalism of present-day economic theory, Frontiers of Political Economy develops a new and accessible perspective on the world economy. Guglielmo Carchedi identifies and analyses three key features of modern capitalism: the rapidly increasing share of human labour needed for the advancement of science and technology rather than for the production of goods; the global, rather than national, nature of production, distribution and consumption; and the dominance of the oligopolies. This analysis enables Carchedi to explore new theoretical frontiers: from an original theory of mental and material labour to an investigation of the conditions under which mental labour produces value; from an assessment of the class structure of modern capitalism to an appraisal of the social content of science and technology; from an alternative account of crises, inflation and stagflation to a study of their relation to the destruction of value and to arms production. He also cast fresh light on a number of basic contemporary issues—including the present financial and monetary crisis—and surveys the most important recent controversies in language accessible to non-specialists. Rigorous and wide-ranging, but written with great lucidity, Frontiers of Political Economy is an essential book for both specialists and students in economics and politics.

The book presents an integral Marxist conception of the dialectics and methodology of scientific theoretical cognition, of the dialectical interrelation between the abstract and the concrete, of the unity of the historical and the logical, of the correlat