Readings in Marxist Political Economy and the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. Compiled by @titusandrgynous, @postcyborg, @sfnthk, @dailyremarx, @livediejoung, @dickophrenic
Background Materials
- Marx’s Capital
- Capital, Volume I
- Capital, Volume II
- Capital, Volume III, Marx, essential reading for this specifically in Part 3, The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, Chapters 13, 14, and 15
- Guides to and elaborations on Capital
- Marx’s Capital, Ben Fine & Alfredo Saad-Filho
- Theory as Critique, Paul Mattick Jr.
- Capital and Exploitation, John Weeks
- A Companion to Marx’s Capital and A Companion to Marx’s Capital Vol. 2 by David Harvey
- Marx’s Theory of Crisis, Simon Clarke
- The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Henryk Grossman
- The Permanent Crisis, Paul Mattick
- Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Paul Mattick
- Late Capitalism, Ernest Mandel
- The Capitalist Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist Theory of the Cycle, Pavel Maksakovsky
- “Surplus Alongside Excess: Uno Kozo, Imperialism and the Theory of Crisis”, Gavin Walker and Ken Kawashima – for an overview of Japanese Marxist debates on value and crisis
- The Sublime Perversion of Capital, Gavin Walker
- Theory of the Crash, Lucio Colletti (PDF available on request)
Theorizing the Long Crisis: 1973-Present
- The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, Andrew Kliman
- Global Slump, David McNally
- The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005, Robert Brenner
- “What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis,” Robert Brenner
- Global Crisis and Reproduction of Capital, Stavros Tombazos
- “Automation and the Future of Work,” Aaron Benanav
- “No Way Forward, No Way Back: China in the Age of Riots,” Chuang 1: Dead Generations
- “Red Dust: The Transition to Capitalism in China,” Chuang 2: Frontiers
- “Notes on the New Housing Question: Home-Ownership, Credit, and Reproduction in the Post-War US Economy,” Maya Gonzalez
- Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State, Simon Clarke
- Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, ed. by Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway
- World In Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability, ed. by Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi
- The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Deborah Cowen
- “Bolsonaro’s Conditions of Existence”, Humanesfera
- Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits, ed. Gustavo Moura de Calvacenti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini
- Business as usual: The economic crisis and the failure of capitalism, Paul Mattick Jr.
- “An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories,” Anwar Shaikh
- “On the periodization of the capitalist class relation”, Screamin’ Alice
- “Morbid Symptoms”, Unity and Struggle
- Bourgeois theories of recession
- Manias, Panics and Crashes by Charles P. Kindleberger and Rober Aliber (intro to Minskian theories of crisis)
- After the Music Stopped by Alan Blinder (historical overview of the Great Recession, US-centric, and liberal economist)
- The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis by Ben Bernanke (a series of lectures, short and best crash course on just “what happened”, same issues as above)
Surplus Populations and the Crisis in Social Reproduction
- “Surplus Populations, Social Reproduction and the Problem of Class Formation”, Bue Rubner Hansen
- “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes #2
- Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
- “Social Reproduction, Surplus Populations and the Role of Migrant Women,” Sara Farris
- Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang
- “Austerity’s Spectres and Failures of Social Reproduction,” Ben Whitener
- Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Riot. Strike. Riot., Joshua Clover
- Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya
- “Wageless Life”, Michael Denning
- Hinterland, Phil Neel
Value-Form Theory
- Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Isaak Rubin
- Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Moishe Postone
- “Communisation and Value-Form Theory,” Endnotes #2
- “The Moving Contradiction: The Systematic Dialectic of Capital as a Dialectic of Class Struggle,” Endnotes #2
- Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. Mathias Nilges, Nicholas Brown, Neil Larsen, and Josh Robinson
- Value and Crisis, Alfredo Saad-Filho
- The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Chris Arthur
- New Dialectics and Political Economy, ed. Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis
- Value: The Representation of Labor in Capitalism, ed. Diane Elson
- Open Marxism (this school emerged out of debates with value-form theorists as well as autonomists, and emphasize that apparent social forms under capitalism are reifications of class struggle)
material community//industrial polity 