In Studies on Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production British and Argentinian historians analyse the Asiatic, Germanic, peasant, slave, feudal, and tributary modes of production by exploring historical processes and diverse problems of Marxist theory. The emergence of feudal relations, the origin of the medieval craftsman, the functioning of the law of value and the conditions for historical change are some of the problems analysed. The studies treat an array of pre-capitalist social formations: Chris Wickham works on medieval Iceland and Norway, John Haldon on Byzantium, Carlos García Mac Gaw on the Roman Empire, Andrea Zingarelli on ancient Egypt, Carlos Astarita and Laura da Graca on medieval León and Castile, and Octavio Colombo on the Castilian later Middle Ages. Contributors include: Chris Wickham, John Haldon, Carlos Astarita, Carlos García Mac Gaw, Octavio Colombo, Laura da Graca, and Andrea Zingarelli.

We have summarized here the essential of this book by the author. PRE-CAPITALIST ECONOMIC FORMATIONS III For Marx, slavery is the main feature of the ancient system. Analysis of it appears to be the western Roman half of the Mediterranean, rather than the Greek. Rome begins as a peasant community. It is not a fully egalitarian community because, as tribal developments with mutual marriages and conquests tend to produce higher and lower social kinship groups, but the Roman citizen is essentially a landowner. His primary occupation is war because the only threat to his existence comes from other communities claiming his land, and the only way to secure the land for every citizen is to occupy it by force. But the very expansionist tendencies of these peasant communities lead to the bankruptcy of the peasant qualities that are their foundation. To a certain extent, slavery, the concentration of land ownership, etc., are compatible with the foundations of these communities. Beyond this point, they should collapse.

This book examines why Marxist philosophy will continue to be a central point of reference well beyond postmodernism and the Anthropocene.

Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory. A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, it both develops the arguments outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the themes and theses that were to dominate his great later work Capital. Here, for the first time, Marx set out his own version of Hegel's dialectics and developed his mature views on labour, surplus value and profit, offering many fresh insights into alienation, automation and the dangers of capitalist society. Yet while the theories in Grundrisse make it a vital precursor to Capital, it also provides invaluable descriptions of Marx's wider-ranging philosophy, making it a unique insight into his beliefs and hopes for the foundation of a communist state.

‘Socialism’ is a word that is now habitually taken to refer to a particular social system that prevailed in different parts of the globe during the twentieth century. This system was defined primarily by single-party rule with public (mainly state) ownership of the means of production along with a centrally planned economy. Its material base was generalised commodity production. The spokespersons of this system claim that this socialism was derived from Marx. Paresh Chattopadhyay’s Socialism and Commodity Production argues the falsity of this claim. On the basis of a comprehensive study of Marx's own texts, as well as a detailed engagement with a wide variety of theorists of socialist economics, it shows that Marx's socialism constituted an ‘Association’ of free individuals in which private ownership, the commodity, wage labour and the state have no place.

In this book, Kalyan Sanyal reviews the traditional notion of capitalism and propounds an original theory of capitalist development in the post-colonial context. In order to substantiate his theory, concepts such as primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalist formation are discussed in detail. Analyzing critical questions from a third world perspective such as: Will the integration into the global capitalist network bring to the third world new economic opportunities? Will this capitalist network make the third world countries an easy prey for predatory multinational corporations? The end result is a discourse, drawing on Marx and Foucault, which envisages the post-colonial capitalist formation, albeit in an entirely different light, in the era of globalization.

In Marx’s Laboratory. Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse provides a critical analysis of the Grundrisse as a crucial stage in the development of Marx’s critique of political economy. Stressing both the achievements and limitations of this much-debated text, and drawing upon recent philological advances, this volume attempts to re-read Marx’s 1857-58 manuscripts against the background of Capital, as a ‘laboratory’ in which Marx first began to clarify central elements of his mature problematic. With chapters by an international range of authors from different traditions of interpretation, including the International Symposium on Marxian Theory, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of key themes and concepts in the Grundrisse, such as method, dialectics and abstraction; abstract labour, value, money and capital; technology, the ‘general intellect’ and revolutionary subjectivity, surplus-value, competition, crisis; and society, gender, ecology and pre-capitalist forms. Contributors include: Chris Arthur, Luca Basso, Riccardo Bellofiore, George Caffentzis, Martha Campbell, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Howard Engelskirchen, Roberto Fineschi, Michael Heinrich, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Guido Starosta, Massimiliano Tomba, Jan Toporowski, Peter D. Thomas, Joel Wainwright, and Amy Wendling.

In Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction, Martha E. Gimenez offers a distinctive perspective on social reproduction which posits that the relations of production determine the relations of social reproduction, and links the effects of class exploitation and location to forms of oppression predominantly theorised in terms of identity. Grounding her analysis on Marx’s theory and methodology, Gimenez examines the relationship between class, reproduction and the oppression of women in different contexts such as the reproduction of labour power, domestic labour, feminisation of poverty, and reproductive technologies. Because most women and men, whether members of dominant or oppressed groups, are working class, she argues that the future of feminist politics is inextricably tied to class politics and the fate of capitalism.