Christian Lotz argues that Immanuel Kant’s idea of a mental schematism, which gives the human mind access to a stable reality, can be interpreted as a social concept, which, using Karl Marx, the author identifies as money. Money and its “fluid” form, capital, constitute sociality in capitalism and make access to social reality possible. Money, in other words, makes life in capitalism meaningful and frames all social relations. Following Marx, Lotz argues that money is the true Universal of modern life and that, as such, we are increasingly subjected to its control. As money and capital are closely linked to time, Lotz argues that in capitalism money also constitutes past and future “social horizons” by turning both into “monetized” horizons. Everything becomes faster, global, and more abstract. Our lives, as a consequence, become more mobile, “fluid,” unstable, and precarious. Lotz presents analyses of credit, debt, and finance as examples of how money determines the meaning of future and past, imagination, and memory, and that this results in individuals becoming increasingly integrated into and dependent upon the capitalist world. This integration and dependence increases with the event of electronics industries and brain-science industries that channel all human desires towards profits, growth, and money. In this way, the book offers a critical extension of Theodor Adorno’s analysis of exchange and the culture industry as the basis of modern societies. Lotz argues—paradoxically with and against Adorno—that we should return to the basic insights of Marx’s philosophy, given that the principle of exchange is only possible on the basis of more fundamental social and economic categories, such as money.

In 1878 Karl Marx developed the reproduction schema: his model of how total capital is produced and reproduced. This is thought to be the first two-sector economic model ever constructed. Two key aspects of Marx’s writings are widely agreed to be undeveloped: The role of aggregate demand and the role of money. This book synthesizes various strands of economic thought to enable the reader to understand and clarify the structure of the reproduction schema. This synthesis will challenge prevailing orthodoxies. This book constructs a macro monetary model which draws on a wide range of economic theories, within both the Marxian economic tradition, and the tradition of Keynes, Kalecki, Domar, Sraffa and Leontief. Marxian economics has been dominated by supply-side thinking, including general equilibrium theory and pronouncements about the shortage of surplus value, whilst Post Keynesians have failed to take seriously the importance of reproduction and the multisectoral structure of capitalism. By locating aggregate demand and the circuit of money in the reproduction schema, this key book provides an analytical contribution to both Marxian and Post Keynesian economics.

Using Marxist critique, this book explores manifestations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Higher Education and demonstrates how it contributes to the functioning and existence of the capitalist university. Challenging the idea that AI is a break from previous capitalist technologies, the book offers nuanced examination of the impacts of AI on the control and regulation of academic work and labour, on digital learning and remote teaching, and on the value of learning and knowledge. Applying a Marxist perspective, Preston argues that commodity fetishism, surveillance, and increasing productivity ushered in by the growth of AI, further alienates and exploits academic labour and commodifies learning and research. The text puts forward a solid theoretical framework and methodology for thinking about AI to inform critical and revolutionary pedagogies. Offering an impactful and timely analysis, this book provides a critical engagement and application of key Marxist concepts in the study of AI’s role in Higher Education. It will be of interest to those working or researching in Higher Education.

Economist, theorist and historian, the author suggests a definition of political economy which has nothing in common with the definition of economics. He states that political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form.

This book critically introduces two compelling contemporary schools of Marxian thought: the New Reading of Marx of Michael Heinrich and Werner Bonefeld, and the postoperaismo of Antonio Negri. Each stake novel claims on Marx’s value theory, the first revisiting key categories of the critique of political economy through Frankfurt School critical theory, the second calling the law of value into crisis with reference to Marx’s rediscovered ‘Fragment on Machines’. Today, ‘postcapitalist’ conceptualisations of a changing workplace excite interest in postoperaist projections of a crisis of measurability sparked by so-called immaterial labour. Using the New Reading of Marx to question this prospectus, Critiquing Capitalism Today clarifies complex debates for newcomers to these cutting-edge currents of critical thought, looking anew at value, money, labour, class and crisis.

This collection includes texts by Henryk Grossman that are primarily concerned with economic theory: monographs, articles, essays, letters and manuscript material. Many have never been published in English before, some in any language. The first in four volumes of Grossman’s works, it provides the basis for a deeper understanding of Grossman’s contributions to Marxist economic theory and critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn’s introduction explains the contexts in which the texts were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.

Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical masterpiece The second volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 2, contains a new English translation of Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism, one of the most important works ever composed on capitalism’s incessant drive for self-expansion and the integral connection between capitalism and imperialism. This new translation is the first to present the full work as composed by the author. It also contains her book-length response to her critics, The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have Made Out of Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique. Taken together, these two works represent one of the most important Marxist studies of the globalization of capital. Also included is an essay on the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital, which had originally appeared as an unattributed chapter in Franz Mehring’s book Karl Marx. Thank you to David Gaharia for helping to support the translation of this book.

"A stunning achievement as the first full account of social science in a non-Western society. Barshay tells an epic story of how a handful of Japanese intellectuals used social science to make sense of the new society into which they were moving. What they did helps us understand not only Japan, but the whole modern world."--Robert Bellah, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Tokugawa Religion and Imagining Japan

This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of its pre-modern and insular past. Scholars examine "age-old" Japanese cultural practices and show these to be largely creations of the modern era.