Is There Life on Marx? Capital as a theory of exploitation and as a theory of crisis

With Riccardo Bellofiore, Former Professor of Political Economy at the University of Bergamo (Italy)

The seminar will present a quick overview of the content of Capital, showing that it is at the same time a theory of impersonal domination and of class domination in capitalism. In the argument money is a constituent of value and production is nothing but the consumption of the living bearers of labour power. Capitalist production needs finance as an ante-validation of firms’ choices about production, and the new value extracted depends from class struggle in production and it is driven by effective demand. Value theory is at the same theory a theory of crisis: the tendential fall in the rate of profit is reinterpreted as encompassing within itself the counter-tendencies contrasting it. This perspective is prolonged into a historical sketch of the long dynamics of capital encompassing the major great ‘structural’ crises