Friedrich Wolf

This chapter aims to make reading the third volume of Capital a challenge and a productive resource for contemporary debates. To do so, it combines a careful consideration of the sources made available by the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe edition with an insistent interrogation of Marx’s reasons for not finishing Capital in the ‘aesthetic form’ he originally planned. From here, it goes on to look at the reception of Capital and its third and concluding volume, in particular, in Marxist politics. The work ‘invested’ in order to make Capital in its entirety, as presented in a theoretically integrated way in Volume III, useful for a politics of overcoming the domination of capital is then discussed, while focusing on the relation of science and politics. This is then turned into an appeal to present debates making full use of the scientific and analytical resources Capital as a whole still has to offer. In this way, we hope to address an invitation—to readers, but also to our authors—to continue the debate on how to scientifically grasp the structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the domination of the capitalist mode of production, and how to make use of such insights to turn anti-capitalist struggles into a forceful reality again.

This conviction of mine [i.e. that a reading of the history of Italian Marxisms should be given which is different from that underlying Cristina Corradi’s book ] is based, indeed, on the very distinction between Marxists and Marxians, which I consider to be decisive. This distinction is not chronological, as if in the 1970s everybody was a Marxist, while after that, out of the blue, the Marxians arrived and were welcomed. The truth is that such an authentically Marxian thread has, in fact, existed, and is defined by some crucial aspects. First, by a return to Marx’s original problems, which had been buried by Marxism: those linked to the monetary constitution of surplus value and those referring to the re-linking of value to labour. And then, [second,] the absence [in Marx] of any separation between the ‘economic’ sides of these problems and those problems concerning their ‘philosophical’ and ‘sociological’ foundations. Finally, the attempt of taking up the enterprise of the critique of political economy again, in a non-dogmatic and non-repetitive way. This thread dates back, however, and has a long history throughout the twentieth century. In order to bring to light the traces of this development, it is necessary to read the history of the discussion on Marx in a very different way from that practised until now.

Eleven experts on Brazil discuss the de-democratization process underway in contemporary Brazil. The relative political stability that characterized domestic politics in the 2000s ended with the sudden emergence of a series of massive protests in 2013, followed by the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsanaro in 2018. Brazil's current political crisis cannot be understood without reference to the continual growth of a new right-wing discourse, on the one hand, and to the neoliberal ideology that pervades the minds of large parts of the Brazilian elites, on the other.

Prof. Dr. Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands, provides an overview of the main currents of modern humanism in Germany. He describes the central stream of German humanism as practical, in that it combines the principled imperative to overcome all structures and situations in which people are not treated as human beings with seeking to widen the horizons of humane existence in the arts and sciences and in capabilities of leading a fulfilling life. This humanism compels resort to other criteria than nature, such as those logical, emotive, cultural, in order to gauge the acceptability of value claims. The practical efforts to humanize society and widen human horizons requires engagement in public policy debates and social organizing and programming on consensus issues. Accordingly, the HVD works on such diverse issues as strengthening the rights to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy, preventing economic collapse, accommodating immigrants, protecting personal privacy, limiting the use of military force, building intra- and international peace, and exposing anti-humanist prejudice.

Wolf investigates the consequences of the missing elaboration of the reproduction of labour power for the enlarged reproduction of capital. The issue of the forms of reproduction of labour power, which Marx skipped in his drafts for Volume II, raises issues of both gender and ecology for an adequate analysis of the comprehensive reproduction process of capital in Volume III. This leads him to identify a deeper absence of ‘living labour’ in Marx’s dialectical presentation of the forms of reproduction of capital, as it dominates modern societies. The missing elaboration of the cycle of metamorphoses undergone by variable capital and labour power is reconstructed on the level of Marx’s analysis of the metamorphoses of capital, on that of the comprehensive process of capital, as well as in the transition to the economic surface of the trinity formula. This absence is simultaneously regarded as a symptom of the specific concentration of Marx’s critique of political economy on issues of economics, and of the need to supplement his reconstruction of the comprehensive process of capital leading to his reconstruction of the economic surface of modern capitalist societies by other dimensions of material reproduction, as in the dimensions of gender, of ecology, and geography. This leads to the idea of supplementing the critique of political economy with other critiques following its paradigm but not dependent on it.