Exploring Marx's Capital : philosophical, economic and political dimensions / / by Jacques Bidet ; translated by David Fernbach ; foreword to the English edition by Alex Callinicos.

• Superior document: Historical materialism book series, v. 14
• Author: Bidet, Jacques.
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Edition: [English ed.].
• Language: English
• Series: Historical materialism book series ; 14.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (351 p.)
• Notes: Translated from the French.

This volume, originally published in French under the title Que faire du Capital ? , offers a new interpretation of Marx’s great work. It shows how the novelty and lasting interest of Marx’s theory arises from the fact that, as against the project of a ‘pure’ economics, it is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an economic and a political aspect, neither of these being separable from the other. Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of Marx’s work in the spirit of the history of science, exploring it as a process of theoretical development. Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of Capital as if they were complementary and mutually illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the next it is possible to see these being eliminated and restructured. This labour, moreover, was never fully completed. The author thus re-assesses Marx’s entire system in its set of constitutive categories: value, market, labour-power, classes, working class, exploitation, production, fetishism, ideology. He seeks to pin down the difficulties that these encountered, and the analytical and critical value they still have today. Bidet attaches the greatest importance to Marx’s order of exposition, which assigns each concept its place in the overall system, and makes the validity of the construction depend on the pertinence of its initial presuppositions. This is particularly the case with the relationship between market mechanism and capitalism – and thus also between the market and socialism. This books an English translation of Jacques Bidet, Que faire du capital? Philosophie, economie et politique dans \'La Capital\' de Marx , published y Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2000.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Foreword To The English Translation Of Jacques Bidet’S Que Faire Du ‘Capital’? / Alex Callinicos -- Author’S Preface To The English Edition / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Introduction / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter One. Preliminary Methodological Remarks / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Two. Value As Quantity / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Three. Value As Sociopolitical Concept / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Four. Value And Price Of Labour-Power / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Five. Relations Of Production And Class Relations / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Six. The Start Of The Exposition And Its Development / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Seven. The Method Of Exposition And The Hegelian Heritage / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Eight. The Theorisation Of The Ideological In Capital / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Nine. The Theory Of The Value-Form / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- Chapter Ten. The Economy In General And Historical Materialism / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- General Conclusions / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach -- References / Jacques Bidet and David Fernbach.