New Book: Deciphering Capital

Book Launch and Discussion
Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and its Destiny
By Alex Callinicos
Discussants: Christopher Arthur and Michael Roberts
Chair: Gilbert Achcar 

Monday, 10 November 2014, 7pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT) at SOAS

Alex Callinicos’s new book deals extensively with the question of Marx’s method and its relationship to Hegel’s Science of Logic. It emphasizes Marx’s understanding of capital as a set of relations constituted by two separations – that of workers from the means of production, giving rise to the exploitation of wage labour, and that between capitals, from which arises their competitive struggle. This understanding also informs the book’s presentation of Marx’s multi-dimensional conception of crises. Marx strove to make Capital a study of capitalism as a global system, and not merely a portrait of the mid-Victorian British economy: the cycle of financial bubble and panic that he investigated has come in the neoliberal era to regulate the world economy, with the devastating effects witnessed in the 2007-8 crash.

Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London and editor of International Socialism. His recent books include Imperialism and Global Political Economy, Bonfire of Illusions, and most recently Deciphering Capital (Bookmarks, 2014)*.

Christopher Arthur taught philosophy at the University of Sussex. His books include Dialectics of Labour and Marx’s Capital and the New Dialectic.

 Michael Roberts is a Marxist economist who blogs at: http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/

 * £14.99 - £10 special offer for book launch