Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a by George Henderson

By George Henderson

Lengthy vulnerable to dogmatic war of words, the query of price in Marx’s thought—what price is, the aim it serves, its software to real-world capitalism—requires renewal if Marx’s paintings is to stay shiny. In Value in Marx, George Henderson deals a lucid rereading of Marx that strips price of its turgid theoretical relief and reframes it as an research into the tensions among social family members and varieties as they're instead of as what they can in a different way become.

Drawing on Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse, Henderson indicates how those volumes don't harbor a unmarried concept of worth that equates worth to capital. in its place, those books experimentally compose and recompose worth for an international that's greater than capitalist. At stake is how Marx conceives of human freedom, of balanced social preparations, and of keep an eye on over the issues humans produce. Henderson unearths that the bounds on social turning into, together with the tendency towards alienated lifestyles, hang-out Marx whilst he appears past the critique of capital to an emancipated society to come.

Can those limits be faced in an inventive, even cheerful, method? Can they develop into facets of what we hope, instead of being silenced and denied? so long as we persist in reading price generally, following it as an lively and never a shut-down, predetermined characteristic of Marx’s texts, Henderson finally perspectives Marx as responding certainly to those demanding situations and applying worth as a robust instrument of the political imaginary.

“Marx’s writings have encouraged a unprecedented corpus of writing designed to appreciate and alter capitalism. even though, whereas many have attempted to put on his boots, few have journeyed in really new instructions whereas retaining Marx’s compass. Henderson right here unearths modern price in Marx’s writings in methods either devoted and surprising.” —Noel Castree, Manchester University

Value in Marx deals a very unique reading—itself an extraordinary thing—backed via virtuosic textual research of Marx and a near-impeccable expertise of the broader literature. One can't ask for a lot more.” —David B. Clarke, Swansea University

“George Henderson’s Value in Marx is touted as a piece on Marx’s price thought that not just elucidates its contents, yet is going past conventional readings of Marx to forge new methods of puzzling over price and social relatives. whereas exhibiting an knowledge of the significant literature on purposes of worth thought to genuine global ancient and political phenomena, it develops theoretical insights that have hitherto remained underappreciated or missed inside Marx’s belief of worth itself.” —Marx and Philosophy

“George Henderson’s ebook Value in Marx is an item of good looks either in and out. The lucidity of the prose, the arresting and infrequently very playful tackle the writer pitches us, and the sheer boldness to try a re-reading of well-thumbed texts to squeeze out extra which means all upload as much as a shining instance of what shut textual research and an inventive spirit can achieve.” —Progress in Human Geography

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In the different ethical context of culture (that is to say, of ‘spirit alien to itself’, as Hegel (1977) defines it), the Enlightenment presents the general struggle of spirit against ‘superstition’ (religion). It is finally in the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, that the coincidence of the rational and the real will be proclaimed and demonstrated, that which makes of modern bourgeois society the socio-historical apex of Jean-François Côté 35 ‘morality’ (in the system of Sittlichkeit). Obviously, we have to understand that today, with the gradual destruction of the great principles of modern bourgeois society, the coincidence between the ideal and real has been displaced, a situation which also displaces the problem of evaluating the ideological and historical situation of our time.

Reflecting on the more general problem of ‘speech genres’, Bakhtin remarks: The boundaries of each concrete utterance as a unit of speech communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects, that is, a change of speakers. Any utterance – from a short (single-word) rejoinder in everyday dialogue to the large novel or scientific treatise – has, so to speak, an absolute beginning and an absolute end: its beginning is preceded by utterances of others, and its end is followed by the responsive utterances of others (or, although it may be silent, others’ active responsive understanding, or, finally, a responsive action based on this understanding).

Ground is the unity of identity and distinction; the truth of what distinction and identity have shown themselves to be, the inward reflection which is just as much reflection-into-another and vice-versa. It is essence posited as totality’ (Hegel, 1991: § 121). In the introduction of the Phenomenology, Hegel writes: ‘Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung]’ (Hegel, 1977: 55).

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Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a by George Henderson
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