NON DIMENTICARE MAI LA LOTTA DI CLASSE

The intervention discusses Roberto Finelli’s last book, An accomplished patricide. Marx's final confrontation with Hegel, following the structure of the book. I agree with Finelli that the early Marx is somehow compromised with Feuerbach’s Gattung; at the same time, a ‘backward’ reading of Marx reveals that some key notions of the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts reappear in different form in the Grundrisse as well as in Capital. My comment then focuses on the confusions and indeterminacies plaguing Finelli’s refer-ence to Arbeits-kraft, ‘labour-power’. Dealing with abstract labour, I show that Finelli’s in-terpretation is defective because he never considers the dimension of the collective worker, and because his view of abstract labour too often reduces it to simple labour, increasingly devoid of skills. To move beyond Finelli’s limits we need to consider the processual consti-tution of capitalist reality, and to distinguish carefully the eventual validation of private la-bours on the market from the immediate socialisation of collective labour going on within the immediate production process. In my opinion, the failure of Finelli’s dual Parricide is a reminder of the need to move forward towards a re-reading of Marx’s abstract value theory of labour as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production

Dobutamine stress MRI in pulmonary hypertension: relationships between stress pulmonary artery relative area change, RV performance, and 10-year survival

In pulmonary hypertension (PH), right ventricular (RV) performance determines survival. Pulmonary artery (PA) stiffening is an important biomechanical event in PH and also predicts survival based on the PA relative area change (RAC) measured at rest using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this exploratory study, we sought to generate novel hypotheses regarding the influence of stress RAC on PH prognosis and the interaction between PA stiffening, RV performance and survival. Fifteen PH patients underwent dobutamine stress-MRI (ds-MRI) and right heart catheterization. RACREST, RACSTRESS, and ΔRAC (RAC STRESS – RAC REST) were correlated against resting invasive hemodynamics and ds-MRI data regarding RV performance and RV-PA coupling efficiency (n’vv [RV stroke volume/RV end-systolic volume]). The impact of RAC, RV data, and n’vv on ten-year survival were determined using Kaplan–Meier analysis. PH patients with a low ΔRAC (<−2.6%) had a worse long-term survival (log-rank P = 0.045, HR for death = 4.46 [95% CI = 1.08–24.5]) than those with ΔRAC ≥ −2.6%. Given the small sample, these data should be interpreted with caution; however, low ΔRAC was associated with an increase in stress diastolic PA area indicating proximal PA stiffening. Associations of borderline significance were observed between low RACSTRESS and low n’vvSTRESS, Δη’VV, and ΔRVEF. Further studies are required to validate the potential prognostic impact of ΔRAC and the biomechanics potentially connecting low ΔRAC to shorter survival. Such studies may facilitate development of novel PH therapies targeted to the proximal PA

Forever young? Marx’s Critique of political economy after 200 years

This article suggests a reconstruction of Marx’s Critique of political economy as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. The first part of what follows will provide a sort of methodological introduction to Das Kapital. I am questioning the meaning of critique versus criticism, the distinction between fetish-character and fetishism, the role of dialectics, and the difference between reading, interpreting and reconstructing. I will focus especially on volume I. At the centre of the discussion are: the multiple meanings of abstract labour and socialization, the role of money as a commodity for the labour theory of value, the ‘method of comparison’ in grounding valorisation (the emergence of gross profits) as the constitution of capital from class struggle in production, the unity of absolute and relative surplus value extraction, the key notion of Technologie in the real subsumption of labour to capital, the law of the tendential fall in relative wage, Marx’s two notions of competition, and the macro-monetary class perspective in capitalist reproduction crucial to Capital, volume I. Some considerations are devoted to the transformation problem, the so-called “New Interpretation”, and crisis theory

The Adventures of Vergesellschaftung

This paper engages in a dialogue with opposite approaches whose importance is that they take seriously the issues of abstract labour and capitalist ‘socialisation’ (Vergesellschaftung). On the one side there is Michael Heinrich’s view about the Marxian ‘monetary theory of value’, stressing the nachträgliche Vergesellschaftung, whereas abstract labour exists only in monetary circulation of commodities, hence in ex post ‘socialisation’, within a non-commodity money approach. On the other side, there is Roberto Finelli, insisting that labour is already immediately fully ‘social’. This latter position is untenable in literal terms and is unilateral (actually erasing money from any essential role in value theory), but its merit is to show how unilateral is also the view of abstract labour within a perspective reducing Vergesellschaftung only to an a posteriori dimension. This limit results from the Neue Marx-Lektüre’s almost exclusive focus on the first three chapters of Capital. I show that in Marx the nachträgliche Vergesellschaftung in universalised commodity circulation gives way in the later chapters to the unmittelbaren Vergesellschaftung: the ‘immediate socialisation’ in the capitalist labour process, where abstract labor not only counts as, but actually is, already abstract in production. Rubin and Napoleoni saw, in complementary ways, that for Marx abstract labour already exists as (potential and latent) ‘value/money in motion’ in immediate production. I argue, with Graziani, that the two socialisations requires a third and prior one: the ante-validation of capitalist labour through finance to production. Abstract labour is a process. The capitalist monetary Kreislauf (circuit) is the other side of the coin of the abstraction of labour as a process, from labour-power (initial finance) to living labour (production) to objectualised labour (ideal money) to the final validation (real money)

Between Schumpeter and Keynes: The Heterodoxy of Paul Marlor Sweezy and the Orthodoxy of Paul Mattick

Paul Sweezy was an assistant of Schumpeter. Their friendship and intellectual distance are such that the word pupil sounds off-key. As he wrote to his brother Al, though interested in the Austrian economist's theories, he did not feel any particular influence. The personal relationship, however, was quite strong, as if he was the substitute for a missing child. There was a memorable debate between them, of which a record remains, thanks to Paul Samuelson's 'memoir', which appeared in Newsweek, 13 April 1970, and the materials made available by John Bellamy Foster in the Monthly Review, May 2011

Bergamo Paper

This is a letter by Riccardo Bellofiore at the University of Bergamo to participants who delivered a paper at the International Conference on the Third Volume of Kapital by Marx (1/30/95). Professor Bellofiore explains the limits Macmillan publishing has put on the size of the Proceedings and requests the authors to have their paper peer reviewed to determine those most suitable for inclusion

House price Keynesianism and the contradictions of the modern investor subject

This article conceptualises the marked downturn in UK house prices in the 2007-2009 period in relation to longer-term processes of national economic restructuring centred on a new model of homeownership. The structure of UK house prices has been impacted markedly by the Labour Government‟s efforts to ingrain a particular notion of financial literacy amid the move towards an increasingly asset-based system of welfare. New model welfare recipients and new model homeowners have thereby been co-constituted in a manner consistent with a new UK growth regime of „house price Keynesianism‟. However, the investor subjects who drive such growth are necessarily rendered uncertain as compared with the idealised image of Government policy because of their reliance on the credit-creating decisions of private financial institutions. The recent steep decline in UK house prices is explained here as an epiphenomenon of the disruptive effect on the idealised image caused by the dependence of investor subjects on pricing dynamics not of their making