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Historical Materialism #285
Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital
This book philosophically reconstructs Marx’s Capital from the perspective of reproduction to produce an original reflection on the prospects for human life and nature’s survival within capitalism.
- GenresPoliticsTheoryNonfiction
212 pages, Hardcover
Published April 11, 2023
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August 4, 2024
A good interpretation of Marx's Capital that attempts to mediate social reproductive orientations with value formal analysis by examining the tension between the reproduction of social life and the reproduction of the life of capital, while overcoming the limitations of labour-centric and value theorist readings of Marx's Capital that fail to fully account for the specific ways in which capitalist reproduction is in tension with the reproduction of human life and nature
The author argues that the relations of freedom and domination are better understood through focus on reproduction than through the category of labour, since the former encompasses the latter, with the aim of locating how to undermine the dominance of capital's social form over concrete life
The author places a focus on financialisation, which they argue has reconfigured wage labour to such an extent that it no longer clearly constitutes the central form of mediation between capital's abstractions and the concrete, or human life and nature, as exemplified by the status of unemployment, unpaid reproductive labour, debt, and the destruction of the environment
Rather financial capital, social reproduction and ecological reproduction work together as logically interconnected, with each medium placing increased strain on the other. This can be clearly seen in the case of the climate crisis, where the reproduction of the capitalist social form has curtailed the sustainable reproduction of a global ecology.
The author argues that the relations of freedom and domination are better understood through focus on reproduction than through the category of labour, since the former encompasses the latter, with the aim of locating how to undermine the dominance of capital's social form over concrete life
The author places a focus on financialisation, which they argue has reconfigured wage labour to such an extent that it no longer clearly constitutes the central form of mediation between capital's abstractions and the concrete, or human life and nature, as exemplified by the status of unemployment, unpaid reproductive labour, debt, and the destruction of the environment
Rather financial capital, social reproduction and ecological reproduction work together as logically interconnected, with each medium placing increased strain on the other. This can be clearly seen in the case of the climate crisis, where the reproduction of the capitalist social form has curtailed the sustainable reproduction of a global ecology.
Displaying 1 of 1 review