Invisible Leviathan

Murray E.G. Smith is Professor of Sociology at Brock University, Canada. His previous books include Culture of Prejudice (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Global Capitalism in Crisis(Fernwood, 2010), and Marxist Phoenix (Canadian Scholars Press, 2014).

"Murray Smith’s Invisible Leviathan provides a comprehensive defence of the labour theory of value, its corollary in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, alongside a thorough debunking of the so-called transformation problem."—Dominic Alexander, Counterfire“Smith is by no means content with a purely theoretical defence of Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s Invisible Leviathan; he moves on to empirical verification of the ‘economic law of motion’ of capital as postulated by Marx.”—Michael Roberts, author of The Long Depression

• Foreword Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition (Excerpts) Copyright Acknowledgements Figures, Charts and Tables 1 Invisible Leviathan: Marx's Law of Value in the Twilight of Capitalism 1 Reflections on Wealth, Human Development and the &'Triumph' of Capitalism 2 The Triple Crisis of the Twenty-First Century 3 The Necessity of Marx's Value Theory in the Twilight of Capitalism 2 The Value Abstraction and the Dialectic of Social Development 1 The Value Abstraction in Pre-capitalist History: Cognitive Faculties as Forces of Production 2 Cohen, Sayer and Söhn-Rethel on Historical Materialism 3 Value Relations and Social Progress 4 An Unresolved Issue 3 Science, Ideology and &'Economic Value' 1 The Labour Theory of Value in Classical Political Economy 2 The Economics Profession Repudiates the Labour Theory of Value 3 Labour Value: From &'Ricardian Socialism' to Marx 4 Marginalism versus Marx 5 Science, Ideology and the Theory of Value 4 Marx's Capital and the Early Critiques 1 Elements of Marx's Theory of Value 2 Value, Capital, and Exploitation 3 Value, Capitalist Competition, and the General Rate of Profit 4 Traditional Criticisms and Orthodox Responses 5 The Controversy Surrounding the &'Transformation Problem' 5 Currents within the Value Controversy 1 The Second Phase of the Value Controversy 2 The Neo-Ricardian Challenge 3 Neo-Orthodoxy and the Rediscovery of the Value-Form 4 Fundamentalist Value Theory 5 Trends in the Value Controversy since the 1990s 6 An Assessment of the Value Controversy 1 Preliminary Thoughts on the Road Just Travelled 2 Some Philosophical and Methodological Considerations 3 Theoretical Considerations 4 Value Theory and Programme 7 Value, Economy and Crisis 1 Capitalist Development and Its Cyclical Crises 2 The Falling Rate of Profit and the Dimensions of Capitalist Crisis 3 Tendencies Counteracting the Fall in the Rate of Profit 4 Theoretical Arguments Surrounding the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit 5 Dimensions of Capitalist Crisis 6 Crises of Valorisation and Crises of Realisation 7 The Historical-Structural Crisis of Capitalism 8 Socially Necessary Unproductive Labour, Valorisation and Crisis 1 Marx and the Problem of Unproductive Labour 2 SNUL and Marx's Value Categories 3 Constant Capital and Capital Fetishism 4 Theoretical Advantages of Treating SNUL as Constant Capital 9 Imperialism, Unequal Development and the Law of Value 1 Unequal Capitalist Development on a World Scale 2 Emmanuel's Theory of Unequal Exchange 3 Critiques of Emmanuel 4 Shaikh's Critique of Emmanuel and the Ricardian Theory of Trade 10 &'Testing Marx' in the Twilight of Capitalism: Marxian Value Categories, National Income Accounts and the Crisis of Valorisation 1 Part I: The Profitability Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s: Contradictory Testimonies of Empirical Marxian Research 2 Part II: The LTRPF and the Rise of &'Fictitious Capital': The Case of the US Economy, 1950-2013 3 Profitability Trends in the US Economy: Some Recent Findings and Debates 4 Appendix 1: Data Sources and Methods for Smith (1991b) Study of Canadian Economy, 1947-80 5 Appendix 2: Data Sources and Methods Used in Smith-Taylor (1996) Study of the Canadian Economy, 1947-91 6 Appendix 3: Data Sources and Methods Used in Smith-Butovsky (2018) Study of the US Economy, 1950-2013 11 Beyond the Law of Value: Class Struggle and Socialist Transformation 1 The Working Class, Value, and Anti-Capitalist Struggle 2 Value Theory and Socialist Construction Bibliography Index