Theories for Radical Change

Raju Das (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is Professor at York University, Toronto. His research interests include Marxist political economy. His recent books include: Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Brill, 2017) and Marx’s Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State (Routledge, 2022).

"Raju J Das has produced the much-needed book all Marxists hoped one of their number would someday provide, uniting in a well-argued and theoretically rigorous manner two positions that have tended to drift apart: what in political and economic terms Marxism is currently seen to involve, and what Marx and Lenin themselves said it must be. By doing so, Das confirms two things: both the resilience of Marxist scholarship, and also that he himself is in the vanguard of this process." – Tom Brass, formerly of SPS, Cambridge University, and Editor of The Journal of Peasant Studies."Raju Das has produced an excellent and wide-ranging conspectus of Marxist political economy, one based on a careful and incisive reading of the “classical” works of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin on the subject as well as a critical survey of the ideas of more recent Marxist thinkers. As Das explains so well, Marx and Lenin didn’t answer all the questions currently posed about our century’s decaying capitalist order; but they did lay an imperishable foundation for answering them." – Murray Smith, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Brock University, Canada.

• AcknowledgementsList of Figures and Tables1 Introduction1 The Political Context2 The Theoretical Context3 Overview2 Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto: Class Relations, Global Capitalism, Workers’ Conditions and Revolutionary Politics1 Class Relations and the State across Class Societies2 Capitalist Economic System and World Market3 Capitalism, Culture and the State4 Workers’ Experience of Exploitation and Its Effects5 Workers’ Struggle within and against Capitalism6 Conclusion3 Marx’s Introduction to Grundrisse: Primacy of Production over Distribution, Exchange and Consumption1 Production as a Moment of the Economic Realm2 Distribution, Exchange and Consumption as Moments of the Economic Realm3 Production’s Primacy over Other Moments of the Economic Realm4 Implications of the Primacy of Production for Contemporary Debates in Political Economy5 Conclusion4 Marx’s Introduction to Grundrisse: the Relation of the Economic Realm to the Political and the Cultural Realms1 Conception of the Producing Individual in Relation to Society2 The Relation of the Economic to the Political3 The Relation of the Economic to the Cultural4 Conclusion5 Marx’s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyFettering of Productive Forces by Social Relations, and Questions of Labour and Nature1 Marx (and Engels) on Fettering of Productive Forces by Production Relations2 Existing Interpretations of Marx’s Concept of Fettering3 A Partial Critique of Existing Interpretations of Marx’s Concept of Fettering4 Towards an Integrative Perspective on Fettering for Today’s World5 Conclusion6 Marx’s Capital Volume 1: Relations of Property, Commodity and Value, and the State1 Property Relations of Class Society, and the State2 Property Relations of Capitalist Class Society, and the State3 Capitalist Commodity and Value Relations, and the State4 Conclusion7 Marx’s Capital Volume 1: Capital Circuit, Capitalist Accumulation, and the State1 The M–C (MP + LP) and the C′–M′ Phases of the Capital Circuit, and the State2 The ‘P’ Phase of Capital Circuit, and the State3 The Crisis-Ridden Capitalist Accumulation and the State4 Conclusion8 Marx’s Capital Volume 1: Labour Circuit, Class Struggle, Economic Reforms, and the State1 The Labour Circuit (C–M–C′–R–C) and the State’s Pro-worker Interventions2 Driving Forces behind the State’s Pro-worker Measures3 Limits to State’s Pro-worker Interventions, and Why?4 Conclusion9 Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia and Other Economic Writings: Commodity Production, Class Differentiation, Capitalism, and Imperialism1 What Is Political Economy, and How to Study It?2 Commodity Production and Class Differentiation3 Capitalism as the Highest Form of Commodity Production, and Its Social and Spatial Forms and Effects4 Capitalism as a Transient Progressive Social Form Production5 Capitalist (Super-)Exploitation, Economic Inequality, and Impoverishment6 Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and National Exploitation7 Workers’ Struggle for Improvements within Capitalism, and for Socialism8 Conclusion10 Theoretical and Practical Implications of Marxist Political Economy1 A General Map of Marx’s and Lenin’s Political Economy as a Field of Study2 Political Economy of the Relation between the Economic and the Extra Economic3 Political Economy of Class Society4 Political Economy of Capitalist Class Society5 Political Economy of Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism6 Political Economy of the Progressive and Dark Sides of Capitalism/Imperialism7 Political Economy of the Capitalist State8 Political Economy of the Conditions of Workers and Petty Producers9 Political Economy as a Guide to People’s Struggle against CapitalismBibliographyIndex