Critical Economics in Times of Crisis (Fourth Seminar) - Riccardo Bellofiore

Marx Reloaded (Saturday 18 April 2015)

The fourth seminar of the series Critical Economics in Times of Crisis was aimed at actualising Marx’s theoretical tools to the current economic turmoil. It has been suggested that his insights remain widely relevant for the analysis of today’s economic crisis and of the capitalist economy as a whole.

RICCARDO BELLOFIORE (Università degli Studi di Bergamo)
Title: Is there life on Marx? The value theory of labour as a theory of exploitation and as a theory of crisis

Abstract: Capital is a zombie: dead labour coming back to life as an un-dead. Value is a ghost that needs to ‘takes possession’ of the body of money and transmogrifies into a vampire. However, Marx’s monetary theory of value – the grounding of the identity between (new) value and (living) labour through money as a commodity – is problematic. It must be reconstructed within a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. The ‘transformation’ of ‘values’ into ‘prices’ cannot but redistribute the monetary ‘value added’ extracted from wage workers within production as ‘contested terrain’. This discourse is prolonged into a new reading of Marx’s theory of crisis.