A Critical Marxist Approach to Capital Theory

This essay provides a critical Marxist reformulation, internal to the cultural tradition of Western Marxism, of Marx’s theoretical treatment of value and capital. It implies the abandonment of the ‘pure’ labour theory of value of the young Marx in favour of a ‘mixed’ labour-and capital theory of value reflecting the different theoretical perspective shown by the mature Marx, after his epistemological break described by Althusser. The accounting practice of defining and measuring income and capital is criticized, for its disregard of the financial cost of invested capital. Foley’s ‘New Interpretation’ of Marx’s theoretical system and its main variants are refused for their acritical endorsement of Marx’s assumption of a ‘new-value equality’ between the net product of the economy and the living labour employed in the production of gross output. A different method for converting quantities of labour-time in terms of money, which accounts for explicit and implicit costs, is proposed.