PRAGOTI

Nearly a hundred and thirty years after his death and 190 years after his birth on May 5, 1818, Karl Marx continues to exert enormous intellectual and practical influence across the world. The socialist future he so confidently predicted has not yet become the global reality that many had hoped it would. The capitalist mode of production that he diagnosed as crisis-prone and doomed to extinction in the course of further historical development dominates the contemporary world. The early attempts at establishing a socialist society have faced exceptionally difficult problems in a predominantly capitalist/imperialist world. Yet, none of these facts can be seen as rendering Marx irrelevant or as diminishing the power and vitality of his theory and vision. Why?

 Everybody agrees that capitalism is undergoing a serious crisis, but different people read this crisis differently. The commonest view, held even by progressive economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, is that the crisis is entirely a consequence of the collapse of the housing ''bubble''; since in this situation of crisis, private expenditure, whether on consumption or on investment, is unlikely to increase in the foreseeable future, a revival is possible only through an increase in State expenditure, which means that both in the United States and in Europe, far from adopting austerity measures, the State should instead be increasing its expenditure. [This article was first published here]

In the backdrop of the economic crisis which continues unabated in the US and Europe, interest in the work of Karl Marx is witnessing a revival. The three volumes of Capital is Marx’s masterpiece, which contains his political economy critique of capitalism. In order to make sense of what is happening to capitalism today, it is worthwhile to revisit and engage with the issues raised by Capital.

Leftword has recently republished the three volumes of Capital alongwith a book, Marx's Capital: An Introductory Reader. The reader contains essays by Marxist scholars like Prabhat Patnaik et. al: http://leftword.com/bookdetails.php?BkId=284&type=PB Pragoti is publishing extracts of the essay contributed by Prasenjit Bose to the volume.