Book Review: In The Tracks of Marx's Capital

Review From Michael Roberts' Blog on Facebook

In the Tracks of Marx's Capital - a new book by Sungur Suman and Ahmet Tonak, is out now.

This book provides an accessible introduction to Marx’s seminal work Capital and explores the core ideas of Marxian political economy relevant for modern day economies. The first part gives an overview of Capital based on the authors’ original thinking in the methodology of Capital.

The second part discusses the application of these ideas to some understudied questions of measuring profit on alienation, the rate of exploitation, the reconstruction of input-output tables, and the role of the welfare state and social wage.

The third part sets forth new research in Marxian analysis in the 21st century, facing the challenges brought about by digital labor and the deep crisis of the global economy. The last part discusses the Marxism/Neo-Ricardianism controversy.

Some chapters are available here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-58343-8

“In this book, Sungur Savran and Ahmet Tonak bring together a series of works written by them over the last 40 years that ‘track’ the development and relevance of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production to the present day.

Savran and Tonak emphasise the key distinction (often confused) that Marx makes between productive and unproductive labour. In so doing, they expose in an original way the faultlines and internal inconsistencies of Sraffian economics, the main modern ‘revision’ of Marx’s theory of value.

They go on to show the great strides that Marxist economics has made in the last 50 years in testing Marx’s theory against empirical reality. Most important, Tonak and Savran take to task various misleading theories about modern capitalism. They show that ‘post-Fordism’, a concept that denies the role of the working class as an agency of change, was a baseless fiction.

They show the fallacy of the latest denial of the role of productive labour in generating surplus value in modern digital media companies.

And they point out that imperialism will remain a nebulous idea unless it is founded on the mechanisms of surplus value transfer from the poor periphery to the rich core of capitalist economies.

Tonak and Savran show convincingly that Marx’s Capital remains the bedrock for understanding the laws of motion of capitalist production despite fashionable attempts to revise and refute his analysis."