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This book critically introduces two compelling contemporary schools of Marxian thought: the New Reading of Marx of Michael Heinrich and Werner Bonefeld, and the postoperaismo of Antonio Negri. Each stake novel claims on Marx's value theory, the first revisiting key categories of the critique of political economy through Frankfurt School critical theory, the second calling the law of value into crisis with reference to Marx's rediscovered 'Fragment on Machines'. Today, 'postcapitalist' conceptualisations of a changing workplace excite interest in postoperaist projections of a crisis of measurability sparked by so-called immaterial labour. Using the New Reading of Marx to question this prospectus, Critiquing Capitalism Today clarifies complex debates for newcomers to these cutting-edge currents of critical thought, looking anew at value, money, labour, class and crisis.

Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx

1. Introduction: Marxian Value Theory in New Times

1.1. New directions in Marxian value theory

1.2. The New Reading of Marx

1.3. The rise of postoperaismo

1.4. What does it mean to be critical?

1.5. This book's contribution

1.6. Ideology critique as social critique

1.7. Chapter outlines

Part One: The New Reading of Marx

2.  Value, Time and Abstract Labour

2.2. Value in the New Reading of Marx

2.3. Political economy and its critique

2.4. Outline of Marx's theory of value

2.6. The social validation of abstract labour-time       

2.7. Socially necessary labour time

2.8. Time in the circuit of capital

2.9. Conclusion

3. Money and the Exchange Abstraction

3.1. Introduction

3.2. A monetary theory of value

3.4. The capitalist schema

3.5. The social synthesis         

3.6. Non-empirical reality

3.7. Conclusion

4. Labour in the Valorisation Process

4.1. Introduction

4.2. Researching value in and beyond labour

4.4. The workers' inquiry tradition

4.5. The life trajectory of the commodity       

4.6. The labour process as carrier of the valorisation process

4.7. Why work?          

4.8. Conclusion

5. Class, Critique and Capitalist Crisis

5.1. Introduction

5.2. The negative dialectics of economic objectivity

5.3. The historical and logical premise of the value-form

5.4. Class and the commodity fetish

5.6. Crisis and the class antagonism

5.7. Conclusion

Part Two: Postoperaismo

6. Immanence, Multitude and Empire

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Operaismo to postoperaismo       

6.3. From the refusal to the celebration of work

6.4. Immanence against dialectics

6.5. Perversion and productivism

6.6. Conclusion

7. The Fragment on Machines

7.1. Introduction

7.2. Fragment-thinking

7.3. The communism of capital

7.4. Too unlimited

7.5. Measurement and violence

7.6. Conclusion

8.1. Introduction

8.2. Immaterial labour and the crisis of measurability

8.3. Critiques of immaterial labour

8.4. Within and against the labour theory of value

8.5. The novelty of immaterial labour

8.6. Concrete existence and immediate abstractness

8.7. Immeasurable productiveness

8.8. Conclusion

9. Creative Industries and Commodity Exchange

9.1. Introduction

9.2. Immaterial labour and the creative industries

9.3. The work of combustion and the form-giving fire

9.4. Creating commodities from products of labour

9.5. Creativity in crisis

9.6. Conclusion

10. Conclusion: From Postoperaismo to Postcapitalism