Fully revised and updated sixth edition of the internationally established guide to Marx's Capital.

Fully revised and updated sixth edition of the internationally established guide to Marx's Capital.

Since it first appeared in 1975, Ben Fine's introductory account of Capital has become the most popular text of its kind, used widely across the social sciences and also read by a wider audience. Its translation into several languages and its frequent reprinting is testimony to the role it has played in serving the growing interest in Marxist economics. The third edition has been substantially revised and expanded to include discussion of controversial areas, such as the transformation problem, falling profitability, rent theory and the theory of interest.

Many scholars discuss Marx’s Capital from many perspectives, but Accounting for Value uniquely advances and defends an ‘accounting interpretation’ of his theory of value, that he used it to explain capitalists’ accounts. It confirms and builds on the Temporal Single-System Interpretation’s refutation of the charge that Marx’s illustration of the ‘transformation from values to prices’ is inconsistent, and its defense of his ‘Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit’. It rejects other interpretations by showing that only a ‘temporal’, ‘single-system’ interpretation is consistent with Marx’s accounting. The book shows that Marx became seriously interested in accounts from the late 1850s during an important period in the development of his critique of political economy, asking Engels for information and explanations. Examining their letters in the context of Marx’s evolving work, it argues, supports the hypothesis that discovering he could explain them with his theory of value gave him the breakthrough he needed to decide how to present his work and explains why, in 1862, he decided to change its title to Capital. Marx’s explanations of capitalist accounting, it concludes, amount to an ‘accounting theory’ that explains how individual capitalists and the capital market use what is, for many, the ‘invisible hand’ of accounting to control the production and distribution of surplus value. Marx claimed his theory of value was a work of ‘science’, a critique of political economy that would deliver a ‘theoretical blow’ from which the bourgeoisie would ‘never recover’. He failed, critics argue, because his critique depends on hypothetical entities, which we cannot directly observe, such as ‘value’ and ‘abstract labour’, ‘surplus value’, which means his theory is not open to empirical refutation. The book, however, argues that he used his theory of value to explain the ‘phenomenal forms’ of ‘profit’, ‘rate of profit’, etc., by explaining the observable accounting principles and practices capitalists use to calculate and control them, in which, as he said, we can ‘glimpse’ the determination of value by socially necessary labor time, which experience could have refuted.

Marx's Capital was a book that revolutionised political economy and for the first time opened our eyes to the real workings of capitalism. It was, however, met with a wall of silence from the mainstream economists and the establishment. Despite this, Capital became regarded in the workers' movement as the Bible of the working class... The aim of this book, written by authors from the International Marxist Tendency, is to help guide readers through the pages of volume one of Capital; to bring out the main themes and ideas contained within it; and to discuss the relevance of this great Marxist classic in terms of understanding the crisis-ridden world around us today - and, most importantly, how we can radically transform it.