In this slim, insightful volume, noted economist Samir Amin returns to the core of Marxian economic thought: Marx’s theory of value. He begins with the same question that Marx, along with the classical economists, once pondered: how can every commodity, including labor power, sell at its value on the market and still produce a profit for owners of capital? While bourgeois economists attempted to answer this question according to the categories of capitalist society itself, Marx sought to peer through the surface phenomena of market transactions and develop his theory by examining the actual social relations they obscured. The debate over Marx’s conclusions continues to this day. Amin defends Marx’s theory of value against its critics and also tackles some of its trickier aspects. He examines the relationship between Marx’s abstract concepts—such as “socially necessary labor time”—and how they are manifested in the capitalist marketplace as prices, wages, rents, and so on. He also explains how variations in price are affected by the development of “monopoly- capitalism,” the abandonment of the gold standard, and the deepening of capitalism as a global system. Amin extends Marx’s theory and applies it to capitalism’s current trajectory in a way that is unencumbered by the weight of orthodoxy and unafraid of its own radical conclusions.

Isaak Ilyich Rubin (1886-1937) was a Soviet economist who participated in the Russian Revolution and was a researcher at the Marx-Engels Institute Though his ideas were suppressed by the Soviet Union and he was eventually killed after being accused of Trotskyism, his ideas have since been rehabilitated within modern Marxism. Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (1924) emphasizes the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism within the labor theory of value. It also argues that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped by social structures. He also discusses commodity production as a mere theoretical abstraction that only explains one aspect of a developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible.

Economist, theorist and historian, the author suggests a definition of political economy which has nothing in common with the definition of economics. He states that political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form.

These three essays by the independent German Marxist Karl Korsch offer expositions, often in polemical form, of basic Marxist ideas. Since they cover both sociology and economics, they are excellent guides for the student on the most introductory, though not the most elementary, level. The first essay, "Leading Principles of Marxism," takes up Marxism on the plane of sociology and deals with the relation of Marxism to Comte and positivism, and to bourgeois sociology in general. The second, his introduction to the 1932 German edition of Capital, consists of an assessment of the work in human thought and an important reader's guide to Volume I. The third, "Why I Am a Marxist," is a polemic against various distortions in Marxism and an affirmation of the revolutionary, as against the academic, character of Marxism.

In this collection, four philosophers and four economists consider the Third Volume of Marx's Capital. The essays take up each of the major themes of Volume III - competition, for formation and development of the general rate of profit, the credit system and finance capital, rent, the Trinity formula and the concept of class - and consider them in the light of the two previous volumes. The authors share a focus on the concept of social form in Marx's work and on the method of his argument. The collection is intended both for specialists in Marxian theory and for students of the history of economic thought and of methodology.