This collection of sixty-one short essays provides some content to its claim that “Marxism offers a theoretical and conceptual apparatus that can be used to review its own evolution” (p. 1). Its ambition to take stock of what Marxists have learned in order to pass the baton to a new generation is reflected in the high proportion of emeritus faculty on the list of contributors.

And, this will be a valuable resource for scholars, many in fields outside economics, for whom Karl Marx remains such a vibrant presence that he is still read and reread in small study groups. Indeed, one highlight is a series of chapters on anthropology, geography, international political economy, political science, and sociology that contextualize the interdisciplinary overlaps with Marxian political economy.

What has been learned? Here is a condensed list that makes no attempt to be comprehensive but does try to identify advances that will interest economists.

First, we have learned to appreciate the commodity and money as forms of value. Here, the chapter by Samuel Knafo on forms of values provides a point of entry that informs the treatment of money (chapter by Paulo dos Santos); the transformation from labour values to prices of production (Alfredo Saad-Filho); the labour theory itself, exploitation and surplus value (chapters by Ben Fine); and the sometimes tense relationship between Marxism and related approaches such as neo-Ricardian economics (Sungur Savran) or Analytical Marxism (Marco Boffo). In the 1970s, rediscovery of the work of Russian economist Isaac I. Rubin and of Marx’s rough draft of Capital aroused awareness that value is more than a product of labor and becomes “a structure that regulates social labour’’ (p. 369). This diverted attention away from the purely quantitative issue of how embodied labor determines prices, which Fine calls an instrumentalist interpretation of the labor theory, and toward the question “under what circumstances does value exist in society itself?’’ (p. 196). This orientation restores primacy to the distinction between abstract and concrete labor, and the “idea that abstract labour only emerges through exchange put[s] the emphasis on the pivotal role of money’’ (p. 371). Marx’s difficult first chapter (in Capital) becomes more manageable: dos Santos provides a helpful guide for those study circles struggling with his derivation of money as a form of value.

Socially necessary abstract labor, then, is the substance of value but prices are its monetary expression that, in turn, regulate social labor. But for this interpretation to work, money itself must embody value, which can be recovered ex post from the monetary expression of value (how many dollars of observable value-added represent one hour of labor time) because it is the reciprocal of the value of money. For Marx, of course, the basis of the value of money lay in the value of the money commodity: gold. The collapse of the gold standard and the demonetization of gold challenge current theorists to explain how the value of money is regulated under fiat moneys issued by the State. Owing to its significance for the modern interpretation of value theory discussed here, it is no exaggeration to say this is the burning question for a Marxian theory of money. Dos Santos provides a hint of where the answer may lie when he remarks that “the currently widespread inflation targeting regimes in monetary policy can be interpreted as unwitting attempts to manage an inconvertible money by influencing the evolution of the value it commands” (p. 239).

This new understanding of the central role of money as an expression of value has shaped the interminable debates about the “transformation problem’’ that arose immediately after the publication of volume three of Capital. These are probably the best-known aspects of Marxian theory among non-Marxian economists, since the luminaries of neoclassical economics from Eugen Böhm-Bawerk to Paul Samuelson have participated in them. At issue is the internal consistency of the labor theory of value, given that, as more concrete determinations are brought into the analysis, particularly the tendency for prices to adjust so that profit rates equalize across industries, prices will systematically diverge from their values determined by socially necessary labor times (as David Ricardo had already discovered). Here, the chapter by Saad-Filho explains the recent evolution of the value-form approach, and makes the point that while the formal transformation debate stops at the equalization of profit rates, the labor theory of value incorporates further layers of determination grounded in circulation (e.g., commercial profit, finance, interest, and rent), giving rise to more concrete and therefore distorted or fetishized forms of value. Modern interpretations of the labor theory preserve and defend the important principles that surplus value is produced by socially necessary labor and that it is redistributed among capitals through competition, finance, and circulation (although that has turned out to be harder to show than Marx originally believed).

Second, we now have a more complete understanding of the origins of capitalism in the breakdown of feudal European society, owing largely to the work of historians Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood in elaborating on and emending the 1950s transition debates between Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb. Chapters by George C. Comninel, David Laibman, and Wood herself provide an overview. The central advance was transcendence of the commercialization model in which capitalist behaviors are already present ab ovo, requiring only the catalytic action of trade and money before they can express themselves. Indeed, the question that must be addressed is why capitalist behavior emerged at all from a feudal society that was itself resistant to change. Brenner’s answer, she explains, lies in the rise of agrarian capitalism, first in England where historical conditions were ripe for the emergence of social relations of production that “generated the imperatives of competition, the requirements of profit-maximization, and the need for constant improvement of the forces of production . . .’’ (p. 38).

Third, we have richer, more nuanced views of the nature of capitalist crisis and the law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall. During the 1970s, when most of the contributors cut their teeth on Marxist theory, vigorous debates broke out over whether the crisis raging then stemmed from Marx’s gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profitrate, from the rising strength of labor, or from chronic underconsumption. Simon Clarke reflects that these (and other) theories of crisis are not competing alternatives, but rather that “the determinants and characteristics of any particular crisis are always singular, embedded in the concrete characteristics of capital accumulation at a particular time and place . . .” (p. 95). Simon Mohun, building on a generation of theoretical and empirical research on profitability, offers the view that Marx’s gesetz and “its counteracting tendencies provide a framework, but no more than that. The challenge then is to explain the historical reality of significant periods both of falling and of rising profitability” (p. 303).

The chapter by Fine on the circuits of capital rejects the view that Marx’s famous schemes of reproduction somehow anticipate modern general equilibrium models. Instead, these are tools for exploring the logical requirements for capitalist reproduction, both simple and expanded, and, in turn, for attacking the critical issues of aggregate demand, money, and Say’s Law that are central to Keynesian economics. Yet, Fine misses an opportunity to explain that Marx left work on expanded reproduction incomplete, and that we now have a solution to the problem due to Duncan Foley’s (Reference Foley1986) formalization of the circuit of capital. Foley showed that expanded reproduction is possible only if there is a source of finance external to the circuit of capital, either a commodity-money sector (gold) or, more importantly, a credit system. David Kotz arrived at this conclusion independently well before he published it (Kotz Reference Kotz1991).

Fourth, we have a keener appreciation of the varieties of capitalism. Marx observed in the preface to the first German edition of Capital that the development of England “shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” But it has not turned out that way. Instead, capitalist development can be fully comprehended only in terms of the distinctive political, institutional, and social arrangements that support the accumulation process as these have evolved in a spiral of crisis, reconstitution, growth, and renewed crisis. New arrivals have typically not conformed precisely to one model of capitalist development, and the leading capitalist countries have not developed along a linear path. Modern scholarship recognizes the need to address the varieties of capitalism, and chapters by Greg Albo, Thomas Marois, Stavros Mavroudeas, and Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy survey the evolving literature on economic development, social structures of accumulation, and the periodization of capitalism up to its most recent phase, now generally categorized as neoliberal capitalism. It is hard to imagine making any progress in understanding modern capitalism without at least some knowledge of the basic categories and analytical language provided by Marxian political economy. Space did not permit mention of the many other stimulating chapters in this collection but they convey well that knowledge and language.