The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation in Latin America and Beyond: Actuality and Pertinence

(Hardback)

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This edited collection engages with Marxs General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, examining the relevance and actuality of Marxs propositions for the analysis of contemporary capitalism in Latin America and beyond. The contributors offer an original and updated interpretation of Marx while also examining important topics in political economy. The contributors bring critical insights into scholarly debates on imperialism, exploitation, labor, and development.

Reviews

[The] eleven chapters of The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation achieve a degree of cohesiveness not particularly common in edited works on controversial topics. The authors present a theoretical analysis of other issues as well, such as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, changes wrought by globalization, economic relations between center and periphery, and the immiseration of the working class. In doing so, the book, which draws heavily on Capital along with Marx's earlier writings, represents an important contribution to long-standing Marxist debates.

-- "Science & Society"

At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, the concentration of income and wealth in just 1% of the world population became more evident than ever. The foundations of this process were theorized by Karl Marx in the General Law of Accumulation, which this book proposes to reinterpret in its contemporary manifestation on a global scale. The contributors to this volume offer excellent insights that are essential for understanding the contemporary world. This book is critical for those who wish to understand the changes in the functioning of the law and its implications and concrete manifestations.

--Paulo Nakatani, Universidade Federal do Esprito Santo

Fusaro and Alcal Sandoval, along with a number of outstanding heterodox scholars, rescue one of the central aspects of Marx's work: the general law of capitalist accumulation. Their book masterly and coherently combines the theoretical study and relevant empirical analysis, thus revealing the explanatory potential of a historical materialist approach. Faced with the primacy of subjectivism in neoclassical or Keynesian versions of orthodox economics-- which leads to the consideration of underdevelopment as a transitory anomaly and blames human psychology for the so-called market failures--this book vindicates why the analysis must start from the inner logic of capital, impersonal and objective, which irreversibly opposes capital to labor and is materialized in geographically uneven development. This book is absolutely recommended reading.

--Juan Pablo Mateo, Complutense University of Madrid

Author Bio

Lorenzo Fusaro is associate professor of political economy at the Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana.

Leinad Johan Alcal Sandoval is lecturer at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico.