Introduction

This introductory chapter is an attempt to present the book and its authors to the reader in a manner consistent with the philosophical approach that underlies the economic analysis to be presented in the main body of the book, i.e. historical materialism. It recounts the historical destiny of Marxism within the last half-century in a nutshell by referring first to the intellectual atmosphere that was born all around the world in the context of the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968 and indicates how, over the subsequent decades, this was replaced by a thoroughly reactionary conjuncture in both the material world and the universe of ideas. The authors having been shaped, it is pointed out, by the fight for emancipation, first and foremost class struggles, that marked the earlier period, have remained unswervingly loyal to the Marxist perspective up until the present. The economic analysis presented to the reader in this collection is thus firmly based on the pathbreaking methodology that Marx developed in his Capital. The Introduction also offers an overview of the contents of the book, explaining the relations between the four parts respectively on the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the following parts (Part I), the innovative empirical work that has been developed internationally within the last half century (Part II), examples of how Marxist political economy sheds light on contemporary twenty-first-century capitalism (Part III), and the most recent, though probably not the last, attempt to discard Marx’s value theory, i.e. neo-Ricardianism (Part IV).