Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital.(Book Review)

Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital (Leiden: Brill 2002)

CHRISTOPHER ARTHUR has devoted much of his scholarly life to studying the relation between Marx's Capital and Hegel's Logic. This is a collection of essays, all of which (except the introductory and concluding chapters) have been published elsewhere, but are here revised to varying extents.

For those interested in Capital, this is an important book to read, for it concentrates the mind on the meaning and sequence of the categories in Marx's great work. It suggests a rigorously dialectical way of reading the interconnection of categories in Capital volume one, chapters 1-6, a way that parallels Hegel's Logic. He makes the important claim that these chapters should be read strictly as a theory of the commodity, money, and capital as circulation forms. It follows that the content of these forms, which requires a labour theory of value, can only be well grounded dialectically after the logics of the value forms have been grounded.

Arthur masterfully presents the basic elements of dialectical reasoning and its appropriateness in studying an object which is self-abstracting in the sense that it is self-expanding value (capital) itself that, through its own motions, homogenizes the actuality that the theory aims to grasp. To an extent, then, in its historical unfolding, capital helps the theorist by …