Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
The introduction to the second volume of Classics of Marxism opens with a bold declaration of purpose, dismissing pessimists and sceptics who fear the future. It asserts that the current global crises—marked by war, mass unemployment, and capitalist decay—are not signs of systemic resilience but the death throes of a reactionary and barbarous order. Overthrowing this system, the text insists, is the necessary precondition for saving civilisation, culture, and humanity itself. Marxists, it proclaims, anticipate this overthrow with enthusiasm and will actively work to hasten it, ending the present nightmare and inaugurating a new chapter in human history. The volume is dated London, 23 September 2015.
The collection comprises five works that together illuminate the core of Marxist theory, which is understood as three interconnected parts: Marxist economics, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism. Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital, based on 1847 lectures, provides an early outline of the labour theory of value. Engels’s introduction corrects Marx’s original formulation, clarifying that workers sell their labour-power, not their labour itself. Value, Price and Profit, delivered in 1865, presents the mature theory: the value of labour-power is determined by the labour-time needed for the labourer’s subsistence, which includes a moral and historical element. Capitalists extract surplus value from unpaid labour by lengthening the working day, intensifying work, or using productivity incentives. This surplus value is realised through market exchange, but competition and mass poverty produce periodic crises of overproduction. The 2008 crash, the text notes, refuted bourgeois claims that markets self-equilibrate.
Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder combats ultraleft sectarianism, insisting revolutionaries must work within reformist mass organisations, including trade unions, and practice tactical flexibility. Trotsky’s In Defence of October defends the 1917 Revolution, arguing that its degeneration into Stalinism resulted from Russia’s material backwardness and isolation, not from socialism’s failure. The bureaucratic elite eventually restored capitalism. The present capitalist crisis, the introduction concludes, shows the system is ripe for overthrow.