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

This edited collection engages with Marx’s General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, examining the relevance and actuality of Marx’s 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.

Table of Contents:
Part I. Revisiting Marx's General Law Chapter 1: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation: A Comprehensive Reading from the Perspective of the Systematic Structure of Capital Chapter 2: Violence and Crepuscular Capitalism. Structural Dynamics and Superstructural Forms of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Chapter 3: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation and a Theory of Labor-Shortage Business Cycles Chapter 4: The Determination of Wages in the Framework of Capital Accumulation: The Industrial Reserve Army and the Value of Labor-Power Chapter 5: Labor Precariousness as an Abstract Form of Domination Part II. Underdevelopment, Imperialism and the Industrial Reserve Army of Labour in Latin America and Beyond Chapter 6: Marx´s General Law and the Development of Underdevelopment Chapter 7: Bordering the Surplus Population across the Mediterranean: Imperialism and Unfree Labor Chapter 8: Marini within its Limits: A Critique of Super-exploitation as a Structural Mechanism of Accumulation in t

About the Author :
Lorenzo Fusaro is associate professor of political economy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Leinad Johan Alcalá Sandoval is lecturer at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Review :
Fusaro and Alcalá 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. 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. [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.