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In his book, Rudolf Hilferding. The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat, William Smaldone sums up: ‘The tragedy in Hilferding‘s life lay in his adherence to a political outlook that was incompatible with German reality in 1933’ (Smaldone 1998, 8). Although this may certainly be true, in this, Rudolf Hilferding did not differ from many others, and Smaldone’s book itself ultimately says much more about Hilferding’s actual tragedy: the talented economist and social democratic politician died in the hell of GESTAPO imprisonment and also played a part in the rise to power of those he had identified as mortal enemies early on, and who were able to maintain that power for many years.

Hilferding’s last theoretical text (1940; published only in 1954) provides an insight into the creativity, as well as into the limitations, of Hilferding’s approach. While he shows himself, indeed, aware of the major challenges confronting Marxism in its crisis in the 1930s, he has an overwhelming tendency to look for solutions in the context of the academic mainstream. Still, his reflections do present a substantial challenge to the Marxist mainstream, which deserves to be taken up and properly answered.

This chapter aims to make reading the third volume of Capital a challenge and a productive resource for contemporary debates. To do so, it combines a careful consideration of the sources made available by the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) edition with an insistent interrogation of Marx’s reasons for not finishing Capital in the ‘aesthetic form’ he originally planned. From here, it goes on to look at the reception of Capital and its third and concluding volume, in particular, in Marxist politics (singling out the theoretical efforts of Lenin and Gramsci). The work ‘invested’ in order to make Capital in its entirety, as presented in a theoretically integrated way in Volume III, useful for a politics of overcoming the domination of capital is then discussed, while focusing on the relation of science and politics. This is then turned into an appeal to present debates making full use of the scientific and analytical resources Capital as a whole still has to offer. In this way, we hope to address an invitation—to readers, but also to our authors—to continue the debate on how to scientifically grasp the structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the domination of the capitalist mode of production, and how to make use of such insights to turn anti-capitalist struggles into a forceful reality again.

This conviction of mine [i.e. that a reading of the history of Italian Marxisms should be given which is different from that underlying Cristina Corradi’s book (Corradi, Storia dei marxismi in Italia, 2005)] is based, indeed, on the very distinction between Marxists and Marxians, which I consider to be decisive. This distinction is not chronological, as if in the 1970s everybody was a Marxist, while after that, out of the blue, the Marxians arrived and were welcomed. The truth is that such an authentically Marxian thread has, in fact, existed, and is defined by some crucial aspects. First, by a return to Marx’s original problems, which had been buried by Marxism: those linked to the monetary constitution of surplus value and those referring to the re-linking of (new) value to (living) labour. And then, [second,] the absence [in Marx] of any separation between the ‘economic’ sides of these problems and those problems concerning their ‘philosophical’ and ‘sociological’ foundations. Finally, the attempt of taking up the enterprise of the critique of political economy again, in a non-dogmatic and non-repetitive way. This thread dates back, however, and has a long history throughout the twentieth century. In order to bring to light the traces of this development, it is necessary to read the history of the discussion on Marx in a very different way from that practised until now.

Wolf investigates the consequences of the missing elaboration of the reproduction of labour power for the enlarged reproduction of capital. The issue of the forms of reproduction of labour power, which Marx skipped in his drafts for Volume II, raises issues of both gender and ecology for an adequate analysis of the comprehensive reproduction process of capital in Volume III. This leads him to identify a deeper absence of ‘living labour’ in Marx’s dialectical presentation of the forms of reproduction of capital, as it dominates modern societies. The missing elaboration of the cycle of metamorphoses undergone by variable capital and labour power is reconstructed on the level of Marx’s analysis of the metamorphoses of capital (Volume II), on that of the comprehensive process of capital (Volume III), as well as in the transition to the economic surface of the trinity formula (a largely unwritten final chapter). This absence is simultaneously regarded as a symptom of the specific concentration of Marx’s critique of political economy on issues of economics, and of the need to supplement his reconstruction of the comprehensive process of capital leading to his reconstruction of the economic surface of modern capitalist societies by other dimensions of material reproduction, as in the dimensions of gender, of ecology, and geography. This leads to the idea of supplementing the critique of political economy with other critiques following its paradigm but not dependent on it.