A Contemporary History of Marx’s Capital

Paolo Favilli provides both students and scholars with an original reading of themes and issues found in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and its connections with present- day challenges. By way of continuous cross- referencing between present and past, Favilli demonstrates that claims regarding the scientific status of Das Kapital, advanced by countless texts since its original publication, are themselves deeply imbued by the ‘spirit of the times’. If in 1963 Jean-Paul Sartre could write that Marxism was the unsurpassable philosophical horizon of our times, what could make an undergraduate student today consider such a claim plausible?

Informed by the latest research on Marxist theory and decades of teaching the Philosophy of History, Favilli employs a didactic approach stimulating student engagement and learning opportunities in the classroom. This approach allows for a better understanding of relationship between the present and the multiple temporalities that characterise and periodise the contemporary era. What follows is a critique of the contemporary academy for its hangover of post-1989 nuovismo (cult of novelty) and inability to make the proper distinctions between Marxism-as-party-state, the works of Karl Marx, and Marxism as an object of history. This led to the spectacle where after 1989, those who had spent most of their careers as Marxist-hued scholars not only abandoned this identity but also spurned any recognition that Marx and Marxism were worthwhile objects of enquiry.

This book was first published in Italian as A proposito de ‘Il capitale’..., Il lungo presente e i miei studenti. Corso di storia contemporanea (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2021). This English translation includes a new foreword by the author.