Christopher J Arthur
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3673763 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Christopher J Arthur |
| NOMBRES | Christopher J |
| APELLIDO | Arthur |
| FIRMA | ARTHUR C J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7577-8472 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1986 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Replies to Critics of The Spectre of Capital
I thank my interlocutors for the care and attention that they have given to my work, The Spectre of Capital; Idea and Reality . 1 I also thank the journal for organizing this symposium. The book rigorously develops a systematic dialectical presentation (SDP) of capital as an Idea. The very first, perhaps, to explore the method of systematic dialectic were Tony Smith and Geert Reuten. This problematic always involves a nuanced reception of Hegel’s…
The Spectre of Capital
falls into three parts: i.
Tracing innovation pathways behind fisheries co-management in Vanuatu
Co-management approaches have become a core part of coastal fisheries policy and planning practice in Vanuatu. With a long history of supporting community based fisheries management (CBFM), we trace its evolution in Vanuatu to understand how new structures and processes become adopted at scale. A theory of scaling for CBFM guides the analysis of regime shifts over time. We discuss planning for sustained spread under a national programme by catego…
Spectre of Capital
Engels Today
The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour
According to Karl Marx, only in the most modern society is the abstract category, precisely in the determinateness of its abstraction, 'true in practice'. This chapter explains how and where the category of 'abstract labour' becomes 'true in practice'. It addresses the relevant passages in the Grundrisse , and also Capital . The chapter explains the consequences of the practical abstraction intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production and excha…
Contradiction and Abstraction
Following the publication of my book The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital', and the symposium on it in Historical Materialism 13.2, a critique by Roberto Finelli recently appeared: 'Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's “Capital”' in Historical Materialism 15.2. Finelli argues that my systematic dialectic is not taken sufficiently far, in that I retain presuppositions not posited by the cap…
The Inner Totality of Capitalism
Money and exchange
This paper endorses Marx's deduction of the need for money to actualise value before exchange can be considered, so that, in exchange, money's function as means of purchase follows from money's ability to actualise value. This is contrasted with the Uno school, whose proponents mix concepts from Capital chapters 1 and 2. The paper goes beyond Marx in presenting a more dialectical derivation of money and a more rigorous account of the logic of exc…
Reply to Critics
Historical Materialism , volume 13:2 (189–221) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 For other aspects of the project, written subsequent to those in the book, see Arthur 1998, 2002b, 2002c, 2004b. Christopher J. Ar thur Reply to Critics Introduction I thank my interlocutors for the close attention they have given my work; and I thank Historical Materialism for organising this comradely and fruitful exchange.…
Money and the Form of Value
In the Preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx drew attention to the fact that the chapter on the commodity, and, more especially, the section on the form of value, is the most difficult (89–90).1 Yet this section is, Marx told Engels, ‘decisive’ for the whole book.2 In this chapter he felt compelled to ‘popularize’ the presentation of certain topics. But the intrinsic difficulty of the section on the form of value prevented this, not becau…
Subject and Counter-Subject
Value and negativity
Recently I have advanced a new theory of value in which the relation of labour to value is not taken in positive terms, but understood as a dialectic of negativity (Arthur 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004). This is derived from the insight that, when the key concepts ('value', 'abstract labour', and 'socially necessary labour') are situated in the capital relation, this changes their meanings from those attributed to them at the more abstract level of simp…
The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital
The spectral ontology of value
The historical specificity of capitalism is that an 'onto-logical inversion' occurs whereby (exchange) 'value', immediately just the negation of use value, gains self-presence, real 'Being', albeit that of an empty 'Presence'. Thus value emerges from the void as a 'spectre' that haunts the 'real world' of capitalist commodity production. Capitalism is marked by the subjection of the material process of production and circulation to the ghostly ob…
Once More on the Homology Thesis
The Hegel-Marx Connection
Capital in General and Marx’s Capital
When Marx published the first substantial result of his studies in 1859 the title was Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; Book One1 was ‘On Capital’, of which ‘Section One’ was ‘Capital in General’.2 However, when the first volume of Marx’s masterpiece appeared in 1867 the overall title was Capital; ‘Critique of Political Economy’ was reduced to a sub-title; and the term ‘capital in general’ had vanished. Nonetheless, it is argued …
The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
Value, Labour and Negativity
The concepts of the first chapter of Capital are there presented abstractly. At a more concrete level 'value', 'abstract labour', and 'socially necessary Labour time' must be situated in the capital relation; e.g. the time that is 'socially necessary' is that in which capital 'pumps out' labour. The essentially contested expropriation of the workers' powers by capital leads to a new understanding of the labour theory of value as a dialectic of ne…
From the Critique of Hegel to the Critique of Capital
The thesis of this essay is that the critique of Hegel cannot be separated from the critique of capital, and that the critique of economic categories is greatly advanced if modelled on the critique of Hegel. It is in truth the very same critique that is to be employed. This identity arises in virtue of the fact that Hegel’s standpoint may be seen as a philosophical absolutisation of the standpoint of capital,1 on the one hand; and in virtue of th…
The Fluidity of Capital and the Logic of the Concept
Capital, Volume Two (Book II, ‘The Process of Circulation of Capital) is the site of a key feature of Marx’s method. For the importance of his introduction of the concept of ‘circuits of capital’ (outlined in Part One, chs 1–4) cannot be overestimated. Whereas neoclassicals explicitly, and the classicals for the most part (if implicitly), as well as many Marxists, all deploy as a key analytical construct the notion of equilibrium, for Marx it is …
The Circulation of Capital
The second volume of Marx's Capital is entitled The Circulation of Capital . Here a collection of original essays, by internationally known scholars, treat its themes, bringing to bear on all its part
Systematic Dialectic
Systematic dialectic is distinguished from historical dialectic and its logic explored. As a strategy of exposition designed to articulate the forms of a given whole it orders the relevant categories in a linear development. The dialectical justification of the transitions is the central question addressed. What is given progressively as the further determination of the abstract beginning should be read retrogressively as a grounding movement val…
The Young Engels and Philosophy
L'A. apporte une correction a un article sur Engels paru dans un numero ulterieur de «Science and Society» qui lui etait consacre. Citant un extrait du texte affirmant que Lenine a defendu sa competence en philosophie...comme l'avait fait Engels avant lui en se proclamant Docteur, l'A. montre que le jeune Engels dit tout le contraire dans une de ses lettres de 1842 a A. Ruge, directeur de la revue «Deutsche Jahbucher», ou il estime ne pas avoir a…
The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital
Value, Labour and Negativity
The concepts of the first chapter of Capital are there presented abstractly. At a more concrete level 'value', 'abstract labour', and 'socially necessary Labour time' must be situated in the capital relation; e.g. the time that is 'socially necessary' is that in which capital 'pumps out' labour. The essentially contested expropriation of the workers' powers by capital leads to a new understanding of the labour theory of value as a dialectic of ne…
Subject and Counter-Subject
Contradiction and Abstraction
Following the publication of my book The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital', and the symposium on it in Historical Materialism 13.2, a critique by Roberto Finelli recently appeared: 'Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's “Capital”' in Historical Materialism 15.2. Finelli argues that my systematic dialectic is not taken sufficiently far, in that I retain presuppositions not posited by the cap…
The Inner Totality of Capitalism
Reply to Critics
Historical Materialism , volume 13:2 (189–221) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 For other aspects of the project, written subsequent to those in the book, see Arthur 1998, 2002b, 2002c, 2004b. Christopher J. Ar thur Reply to Critics Introduction I thank my interlocutors for the close attention they have given my work; and I thank Historical Materialism for organising this comradely and fruitful exchange.…
Tracing innovation pathways behind fisheries co-management in Vanuatu
Co-management approaches have become a core part of coastal fisheries policy and planning practice in Vanuatu. With a long history of supporting community based fisheries management (CBFM), we trace its evolution in Vanuatu to understand how new structures and processes become adopted at scale. A theory of scaling for CBFM guides the analysis of regime shifts over time. We discuss planning for sustained spread under a national programme by catego…
Money and exchange
This paper endorses Marx's deduction of the need for money to actualise value before exchange can be considered, so that, in exchange, money's function as means of purchase follows from money's ability to actualise value. This is contrasted with the Uno school, whose proponents mix concepts from Capital chapters 1 and 2. The paper goes beyond Marx in presenting a more dialectical derivation of money and a more rigorous account of the logic of exc…
Value and negativity
Recently I have advanced a new theory of value in which the relation of labour to value is not taken in positive terms, but understood as a dialectic of negativity (Arthur 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004). This is derived from the insight that, when the key concepts ('value', 'abstract labour', and 'socially necessary labour') are situated in the capital relation, this changes their meanings from those attributed to them at the more abstract level of simp…
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born in Trèves in the Rhineland. He studied law in Bonn, philosophy and history in Berlin, and received a doctorate from the University of Jena for a thesis on Epicurus (341–270 BC). (Epicurus' philosophy was a reaction against the ‘other-worldliness’ of Plato's theory of Forms. Whereas for Plato knowledge was of intelligible Forms, and the criterion of the truth of a hypothesis about the definition of a Form was that it…
Dialectics of Labour
This detailed study of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 demonstrates the unity of the different manuscripts, and clarifies and expands upon many of Marx's obscured thoughts. Marx developed a central notion of the importance of human labour in the history of society based on German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. The first part of this book outlines Marx's theory of alienation. The second deals with…
Negation of the Negation in Marx's Capital
(1993). Negation of the Negation in Marx's Capital. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 49-65
Engels Today
Engels Today marks the centenary of Frederick Engels death through a collection of papers engaging with the thought of Marx's only close collaborator, who was influential in his own right, as well as
Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics
It is a little known fact that Frederick Engels was the original pioneer in the territory Karl Marx later made his own, namely the critique of political economy. Prior even to Engels’s empirically-based study of the condition of the English working class in 1844 was his article Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, written in 1843. This came into Marx’s hands in his capacity as editor of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in which it was …
The Fluidity of Capital and the Logic of the Concept
Capital, Volume Two (Book II, ‘The Process of Circulation of Capital) is the site of a key feature of Marx’s method. For the importance of his introduction of the concept of ‘circuits of capital’ (outlined in Part One, chs 1–4) cannot be overestimated. Whereas neoclassicals explicitly, and the classicals for the most part (if implicitly), as well as many Marxists, all deploy as a key analytical construct the notion of equilibrium, for Marx it is …
The Circulation of Capital
The second volume of Marx's Capital is entitled The Circulation of Capital . Here a collection of original essays, by internationally known scholars, treat its themes, bringing to bear on all its part
Systematic Dialectic
Systematic dialectic is distinguished from historical dialectic and its logic explored. As a strategy of exposition designed to articulate the forms of a given whole it orders the relevant categories in a linear development. The dialectical justification of the transitions is the central question addressed. What is given progressively as the further determination of the abstract beginning should be read retrogressively as a grounding movement val…
The Young Engels and Philosophy
L'A. apporte une correction a un article sur Engels paru dans un numero ulterieur de «Science and Society» qui lui etait consacre. Citant un extrait du texte affirmant que Lenine a defendu sa competence en philosophie...comme l'avait fait Engels avant lui en se proclamant Docteur, l'A. montre que le jeune Engels dit tout le contraire dans une de ses lettres de 1842 a A. Ruge, directeur de la revue «Deutsche Jahbucher», ou il estime ne pas avoir a…
Engels Today
From the Critique of Hegel to the Critique of Capital
The thesis of this essay is that the critique of Hegel cannot be separated from the critique of capital, and that the critique of economic categories is greatly advanced if modelled on the critique of Hegel. It is in truth the very same critique that is to be employed. This identity arises in virtue of the fact that Hegel’s standpoint may be seen as a philosophical absolutisation of the standpoint of capital,1 on the one hand; and in virtue of th…
Value, Labour and Negativity
The concepts of the first chapter of Capital are there presented abstractly. At a more concrete level 'value', 'abstract labour', and 'socially necessary Labour time' must be situated in the capital relation; e.g. the time that is 'socially necessary' is that in which capital 'pumps out' labour. The essentially contested expropriation of the workers' powers by capital leads to a new understanding of the labour theory of value as a dialectic of ne…
Capital in General and Marx’s Capital
When Marx published the first substantial result of his studies in 1859 the title was Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; Book One1 was ‘On Capital’, of which ‘Section One’ was ‘Capital in General’.2 However, when the first volume of Marx’s masterpiece appeared in 1867 the overall title was Capital; ‘Critique of Political Economy’ was reduced to a sub-title; and the term ‘capital in general’ had vanished. Nonetheless, it is argued …
The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
The spectral ontology of value
The historical specificity of capitalism is that an 'onto-logical inversion' occurs whereby (exchange) 'value', immediately just the negation of use value, gains self-presence, real 'Being', albeit that of an empty 'Presence'. Thus value emerges from the void as a 'spectre' that haunts the 'real world' of capitalist commodity production. Capitalism is marked by the subjection of the material process of production and circulation to the ghostly ob…
Once More on the Homology Thesis
The Hegel-Marx Connection
Money and the Form of Value
In the Preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx drew attention to the fact that the chapter on the commodity, and, more especially, the section on the form of value, is the most difficult (89–90).1 Yet this section is, Marx told Engels, ‘decisive’ for the whole book.2 In this chapter he felt compelled to ‘popularize’ the presentation of certain topics. But the intrinsic difficulty of the section on the form of value prevented this, not becau…
Subject and Counter-Subject
Value and negativity
Recently I have advanced a new theory of value in which the relation of labour to value is not taken in positive terms, but understood as a dialectic of negativity (Arthur 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004). This is derived from the insight that, when the key concepts ('value', 'abstract labour', and 'socially necessary labour') are situated in the capital relation, this changes their meanings from those attributed to them at the more abstract level of simp…
The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital
Reply to Critics
Historical Materialism , volume 13:2 (189–221) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 For other aspects of the project, written subsequent to those in the book, see Arthur 1998, 2002b, 2002c, 2004b. Christopher J. Ar thur Reply to Critics Introduction I thank my interlocutors for the close attention they have given my work; and I thank Historical Materialism for organising this comradely and fruitful exchange.…
The Inner Totality of Capitalism
Money and exchange
This paper endorses Marx's deduction of the need for money to actualise value before exchange can be considered, so that, in exchange, money's function as means of purchase follows from money's ability to actualise value. This is contrasted with the Uno school, whose proponents mix concepts from Capital chapters 1 and 2. The paper goes beyond Marx in presenting a more dialectical derivation of money and a more rigorous account of the logic of exc…
Contradiction and Abstraction
Following the publication of my book The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital', and the symposium on it in Historical Materialism 13.2, a critique by Roberto Finelli recently appeared: 'Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's “Capital”' in Historical Materialism 15.2. Finelli argues that my systematic dialectic is not taken sufficiently far, in that I retain presuppositions not posited by the cap…
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