Introduction

Our world is one in which the contradictions of relatively unopposed capitalism are becoming more blatant every day. Neoliberal globalisation is throwing a growing proportion of the world’s people into desperate economic insecurity and poverty — providing ever fewer well-paying, secure jobs relative to the world’s population. At the same time, irreparable damage to the Earth’s environment is accelerating at a truly frightening pace. And one of the great ironies is that because of ideological manipulation, intellectual fashions and fads, and the seeming triumph of neoliberal capitalism, less and less attention is being devoted to the task of refining and improving the theory developed by Marx in Capital — the theoretical work that more than any other advances our understanding of capital’s deep structures. How ironic that intellectuals would turn away from a theory that sets the explanation of the deep structure of capital on a strong footing precisely at a time when capitalism is the main force wreaking havoc in the world.