This edition of Invisible Leviathan appears twenty five years after the publication of the original in 1994. For the most part, the contents of that first edition (including its preface, a major portion of which is reprinted below) have withstood the test of time remarkably well. Several chapters have required little in the way of revision or updating, although they have, I hope, benefitted from my efforts to improve their literary quality. Approximately half the chapters have been supplemented by new theoretical and empirical materials that have significantly strengthened the core arguments of the book. A new chapter on ‘Socially Necessary Unproductive Labour, Valorisation and Crisis’ has been added, and an old one, the original Chapter 11 on ‘Modernity, Postmodernism, and the Law of Value’, removed. The original Chapter 8, entitled ‘Respecifying Marx’s Value Categories: An Empirical Study of the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit’, has been replaced by the new Chapter 10, entitled ‘ “Testing Marx” in the Twilight of Capitalism: Marxian Value Categories, National Income Accounts and the Crisis of Valorisation’.
The different subtitles of the two editions speak not only to the revisions that the book has undergone, but also to the very different times in which they were produced. The subtitle of the first edition – ‘The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism Beyond Postmodernism’ – suggested that the book was both a defence of Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism (above all, his theory of labour value) and a rebuke to ‘postmodernist’ intellectual fashions that were flourishing in the early 1990s, in good part owing to the widespread belief that the demise of Soviet-bloc Stalinism signified the definitive ‘death of Marxism’. Replying in 1998 to what still stands as the most substantial commentary on the first edition (a lengthy and ostensibly appreciative article by Noel Castree entitled ‘Invisible Leviathan: Speculations on Marx, Spivak and the Question of Value’), I observed that ‘Marx’s theory of value provides some important keys to resolving a number of long-standing problems that postmodernist thought has exploited in order to advance a mode of theorizing and a politics that is fundamentally counterposed to Marxian socialism’, adding that ‘it was for this reason that I (somewhat reluctantly) agreed, at the urging of my publisher, to include a reference to postmodernism in the book’s subtitle’.2
The subtitle of the first edition may have succeeded in attracting the attention of a small number of left intellectuals interested in furthering the project of what Castree called an ‘ambivalent modern/postmodern Marxism’, but a definite price was also paid for using it. In a generally favourable review, the Marxist economist Alfredo Saad Filho noted quite correctly that ‘very little space is given to the Marxist critique of postmodernism, in spite of the title’.3 My somewhat plaintive response, recorded in my reply to Castree, was to insist that my intention had not been to ‘develop a full-blown critique of postmodernism, but to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism “beyond” the assumptions, preoccupations, and shibboleths of postmodernist thinking’, and that an ‘extended explicit engagement with postmodernist theory was not at all necessary to such an undertaking’.4
The extent to which its subtitle might have dampened interest in the first edition of Invisible Leviathan is arguable. The timing of its publication was in any case less than auspicious. Interest in Marxism, and in Marx’s theory of value (the main subject matter of the book), was at an all-time low. The rapid ascendancy of neoliberal and postmodernist ideas testified that Marxism, if not yet dead, was at the very least in precipitous decline as an intellectual and political force. Early in the 2000s, the book’s publisher, the University of Toronto Press, announced that Invisible Leviathan was officially ‘out of print’ – just as the proverbial Zeitgeist was making ready to change course.
The new millennium saw an explosion of ‘anti-corporate globalisation’ protests as well as massive, worldwide demonstrations against the Bush-Blair drive to war with Iraq. ‘Anti-capitalism’ was making a comeback as a new generation awakened to the reality that ‘the defeat of Communism’ and the end of the Cold War, far from conferring a ‘peace dividend’ of real value upon the popular masses, had actually emboldened the capitalist rulers to aggressively contain the intensifying crisis tendencies of twenty-first-century capitalism at the expense of the poor, the working class and ever-widening segments of the (always ill-defined) ‘middle class’. The slogan ‘Another World is Possible’ came to be embraced by millions of young people repelled by the neoliberal fallacy (first formulated by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) that ‘There is No Alternative’.
The Great Recession of 2008–09, the inaugural moment of what Anwar Shaikh has called ‘the First Great Depression of the Twenty-First Century’, definitively dispelled the long pall cast by the Death of Communism propaganda machine. Marx was back, and Marxist analysis was once again finding an audience. Several portions of Invisible Leviathan were resurrected for inclusion in my 2010 book Global Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System, which became the subject of a 2011 review symposium for the online journal Global Discourse. In 2012, one of the more directly political arguments of that book was republished under the title ‘Vertical’ in Adbusters, the iconoclastic publication credited with instigating the Occupy movement.
In 2014, my book Marxist Phoenix: Studies in Historical Materialism and Marxist Socialism was published as something of a companion volume to Global Capitalism in Crisis. In its preface, I described the two works as ‘joint sequels’ to Invisible Leviathan, but I was nevertheless acutely aware that their availability failed to compensate for the latter’s out-of-print status. Hence, when Sebastian Budgen encouraged me to submit a publication proposal to the Historical Materialism book series for a new edition of Invisible Leviathan, I was only too happy to comply – and not least because it afforded the opportunity to attach to the book a more fitting subtitle than the one with which it had been saddled in 1994.
In light of the revisions and additions I decided to make to the book, the criteria for a new subtitle came quickly. First, it needed to eliminate entirely any reference to postmodernism, consistent with my decision to excise the last chapter of the first edition on ‘Modernity, Postmodernism, and the Law of Value’.5 Second, I wanted it to resonate with a major theme of Marxist Phoenix as signalled in the latter’s introduction:
… the theoretical interests and preoccupations displayed here are not dominated by questions pertaining to how the capitalist state might be incrementally ‘democratized,’ or how the capitalist economy might be made more ‘stable’ and its distribution of income more ‘just,’ or how the phenomena of racial and gender oppression within particular wealthy nations might be mitigated while leaving intact the structures of capitalism, imperialism, and oppression on a world scale. Rather they are shaped by my intention to make the case that a mass socialist workers’ movement must be built – and built soon! – to rescue humanity, once and for all, from the perils and increasingly onerous burdens of a rapidly decaying capitalist order.6
Finally, the subtitle needed to speak to how the ‘invisible leviathan’ (that is to say, the capitalist law of value, as analysed by Marx) had run its course in promoting human development, and how its malignant presence now threatens the survival of its host: human civilisation itself. ‘Marx’s Law of Value in the Twilight of Capitalism’ fit the bill perfectly. Indeed, the preface to the first edition (reprinted below) could easily have been written with this subtitle in mind.
The French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre formulated our contemporary conundrum very well as long ago as the 1960s:
… there is acute conflict today between the quantitative (growth) and the qualitative (development). It is accompanied by mounting complexity in social relations, which is masked and counteracted by opposed elements. Control over external nature is increasing, while man’s appropriation of his own nature is stagnating or regressing. The former falls primarily under the head of growth, the latter of development.7
Real human development requires a qualitative leap beyond capitalism, beyond a system dominated by the imperative of mindless quantitative growth – of markets, profits, capital, and GDP, and increasingly of debt, weaponry, waste and destitution. It requires a leap into socialism, a global civilisation in which ‘the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all’,8 and upon which a rational and sustainable relationship between humanity and the natural world can be founded.
Marx’s theory of value provides us with the indispensable intellectual tools needed to expose the madness of the prevailing capitalist ‘world disorder’, to demonstrate that this sorry state of affairs is by no means ‘inevitable’, and to inspire a vision of a new and far superior civilisation that is within our grasp if we can only muster the intelligence and the will to fight for it. The stakes surrounding the ‘value controversy’ could not be higher. And that is why this book has been republished at a time when the potential audience for it should, at long last, be burgeoning.
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In addition to those mentioned in the preface to the first edition, I wish to thank the following individuals for the support and advice they have given me in the writing and production of this new edition: Sebastian Budgen, Adam Hanieh, Danny Hayward, and Simon Mussell (all four associated with Historical Materialism); the two anonymous peer reviewers enlisted by the editors of the Historical Materialism book series; the production team at Brill; Michael Roberts for contributing a foreword to the volume; Josh Dumont and Takuya Sato for their commentary on various parts of the manuscript as it progressed; and Jonah Butovsky for his contributions to Chapter 10, a good portion of which is based on work I co-authored with him. All remaining errors and shortcomings are, of course, my responsibility alone.
Niagara Falls, Ontario
April 2018