Abstract

Saying that Marx′s Capital is about capital, which in itself constitutes a social relation, seems quite trivial. However, the debate on Marxian theory took more than 100 years from the first edition of his opus magnum to arrive at this understanding. The most fruitful contribution in this regard has been made since the late 1960s in western Germany by the so-called “neue Marx-Lektüre”, which was an attempt at a new reading of Marx opposed to both the governmental Marxism and its anti-communist counterpart. While other, certainly more renowned, strands of dissident Marxist theorising still widely shared the orthodox assumptions on the theory of value, the “neue Marx-Lektüre” addressed central issues of the Marxian critique of political economy, concerning its subject matter and its peculiar method of research and representation