The 21st century has been a century of historic crises with deep socioeconomic and political consequences.Before the end of its first decade, the world was hit by the 2007-2009 Great Recession, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, followed by the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. While the ecological crisis with its colossal levels of human and environmental devastation continues to break every historical record, we entered into the third decade of the century with a global pandemic, the worst since the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu.The new century has also seen some of the longest, deadliest, and most widespread wars since the Second World War. These crises have underpinned the emergence of morbid backlashes in the form of far-right movements and authoritarianism (Tooze, 2018). A glance at the rise of far-right political parties and populist politicians around the world is enough to see that democratic backsliding and xenophobic, racist, sexist, and elitist politics are threatening not only unconsolidated and fragile democracies but also those political regimes that were considered as the most stable of liberal democracies.As alarming as these developments are, they certainly cannot be identified as temporary anomalies in the long history of capitalism seen from a global perspective. Capitalist development since its inception in the 16th century has always been riddled with systematic exploitation, economic recessions, colonial oppression, genocidal wars, and ecological devastation, all the while generating the most massive expansion of productive capacity and monetary wealth in human history. Nevertheless, the scale of its crises and the extension of its consequences into the core capitalist countries, particularly after the Great Recession have led to a renewed interest in the critique of capitalism and theorization of alternative socioeconomic models. Critical discussion on contemporary capitalism is no longer confined to the radical left (e.g.,
The year 2017, which marks the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx's Capital, presents an occasion to review the history of one of the most influential books ever written. This article gives an overview of the dissemination and reception of Capital in the United States and Britain over the last 150 years. This article, which is part of a larger ongoing project of writing a global history of the dissemination and reception of Capital (Musto and Amini 2017), seeks to illuminate the path forward in interpreting this important book by identifying how and why Marx's most piercing insights into the foundation of the capitalist mode of production have been received, understood, misunderstood, or ignored by his opponents and proponents.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.