Toward an Unexplored Marx
Guest Editor:
Katya Colmenares
INFP-MORENA
katyacolmenares@gmail.com
The economic, environmental, political, and social crises we are facing in the 21st century have led, in the last few years, to a re-reading of Karl Marx’s work. However, the new materials unveiled by the Complete Works of Marx and Engels (Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe—MEGA), being published by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in their original language, bring us a major discovery: The Marx that the 20th century Left got to know had been sifted through a doctrinarian Stalinist filter denaturalizing the theoretician’s work and methodology up to the point of turning the greatest thought on modern-capitalist production mode into a blatant formula quite unrelated to Marx’s unfinished complex theory. Unfortunately, the MEGA works are not available in Spanish language yet, so our scholarly context is set to continue to reproduce the interpretative limitations of the Marxist tradition.
The 20th century Marxism left a deep mark in the historic-political and geo-political processes occurred throughout the latest century, in the theoretical understanding of today’s Left, and in the critical perspectives to build alternatives to the capitalist production mode. Without the intention of discrediting the contribution of that theoretical production, it is worth highlighting that the categorial framework of Marxism during the 20th century drew upon Jacobian, modern economistic assumptions that literally became blinds hindering deep understanding of the capitalist production mode as Marx viewed it, not merely as an economic system, but as a political, social, even a civilizing system.
In 2022, we complete 10 years from the publication of the second section of the MEGA, encompassing all the materials written around the topics of The Capital: Works published in several languages, unpublished drafts and manuscripts, collected in 15 volumes (23 sub-volumes). This invaluable work by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences brings us for the first time in history the chance to read Marx’s work from the original source, helping us discover the genealogy and complexity of Marx’s thinking beyond all the ideologized and simplified literature that define the understanding of Marxism as applied up to our days.
150 years have passed since the second edition of The Capital was published, and the world has continued to change, along with the modern-capitalist system. New problems and new questions trouble us as humanity, newly published materials and new historic conditions bring us the possibility to perform a renewed reading of the «Moor»’s work that may provide us categorial tools to face the challenges of a new century ahead.
In the last years, the MEGA has been arousing increasing interest in the scholarly world, leading to the emergence of research teams all over the world that are engaged in the study of new materials and in the translation from those unpublished texts directly into different languages. In this Tabula Rasa issue, we aim to open a space to put those ongoing efforts in perspective in order to discover this unknown Marx. Our aim is to contribute to the study of Marx’ work beyond Marxist scholarship in order to produce research work relevant to our historic time.
For further information or to submit your complete manuscript along with an abstract (in English, Portuguese, or Spanish languages), please write to our Guest Editor.
Manuscript reception deadline is April 28, 2023
Submisssions should be previously unpublished and comply with the journal guidelines. Refer to: https://www.revistatabularasa.org/normas/
