Marx right side up - Capitalism, Class Struggle, and the Recovery of Marx's Project: - Capitalism, C

Marx Right Side Up

Capitalism, Class Struggle, and the Recovery of Marx's Project

For more than a century, Marx's analysis of capitalism has been read in two opposing ways: as a theory of economic determinism or as a justification for authoritarian rule. Both claim fidelity to Marx-and both miss what is most essential in his work.

Marx Right Side Up reconstructs Marx's project by returning to a neglected core: class struggle as a historical process of learning, the development of workers' knowledge, and capabilities", and transformation within capitalism itself. Drawing on political economy, organization theory, and an empirical case from Swedish industry, Sarah Philipson shows how capitalism's dominant tendency toward price-based competition and concentration can be interrupted by value-based competition, institutional mediation, and collective worker learning.

The book challenges three entrenched assumptions: that capitalism will automatically produce its own transcendence; that ownership is the primary lever of socialist transition; and that workers' emancipation can be delivered by parties, states, or elites acting on their behalf.

Neither a call for revolutionary acceleration nor a defense of reformist accommodation, Marx Right Side Up argues that capitalism can only be overcome if its dominant competitive logic is partially suspended, allowing workers to develop the capacities required for self-governance. Without this transformation, attempts at liberation risk becoming substitution-replacing one form of domination with another.