In this updated and expanded edition of Invisible Leviathan, Murray E.G. Smith critically explores and makes significant contributions to the debate surrounding Karl Marx's 'capitalist law of value' and its corollary, the law of the falling rate of profit. A powerful case is presented that capitalism has exhausted its potential to contribute to human progress. Humanity confronts a fateful choice: to allow this obsolescent system-which necessarily measures 'wealth' in terms of 'abstract social labour' and money profit-to destroy human civilisation; or to make the leap toward a global, egalitarian-socialist society in which the satisfaction of human need is the starting-point and the all-round development of each and every human individual the goal of the socio-economic life process. First published in 1994 as Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism Beyond Postmodernism by University of Toronto Press. This second and revised edition includes a new Foreword by Michael Roberts, and a Preface to the Second Edition.

In the 21st century, the capitalist system has little more to offer than a menu of despair: pandemics, deepening inequality, worsening depression, out-of-control climate change, growing authoritarianism and intensifying militarism. This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the origins, implications and scope of the "combined" crises of 2020 and beyond. It makes a compelling case that Karl Marx's critical analysis of capitalism, as well as his program of class-struggle socialism, are essential to understanding and addressing the most important social, economic, and ecological problems of our time.

Providing a Marxian analysis of the origins, implications, and scope of the current economic downturn, this critique of global capitalism argues that the ongoing crisis is not merely a result of overproduction and problems with credit and finance, but rather a deep-seated systemic failure of capitalism itself. The discussion clearly roots the present economic slump in the history of capitalism and contends that, in order to find a more permanent solution, the crisis needs to be understood structurally, as the result of a failed theory, rather than as an aberration.

This book is unified by a concern to reassert the pivotal importance of Marx's theory of labour-value-'the labour theory of value, ' as it is more commonly known-to an understanding of our social world and its historical development.