Phantoms and spectres: capital and labour at the millennium

As the financial system tailspins and ʹAsian Fluʹ reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marxʹs ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marxʹs insights on the "laws of motion" of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing global political-economic disorder. I discuss, more specifically, his theory of crisis and the dialectics of accumulation and circulation of "real" and "fictitious" capital as sketched out in the Grundrisse and Capital (volumes 1 and 3). I end with an exploration of the famous political prognosis from The Communist Manifesto of mass collective class struggle and the development of a "world literature", and set all this within the context of a newly emerging workersʹ internationalism and social-movement unionism.