The neoclassical and neoliberal appropriation of Smith is simplistic at best and false at worst. Marx, in contrast, rightly regarded Smith as one of his most important intellectual forbears, whose ideas he both valued and criticized in arriving at his own critique of political economy.
Marx considered Smith to be among those investigating ‘the real internal framework [Zusammenhang] of bourgeois relations of production’ — in particular, through his concept of the division of labour, at once advancing the productive capacities of human labour and stunting the human personality, and his belief that labour was ‘the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’.
Indeed, the centrality of these and other themes of Smith’s work to Marx’s indicates that many of them point beyond capitalism itself.
The Wealth of Nations also addressed, as the curtain rose on the modern capitalist world, the central issue of what makes nations rich or poor. It has formed the running thread of the study of political and geopolitical economy. Today it is central to discussions of the multipolar and pluripolar world, as socialist and other anti-imperialist countries challenge capitalist domination through the increasingly successful pursuit of development, combined with a rejection of the imperial domination that was formative of, and remains fundamental to, capitalism’s very existence.
As in previous years, we will run a geopolitical economy stream to strengthen understanding of what Marx called the ‘relations of producing nations’ of the age of capital, and of the transition away from capitalism.
We commemorate Smith’s The Wealth of Nations this year by inviting submissions that add to existing scholarship on Smith, particularly those that develop the radical and developmental aspects of his thought in the spirit of Marxism, those that investigate his relation to Marx and other critical thinkers since and especially those that which investigate how reconsideration of Smith’s work may contribute to understanding the political and geopolitical economy of the twenty-first century of decaying capitalism, and to advancing socialism in what Marx termed the ‘relations of producing nations’ in the age of multi- and pluripolarity.
