# Neue Marx-Lektüre

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vte :
Neue Marx-Lektüre (German for "New Reading of Marx") or NML is a revival and interpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, which originated during the mid-1960s in both Western and Eastern Europe and opposed both Marxist–Leninist and social democratic interpretations of Marx. Neue Marx-Lektüre covers a loose group of authors primarily from German-speaking countries who reject certain historicizing and empiricist interpretations of Marx's analysis of economic forms, many of which are argued to spring from Friedrich Engels role in the early Marxist workers' movement.

## Overview

Neue Marx-Lektüre includes a loose group of authors mainly in German-speaking countries, who revise the historicising and empiricist interpretation of Marx's analysis of economic forms, which goes back to the work of Friedrich Engels. The term has been used since around 1997 and comes from work by Hans-Georg Backhaus. Other names for this inner-Marxist trend include Neomarxismus (Neo-Marxism), kritischer Marxismus (Critical Marxism), Kapitallogik (Capital Logic), Hegelmarxismus (Hegel Marxism) or Marxismus als Sozialwissenschaft (Marxism as a Social Science).
The school of thought is influenced especially the work of the early Soviet thinkers Evgeny Pashukanis and Isaak Illich Rubin, as well as the critical theory of Theodor Adorno. Ingo Elbe [de] traces the origins of the school of thought to the 1960s, with the works of Helmut Reichelt and Hans-Georg Backhaus in the 1970s and 1980s, and the writings of Michael Heinrich in the 1990s being of high importance, and consequently produced at the turn of the millennium a partly academic, partly off-academic debate concerning the question of value. These authors depart in a number of respects from the traditional reading of Marx related to the workers' movement, the bourgeois state and state socialism.
The Neue Marx-Lektüre rejects
* Pre-monetary theories of value, which "share the idea of an initial stage of generalized exchange without money, and have in common a historical reading of the form of value." NML claims instead that "Marx wanted to show that it was not possible to construct a non-contradictory concept of a pre-monetary market economy organized on the basis of the division of labour. The concept of a pre-monetary commodity cannot be thought."
* Conceptions of the state as a manipulative instrument of a ruling class. Instead, the Staatsableitungsdebatte (state derivation debate) has an understanding of the state as a structurally necessary, but relatively separated part of capitalism.
* Determinist theories of history which lead to the anticipation of a revolution to be accomplished by the proletariat. In opposition to this idea, capital is considered as an "automatic subject", which exists in a sham as well in a real form.
Thus, the authors of the Neue Marx-Lektüre contrast themselves from the dominant neoclassical school of economics and maintain the relevance of Marx's approach. In particular, they insist that the microeconomic approaches of the neoclassic theory of economy can't explain the constitution, maintenance and dynamics of the economic value-relations, and can only exhibit insufficient theoretical means when it comes to macro-economic constructs such as e.g. the gross national income. They claim that Marx, although unable to answer these questions, nevertheless provides a higher degree of reflection and awareness of the problems, which has to be recovered in a critical manner for the contemporary discussion.