Valuing transition/transitioning value: Class struggle in Open Marxism and Political Marxism

The article considers the origins of capitalism in order to scrutinise critiques of Open Marxism and Political Marxism, to bring these not-so-distant approaches more into dialogue and enhance the explanatory and critical capacity of both. First, we discuss the centrality of class relations to both Open Marxism and Political Marxism. Second, we show that Open Marxism has been criticised for its failure to provide a comprehensive account of the origins of capitalism and for analytically subordinating class struggle to the value-form. This leaves Open Marxism vulnerable to characterisation as a commercialisation model, a self-fulfilling narrative about capitalist development that fails to adequately account for the diverse, multiple origins of capitalism. Third, Political Marxism’s historical approach focuses on specific case studies of transition, which has led to the approach being criticised for particularism or Eurocentrism. In response, we discuss the advantages and limits of the case-study method, and specifically the relationship between global value and a national state. On the one hand, Open Marxism’s limited attention to historical transformations could be complemented by Political Marxism’s case-study method to ground its form-analytical theorising more concretely. On the other hand, the ontologising tendency in Political Marxism’s case-study method, and its risks of reification, could be checked and averted by drawing on Open Marxism’s form-analytical theorising.