Li Jingwen: A Study on the History of the Dissemination of Marx's "Capital" in Italy
Das Kapital represents the culmination of Marx's life's work. By applying historical materialism, Marx achieved a transcendence of classical political economy, dismantling the illusions of existence that capitalist society had long projected for humanity and taking a crucial step toward "knowing oneself." This epoch-making work drew widespread global attention. In Italy, Paolo Favilli, author of The History of Italian Marxism, points out that it was precisely through key texts like Das Kapital that Italian Marxists completed their creative and independent reflections, thereby making significant contributions to the study of Marxist theory worldwide.
I. The Early Dissemination of Das Kapital in Italy (late 1860s to early 20th century)
(i) Translation and Introduction Initiated by Anarchists
"The movement in Italy was initially born under the influence of Bakuninism," and the dissemination of Das Kapital in Italy was likewise initiated by anarchists. In 1864, shortly after the founding of the First International (International Workingmen's Association), Marx entrusted Bakunin with propagating the spirit of the International’s documents in Italy, but this encountered immense difficulties. On one hand, the impact generated by the International through normal propaganda channels was extremely limited; on the other, its ideas often had to survive in the margins as "negative examples" used for critique. In 1866, prior to the Geneva Congress of the First International, Marx specifically remarked that "every step they think fit should be taken to secure the representation of the Italian societies at the Congress." However, this wish remained unfulfilled. Although the early dissemination of Marxist theory in Italy was fraught with hardship, the ranks of those spreading Das Kapital and its manuscripts did not vanish. Instead, they grew quietly amid the "single sparks" [1] sown by Marx and Engels, guiding the continuous development of the Italian workers' movement. As the head of the First International in Italy, Bakunin, despite establishing his own secret underground organization, still had to conduct all his work around the International; thus, propagating its ideas was an unavoidable task. Under Bakunin’s influence, the publishing house of the same name under the Italian revolutionary organization "Liberty and Justice" (Libertà e Giustizia) published parts of the preface to Das Kapital on October 27, 1867. The translation was completed by the anarchists Emilio Covelli and Carlo Cafiero. However, due to the fragmented state of Italy at the time and the Mentana Massacre of democrats in November of that year, the International’s propaganda work faced major obstacles, and the translation of the preface failed to make an impact. In April 1877, after being imprisoned for his involvement in the failed "Matese Gang" (Banda del Matese) insurrection, Cafiero read Volume I of Das Kapital in the French translation by Joseph Roy. In the spring of 1879, he completed the book Karl Marx's Capital (Il Capitale di Carlo Marx). This pamphlet provided a relatively complete exposition of Volume I, received Marx’s personal approval, and was reprinted numerous times.
(ii) Early Translation Efforts of Das Kapital
The first German edition of Volume I of Das Kapital appeared in 1867. For nearly twenty years thereafter, aside from a small number of studies and translations, work in Italy saw no substantial progress. Although various translation attempts were made in academic circles, the overall work mainly consisted of reprinting existing texts. It was not until 1886, organized by the Italian economist Gerolamo Boccardo, that Volume I was translated from the French version into Italian and published by the Biblioteca dell’Economista (Economist’s Library) press. This marked the first appearance of the most complete Italian translation of Volume I. Subsequently, Italian scholars did not proceed with Volume II in chronological order but focused more on the later-published Volume III. This phenomenon was primarily due to the rise of "Loriaism" in Italy at the turn of the century. At that time, the Italian economist Achille Loria took the lead in critiquing Marxist theory, particularly the "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" in Volume III, which exerted a broad influence in Italy. In this context, the issues involved in Volume III drew universal attention from Italian scholars, causing interest in Volume III to far exceed that in Volume II. In 1895, Pasquale Martinetti translated Engels’s preface to Volume III and published it in the Neapolitan biweekly Critica. In a reply to Martinetti, Engels praised his translation and stated that its publication would help the Italian public better understand the true face of Loria and his supporters. In the same year, Martinetti translated Engels’s Supplement to Capital, Volume III, published in the 5th issue of Critica Sociale. Beyond Martinetti’s work, in 1897, the Pontaniana Academy in Naples, with its glorious tradition, organized an essay competition on the exposition and critique of the recently published posthumous third volume of Marx’s Das Kapital. In 1899, the Italian revolutionary syndicalist Arturo Labriola published Karl Marx’s Theory of Value: A Study of Volume III of Das Kapital.
(iii) Early Research on Das Kapital in Italy
Although Das Kapital was translated into Italian quite early, it did not initially receive sufficient attention and was even long subjected to doubt and distortion. This situation changed largely due to the outstanding contributions of Antonio Labriola. Labriola was among the first scholars to disseminate Marxism in Italy; he not only openly propagated Marxism but also actively participated in the international workers' movement, assisting Filippo Turati in founding the Italian Workers' Party in 1892.
At that time, Italy's intellectual and cultural spheres were heavily influenced by trends such as anarchism and utopian socialism. After a "long and painful struggle," Labriola shifted "from the Hegelian Left to radical democracy, and finally became a Marxist." After turning to Marxism in the 1890s, Labriola wrote In Memory of the Communist Manifesto and Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, which became vital documents for understanding Marxism in Italy. In the former, Labriola provided an interpretation of Das Kapital. On one hand, he examined the early economic studies of Marx and Engels, affirming the significant influence of Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy and The Condition of the Working Class in England. He noted that "before they were commissioned to formulate principles and a program for the Communist League in the Manifesto, they had already conducted a brand-new critique of economic science." On the other hand, he affirmed the important role of Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 (Grundrisse) in the formation of the materialist conception of history and the writing of Das Kapital. He pointed out that ideas such as the commodification of labor power being the prerequisite for the emergence of surplus value were "the first seeds of those ideas later revealed and analyzed coherently and in detail in Das Kapital." Furthermore, Labriola analyzed the historical and revolutionary nature of Das Kapital. He argued that Marx analyzed socio-economic formations prior to the realization of communism from the perspective of historical development, rather than discussing communism in isolation or abstraction. Changing the mode of production requires a "thorough" breaking of the original model; attempts at partial change (reformism) are unfeasible. In this sense, Marx’s Das Kapital was not the "first work of critical communism" but rather the "last great work on bourgeois economy." Faced with the distortions of Loriaism, Labriola affirmed Engels’s critique of Loria in the preface to Volume III and defended Marx’s historical materialism.
Under Labriola’s influence, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce also began studying historical materialism and Marx’s political-economic thought. However, the influence Labriola exerted on Croce was complex, involving not only identification and development but also critique and debate. Initially, Croce's intellectual direction aligned with Labriola's. However, after corresponding with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile in late 1896, Gentile’s critique of Labriola influenced Croce's position. Croce’s tendency to idealize historical materialism grew increasingly severe, eventually detaching it from actual political and economic conditions.
In 1900, in Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, Croce questioned the scientific nature of Marxist theory, marking a systematic ideological turn during this period. Nevertheless, Croce never considered himself a critic or opponent of Marxism; he believed his views "diverged and varied [from Marxism], but not so much in the substance of the thought as in the tone or coloring." However, a deep dive into his texts reveals that Croce's interpretation indeed involved misunderstandings and regressions. In his book, he criticized Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In Croce's view, while a falling trend in the profit rate did exist, the most important factors were not the increase in the organic composition of capital brought by technological progress, but rather the growth of savings and population. Thus, he returned to the explanatory framework of vulgar economists. Due to his refutation of the falling profit rate law, Croce's attitude toward Loria was also strikingly different from Labriola's. Croce believed that "Engels’s words against Loria carry great weight in a preface to a book like Das Kapital," but that "this accusation is both useless and ungenerous."
Although Croce’s understanding of Marxism gradually drifted off track under the influence of French Sorelianism and local Italian misconceptions, he still made specific contributions. On one hand, Croce’s emphasis on Hegelian philosophy made the tradition of interpreting Marx through Hegelianism increasingly prominent in Italian theoretical circles, and he placed more importance than Labriola on analyzing the principles of historical materialism within Das Kapital. On the other hand, his aforementioned questioning constituted the direct starting point and core agenda for Antonio Gramsci's exploration of political-economic issues. On a practical level, Croce’s discourse made Marxism more widely known in Italy.
II. The Translation of Das Kapital and the Italian Socialist Movement Between the Two World Wars
(i) Translation of Das Kapital Around World War I
In 1915, approximately 30 years after the publication of the first Italian edition of Volume I of Capital, a second edition of Volume I, translated from the German, appeared in Italy. The translation was published in Avanti! [2] by the translator Ettore Marchioli. This volume was simultaneously published by the Avanti Publishing House as the seventh volume of the Collected Works of Marx, Engels, and Lassalle. In the period between the publication of these two complete translations, few Italian editions of Capital were released; the most influential among them was the 1902 "Popular Edition" of Marx’s Capital, compiled and translated by Ettore Fabietti. Beyond the translation of Volume I, the Rome publisher Luigi Mongini published Volume II of Capital in 1908 and a portion of Volume III the following year. Between 1905 and 1910, the Theories of Surplus Value (Volume IV of Capital), edited and published by Kautsky, received significant attention from Italian academic circles. The Rome-based organ of the anarcho-syndicalist revolution, Social Evolution (L'Evoluzione sociale), published portions of Volume IV between August–December 1906 and December 1907–May 1908. These translations further propelled the dissemination of Capital in Italy.
(2) "Dormancy and Growth" Between the Two World Wars
After the October Revolution, the translation and introduction of Capital provided a new guide for the Italian revolution. In 1917, Gramsci published the article "The Revolution Against Capital." While the piece appeared to use the facts of the October Revolution to critique the "iron necessity" mentioned in Marx's Capital, it was in fact Gramsci’s exploration of the relationship between theory and revolution. Gramsci did not understand the principles of historical materialism expounded in Capital dogmatically; he clearly stated that "the principles of historical materialism are not as unchangeable as people might think and have always imagined," and that the Bolsheviks "did not use the master’s works dogmatically to create a rigid theory that admits no discussion." Thus, the Bolshevik victory was a successful practice of applying historical materialism in integration with Russian national conditions.
Starting from 1920, to suppress the revolutionary labor movements breaking out in Italy, such as the Turin Factory Council Movement, the bourgeoisie employed various means of repression, further intensifying the contradiction between workers and capitalists. In this environment, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was born. However, shortly after its founding, the Fascist Party seized state power. Communists suffered harsh repression for resisting the dark rule of the Fascist regime; Gramsci, then General Secretary of the PCI, was arrested, while Togliatti, another important founder, went into exile in Moscow. During this period, Marxism became a taboo in Italy, and Gramsci’s prison writings could only use "philosophy of praxis" [3] as a code for "Marxist philosophy." In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci explored issues related to economics. When discussing the application of the "philosophy of praxis" to politics, Gramsci argued that Capital was a "practical lesson taught to rivals" by Marx, because it systematically and rationally grasped and explained the reality of capitalist society.
Due to the high-pressure rule of the Fascist regime and the impact of the two World Wars, no widely circulated or deeply influential translations of Capital or its manuscripts appeared in Italy from the rise of Fascism to the end of the Second World War. The domestic translation and study of the texts of Capital fell into a trough or even a period of stagnation. However, the development of Marxism in Italy did not stop; Italian Communists led by Togliatti relocated to Soviet territory to build up their strength.
Looking across the two historical periods of Capital’s dissemination in Italy from the late 1860s to the end of the Second World War, the research of Italian Marxists followed a continuous line, reflected primarily in three aspects: First, because the text of Capital was met with skepticism and criticism in Italy early on, Italian Marxists of this period maintained a sustained focus on the "falling rate of profit" issue. Second, based on their concern for the intellectual origins of Marxist theory, Italian Marxists emphasized the influence of Hegelian philosophy on Marx’s writing of Capital, establishing a consistent main thread for Italian Capital studies. Third, given Italy’s specific historical environment, the dissemination of Capital was closely linked to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.
III. The Translation and Study of Capital from the Post-War Period to the Late 1970s
(1) The Prosperity and Transition of Capital Studies
Around the 1950s, the Italian economy recovered to pre-war levels and ushered in more than a decade of the "Italian Economic Miracle," yet the Communist Party of Italy lost its way on the question of choosing a path. Togliatti, then General Secretary of the PCI, led the party in attempting to adopt a "peaceful parliamentary road," seeking to "replace class struggle with class cooperation and proletarian revolution with 'structural reform'" to legitimize the PCI and move it into the mainstream of Italian politics.
Nonetheless, the post-war domestic environment of peace and development, along with the PCI’s strong momentum, provided fertile soil for the translation of Capital and its manuscripts. Editori Riuniti, a publisher with a left-wing background, published many translations: between 1952 and 1956, a three-volume translation of Capital was released; in 1957, an Italian translation of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (based on the 1859 German edition) was published; in 1961, the translation of Wages, Price and Profit appeared. In 1961, Giorgio Giorgetti edited and published the Italian translation of Theories of Surplus Value, introducing Marx's Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 in the preface. He pointed out that to understand the theory of surplus value, one must examine the developmental stages of Marx’s theoretical research before the 1861 manuscripts; therefore, the 1857–1858 Manuscripts must serve as a primary reference. From a methodological perspective, he also affirmed the consistency between the 1857–1858 Manuscripts and Capital. In 1965, the "Capital Series," edited by Eugenio Sbardella and published by Rome’s Avanzini e Torraca, was released. In 1968, the Italian edition of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was published in Turin. From 1968 to 1970, Marx’s 1857–1858 Manuscripts were published in two volumes by La Nuova Italia under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, translated by Enzo Grillo from the German. In 1969, La Nuova Italia published Capital: Volume I, the Unpublished Sixth Chapter, namely the "Results of the Direct Production Process" section of the 1863–1865 Manuscripts.
The publication of these numerous translations pushed domestic Marxist theoretical research into a new stage. However, influenced by the 1956 events in Hungary and Poland, internal divisions within the PCI emerged and gradually intensified. In this context, the "Della Volpe School" rose to prominence. This school, rejecting historicist interpretations of Marxism, pioneered a scientistic paradigm for interpreting Marxist theory and conducted groundbreaking research on Capital and associated manuscripts such as the Paris Manuscripts and the 1857–1858 Manuscripts.
Before the Paris Manuscripts and the 1857–1858 Manuscripts were translated into Italian, the philosopher Galvano Della Volpe studied their German editions. Applying a positivist method to Marx’s dialectic and its application in Capital, he became the founder of neo-positivist Marxism. In his book Rousseau and Marx, Della Volpe interpreted the Paris Manuscripts as Marx's "philosophical legacy." He disparaged Hegelian-Marxist interpretations, arguing that such "philosophical" understandings only served to highlight the supposed immaturity of the Paris Manuscripts. However, Della Volpe also acknowledged the significance of the Paris Manuscripts for understanding the 1857–1858 Manuscripts and its "Introduction": "Had it not been for the epistemological key provided by this so-called immature work, this 'Introduction' would also remain obscure." Della Volpe concluded that the Marxian dialectic reflected in the "Introduction" was a "scientific dialectic" distinct from Hegel's, regarding it as a scientific exposition of empirical facts.
Lucio Colletti inherited the research trajectory of his teacher Della Volpe, arguing that Marx formed a scientific understanding of capitalist society in Capital and concluded that capitalism would inevitably perish. However, he believed it was more important to use the summarized laws to guide the revolutionary movement of the working class: "The working class becomes a class when it transcends economic spontaneity and exerts its consciousness as the protagonist of a revolution that liberates not only the workers but the whole of society. Through this consciousness, the working class forms political organizations and plays a leading role in its alliance with other classes." That is, Colletti viewed the working class as the executor of capitalist economic activity; when economic laws are expressed as the class consciousness of the working class, the proletariat can drive economic and historical development through the transformation of that consciousness.
Compared to Della Volpe, Colletti held the Paris Manuscripts in even higher regard, viewing them as Marx’s first attempt to pivot from philosophical analysis to the analysis of social relations of production, following a "logic of production" to understand historical materialism. However, Colletti did not identify with the French structuralist scholar Louis Althusser, who shared many similarities with Italian neo-positivism at the time. In his view, Althusser’s research lacked a philosophical foundation and failed to understand the "subject" in Hegelian philosophy. Regarding Althusser's reading of Capital, Colletti bluntly cited Eric Hobsbawm’s assessment: "Reading Capital has not helped anyone to read Capital."
(2) A "Guiding Light" for the Labor Movement
In 1964, influenced by the economic crisis, Italy's economic development began to slow, and the situation of the working class became increasingly difficult. The Autonomist Marxist movement emerged amidst various conflicts. In 1968, revolutionary movements broke out in many parts of Italy, a wave that lasted until the late 1970s. During the same period, various social movements erupted worldwide, such as the "May 68" in France, the student movement in West Germany, and the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia. The outbreak of these revolutionary movements became an important opportunity for the dissemination of Capital and its manuscripts in Italy and propelled the promulgation of the Italian Workers' Statute [4] in 1970.
The representatives of the early workerist (operaist) [5] movement were predominantly members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), some of whom were influenced by the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie and opposed Stalinism and dogmatism ideologically. Unlike other Marxists, they were less concerned with political party organization and focused instead on autonomous organizations outside traditional structures. They believed that the working class could establish organizations independent of the state, trade unions, or parties to transform the capitalist system through a bottom-up approach. Driven by the practical needs of the workers' movement, they emphasized the study and application of Capital. During this period, Italian scholarly research on Capital was relatively fragmented and lacked continuity, often taking the requirements of the workers' movement as its primary theme, which led to a diversity of research content. In the late 1950s, the Italian Marxist theorist and PSI leader Raniero Panzieri began applying Marxist theory to guide the workers' movement. Together with Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, and Danilo Montaldi, he founded the journal Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), using it as an ideological front to propagate their views. These scholars later became the primary representatives of autonomist Marxism.
To better guide the workers' movement, autonomist Marxists attached great importance to exploring the connection between actual struggles and Capital. They engaged in rigorous study of Marxist works and went deep into factories to disseminate the ideas found in Capital and other seminal texts, attempting to find direct links between the classical texts and the workers' movement. Several leading figures of autonomist Marxism made outstanding contributions to the translation and dissemination of Capital in Italy. In 1968, Panzieri, along with Delio Cantimori and Maria Luisa Boggeri, co-translated and published the complete three volumes of Capital, with Panzieri primarily responsible for the translation of Volume II. Additionally, he authored Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on a Reading of Capital, utilizing a more accessible interpretation to help young workers and students understand Marx’s critique of capitalist society. Panzieri’s interpretation influenced a generation of young intellectuals in the workerist movement, driving the dissemination of Capital. In 1971, Tronti translated and published Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital and published a translation of Capital Volume II in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia. The translation of these texts provided theoretical support for the Italian workers' movement to create new concepts and form new ideas. In 1979, Negri published his work Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, providing a politicized interpretation and development of the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858.
Influenced by the workers' movement of this period, a large number of translations of Capital and its manuscripts sprang up in Italy like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, and the project to publish an Italian edition of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works) was also placed on the agenda. In addition to the translation of Capital and its manuscripts, translations of research on Capital by foreign scholars also began to circulate in Italy. For example, in 1973, the Italian translation of French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s work Critique and the Critique of Political Economy: From the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to Capital was published by Feltrinelli. In 1976, Giorgio Backhaus's translation of the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse) was published in Turin.
Overall, the dissemination of Capital and its manuscripts in Italy became more extensive after World War II; the translation of the manuscripts in particular opened a new chapter in Italian Capital studies. During this period, Italian scholarship on Capital exhibited three prominent characteristics: first, research became more systematic, emphasizing the role of the manuscript clusters and focusing on the relationship between the manuscripts and Capital; second, a scientistic paradigm emerged in the interpretation of Capital that stood in opposition to humanism; third, the social transformations following WWII led some scholars to attempt to seize the moment to further social movements, while others felt disillusioned by these movements and chose to pursue theoretical research, gradually detaching themselves from social practice. Nevertheless, the concerns of these two types of theorists were remarkably similar: both focused on analyzing the changes brought to capitalist modes of exploitation by the development of science and technology, emphasized the role of the revolutionary subject, and maintained a focus on interpreting Marx’s economic manuscripts.
IV. The Translation and Development of Capital and Its Manuscripts from the 1980s to the Present
(i) Translation and Research of Capital and Its Manuscripts from the 1980s to the End of the 20th Century
The workers' movement from the 1960s to the early 1970s represented a high point in the development of Italian socialism, and the translation and study of Capital and its manuscript clusters reached a corresponding peak. However, in the mid-to-late 1970s, the momentum of the workers' movement gradually waned. During this period, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was increasingly marginalized due to external interference and internal divisions. Compounded by fears of "black terrorism" [6] from neo-fascist remnants, the PCI eventually chose to compromise with the Christian Democracy party, making the dissemination of Marxism in Italy even more difficult. From the 1980s to the end of the 20th century, as the workers' movement ebbed, domestic research on Capital and its manuscripts entered a renewed trough.
During this period, although the work of translating Capital and its manuscripts did not come to a complete standstill, there were few pioneering translations; the primary work consisted of reissuing existing editions. In 1980, Editori Riuniti published the ninth edition of the complete three-volume Capital translated by Panzieri and others in 1968; this enduring version became the generally recognized translation in Italy. Meanwhile, Editori Riuniti’s plan for the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe continued into the early 1990s, with a total of 32 volumes published. In 1997, Enzo Grillo’s translation of the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858, published in two volumes under the title Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy 1857–1858, saw its second edition, receiving a positive reception. Furthermore, the 1990 founding of the "International Symposium on Marxian Theory" (ISMT) promoted Italian research on Capital and facilitated exchange with international peers. From 1991 to 2012, the ISMT held annual meetings, and Italian scholars such as Riccardo Bellofiore and Guglielmo Carchedi frequently participated in writing and editing academic papers for these conferences. They collaborated with scholars from the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, and Mexico to publish 11 books, including The Methods in Marx’s "Capital": A Reexamination and Marx's "Capital" and Hegel's Logic: A Reexamination, exploring issues such as the methodology of Capital and the historical background and textual logic of the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858.
(ii) Publication and Reissue of the Second Part of the Italian Edition of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
After Editori Riuniti’s publication plan for the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe ceased in the 1990s, the Naples-based La Città del Sole and Milan-based Lotta Comunista took over the task. The new edition continued the original plan while adopting the translations published by Editori Riuniti in 1964–1965.
As of the end of May 2022, Lotta Comunista and La Città del Sole have jointly completed the publication of 38 volumes of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Although the two publishers did not meet the original target of completing the entire publication by 2020, the reissue of the collected works has increased the influence of Marxist theory in Italy. Among all published volumes, Volume 30 contains the content of Capital Volume I and was published in 2011. Its editor, Roberto Fineschi, drew extensively on MEGA2 [7] texts during the compilation process. In the introduction, he devoted significant space to explaining the selection criteria for translated terminology, the indexes established for various documents, and the relevant background knowledge involved in the translation process, guiding readers to understand Capital through the lens of the latest academic research. This volume was organized into two parts: the first part introduces the 1890 fourth German edition of Capital Volume I and Engels’s editorial work; the second part traces the background of the book's composition and Marx’s preparatory work, introduces the evolution of several major versions — including the first and second German editions and the French edition — and details all the materials Marx prepared for writing Volume I. This provided an important research reference for Italian academia and a reference text for the general public reading Capital.
(iii) The Renaissance of Capital Studies in the New Century
Since entering the 21st century, Marxist studies have remained a "niche" field within Italy, yet the relatively peaceful domestic and international environment has provided favorable objective conditions for the translation and dissemination of Capital and its manuscripts. In 2010, the publisher Pgreco released the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858, noting in the preface that this work represents an important transition for Marx from the early Paris Manuscripts to the later Capital. On January 2, 2012, Giovanni Sgrò published a translation of the Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1865, which is one of the latest achievements of Italian scholarship referencing MEGA2. In 2017, Editori Riuniti University Press published Capital Volume I with a preface by Eric Hobsbawm. The revision of this edition placed greater emphasis on Marx’s analysis of the systemic characteristics of modern society and reduced some polemical content. In 2018, Feltrinelli reissued the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; to help readers better understand Marx’s text, this version not only referenced MEGA2 but also incorporated the Notes on James Mill based on previous editions.
The 2008 global financial crisis caused Marxist research to once again receive attention in the Western world. In July 2008, the ISMT held a conference at the University of Bergamo in Italy, hoping to engage in deep reflection on Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 in the context of the 190th anniversary of Marx's birth. This conference led to the publication of the book In Marx's Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse. In 2018, Italian scholars Luca Basso, Bellofiore, and Favilli, along with the French scholar Étienne Balibar and others, edited Re-reading Capital. They argued that Capital is a vital basis for understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalist society and that, through re-reading Capital, one can better understand the development and changes of contemporary capitalism.
It is worth mentioning that although a scientistic interpretive paradigm emerged in Italian academic circles in the mid-20th century, the importance placed on Hegelian philosophy—perpetuated by philosophers such as Vico [8] and Croce [9]—continued to deeply influence Gramsci and many subsequent Italian Marxists. At the same time, because scientism emerged to a certain extent based on a critique of humanism, humanism never truly exited the historical stage in the theoretical research and practice of Italian Marxist theorists. On the one hand, although many Italian scholars (such as Negri and Basso [10]) focused on analyzing the structure of capitalist society and new developments in science and technology at the macro-level of research, they still tended to emphasize the historicity of capitalist society from the perspective of social-historical development when dealing with micro-concepts, acknowledging the significant influence Hegel exerted on Marx’s writing of Capital. On the other hand, Italian scholars in other camps of scientism drew upon the research results of humanist Marxism and attempted to transcend them. For instance, Colletti [11] attached considerable importance to the role played by Marx’s early Paris Manuscripts [12] in the formation of his critique of political economy, striving to explain the relationship between the concept of alienated labor in the Paris Manuscripts and Capital. Bellofiore, meanwhile, has paid close attention to the New Reading of Marx [13] (Neue Marx-Lektüre) in Germany and sought the theoretical origins of its humanist dimension in figures such as Theodor Adorno. These phenomena all demonstrate the historical trend of mutual influence and integration between the two major paradigms of scientism and humanism in the developmental process of Italian Marxism.
In summary, with the relaunch of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe project and the dissemination of MEGA2 [14] in Italy, research on Capital and its manuscripts has been further deepened, and the scope of translation and introduction of related manuscript groups has been further expanded. Italian research on Capital exhibits the following new characteristics: first, international academic cooperation has further deepened, and its influence within the international academic community continues to expand; second, the scientistic and humanist interpretive paradigms have shifted from opposition toward integration, leading to more profound research by the academic community into the content and structure of Capital.
(Author: Li Jingwen, School of Marxism, Renmin University of China) (This article is a staged result of the National Social Science Fund of China Major Project "Latest Progress in the Research of Capital in Foreign Academic Circles") Web Editor: Tongxin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (Guowai Lilun Dongtai), Issue 4, 2022.