In this paper the author provides a sympathetic critique of open Marxism. In particular the author suggests that while open Marxists successfully show how social forms reflect the contradiction between capital and labour, they do not at present demonstrate with equal insight how social forms also refract this contradiction in their own unique and qualitative way. This leads the author to insist that a genuinely open approach to Marxist theory must seek to develop dialectical categories in a manner that can account for the refracted nature of each social form. His argument is developed through the concepts of abstraction, social form, crisis, regulation and discourse.
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