Marcello Musto

Marcello Musto
Born	(1976-04-14) April 14, 1976 (age 45) Naples, Italy
Occupation	Professor
Academic background
Education	University of Naples "L'Orientale" University of Nice Sophia Antipolis
Thesis	Karl Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’. Philological Examination, Critical Theory, Vicissitudes of Publication (2006)
Influences	Karl Marx
Academic work
Discipline	Political Science, Sociology
Institutions	York University
Main interests	History of political thought, Political theory, Intellectual history, Sociological theory, Political philosophy
Website	www.marcellomusto.org

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Marcello Musto (born 14 April 1976) is a Professor of Sociology at York University in Canada. He is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade.^[1] His major writings comprise four single-authored books, ten edited volumes, and more than 40 journal articles and books chapters.^[2][3] His work has been translated worldwide in more than twenty languages.

Education and Career[]

Marcello Musto received a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science, and a Ph.D. degree in Philosophy and Politics, from the University of Naples "L'Orientale". He also earned a Ph.D. degree in Philosophy from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, under the supervision of André Tosel.

He was appointed Assistant Professor of sociological theory, at the department of Sociology of York University, in 2014. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016 and Full Professor in 2020.^[4][5] He has held visiting appointments at many universities around the world, including the University of Pisa, University of Helsinki, and Rikkyo University, and is a permanent Adjunct Professor at the Department of Philosophy of Nanjing University. His research has been supported by funding bodies in seven countries.

Musto has disseminated his ideas through invited lectures and presentations at conferences, at more than 70 universities, in 20 countries. He is a freelance contributor to the newspapers Corriere della Sera, The Statesman, and La Razón, and is the editor of the book series Marx, Engels, Marxisms at Palgrave Macmillan.^[6]

Scholarly Work[]

In Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (2018) Musto uses the most recent textual acquisitions of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe edition, to which he has dedicated several essays,^[7][8] to provide a critical re-examination of Marx's ideas on post-Hegelian philosophy, the materialist conception of history, research methods, working-class self-emancipation, and revolutionary theory. Divided in three parts – “Intellectual Influences and Early Writings”, “The Critique of Political Economy”, and “Political Militancy" – the book underlines the gulf between Marx's critical theory and the dogmatism of many twentieth century Marxisms.

The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (2020) is a reassessment of Marx’s theoretical insights from the final, mostly unexplored, years of his life. Focusing on the period 1881-1883, Musto dispels the myth that Marx ceased to write late in life, and challenges the long-standing misrepresentation of Marx as a Eurocentric and economistic thinker who was fixated on class conflict alone.^[9] Musto argues that in this period Marx extended his research to new disciplines, political conflicts, theoretical issues and geographical areas, and demonstrates that he studied recent anthropological discoveries, analyzed communal forms of ownership in precapitalist societies, supported the struggle of the populist movement in Russia, and expressed critiques of colonial oppression in India, Ireland, Algeria and Egypt. For Musto, from Marx’s late unpublished or previously neglected manuscripts and notebooks emerge an author markedly different from the one represented by many of his contemporary critics and followers alike.

Among Musto’s numerous edited volumes, four have been particularly praised for their rigor and high level of scholarship. Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (2008) is considered to be one of the most complete references to Marx’s best-known preparatory manuscript of Capital, the Grundrisse. The book demonstrates the relevance of the unfinished manuscript written between 1857 and 1858 to an understanding of Capital and analyzes why the numerous reflections on matters that Marx did not develop elsewhere in his oeuvre are important for an overall comprehension of his thought. Musto and various international experts in the field also highlight the continuing explanatory power of Marxian categories for contemporary society. The third part of this collection, dedicated to the “Dissemination and Reception of Grundrisse in the World”, reconstructs the history of all the translations and interpretations of this text and has been described as an example of “wonderful scholarly madness”.^[10]

Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (2014) is the first anthology ever made of the addresses, resolutions, and documents of the International Workingmen’s Association. In his lengthy introduction to this book, Musto illustrates the foundations of labour movement history and presents the life of the "First International" differently from the ideological orthodoxy of Marxism-Leninism: not merely a creation of Marx but a complex organization with multiple tendencies contending for political hegemony. For Musto, “the International helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. It also spread awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force; and that it was essential to overcome the capitalist mode of production and wage labour, since improvements within the existing system, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate dependence on employers’ oligarchies”.^[11]

The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (2020) highlights the contemporary relevance of Marx through 22 essays from some of the most prominent contemporary Marxist scholars. They indicate the areas where Marx’s theory requires most updating as a result of changes since his times, and the reasons why it is still of such relevance in today's world. In his own chapter “Communism”, Musto argues that in his vision of post-capitalist society, “Marx attached a fundamental value to individual freedom, and his communism was radically different from the levelling of classes envisaged by many of his predecessors or from the political and economic uniformity pursued by many of his epigones”.^[12]

Musto’s most recent book is the anthology Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation (2021). In the introduction to this volume, he argues that many authors who have written on alienation have erroneously based their interpretations on Marx’s early writings. By contrast, Musto focuses his analysis on what he calls the “second generation” of Marx’s writings on alienation, i.e., the parts dedicated to this concept in the Grundrisse and in “Capital, Volume I: Book 1, Chapter VI, Unpublished”,^[13] and considers that Marx’s ideas comprised in his later economic works were far more extensive and resourceful than those of the early philosophical manuscripts. For Musto the diffusion of these theories not only paved the way for a notion of alienation different from the one hegemonic in sociology and psychology in the second half of the twentieth century but also provided “an anti-capitalist conception geared to the overcoming of alienation in practice”.^[14]

Publications[]

Authored Books[]

The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography, Stanford University Press, 2020. (Translated into Italian, Tamil, Portuguese (Brazil), Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Hindi, Indonesian, Catalan)

Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. (Translated into Japanese, Indonesian)

Karl Marx. Biografia intellettuale e politica, 1857-1883 [Karl Marx: Intellectual and Political Biography, 1857-1883], Einaudi, 2018. (Translated into Hungarian, Spanish)

Ripensare Marx e i marxismi. Studi e saggi [Rethinking Marx and Marxisms: Studies and Essays], Carocci, 2011. (Translated into Korean)

Edited Books[]

Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. (Translated into Italian, Kurdish)

The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, Cambridge University Press, 2020. (Translated into Italian)

(With S. Gupta and B. Amini) Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, Routledge, 2019.

(With G. Comninel and V. Wallis) The International After 150 Years: Labour Versus Capital, Then and Now, Routledge, 2015.

Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. (Translated into Italian, Portuguese, Tamil, Telugu, Hindu, French, Spanish)

Marx for Today, Routledge, 2012. (Translated into Spanish, Chinese)

Karl Marx, Introduzione alla critica dell’economia politica [Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy], Quodlibet, 2010.

Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, Routledge, 2008. (Translated into Farsi, Chinese, Italian, Spanish)

Sulle tracce di un fantasma. L’opera di Karl Marx tra filologia e filosofia [In the Tracks of a Spectre: The Work of Karl Marx between Philology and Philosophy], Manifestolibri, 2005. (Translated into Spanish)

External links[]

Marcello Musto's Website

References[]