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The Political Economy of Barbarism advances a provocative Marxist interpretation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism, arguing that humanity has already entered the historical stage Rosa Luxemburg described as "barbarism." Rather than viewing barbarism as a future catastrophe, the book contends that it emerged as a stable and institutionalized form of capitalist reproduction during the Great Depression, particularly through the abandonment of commodity money and the rise of state-managed fiat currency. Drawing on Marx, Engels, Henryk Grossman, and the Grundrisse, Rev. Laskaris argues that the U.S. gold confiscation policies of the 1930s marked a decisive rupture in the history of value, enabling the state to devalue labor-power, manage crises of overaccumulation, and sustain profitability through monetary intervention.
The book maintains that fiat money allows capitalism to overcome the constraints imposed by commodity money by facilitating chronic deficit spending, credit expansion, and the growth of what the author terms "superfluous labor time." In this framework, contemporary capitalism survives not through the productive expansion of value, but through the state's management of overaccumulated capital, the proliferation of debt, and the maintenance of labor activities increasingly detached from the production of real material wealth. The author interprets these developments as evidence of a historical breakdown of production based on exchange-value, in which technological development and the "general intellect" have undermined labor-time as the principal source of wealth while capitalist social relations persist.
Building on this analysis, the text offers a polemical critique of contemporary left-wing politics, arguing that demands centered on higher wages, welfare expansion, and social-democratic reforms fail to address the structural transformations of the barbaric phase of capitalism. Instead, the book calls for a reassessment of revolutionary theory capable of confronting a system sustained by fiat money, state intervention, and the management of surplus populations and surplus capital. Through its synthesis of monetary theory, crisis theory, and Marxist political economy, The Political Economy of Barbarism presents a controversial and ambitious account of capitalism's contemporary historical form.
Rev Laskaris is a Marxist researcher in the RTSG Collective and a member of the Political Bureau of the American Communist Party.