Ernesto Screpanti (born 1948, in Rome) is a professor of Political Economy who worked in various universities, like Trento, Florence, Trieste, Parma, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Siena. He did research in the “rethinking Marxism” scientific programme, in the attempt to update Marxist analysis by bringing it in line with the reality of contemporary capitalism, on the one hand, and to liberate Marxism from any residue of Hegelian metaphysics, Kantian ethics and economic determinism, on the other.

Theory

He formulated a general theory of capitalism by which the fundamental institution of this mode of production is not private property but the employment contract, intended as an institution that generates an authority relationship enabling capitalists to subject and exploit the workers. Capitalism may take various forms, all of which have the above-mentioned fundamental institution in common, but vary depending on the ways in which different property rights regimes and accumulation governance structures are combined. In dynamic analysis Screpanti criticized the so-called “laws of movement of capitalist development” as formulated by Marx, because of their deterministic implications as philosophies of history and the analytic limitations of some of their assumptions. He put forward a theory of development as an evolutionary process of a cyclical kind, coupling long and short run periodicity factors, both of which are determined by the dynamics of class conflict and income distribution. In a more concrete analysis of contemporary capitalism, Screpanti formulated the theory of “global imperialism”, which defines a governance system of world accumulation that cannot be understood with the traditional theories of imperialism. The fundamental imperialist contradiction is between the centre and the periphery of the global economy. There is no dominating imperial centre; there is instead a plurality of national, international, governmental, non-governmental, public and private agencies that contribute to accumulation governance on a world scale through a sort of competitive cooperation. In the theory of value, he proposed an interpretation of the notion of abstract labor as a social phenomenon, that is, as the labor time of workers who are subordinate and subsumed under capital. Exploitation is made possible by the exercise of command over work in the production process. Values are expressed in terms of labor commanded or the monetary value of labor. As to the theory of communism, Screpanti proposed a re-reading of Marx and Engels as libertarian theorists. Freedom is defined as the real capacity of individuals to make choices. Following Gramsci’s approach, enriched with the achievements of current theory on the freedom of choice, this is intended as a magnitude determined by the opportunity sets available to individuals. Freedom of choice is not distributed equally in capitalism: it is practically nil for the workers and at its greatest for capitalists in the production process; it is negligible in the poor social strata and very large for the privileged classes in the consumption sphere. Communism is seen as a conflicting process of historical transformation in which the oppressed and exploited classes struggle for the redistribution of freedom. Screpanti also wrote in the history of economic thought. His book on the history of political economy has been highly valued worldwide. His most recent work Screpanti develops a theory of revolution as a liberation process set in motion by individuals and social aggregates driven by the need for autonomy and the desire to broaden their sets of choice opportunities.

Works