Claudio Napoleoni e la critica del presente

Bellanca, Nicolo' (2025): Claudio Napoleoni e la critica del presente.

Abstract

This paper revisits Claudio Napoleoni’s critical legacy by engaging closely with Riccardo Bellofiore’s recent monograph and the broader corpus of Napoleoni’s writings. After arguing for Napoleoni’s status as a “contemporary classic,” it reconstructs his model of “pure” versus “historical” capitalism, showing how he locates rent extraction, alienation, and unproductive consumption at the heart of Italian economic dynamics. Building on his anthropological dialectic, the paper highlights Napoleoni’s vision of human emancipation as liberation “from” and “of” work—a shift from an economistic to a time autonomy paradigm. It then interrogates his ongoing self critique and methodological “back and forth,” which prevented theoretical closure but fueled an open ended critical practice. Turning to Bellofiore’s reinterpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, the study questions the implicit use of counterfactuals in his comparative method and examines his meta theory of crisis centered on the falling rate of profit and its counter tendencies. Finally, the paper illustrates how integrating non Marxist social science—especially recent contributions on discretionary time, institutional design, and democratic enterprise governance—can enrich and update Napoleoni’s radical questions. In so doing, it proposes a truly interdisciplinary critique of present day capitalism.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• English Title: Claudio Napoleoni and the Critique of the Present
• Language: Italian
• Keywords: Claudio Napoleoni; Riccardo Bellofiore; Marxist theory of value; pure vs. historical capitalism; economic rent; alienation; time autonomy; methodological andirivieni; interdisciplinary critique
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B3 - History of Economic Thought: Individuals > B31 - Individuals; B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B4 - Economic Methodology > B41 - Economic Methodology; B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches > B51 - Socialist ; Marxian ; Sraffian; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O11 - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development; P - Economic Systems > P1 - Capitalist Systems > P10 - General

References

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