Emmanuel Farjoun & Moshé Machover’s Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy (1983) (henceforth LoC)^[FM20] was republished in 2020; this republished version is reviewed below.

In this review, we learn exactly how LoC (& much of the Anglophone literature in general) fundamentally misunderstands categories of Karl Marx’s Capital^[1] such as price, production‐price, value, capital, labour‐power, etc.; learn a bit about these categories themselves; locate the particular source of the neoricardians’ uncomprehension; and ultimately indicate which aspects of LoC can nonetheless be salvaged.

Readers of LoC interested in the critique thereof may skip ahead to the section on ch. III. Those solely interested in the heart of the matter may skip ahead to the crux of ch. VI. Many (but not all) findings are briefly summarised in the conclusion.

A guest post (from the end of last year) by Guglielmo Carchedi on Michael Roberts’s blog^[CR24] makes an attempt to refute the framework put forth in Emmanuel Farjoun & Moshé Machover’s Laws of Chaos (1983) (henceforth LoC).^[FM83] Paul Cockshott responds on his own blog^[Coc24] in defence of LoC’s approach, and Carchedi fires back with an addendum.

All involved are avowed “Marxists”, and the result is generally illustrative of the level of (mis)understanding of Marx’s own work that’s typical of so‐called “Marxists”. By investigating said exchange, this post begins a brief series, which will only touch upon LoC in the second instalment; that is, the present post neither attacks nor defends LoC.