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Transcript of Notes David Harveys Companion to Capital
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Preface to First German Edition
“The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and
simple.” Yet, minds have struggled to understand it while, at the same time successfully
analyzing “much more composite and complex forms… Why? Because the body, as an organic
whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body… But in bourgeois society, thecommodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity – is the economic
cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It
does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic
anatomy.”
“My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a
process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations
whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above
them”
“Present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly
changing.”
Afterword to the Second German Edition
“The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel‘s hands, by no means prevents him from
being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.
With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the
rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed totransfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and
abomination to bourgeoisdom… because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative
recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation
of that state… because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid
movement… it is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”
Harvey’s Introduction
Marx’s aim is to convert the radical political project from shallow utopian socialism to a scientific
communism:
1. Reconfigure social scientific method
a. Interrogation of classical political economy (British)
b. Using the tools of critical philosophy (German)
c. To illuminate utopian socialism (French)
2. Thus answering the following questions:
a. What is communism?
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b. How can we understand and critique capitalism scientifically in order to
chart the path to communist revolution more effectively?
Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion (process).
Marx seeks a conceptual apparatus, a deep structure, that explains the way in which motion is
actually instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. Relations (transformative activity) rather than stand-alone principles
Chapter 1
Section 1: Use Value and Value
I.
1. Commodity: dual character: use-value and exchange-value.
2. The exchange ratios between commodities… appear accidental, but… exchange presupposes that
all commodities have something in common that makes them… commensurable: they are all
products of human labor.
3. As such, they incorporate "value”... the socially necessary (average) labor time necessary to
produce them under given conditions of labor productivity.4. But for labor to be socially necessary, somebody somewhere must want… the commodity:
use-values must be reintegrated into the argument.
This analysis is not causal. It is about… dialectical relations. Once cannot consider exchange-value,
use-value, or value without talking about the others. The concepts are… relations within a totality… This
totality is not static and closed but fluid and open and therefore in perpetual transformation (not a Hegelian
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totality).
II.
1. What kind of human labor is socially necessary?
2. The search for an answer reveals duality: concrete (actual) v.s. abstract (socially relevant) labor.
3. These two forms of labor converge again in the unitary act of commodity exchange.
4. Examination of… exchange reveals another duality: relative v.s. equivalent value.
5. Duality of value expression reunited in emergence universal equivalent (money).
Pattern… of argumentation: gradual unfolding of the argument that works through
oppositions that are brought back into unities… that internalize a contradiction which in turn generates yet
another duality… This is not Hegelian logic in the strict sense, because there is no final moment of
synthesis, only a temporary moment of unity within which yet another contradiction (duality) is internalized
and then requires a further expansion of the argument if it is to be understood.
Section 2: The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities
Metabolism:
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Heterogeneity of concrete-labor/use-value ↦ Homogeneity of abstract-labor/”value”
Abstract (homogeneous) and concrete (heterogeneous) aspects of labor are unified in the unitary act of
laboring… The duality resides within a singular labor process...There is, therefore, a relationship between
concrete and abstract labor. It is through the multiplicities of concrete labors that the measuring rod of
abstract labor emerges.
The singular commodity internalizes use-values, exchange-values, and values. A
particular labor process embodies useful concrete labor and abstract labor or value (socially necessary
labor-time) in a commodity that will be the bearer of exchange value in the market place.
Section 3: The Value Form, or Exchange- Value
Distinction: process of value-creation (labor) and value itself (labor coagulated in a thing and represented
in money-form).
Value is immaterial (social relation) but objective (represented): not directly measured
Exchange relations exist in dialectical/reciprocal dependency-relation with values
1. Relative value v.s. equivalent value: opposition between use-value and value internal to the
commodity is represented externally by reciprocal opposition between one commodity (relative)
that is a use-value and another (equivalent) that represents its value in exchange.
2. Increasing complexity of exchange relations: Expanded-value↦ general-value↦ universal
equivalent (money commodity).
a. Money commodity arises from trade-system and does not precede it.
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b. Co-evolving (historical) relation between emergence of money and value-forms.
By representing value, money allows it to regulate exchange relations but is, itself,
emergent from those relations.
Use-value, exchange-value and value internalize different spatiotemporal referents:
1. Use-values exist in absolute space-time.2. Exchange-values exist in the relative space-time.
3. Values exist in relational space-time.
The three concepts are dialectically integrated with one another: space-time of capitalism is
not constant but variable (e.g. "the annihilation of space by time").
Section 4: The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret
Two step analysis:1. Identify how fetishism arises and works as a fundamental and inevitable aspect of political
economic life under capitalism.
a. Commodities are sensuous things which are also supra-sensible or social.
b. Fetishism: social relation between men assumes fantastic form as relation between things.
c. Not illusory but objectively real, inseparable from capitalist mode of production:
knowledge of labor or the laborers from commodity in itself is impossible.
2. Examine how this fetishism is misleadingly represented in bourgeois thought
a. Freedom of the market: not freedom but fetishistic illusion. Market regulates us.
b. Naturalization (ala Crusoe) of capitalist production: categories of bourgeois economics"
are merely socially valid (objective) for the relations of production belonging to thishistorically determined mode of social production.
i. For revolutionary transformation of society, overthrow of the capitalist value-form
and construction of alternative.
CHAPTER 2: THE PROCESS OF EXCHANGE
Marx's purpose is to define the socially necessary conditions of capitalist commodity exchange
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It is as the bearers (personifications) of economic relations that characters who appear on the (capitalist)
economic stage come into contact with each other.
Marx is concerned with economic roles rather than with individuals
Individuals are juridical subjects with private-property ownership of a commodity which they trade
under (reciprocally) non-coercive, contractual conditions.
This arrangement socially necessary institutional and legal structure is historically specific tocapitalism. If interpreted (ala Proudhon) as universal and foundational, then merely re-inscribes
bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society and precludes radical
displacement of a capitalist mode of production.
Economy of market exchange implies exchangers (private owners) alienated both from the things they
own (thus exchangeable) and from each other (social relationships of reciprocal isolation and foreignness).
Unique to capitalism and concomitant of juridical ownership of commodities.
Adequate form of appearance of value is socially necessary. Money commodity internalizes a duality. It
is an ordinary commodity (labor-product) and also use-value as medium of social function (representsrelations between all other commodities).
Though symbolic, not arbitrary. Money commodity represents value only by exchange with all
other commodities as equivalents, even as it postures as the universal equivalent.
Difficulty not in comprehending money as a commodity, but in discovering how, why
and by what means a commodity becomes money.
With magic and fetish of money, men relate atomistically in their social process of production. These
assume a material shape independent of their conscious control/action.
Methodological point: Marx often assumes liberal/neoliberal theses so as to argue that the more the marketis structured and organized according to this utopian liberal or neoliberal vision, the greater the class
inequalities.
Thus must we be careful to distinguish when Marx discusses/critiques liberal utopian vision in its
perfected state from when he discusses/critiques actually existing capitalism
CHAPTER 3: MONEY, OR THE CIRCULATION OF COMMODITIES
General narrative of the chapter:
1. While, (section 3) there is only one kind of money, tension between:
Money qua measure of value (section 1)
Money qua medium of circulation (section 2)
2. Partial resolution: Necessity, of another form of circulation: credit moneys
3. Consequent debtor/creditor relation necessitates another form of circulation: capital
In the same way that money crystallized out of exchange, so capital crystallizes out of the
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contradiction between money qua measure of value and money qua means of circulation.
Section 1: The Measure of Values
As measure of value and as price-standard Sub-duality within the theory of money
1. Money duality:a. Measure of value
b. Medium of circulation
2. Money sub-duality:
a. Measure of value as social incarnation of human labour (“ideal" representation)
b. Standard of price as a quantity of metal with a fixed weight (X is worth quantity Y)
Money-names of the metal weights are gradually separated from their original weight-names
1. The money-name = a fetish-construct
a. Further disguises relationship to socially necessary labor-time
b. Price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity
Two key observations:
1. Possibility of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value (quality)
a. Average realized price vary depending on fluctuations in supply and demand conditions.
b. Thus emerges price-equilibrium (natural price): supply and demand in equilibrium.
c. The fact that we put money-names on commodities and convert the measure of value into
this ideal (price) form allows price fluctuations to equilibrate the market. This enables
representation of value as an equilibrium or natural price:convergence on the average
social labor necessary to produce a commodity.
2. Once anything is priced, anything can be priced independently of actual value.
If we assume that values are fixed, then we see prices fluctuating over time around "natural" prices
(equilibrium of demand and supply). Actually, however, natural price is appearance/representation of
socially necessary labor-time that generates the value crystallized in money. And this value is what the
market prices actually fluctuate around. Market prices perpetually and necessarily deviate from values; if
they didn't, there would be no way of equilibrating the market.
Section 2: The Means of Circulation
Three money commodity contradictions:
1. Use-value becomes the form of appearance of value (its opposite)
2. Concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of abstract human labour (its opposite)
3. Private labour takes the form of labour in its directly social form (its opposite)
There is no synthesis to thesis and antithesis. There is only the internalization of and greater
accommodation of the contradiction. Contradictions are never finally resolved. They can only be
replicated: either within a perpetual system of movement (like the ellipse) or on an expanded scale.
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There are apparent moments of resolution, as when the money-form crystallizes out of exchange
to resolve the problem of how to circulate commodities efficiently.
We must now analyze contradictions that money-forms internalize, that perpetually expand.
Exchange differentiates the commodity into commodity and money:
Movement of one (the exchange of money) facilitates the other (the movement of commodities). Yet an oppositional flow conditions rise of antagonistic forms
Sets the stage for the analysis of commodity-metamorphosis
Twofold metamorphosis of value:
1. C (universal) M (particular)
2. M (universal) C (particular)
Antithesis signals contradiction (in general metamorphosis/circulation of commodities):
1. Say's law: impossibility of general crisis of overproduction b/c each sale is a purchase and
visa-versa: aggregate equilibrium of purchases and sales in the market). Presumes that while purchased commodity (use-value) falls out of circulation, money does not.
2. Marx's objection: money can stay out of circulation; esp. periods of economic insecurity.
3. Money broadly removed from circulation commodities don’t circulate general crisis.
Ratio of money to commodities to preserve circulation?
1. Quantity theory of money: quantity of circulating medium determined by sum of prices of
commodities in circulation, and average velocity of money-circulation.
2. Three factors: movement of prices, quantity of commodities in circulation, and velocity of
money-circulation all vary in various directions under different conditions.
a. Necessary quantity of money varies accordingly b. The greater the velocity of money, the less money you need, and visa-versa
3. The quest for efficient forms of money, therefore, becomes paramount.
a. Socially necessary replace gold with other symbolic forms of money.
Section 3: Money
Contradictions internal to money:
As a measure of value
As a medium of circulation
Yet, only one money: contradictions must have "room to move" or even be resolved
By loosening connection between value and its expression (at expense of contact with a real and
solid monetary base)
From this point, Marx probes deeper into the contradictions that characterize this evolved form of the
money system.
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I. Phenomenon of money-hoarding (petrification):
1. Motivation to hoard:
a. Social necessity.
i. Temporal problem of coordinating sale/purchase of different commodities with
different rates of production/market-preparedness.
b. Social necessity awakens lust for money-power.i. Once something is priced anything can be.
ii. Nothing incommensurable with money: thus “democratic”/“egalitarian.”
iii. Money (universal equivalent) is itself a commodity: social power (in monetary
form) becomes concentrated as private and, eventually, class power. Money
destroys community by replacing it.
2. Contradiction: qualitative infinity and quantitative finitude to hoarding drive
a. Ever pushes hoarder to Sysphean task of accumulation of money as social power
b. Founds contradiction btwn. limitless potentiality of money-power accumulation and limited
possibilities for use-value accumulation.
3. Utility of hoarding: provisional resolution to contradiction between money as value-measure and ascirculation-medium.
a. Hoarded money = reserve to be put into circulation upon production surge and retracted
upon shrinkage of need for circulating money (e.g. w/ velocity-increase).
b. Enticed into circulation by raising the relative price of gold and silver, enticed out of
circulation by lowering relative price thereof.
II. Money as means of payment.
1. Problem of coordinating temporalities of different commodity-production-modes
2. Hoarding alternative: money as a means of payment creates a time gap between
commodity-exchange and money-exchange.a. Money becomes money of account.
b. Since no money actually moves until settlement date, less aggregate money is needed to
circulate commodities. This helps resolve tensions between money as a value-measure
and as circulation-medium.
c. New social relation: debtor/creditors new transaction-mode & social dynamic.
d. Shift from occasional form to rigid crystallization more definite class relation.
3. Replacement of C-M-C circulation with M-C-M circulation
a. Capital emerges when money is put into circulation in order to get more money.
b. Crystallizes from circulation of commodities mediated by the contradictions of
money-forms.
III. Course of Marx’s argument thus far:
1. Proliferation of commodity exchange leads to rise of money-forms
a. Dialectical and relational opposition between use-value and exchange-value
b. Externalization thereof in money-form to represent value and facilitate exchange
2. Internal contradiction within money-forms lead to rise of the capitalist circulation: money is used to
gain more money.
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a. Internalization of contradiction by money-form as circulation- medium value-measure.
b. Resolution of that contradiction in debtor/creditor relation: use of money as a means of
payment.
c. Money as the beginning and end point of a distinctive circulation process: capital.
IV. Contradiction in the function of money as means of payment1. Universal commodity: independent, separate from daily commodity circulation.
2. Expressed in monetary crises:
a. Chain of payments developed along with artificial system for settling them.
b. With disturbance of the mechanism, money suddenly converts from its nominal shape
(money of account) into hard cash.
i. Irreplaceable by profane commodities.
ii. Deficit in circulation-medium circulation halt production halt crisis
3. Modification to quantity theory of money:
a. The more payments balance each other out and the more money becomes a mere means
of payment, the less money is needed.i. Necessitates money-hoarding to cover debts as they come due.
b. Total quantity of money required in circulation is the sum of commodities, multiplied by
their prices and modified by the velocity/development of means of payment. To this is
added a reserve fund (hoard) to permit flexibility in flux-times.
V. World Finance
1. States independently manage their own monetary systems.
2. Yet, states remain connected and subject to dynamics of the world market.
3. Thus necessity of universal currency (lingua franca):
a. Though financial system now works without a money commodity (metallic base), this ismerely a change in the of representation has changed. The value of a particular currency
is determined in terms of the value of the total bundle of commodities produced within a
national economy.
4. Contradiction: fiction/fetish of national economy:
a. Within capitalism cannot abolish fetishism, condemned to live in a topsy-turvy
world of material relations between people and social relations between things.
b. Way forward: advance analysis of inherent contradictions, understand the way they
move, open up new possibilities for development, and potentiate crises.
CHAPTER THREE: From Capital To Labor-Power
C-C C-M-C M-C-M sensible only with surplus-value-accrual (M-C-M + ∆M)
If the laws of exchange (equivalence) are to be observed as the theory states, then a commodity
must be found that has the capacity to produce more value than it itself has: labor-power.
CHAPTER 4: THE GENERAL FORMULA FOR CAPITAL
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Capital is money used in an unceasing movement of profit-making. Capital is value-in-motion that appears
in different forms (money, commodities) and, “in itself” adds surplus-value, “lays golden eggs.”
Fetishistic tendency to assume that this expansion simply belongs to the nature of money.
In the circulation M-C-M, value presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a processof its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. Moreover, instead of simply
representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself. It
differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value.
Capital: value in process, money in process, multiplying itself within its circulation.
We see different possibilities: industrial, merchant, and interest-bearing capital, all of which have the
M-C-M + ∆M form of circulation: the general formula for capital.
CHAPTER 5: CONTRADICTIONS IN THE GENERAL FORMULA
Whence surplus-value? Pure-form-exchange: MCM transition-equivalence. ~(Surplus-value).
Not use-value fluctuation b/c commodity circulation/exchange also demands equivalence.
Not non-equivalent-exchange: though particular cases exist, it fails in generalized markets.
Not “effective demand” (demand external to equilibrium-market-exchange which, therefore,
brings an influx of fresh capital) b/c surplus-value must be produced before it can be consumed.1
We cannot appeal to processes of consumption in order to understand its production. At some
point, therefore, equivalence must prevail. We must, therefore, consider the problem of
surplus-value origin in a geographically closed and perfected capitalist mode of production
Individuals may sell high or buy low, but examined systemically and in aggregate social terms, if one gains,another loses and there is no aggregate surplus value accumulation. All capitalists must gain surplus value.
Therefore can capital neither arise from circulation (equivalent-exchange) nor apart from it.
CHAPTER 6 : THE SALE AND PURCHASE OF LABOUR-POWER
Resolution to this contradiction: money-owner must, within the sphere of circulation, find a commodity
whose consumption (use-value) is itself an objectification of labour (a creation of value).
It is labour-power: the capacity to congeal value in commodities.
To be itself a commodity, labor-power must have certain characteristics (dual-freedom):
1. Its possessor must be free to sell it.
a. Free proprietor of his own labor-capacity, hence of his person.
2. Its possessor must be “free” of other means by which to realize it
a. I.e. must already be dispossessed of an independent means of production.
1 Here is an important point were geographic and geopolitical issues come into play. There is an extensive discussion
of the economic context of the opium war. Capitalism entails geographic expansion, imperialism and colonialism; the
“spatial fix.”
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How does the laborer become "free" in this double sense? Historical origins: proletarianization.
Unique qualities of labor as a commodity:
1. Has the capacity to create value.
2. Circulation differential:a. Laborer: C-M-C
i. Thus content with the equivalent-exchange b/c it is use values that matter.
b. Capitalis: M-C-M
i. Must derive surplus-value from equivalent-exchange.
3. Unique mode of value-determination
a. Labor-power-value fixed by commodity-totality-value for a given living-standard.
i. Living-standards vary according to natural, social, political and historical
circumstances (e.g. conditions of class struggle, the degree of civilization in the
country and the history of social movements).
4. Unlike other commodities, it is paid for after use.
Difference btwn. C-M-C the (capitalist) C-M-C + C circuits:
1. The use-value capitalists acquire manifests itself only in its consumption, which is, at once, the
production process of commodities and of surplus-value.
2. As any commodity, labour-power-consumption is completed outside of circulation.
a. But circulation is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham
b. The capitalist comes out ahead and the laborer behind
c. Fallacy of liberalism.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Labor Process And The Production Of Surplus-Value
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CHAPTER 7: THE LABOUR PROCESS AND THE VALORIZATION PROCESS
Marx generally deals only w/ categories formulated within a capitalist mode of production. But in this
chapter he considers labor as a universal, independently of any specific social formation: eternal natural
necessity, mediates man-nature metabolism and, therefore, human life itself.
Inherent duality: one transforms nature and is thereby transformed (and visa-versa).
1. Not unique to human beings.
2. Distinction of human labor: end result of a labour process was conceived beforehand.
a. Humans act with self-conscious purposiveness.
b. Dialectic of labor-process: metabolic relation with nature means that while, on the one
hand, because ideas are not divorced from material experience, they are not independent
thereof, on the other hand internal relations are inevitably externalized to reshape the
material world and produce something new/different.
3. No neutral transformation of an externalized nature in relationship to man. Human nature is
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perpetually evolving by virtue of human labor activity.
Characterization of labor process as universal condition of possibility of human existence:
1. Purposeful activity
a. Process (as opposed to a thing) of making use-values:
i. Transforming one thing another.ii. Becoming/motion congealing in product/being/fixity
2. Object on which that work is performed
a. Raw nature v.s. raw material
3. Instruments of that work
a. Given directly v.s. consciously produced
b. Not what is made but how and by what instruments that distinguishes different economic
epochs. Instruments indicate:
i. Standard of the degree of development
ii. Social relations within which men work
iii. Dialectic btwn. technology and social relationsc. Represents labor stored-up for future use
i. Includes fields, cities and physical infrastructure
Relation of past-labor-products (tools) to present laboring activity:
1. By contact with living labor is value dead labor congealed in past products revived.
a. Indicates vital distinction between productive and individual consumption
i. Productive consumption: past labor is consumed in current labor to make new
use-value
ii. Individual consumption: consumed by people as they reproduce themselves.
Thus far: universal physical descriptions of the labor process independent of any social formation or
particular social meaning. What remains is to consider how capitalism makes distinctive use of these
universal capacities and powers.
The Capitalist Form of the Labor Process:
Two conditions attached to capital-labor contract which permit capitalist to produce commodity greater in
value than sum of commodities used to produce it (MP and LP):
1. Worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs.
2. Whatever the laborer produces during contract-period belongs to the capitalist.
a. Total alienation of laborer from the creative potential in laboring and product.
Commodity-exchange-laws unviolated: equivalents are exchanged. Yet, surplus-value is created .
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Granted equivalence, whence comes surplus value?
Capitalists could not possibly sustain the whole system by appeals to virtue (abstinence, benevolence,
alacrity). Individual behavior is irrelevant to capitalist class-activity (procuring surplus-value).
Furthermore, competition-coercion coerces behavior-similarity.
Origin of surplus value:
1. Daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily creation of value are two totally different
things.
a. Daily cost of maintaining labour-power: determines labor-power exchange-valuei. C-M-C circuit
b. Daily creation of value: determines labor-power use-value
i. M -C-M + M circuit.
2. Hidden variable: length of the work-day:
a. Capitalist can procure surplus-value only by contracting laborers to work longer than
necessary to produce the equivalent value of their labor-power.
i. Liberal utopia turns out to be not so utopian after all.
ii. World of freedom, equality, property and Bentham is a mask, a ruse, to permit
surplus-value-extraction w/out violating the laws of exchange.
b. Caveat:i. Production-time counts only in so far as it is socially necessary for the production
of a use-value:
1. Depends on labor power functioning under "normal conditions,” “normal
effectiveness,” and at “usual intensity.” I.e. on non-waste of labor.
ii. Result: duality:
1. Production of commodities in general: unity of the labour and
value-creation processes.
2. Capitalist production of commodities: uses commodity production to gain
surplus-value. New kind of unity.
c. Skill distinctions, illusory, arbitrary and socio-historically determined: all labor is reducible
to unskilled labor.
Footnote on relationship between slavery and wage labor: When the two labor systems compete,
pernicious. Slavery becomes more brutal under the competitive lash of market integrations into capitalism,
while, conversely, slavery exerts strong negative pressures on both wages and conditions of work.
Slavery not about value-production in the sense that Marx means it. It entails a different kind of
labor process. There is no abstract labor in a pure slave system.
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This was why Aristotle could not formulate a labor theory of value-because this theory only works
in the case of free labor.
CHAPTER 8: CONSTANT CAPITAL & VARIABLE CAPITAL THE RATE OF
SURPLUS-VALUE
Distinction: Constant v.s. Variable capital
1. Constant capital: value invested in past labor congealed in means of production.
a. Productive consumption: incorporation of constant-capital-value into active labor process
and consequent transfer to new commodities.
i. Possible only b/c value is immaterial but objective (i.e. socially accountable)
2. Variable capital: value invested in labor
a. Active agent vis-a-vis value
i. Transfer of value from constant capital to commodities
ii. Congealing socially necessary labor-time in commodities to produce:
1. Value-equivalent for variable-capital investment: social reproduction of labor power.
2. Surplus value: social reproduction of capitalist
b. Implicit political significance:
i. Laborers can destroy constant capital by refusing to work with it (strike).
ii. If capitalists argue right to surplus-value b/c they grant employment, laborers can
argue same right b/c they grant value to constant capital.
3. Total value of commodity: value-sum of constant capital (c), variable capital (v), and surplus value
(s). Thus: commodity value = c + v + s).
a. Surplus-value accumulation: control over active element of labor process (v)
i. Ideological manipulation (obfuscation of surplus labor).
CHAPTER 9: THE RATE OF SURPLUS-VALUE
1. Labor-power- productivity-rate:
a. C/V ratio: total (c)-value transferable to commodities via one (v) value-unit
2. Labor-power-exploitation-rate:
a. S/V ratio: total (s)-value producible via one (v) value-unit. Relationship btwn:
i. Surplus-labor and necessary labor
ii. Surplus labor-time and necessary labor-time
iii. Total value produced minus that paid for labor-power and value laid out to
purchase labor-power.
3. Profit rate:
a. S/(C + V) ratio: ratio of (s)-value to total value used.
i. Always lower than the rate of exploitation
1. Competition drives profit-rate rather than exploitation-rate emphasis
2. Thus emphasis on (c)-investment
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3. Rising (c)-investment falling profit rate crisis
The bourgeoisie cannot concede that labor is the form-giving, fluid, creative fire in the transformation of
nature that lies at the heart of any mode of production, including capitalism. Nor they praise labor for all
the value it produces, including the surplus-value that underpins capitalist profit.
Marx ends this chapter with a fantastic piece critiquing a typical bourgeois representation of labor:
Senior’s last hour.
1. Senior argued:
a. 8 hours: labor produces equivalent value of (c).
b. 3 hours: labor reproduces (v)
c. 1 hour: Labor produces (s)
d. Therefore, 12-hour day essential to gaining a profit.
2. Absurd, but confirms Marx’s fundamental contentions:
a. Profit rooted in command over laborer’s time.
b. Definition of value as socially necessary labor-time.i. What is socially necessary about the temporalities of laboring? Not only
must capitalists command the labor process, the product and the time of the
laborer, but they must also strive to command the social nature of
temporality itself.
CHAPTER FIVE: The Working Day
CHAPTER 10 : THE WORKING DAY
I. History of class struggle over the length of the working day
1. Theorization:
a. Nature of time and temporality under capitalism
b. Why capitalist production-mode necessarily constituted via class struggle.
2. Distinction:
a. Labor theory of value: how socially necessary labor-time is congealed in commodities by
the laborer. Standard of value represented by the money commodity and by money in
general.
b. Value of labor-power: Value of labor-power as a commodity sold in the market.
i. Yet, unlike other commodities, entails historical and moral elements.
II. Time/temporality can be manipulated for social purposes. Fundamental feature of capitalism.
1. As soon as surplus labor-time extraction becomes fundamental to class-relations replication, the
question of what time is, who measures it, and how temporality is to be understood moves to the
forefront of analysis.
2. Time is not simply given; it is socially constructed and perpetually reconstructed.
3. Time is also a density: how much can fit into it?
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a. Origin of industrial disciplinary and supervisory system:
i. Moments are the elements of profit
ii. Capitalists utilization of each work-day-moment at maximum intensity.
III. Surplus-value: labor-time in excess of labor-power-equivalent: work-day-length-dependant.1. Fluid quantity: antinomy of rights
a. Workers and capitalists equally bear the seal of the law of equivalent exchange when one
demands shorter and the other longer work-days.
2. Between equal rights, force decides: class struggle alone determines working-day
a. Not only physical force but also political force: capacity to mobilize, build alliances and
institutions, and influence a state apparatus to legislate “normal” working day.
b. Value is socially necessary labor-time: time is of the essence within capitalism.
i. Control over time (of others) has to be collectively fought over. It cannot be
traded.
ii. Class struggle therefore moves center stage3. History of class-struggle over length of working day:
a. Capitalism not only society that extracts surplus labor/product for a ruling-class.
b. But capitalist exploitation has particular qualities
i. Surplus labor/product surplus-value accumulated in money form
1. Infinite in scope
a. Unlike necessary limits to feudal commodity-accumulation,
ii. Appropriation occurs in context of wage labor:
1. Surplus labor extraction is obfuscated
a. Unlike transparent feudal appropriation: e.g. corvee system in
which work-days are literally appropriated. b. Social construction of temporal determinations: “work-day”
measured not by actual day, but by work-quantity that should be
completed.
4. Contradiction: capitalism both rejects and demands work-day-limits: E.g. Factory Acts
a. If labor is a key resource and if (due to its exceedingly lopsided power relationship with
capital) it is overexploited and degraded, then the capacity to continue production of
surplus-value is undercut.
i. Capital unemployed by living labor is lost capital
b. Yet, capitalist class-interest in a "sustainable" labor force conflicts with individual
capitalists faced with “coercive law of competition” and driven toward overexploitation.
i. Both poles of contradiction motivated by need to keep fixed capital perpetually
employed.
c. Therefore some limit has to be put on competition between them.
d. Alternatives:
i. Relay system
ii. Surplus population.
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IV. Centuries of struggle between capitalist and worker have established normal working day
1. In medieval times, very difficult to get people to be wage laborers.
2. Legislation enacted to codify the wage relation, extend the length of the working day and
criminalize beggars and vagabonds. In effect, a disciplinary apparatus was created to socialize the
population into the role of wage laborers.3. Entails revolution in time determination/socialization: These are not natural but social
determinations, and their invention was not irrelevant to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
a. When Foucault talks about the rise of governmentality, what he is really talking about is
that moment when people started to internalize a sense of temporal discipline and to learn
to live by it almost without thinking. To the degree that we all have internalized this sense,
we become captive to a certain way of thinking about temporality and the practices that
attach thereto. For Marx, this temporality arises in relationship to the emergence of value
as socially necessary labor-time.
b. No longer a matter of saying that “between equal rights, force decides” but of recognizing
the class character of hegemonic forms of temporal thinking about the world.c. Not only temporality that is involved here, because the issue of spatiality also arises.
i. Spatial organization is part of the disciplinary apparatus brought to bear on the
worker. This almost certainly inspired Foucault's various studies of spatially
organized disciplinary apparatuses
ii. To be a "normal" person, is to accept a certain kind of spatiotemporal discipline
convenient to a capitalist mode of production.
1. What Marx demonstrates is that this isn't normal at all-it's a social
construct that arose during this historical period in this particular way and
for these particular reasons.
By the 1860’s, after 50 years of struggle over the Factory Act(s), bourgeoisie learned that a healthy and
efficient labor force is more productive than an unhealthy, inefficient one. Being impelled to over-exploit
by coercive laws of competition to over-exploit labor is, therefore, contrary to their class interest.
Capitalists could then overtly support a certain level of collective regulation to limit such coercion.
The implication is that collective class struggle can be a stabilizer within the capitalist dynamic. If workers
are completely powerless, then the system goes awry. Thus, class struggle sustains the capitalist mode of
production.
But there is also a point at which struggle over the length of the working day and the empowerment of a
working-class movement can go beyond trade-union consciousness and morph into more revolutionary
demands. The question here is, at what point? If there is an equilibrium point for class struggle, it is not
fixed, nor is it known. But it does depend on the nature of the class forces and the degree of flexibility that
capitalists have (e.g. a shortened working day that permits compensation by work-intensification does
nothing).
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CHAPTER 11 : RATE AND MASS OF SURPLUS-VALUE
1. Mass (M) of surplus-value (S): rate of (S) multiplied by number of laborers (L) employed.
a. M = L(S/C+V)
b. If (L) decreases but rate increases proportionally, mass remains constant2. Limits:
a. Rate of labor exploitation (S/V)
i. Limited by length of day (itself limited by political and social barriers).
ii. circumvented by (L) increase
b. Total available labor force (and of variable capital).
3. Faced with these two limits, capital must generate a different strategy for increasing the
surplus-value mass.
a. When we view the production process as a process of valorization then means of
production changed into means for absorption (consumption) of labour, which employ the
worker rather than being employed by him.i. Follows from fact that value of the means of production is preserved only by
absorption of fresh supplies of living labor.
4. Capitalism abhors limits of any sort, perpetually strives to transcend all limits
CHAPTER SIX: Relative Surplus-Value
CHAPTER 12: THE CONCEPT OF RELATIVE SURPLUS - VALUE
I. Two Forms of Relative Surplus Value:1. Based on labor-power exploitation rate (S:V):
a. Labor-commodity-value: total value of commodities needed to reproduce laborers
(wage goods):
i. Falls with rising productivity in wage-goods industries
ii. Unaffected by productivity-increase in other industries (e.g. luxury).
b. Lower (V) costs higher S:V rate.
i. Applies to all industries on a relatively permanent basis.
2. Based on labor-power productivity rate (C:V)
a. Technological advance super-efficiency increased productivity
i. Increase in (C) relative to (V) means production below average necessary social
labor time
ii. But exchange at average necessary social labor time
iii. Thus extra surplus-value
b. Competition forces industry-wide tech-update, thus lowering average socially necessary
labor-time.
i. Industry-specific (except in wage-goods industries) and time-limited.
c. Peculiar result: machines not be a source of value, but surplus-value.
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i. Explains technological dynamism of capitalism.
ii. Explains tech-fetishism: tech-fix allows (S) increase without open class struggle
over absolute (S) increase related to working-day-length.
If the benefits from technological dynamism are more evenly distributed among the classes, worker’s
standard of living can rise (as measured by the use-values they can afford) at the same time as the rate of exploitation increases. Then:
Opposition to that technological dynamism becomes muted.
Political opposition to capitalism in general also becomes less strident.
CHAPTER 13 : CO-OPERATION
Elevating productivity of labor depends on organizational forms (cooperation and divisions of labor), as well
as on machinery and automation (technology).
I. Cooperation is essentially positive in nature:
1. Increase in productive power of the individual
2. Creation of a new, collective productive power which enhances individual efficiency.
a. Productive power of social labour that arises from co-operation.
i. Workers divested of individuality develop species-capabilities.
3. Enhanced spatial qualities:
a. Geographical expansion (work conducted over a large area).
b. Geographical concentration (aggregating workers for purposes of cooperation)
i. Political consequences as workers organize.
4. Requires some directing authority, but unlike that of capital.
II. Cooperation and division of labor co-opted by capital becomes a negative (for the laborer).
1. Simultaneous mass-employment of wage-labourers in same process: genesis of capitalism.
2. Distinction:
a. Formal subsumption of labor - not under direct capital-supervision
b. Real subsumption of labor - under direct capital-supervision
3. Special character of capital-supervision: recognize that moments are the elements of profit and to
squeeze as much labor-time out of the laborer as possible.
a. Result: financial and functional stratification of wage-labor
i. Industrial army of workers.
ii. Supervised by officers (managers and foremen): authoritarian/despotic.
b. Cooperative apparatus structured according to capital interest: (S)-production
4. Laborers enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other.
a. Cooperation once already incorporated into the working organism of capital.
i. Ceased to be themselves, form but a particular mode of existence of capital.
b. Socially productive power of labour appears as a power inherent in capital.
5. No longer adequate to think only of the wage laborer: working class is stratified functiona
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CHAPTER 14: THE DIVISION OF LABOR AND MANUFACTURE
Labor-division: reorganization of existing methods, skills, tools into a new system: manufacturing
Two reorganization-modes: human relation w/in cooperative regime of production space.
1. Heterogeneous: fitting together of partial products produced independently
2. Organic: passing one product through a series of processes.
Craftsmen who perform various partial operations must change place, tools, etc. Transitions interrupt
labor-flow, create time gaps, thus reduce labor-exploitation-rate. Gaps are closed by the creation of the
“collective worker.”
1. Production analyzed, decomposed into partial operations
a. Worker specialization: assignation to one partial operation.
2. Successive process-stages become simultaneous, spatially contiguousa. Efficiency gained through spatiotemporal reconstruction of labor process
b. Rationalized space-organization: save on movement costs.
i. Movement-time reduction productivity increase
ii. Major organizational aspect of capitalism spatiotemporal construction
3. Impact on workers: industrial pathology
a. Hyper-specialized individual made a fragment of his own body
i. Deskilling
1. Labor-power-value reduction
a. Exception: when decomposition generates new functions.
Reskilling of privileged minority of laborers (e.g. specializedengineers)
ii. Loss of freedom: suppression of a whole world of productive drives, inclinations,
and abilities. Productive activity mere appendage of workshop.
b. Intellectual labor becomes a specialized function, separating mental from manual labor.
Possibility of intelligent direction of production expands in one direction, because it
vanishes in many others. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the
capital which confronts them.
Social division of labor:
1. Origin:
a. Natural/physiological in family/tribe
b. Exchange at borders: groups w/ different assets
2. Advanced form:
a. Precondition: adequate population and density
i. Relative to transport and communication
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b. Foundation: separation of town from country.
c. Increasing complexity of production leads to territorial specialization
Diametrical opposition: division of labor in the workshop and social division of labor achieved through
competition in the market
1. Social DL equilibrium by market mechanisms: mediated through among different branches of industry. Presupposes a dispersal of production-means among many independent producers. A
Posteriori.
2. Workshop DL mediated through the sale of the labour-power of several workers to one capitalist,
who applies it as combined labour-power. Presupposes concentration of the means of production
in the hands of one capitalist. Apriori.
3. Capitalism lives always in the (mutually conditioned) contradiction between anarchy in social DL
and despotism manufacturing DL.
a. Implication: Socialism is the introduction of regulation to social DL
i. Problem is not the techniques but the fact that relative (S) not employed to
satisfy material needs of all, but accumulated by capitalist.
Reorganization of DL hallmark of the "manufacturing period" in capitalism's history.
1. Limit: unable either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionize that
production to its very core.
a. Contradiction of its narrow technical basis w/ production- requirements it created.
2. Limit transcended with machinery and the organizational forms it generates.
CHAPTER SEVEN
What Technology Reveals
CHAPTER 15 : MACHINERY AND LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY
Important Footnote
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I. Marx's relation with Darwin: Human history as social evolution
1. Marx appreciated Darwin's approach to evolution as a process open to historical reconstruction
and theoretical investigation.
a. Critical history of technology: idea of human evolutionary process in which we can discern
radical shifts not only in technologies but in whole modes of social life.
b. More than history, theoretical engagement w/ processes of social transformation.2. Critique of Darwin: exportation of capitalist (Malthusian) structures to natural processes.
a. Alternative: Russian evolutionist emphasis on cooperation exported by Kropotkin into the
fundamentals of social anarchism.
II. Dialectic of evolutionary elements
1. Six elements constitute distinctive moments in the overall process of human evolution understood
as a totality. No one moment prevails over the others, even as there exists within each moment
the possibility for autonomous development
2. All elements co-evolve in an open, dialectical manner, are subject to perpetual transformation as
dynamic moments within the totality (ensemble, assemblage).
a. Major transformations occur through a dialectic of transformations across all the
moments.i. Uneven development among elements (in space and time) produces contingency
in human evolution
ii. Danger for social theory: conceiving one as determinant for all the others.
1. Failure to recognize need to engage politically across all these moments in
a way that was sensitive to geographical specificities.
III. Historical Materialism
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1. Marx’s materialism is different from that of the natural scientists; it is historical.
a. Abstract materialism of natural science excludes the historical process.
i. Risk of uncritical importation of historical and political assumptions into
supposedly neutral and objective science. Misinterpretation.
2. Marx’s method: begin with the surface appearance, then dive deep down beneath the fetishisms to
uncover a theoretical conceptual apparatus that can capture the underlying motion of social processes. That theoretical apparatus is then brought step by step back to the surface to interpret
the dynamics of daily life in new ways.
a. Base — superstructure model: dialectical (not mechanical or causal): co-conditioning of
mode of production and general process of social, political, and intellectual life (i.e. how
we become conscious of problems and fight them out).
b. Gramscian notion of hegemony: Common institutional/conceptual system: we seem not to
have choices because that's what the deep structure of capitalism mandates.
i. Change demands struggle with respect to all moments simultaneously.
Sections 1-3: Machine Development, Value Transfers and Effects on Workers
As above, machines generate not value, but surplus-value. Technological advances generate increase in
rate of exploitation till they are adopted universally, at which point the socially necessary labor-time drops
and the difference between the innovator and the others disappears.
Industrial revolution: difference btwn. tools and machines
1. Machine replaces the worker — who handles a single tool — by a mechanism operating with a
number of similar tools and set in motion by a single motive power.
a. While workers can continue to provide the motive power, at some point need arose to
supplement that power from an external source.i. Water-power: geographically restricted (localized).
ii. Steam engine overcomes this limit: effect, not cause of machine-revolution.
2. Revolution in mode of production necessitates two parallel revolutions:
a. In social relations: co-operation by DL becomes coordination of machines. Co-evolution
of mental conceptions and technological development.
b. In social process of production (communication and transport): annihilation of space by
time.
3. Limit: inadequate technical foundation. Mechanized industry founded upon non-mechanized
machine-producing labor.
a. Contradiction appears in social process of production: scale exceeds capacity.
i. Industry forced to produce machines by means of machines.
ii. Adequate technical foundation for capitalist mode of production.
4. Result: parallel revolution in nature of cooperation:
a. In manufacture organization of social labour process is subjective. In the machine system
of large-scale industry: objective organization of production which confronts worker as a
pre-existing material condition of production.
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Value-transfer from machine to product.
1. Machine is a commodity with a value
a. Initially, Marx appeals to the idea of straight-line depreciation.
b. Limit: fixed by difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour
power replaced by it.
i. Enforced by the coercive laws of competition: sum of saved (V) depends, on thevalue of labor-power.
Consequences of machine deployment (destruction of skill base) for the worker
1. Easier to employ unskilled women and children.
a. Possible to substitute family wage (FW) for the individual wage (IW).
i. IW reduced while family wage remains constant.
ii. Capitalists class get several laborers for close to the price of one.
b. Less labor in home More money spent (on ready-made commodities) outside
i. Reproduction-cost of working-family grows, balances greater income.
ii. Less labor in home moral degradation1. Contradiction between market-compulsion of individual capitalists and
state efforts to combat degradation (education).
2. Prolongation of the Working
a. Incentives to use up the machines ASAP: deterioration due to non-use and economic
obsolescence.
i. More use more wear machine turnover: incentivize work-day lengthening.
1. Paradox: machines intended to shorten work-day stimulate need lengthen
it.
b. Mechanization reduces (V) demand: machinery produces a surplus working population,
compelled to submit to the dictates of capital (wage reduction, work-day elongation).i. Immanent contradiction: mass of (S) depends on the rate of (S) and number of
workers (V), but rate of (S) can be increased only by diminishing (V). Therefore,
increased rate of (S) ultimately decreases mass of (S). Falling rate of profit.
3. Intensification: regulating porosity of the working day
a. In charge of own tools, Laborers can work at their own pace.
b. With machines, speed and continuity determined by machine system, and workers have to
conform.
i. Inversion in social relations: workers become appendages of the machine.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Machinery and Large-Scale Industry
Story thus far:
1. Tech. transformation of manufacture. Tech-basis achieved by production of machines by
machines, and organization of many machines into factory ensemble.
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2. Machine = commodity: value must circulate as (C).
a. Limit: depreciating value of the machine should be less than the value of the labor
replaced by it.
i. Possibility of uneven geographical development: high labor cost incentivizes
machine employment and the converse.
3. Implications for the laborer: relationship btwn. technologies and social relations.a. Deskilling permits employment of women and children
i. Substitution of family labor/wage for individual labor/wage with savings for
capitalist.
ii. Vast ramifications for family structures.
b. Incentive to prolong working day and intensify labor process.to confront economic
obsolescence.
Sections 4-10: Workers, Factories, Industry
Section 4: The factory not simply as a technical thing but as a social order.1. Deskilling: along w/ tool, worker-skill in handling it passes over to machine.
a. Destroys technical foundation of DL: homogenization of labor.
i. Workers become machine-appendages.
b. Labor easily replaced, production continuity depends on machines.
2. Intelligence now divided from physical labor.
a. Concentrated in capitalists and specialized workers like engineers.
b. Whole structure of mental conceptions, social relations, reproduction of life, relation to
nature and so on is being transformed along class lines.
Section 5: Worker resistance to transformations of this sort1. Workers distinguish btwn. machinery and its use by capital; transfer attacks from material
instruments of production to capitalist form of society.
a. Implication: machinery itself is neutral, can be socialistically employed.
i. Problem: machines not neutral (as per preceding sec.).
ii. Attempts to construct socialism with capitalist technologies will generate another
version of capitalism (Soviet Union).
1. Necessity: technology fit for socialist/communist production-mode
2. Class character of capitalist technologies:
a. Capitalists construct technologies as instruments of class struggle.
i. Strike suppression: discipline the laborer within the labor process
ii. Tech.-induced unemployment: labor surplus to depress wages.
Section 6: Compensation Theory
1. Compensation theory: surplus (V) reapplied to new ventures, redundant labor reabsorbed
2. Blocked compensation options:
a. Operation expansion w/in original industry: all cannot be re-absorbed.
b. Growth of machine industry: (V)-increase must be less than (V)-reduction by machinery
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or machines are useless.
c. Growth in raw-material extraction: rise in (near) slavery, not wage labor.
3. Open compensation options:
a. Infrastructure investment
b. Growth of (unproductive) service industry (includes ideological groups)
Section 7: Repulsion and Attraction of Workers through Development of Machine Production
1. Profits attract social capital to the favoured sphere of production.
a. Problems:
i. Limited availability of raw materials.
ii. Limited sales outlets (i.e. risk of non-circulating surplus).
2. Solution: geographical and temporal displacements (spatial fix):
a. Capital expands geographically (colonialism and imperialism) by wrecking domestic
industry of a colony.
i. Transforms colony into new market for commodities.ii. Forces colony to become producer of raw-materials.
b. Solution to problem of capital-surplus disposal
c. Genesis of international division of labor suited to requirements of dominant industrial
countries.
3. Industrial cycle of capitalism: moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation.
Consequent normalization of employment instability for workers.
Section 8: Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicrafts and Domestic
Industry
1. Spatio-temporal coexistence of and competition among domestic, handicraft, and manufacturinglabor systems.
a. While Marx implies that factory system will prevail, it is better to interpret coexistence of
and competition among systems as a permanent fixture of capitalism.
i. Capitalists like to preserve labor-system-choice. Their competition becomes a
weapon against labor in struggle to procure surplus-value.
2. Adaptation, not overthrow: mental conceptions associated with machine technologies (breaking
down labor processes into component phases, routinizing) applied to reorganization of older
systems. Horrific consequences:
a. Other industry forms converted into external department of Large-Scale Industry: enables
shameless exploitation and crippling of labor-resistance by dispersal.
3. Role of Regulation in progress of industrial revolution: regulatory capture: corporations capture
regulatory apparatus to eliminate competition which lacks resources to comply.
4. Fluctuations in demand and supply, both seasonal and annual, called for flexible modes of
response. Requirement: creation of adequate transport and communications infrastructure.
Section 9: Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts
1. Traditional trades were conservative in character. Their stable processes are now dissolved,
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consciously and systematically divided according to particular intended effect.
2. Result: continual revolution in technical basis of production, and worker-functions/social
combinations of the labour process. Revolutionizes DL within society.
a. Thus large-scale industry necessitates fluidity and adaptability of labor, an educated and
well-rounded labor force, capable of doing multiple tasks and able to respond flexibly to
changing conditions.i. Contradiction: capital needs both degraded, unintelligent, labor and also flexible,
adaptable and educated labor, too. Hence Factory Acts with education clauses.
1. Contradiction-development in a production-form is its mode of dissolution
and reconstruction.
b. Capital dissolves patriarchal structure of old labor system:
i. Creates economic foundation for higher form of family and gender relations
ii. Allows for humane development under the appropriate conditions.
c. Thus, by maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of
production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that
process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forcestending towards the overthrow of the old one.
Section 10: Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture
1. More revolutionary effect in agriculture than elsewhere
a. Annihilates peasant with wage laborer: generates class conflict in the countryside.
b. Extension of rational scientific principles to agriculture revolutionizes relations between
agriculture and manufacturing and creates the material conditions for higher synthesis
between agriculture and industry.
i. Cost: disrupting metabolic interaction between man and the earth.
Marx not advocate return to society where production processes were “mysteries.” Believes application
of science and technology has progressive implications. Problem discovering where, and how to mobilize
them to create socialist mode of production. Technological and organizational changes embedded in
coevolution of our relation to nature, processes of production, social relations, mental conceptions of the
world, and the reproduction of daily life. This chapter can and should be read as an essay on thinking
through the relations among these moments.
CHAPTER NINE:
From Absolute and Relative Surplus Value to the Accumulation of Capital
Distinction: relative v.s. absolute surplus-value. Duality returns to unity: only one surplus-value, and its two
forms are conditional on each other. Synthesis highlights material already presented and takes it to a
vantage point whence terrain of capitalism seen in novel way.
Ch. 16: controversial claims
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1. Definition of Productive Labor:
a. Broadened: concept of collective laborer and surplus-value extraction
i. Ambiguity: if not fictively limited to e.g. factory workers, but includes the whole
spectrum of labor, then border of “collective laborer” is undefined.
b. Narrowed notion of productive labor: worker productive only if produces surplus-valuei. Ambiguity: productivity varies according to natural and social conditions within
which labor is carried on.
2. Two facets of productive labor definition enable transition from individual micro-perspective to
macro-analysis of class relations.
The following two chapters do not pose any substantial issues
Chapter 17: Marx does is to recognizes three variables determining surplus-value: length of the working
day, intensity of labor, productivity of labor. Thus three deployable strategies.
Emphasizes flexibility of surplus-value strategies: if not obtained one way then another.
Chapter 18 reviews various formulae for interpreting the rate of surplus-value.
Chs. 19 - 22: wages
1. Difference btwn. "value of labor" and "value of labor-power”: worker sells labor-power. When
labor begins: does not belong to him and cannot be sold. Labor is substance and immanent
measure of value, but valueless in itself.
a. Notion of “value of labor” is imaginary, a fetish concept that disguises idea of value of
labor-power and thereby evades question as to how it became a commodity.
b. Classical economy explains “value of labor” by supply and demand, but these explainnothing once equilibrium is achieved: price of labour is its natural price, determined
independently of the relation of demand and supply.
i. Actually fixed by value of commodities needed to reproduce the worker at a
given standard of living in a given society at a given time.
2. Marx offers brief resume of the theory of surplus-value to dispel confusions derived from talk
value of labor instead of labor-power.
Chapter 20: how the time-wage system works. Remember that the way in which this is being worked out
in the market disguises the underlying social relation.
Chapter 21: piece wages. Advantage for the capitalist: workers can be forced to compete with one
another in terms of individual productivity: drives productivity up and wages down. But competition btwn.
capitalists drives up. Thus equilibrium point produces actual wage which adequately represents value of
labor-power.
Chapter 22: national differences in wages. Marx departs from tendency to analyze capitalism as if it were
a closed system. Opening to examine uneven geographical development in a globalizing system.
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1. If value of labor-power is fixed by value of commodities needed to support the laborer at a given
standard of living, and if that standard varies according to natural conditions, the state of class
struggle and the degree of civilization in a country, then plainly the value of labor-power stands to
vary geographically.
2. Productivity-variations in productivity in wage good industries in different parts of the world
produce differentiations in the value of labor-power and wage rates.a. Low nominal wage in a highly productive country = higher real wage, and vice versa,
because workers command more goods with the wages they receive.
PART VII: THE PROCESS OF ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL
Marx's conclusions not universal, but contingent statements based on and limited by assumptions:
1. Capital passes through process of circulation in normal way: i.e. no problem selling goods at value
in market or recirculating surplus-value back into production.
2. Division of the surplus-value into profit of enterprise, profit on merchant capital, interest, rent, andtaxes has no effect.
3. Closed system: no account of the export trade. Treat the whole world of trade as one nation, and
assume that capitalist production is established universally.
We are left with a stripped-down model of the dynamics of capital accumulation derived from the theory
of absolute and relative surplus value operating in a closed system.
Vol.II treats dynamically the constant and holds constant what is treated dynamically in Vol. I
1. Contradiction of equilibrium conditions: If things go right according to Volume I, they are likely go
wrong according to Volume II, and vice versa.2. This prefaces the discussion of the inevitability of crises in Volume III
CHAPTER 23 : SIMPLE REPRODUCTION
Reproduced of capital accumulation by extraction of surplus-value over time
Capital accumulation must be viewed as a connected whole in constant flux of renewal: all
capitalist-productive-processes are also capitalist-reproductive-processes.
I. Reproduction of the worker: appendage of capital in the marketplace and home
1. (S) invested in (V) allows for system reproduction.
a. Part of product continuously reproduced returns to worker in wage-form (money).
b. Workers then spend wages to buy back a portion of commodities they themselves
collectively produced. Individual consumption of worker = productive consumption for
capital.
i. Body of worker: transmission device for circulating part of capital, in a
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continuous, circular (non-linear) version of the C-M-C process.
1. Thus (V) not advanced by capital, but labor: is paid after work.
2. If so, then how does capital get the process started in the first place?
Extra-systematic genesis: primitive accumulation.
II. Reproduction of worker-class:
1. Reproduction of capital: even if principal-capital was, upon entry into production-process, personal property of investor this would entitle him only to its (S)-equivalent. Once this is extracted, if
property right to principal does not fall to workers its value (and the (S)-value generated with it) is
appropriated without an equivalent.
c. Meidner Plan.
III. Capitalist process of production seen as a total process of reproduction, produces not only commodities
and (S), but also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself: on the one hand the capitalist, on the
other the wage-labourer.
CHAPTER 24: THE TRANSFORMATION OF SURPLUS-VALUE INTO CAPITAL
Production of capital on a progressively increasing scale involves combining additional labor-power with
additional means of production. Consequently, part of surplus labor must be applied in advance to produce
of means of subsistence and means of production for subsequent labor appropriations. Whereby (S)
production becomes a repeating cycle.
1. Laws of appropriation or of private property become their opposite through their own internal
dialectic.
a. The exchange of equivalents is only apparent since capital exchanged for labor-power is
itself merely a portion of the product of the labor of others which has been appropriated
without an equivalent.i. Exchange relation belongs only to process of circulation, becomes a mere form,
which is alien to its content.
2. Property turns out to be the capitalist’s right to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its
product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product.
a. Hence objection to to any attempt to universalize bourgeois conceptions of right: legal,
ideological and institutional cover for the ever-increasing capital production.
Capitalists are motivated by accumulation of social power in money-form.
1. Competition compels individual capitalist to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he
can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.
2. Capitalism is always about progressively increasing accumulation for the sake of accumulation,
production for the sake of production.
a. Not a fixed magnitude, but a part of social wealth which is elastic in terms of magnitude
distribution (revenue, additional capital) and field of action for further accumulation.
CHAPTER TEN: Capitalist Accumulation
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CHAPTER 25: THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION
I. Composition of capital:
1. Three forms of composition
a. Technical composition: worker’s physical ability to transform certain use-value quantity a
commodity in certain time-period. Changes with technological development. b. Organic composition: C/V ratio as modified by technical composition of capital.
c. Value composition: C/V ratio as modified by factors other than technical composition of
capital (e.g. economizing on waste, depressing standard of living, (V) reduction due to
increased productivity in wage-good industries, (C) reduction due to increase productivity
in industries producing the means of production.
2. This is important b/c later Marx considers tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
a. Ricardo had explained this in Malthusian (i.e. the problem resides in the relation to
nature).
b. Marx argues that internal dynamics of technological change w/in capitalism increases
organic composition of capital, (C/V), which eventually produces falling rate of profit(S/[C+V]) under assumption of limits on exploitation-rate (S/V).
i. I.e. labor-saving innovations remove the active value producer from the labor
process and so make it more difficult to produce surplus-value.
1. Argument incomplete b/c no definite reason for C/V ratio increase as per
Marx’s specifications.
ii. Law of the progressive growth of (C) in comparison with (V): (C) magnitude is
directly proportional, whereas (V) magnitude is inversely proportional, to the
progress of accumulation.
II. Models of Capital Accumulation
1. First Model of Capital Accumulation: Two Oscillating Alternative Poles
a. (S) mass rises labor-demand rises wages rise exploitation-rate diminishes.
b. (S) mass falls Labor-demand falls Wages fall exploitation-rate rises
2. Second Model of Capital Accumulation: Perpetual flux of countervailing tendencies of
concentration/centralization on the one hand and deconcentration/decentralization on the other.
a. Concentration/centralization: each accumulation cycle results in control over an increasing
mass of capital which, therefore, grows at a compound rate with every repetition.
b. Deconcentration/decentralization: fragmentation of the total social capital into many
individual capitals or the repulsion of its fractions from each other.
i. But result of competition is always monopoly b/c adequate instruments of
centralization are absolutely critical to the dynamics of accumulation. Thus,
concentration/centralization prevails.
III. Industrial army and its results
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1. Labor-demand determined not by total capital but its (V) constituent alone: inverse relation to
growth in magnitude of total capital. With growth of total capital, its (V) constituent, the labour
incorporated in it, increases, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.
a. Thus capitalist accumulation constantly produces a redundant/surplus working population,
superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization. Labor produces its
own superfluity/domination.2. Marx’s objection to Malthus: capitalism produces poverty/unemployment — by creating a relative
surplus of laborers through the use of technologies that throw laborers out of work — regardless
of the population-resources ratio. It isn’t natural.
3. Permanent pool of unemployed laborers is socially necessary for accumulation to continue to
expand: disposable industrial reserve army.
a. It is not technology itself that is the main lever of accumulation, but the pool of
surplus laborers to which it gives rise.
4. Results: famous concluding thesis about the increasing immiseration of the proletariat as a socially
necessary consequence and condition of capitalist accumulation:
a. Overwork of the employed; they can be threatened with layoffs if unless they work overtime and agree to increased intensity of labor.
b. Wage depression due to excess of labor-supply over labor-demand.
c. This creates problem of effective demand which is addressed in Vol. 2 of Capital with the
notion of rational consumption.
What Marx has done in Volume I of Capital is to assume perfect application of classical (capitalist)
political economy and show that — contra Adam Smith — national wealth would not grow and that
everyone would/could not be better off with laissez-faire market ideology but, rather, an increasing
accumulation of wealth at one pole and a burgeoning accumulation of misery at the other would be
produced. The only ones this would benefit would be the capitalist class and, hence they are(neoliberalism) and have always been the ones to promote it.
Marx also shows the inevitability of the increasing concentration and centralization of capital under
conditions of free-market utopianism. Oligarchy and Monopoly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
The central presumption of the book until now: Marx accepts Adam Smith's position and deconstructs its
utopianism.
Capitalism depends fundamentally on a commodity capable of producing more value than it itself has: the
labor-power of the “free worker.” Laborers are “free” in the double sense: able to sell their labor-power
to whomever, while forced to sell it in the first place b/c freed from control over the means of production.
This relation is not natural, but the result of a historical development. Part 8 traces this process: how
labor-power became a commodity
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1. Primitive accumulation is the process which creates the capital-relation by divorcing workers from
ownership of the conditions of their own labour:
a. Social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital.
b. Immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers.
2. “Primitive” because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production
corresponding to capital.
In Marx's version of primitive accumulation, all the rules of market exchange earlier laid out are
abandoned. There is no reciprocity, no equality. The real process is about the violent dispossession of a
whole class of people from control over the means of production, at first through illegal acts, but ultimately
through actions of the state.
CHAPTERS 27-33: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION
Chapter 27: expropriation of the agricultural population and the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers.
1. Dispossess peasantry by land-appropriation.2. Release of the retainers by development of money-power:
a. “Moral economy” of traditional community is dissolved by money which, in doing so
becomes the community.
3. Initially, state power attempts to preserve moral economy but gradually yields for two reasons:
a. State depends on and thereby becomes vulnerable to money power.
b. Money power created and mobilized in ways that state has difficulty stopping.
4. This trend consolidates with the Glorious Revolution of 1688: formation of a bourgeoisie made up
of landed, merchant, finance, and manufacturing capitalists in broad alliance that bend state
apparatus to their collective will.
a. The law itself now becomes the instrument. Systematic theft of communal propertyspearheaded by a grand movement of enclosure of the commons.
Chapter 28: what all these people kicked off the land are going to do.
1. The violence of the socialization of workers into the disciplinary apparatus of capital is at first
transparent:
a. Agricultural folk forcibly expropriated become vagabonds are tortured by grotesquely
terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour.
2. Over time, silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist
over the worker and overt violence can fade into the background, because people have been
socialized into their situation as wage laborers, as bearers of the commodity labor-power.
a. But bourgeoisie still needs state-power to regulate wages and prevent collective
organization of the worker.
Chapter 29: Genesis of the capitalist farmer. Process of monetization and commodification:
agricultural revolution on the land, which permitted capital to command the soil:
Bailiff sharecropper tenant farmer paying ground (money) rent to landlords.
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Chapter 30: impact of agricultural revolution:
1. It set free:
a. A lot of labor.
b. Means of subsistence formerly consumed on the land directly.
i. It commoditized the food supply.
2. The market for goods and commodities grew because fewer people could subsist on their own.a. Result: expansion of market exchange and an increase in the size of the market.
Chapter 31: genesis of the industrial capitalist.
Under feudalism: many barriers to turning the growing quantity of money into industrial capital. Thus,
industrial capitalism developed on greenfield sites lacking in regulatory apparati: still a significant aspect of
the geographical and locational dynamic of capitalism.
The roles of the colonial system and the slave trade cannot be ignored, since it was by these means that
the bourgeoisie both circumvented and overturned feudal powers.1. All such methods employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society,
to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the
capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is
pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
a. We cannot understand this crucial role of the state as an organizing force, and as
promoter of the colonial system, without acknowledging the significance of both the
national debt and the public credit system as means whereby money power can start to
control the power of the state.
2. The colonial system allowed the treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting,
enslavement and murder to flow back to the mother-country and be turned into capital there whilethe public debt became one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation.
3. It took immense effort to unleash the “eternal natural laws” of the capitalist mode of production, to
complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to
transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the
opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into the free 'labouring poor.
Chapter 32: the processes of expropriation are as drawn out as they are brutal and painful. Feudalism did
not dissolve without a struggle. New forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society, forces
and passions which feel themselves to be fettered by that society. But once set in motion, the processes
of capitalist development assume their own distinctive logic,
including that of centralization.
Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other
developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the
labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil.
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From this there also grows the revolt of the working class: the centralization of the means of
production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their
capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The
expropriators are expropriated.
Chapter 33: about the theories of colonization set out by a man called Wakefield. Wakefield simplyrecognized that you can take all the capital in the world to a colony, but if you can't find any "free" laborers
to work for you, you cannot be a capitalist. In short, he discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social
relation between persons which is mediated through things.
Marx uses this colonial theory to rebut Adam Smith's theory of original or primitive accumulation.
In the preface to the second edition, Marx takes up his relationship to Hegel, noting, "I criticized the
mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago" (his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right ). There, Marx at paragraph 250 of Hegel's exposition. But the content of the preceding
paragraphs is surprising.
Hegel discusses the internal contradictions of capitalism. Inner dialectic: production of a worker-class
leads to generalized impoverishment and, at the same time, concentration of disproportionate wealth in a
few hands. This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it to seek relief in an "outer dialectic" of colonial
and imperialist activity, to push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of
subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has over-produced, or else generally
backward in industry. Thus it supplies to a part of its population a return to life on the family basis in a
new land and so also supplies itself with a new demand and field for its industry.
Whether Hegel believes that this will resolve the inner problem is not clear. But Marx is quite clear that itcannot. The penultimate chapter of Capital, which contemplates the expropriation
of the expropriators as the ultimate outcome of the inner dialectic, cannot be countered by colonial
practices that merely re-create the social relations of capitalism on a wider scale. There can be no colonial
solution to the internal class contradictions of capitalism, and by the same token
no ultimate spatial fix to the internal contradictions. What we now call globalization is simply, as we are
again and again reminded, a temporary fix that "solves" problems in the here-and-now by projecting them
onto a larger and grander geographical terrain.
There is a real problem with the idea that primitive accumulation occurred once upon a time, and that once
over, it ceased to be of real significance. We need to take the continuity of primitive
accumulation throughout the historical geography of capitalism seriously. Rosa Luxemburg insisted that we
think of capitalism as being based on two different forms of exploitation.
1. Concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced: here peace,
property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal
how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other
people's property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes
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class-rule.
2. Concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start
making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an
international loan system-a policy of spheres of interest-and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting
are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover
within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process.
There is, she maintains, an "organic connection" between these two systems of exploitation and
accumulation. The long history of capitalism centers on this dynamic relation between continuous primitive
accumulation on the one hand and the dynamics of accumulation through the system
of expanded reproduction described in Capital on the other. Marx was therefore wrong, she argues, to
confine primitive accumulation to some antediluvian point, some prehistory of capitalism.
Since it seems a bit odd to call them primitive or original, I prefer to call these processes accumulation by
dispossession.
Political struggles against accumulation by dispossession, I argue, are just as important as more traditional
proletarian movements.
CONCLUSION
Volume I of Capital examines a circulation process of capital that looks like this:
With money, the capitalist buys (V) and (C). The capitalist simultaneously selects an organizational form
and a technology and proceeds to combine (V) and (C) in a process that produces a commodity, which is
then sold in the market for the original money plus (S). Impelled onward by
the coercive laws of competition, capitalists appear to be forced to use part of (S) to create even
more (S). Accumulation for accumulation's sake and production for production's sake, producing
compound rates of growth forever, unless capital encounters limits or insurmountable barriers. When this
happens, capital encounters a crisis of accumulation (simply defined as lack of growth).
Summarizing the potential barriers are as follows: (1) inability to mass together enough original capital to
get production under way (2) scarcities of labor or recalcitrant forms of labor organization that can
produce profit squeezes; (3) disproportionalities and uneven development between sectors within the
division of labor; (4) environmental crises arising out of resource
depletion and land and environmental degradation; (5) imbalances and premature obsolescence due to
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uneven or excessively rapid technological changes driven by the coercive laws of competition and resisted
by labor; (6) worker recalcitrance or resistance within a labor process that operates under the command
and control of capital; (7) underconsumption and insufficient effective demand; (8) monetary and financial
crises (liquidity traps) inflation or deflation) that arise
within a credit system that depends on sophisticated credit instruments and organized state powers
alongside a climate of faith and trust.
The numerous potential barriers to the free and continuing flow of capital through all its moments are
neither independent of one another nor systemically integrated. They are best construed as an
ensemble of distinctive moments within the totality of the circulation process of capital.
Tendency in Marxian theorizing about crises, however, to look for one dominant and exclusive explanation
of the origins of the obviously crisis-prone character of a capitalist mode of production. I think it is more in
keeping with Marx's frequent invocation of the fluid and flexible character of capitalist development to
recognize the rapid repositioning of one barrier at the expense of another and so recognize the multipleways in which crises can be registered in different historical and geographical situations.
This is not the end of the analysis of crisis formation and resolution under Capitalism, however. To begin
with, the dynamics of uneven geographical development together with the whole problem of
spatiotemporal unfolding of capitalist development on the world stage are stressful in the extreme, as
capital seeks to create a geographical landscape (of physical and social infrastructures) appropriate to its
dynamic at one time only to have to destroy it and re-create yet another geographical landscape at a later
point. The changing dynamics of urbanization on the world stage dramatically illustrate this process.
Geopolitical conflicts have a logic that does not neatly fit into the requirements of continuous capitalcirculation and accumulation.
The insights that come from a study of Marx's works need to be used flexibly and contingently rather than
formalistically. My own view of the internal dynamics of crisis theory (as opposed to independently
occurring but not unrelated geopolitical struggles) rests on an analysis ofthe various limits and barriers
encountered within the circulation process; a study of the various strategies for overcoming or
circumventing these limits and barriers politically and economically; and a careful monitoring of the ways
in which barriers overcome or circumvented at one point result in new barriers appearing at other points.
Behind this lies a deeper problem. Accumulation for accumulation's sake and production for production's
sake and the perpetual need to achieve a compound rate of growth were all very well when the core of
industrial capitalism was constituted, as it was around 1780, by activities in the forty square miles around
Manchester and a few other hot spots of capitalist dynamism. But what we are now confronting is the
possibility of a compound rate of growth within a global economy. The mass of accumulation and of
physical movement required in future years to keep this compound rate of growth going will be nothing
short of staggering.
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I view crises as surface eruptions of deep tectonic shifts in the spatiotemporal logic of capitalism. The
tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion, and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent
crises increases. The manner, form, spatiality and time of the consequent eruptions are almost impossible
to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and power is almost certain.
What better argument could there be for capitalism to be gone? But this is easier said than done. It
entails, of course, the shaping of a political project. We need to define exactly what this might mean for
our place and times. We have been told again and again that class is irrelevant, that the very idea of class
struggle is so old-fashioned as to be mere fodder for academic dinosaurs. But there is, of course, a reason
for the wishful silences. Class is the one category that the powers that be do not want anyone to take
seriously.
But there is much to do to make the category work. For example, one of the questions that comes out of
reading Capital is what to say about the relations between struggles waged around primitive accumulation
and accumulation by dispossession on the one hand, and the class struggles typically waged around theworkplace and in the labor market on the other. Marx's chapter on “The Working Day” teaches that
alliances are important and that it is hard to get anywhere without them, because the capitalist class
accumulates capital by whatever means are at hand.
But what Volume I also teaches is that the displacement of one mode of production by another is a drawn
-out and complicated process. It took a coevolution and uneven development of different moments
(technologies, social relations, mental conceptions, production systems, relations to nature and patterns of
daily life) within the social totality before capitalism took its own distinct shape.
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