In Capital, Marx argues that the tendency toward the centralization of capital is a contradictory phenomenon that reflects capitalism’s fundamentally contradictory nature. He saw capitalism as a system that, on the one hand, liberated humanity from the darkness of slavery, feudalism and religious backwardness; and, on the other, enslaved the toiling masses to exploitation and […]
Tag: capitalist accumulation
In David Harvey’s early work The Limits to Capital, he develops the foundations of his spatial analysis of capitalism through a reading of all three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. This post focuses on the sections devoted to the centralization of capital and finance capital. While Harvey provides a series of insightful analyses regarding the […]
In this post, I provide some speculative thoughts and questions on the nature of fictitious capital. I have only read Marx’s incomplete discussion of the concept in Capital and listened to David Harvey’s discussion in his Volume II class, so these thoughts will not take into account most current research on the topic. The best […]
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Capital Volume II: Class 11
Readings: Capital II, ch. 20 (sections 6-13), 21 Returning to a point I have made multiple times, the implication of Marx’s theory in Capital is that the anarchic capitalist system needs to be replaced with an egalitarian, planned economy. His project is to render visible all of the hidden and ignored inefficiencies in capitalism so […]
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Capital Volume II: Class 10
Readings: Capital II, ch. 18, 19, 20 (sections 1-5) Part Three of Volume II develops in greater detail the concept of reproduction, originally introduced in Volume I. In my notes on Volume I, I wrote that reproduction refers to how the capitalist system is sustained. In this section of Volume II, Marx delves into exactly […]
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Capital Volume I: Class 11
Readings: Capital I, ch. 25; Capital III, ch. 5, 6, 13-15 “Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation […]
World of Lenidzky 