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: centralization
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 8
Readings: Capital II, ch. 12-14 The total turnover time of capital is equal to the sum of the production time and the circulation time. Production time can be further broken down into the working period and the period of production during which no labor is done. During the non-working period, constant capital undergoes natural processes […]
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Capital Volume II: Class 7
Readings: Capital III, ch. 36, 27-32 I have yet to find a place in Volume III where Marx explicitly defines fictitious capital. This may be a result of the unfinished nature of Part Five of this volume, or an oversight on my part. The closest I have found is his reference to fictitious capital as […]
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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 