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: dialectics
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 9
Readings: Capital II, ch. 15-17 “If we were to consider a communist society in place of a capitalist one, then money capital would immediately be done away with, and so too the disguises that transactions acquire through it. The matter would be simply reduced to the fact that the society must reckon in advance how […]
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Capital Volume I: Class 4
Reading: Capital I, ch. 4-6; Capital II, ch. 1; Capital I, “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production”; Capital I, ch. 19-21; Grundrisse, pp. 239-272; Limits to Capital, pp. 20-24 This week’s reading brought to the front of my mind Marx’s dialectical method. Throughout the book, he uses a plethora of literary devices to […]
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Capital Volume I: Class 3
Reading: Capital I, ch. 2-3; Limits to Capital (Harvey), pp. 1-20; Critique of Political Economy, ch. 2 In chapter 3, in his extended discussion of the circulation of money and commodities, Marx explains the dialectical movement of this process as follows: “Commodities first enter into the process of exchange ungilded and unsweetened, retaining their original […]
World of Lenidzky 