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: Marx’s Capital
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Capital Volume I: Class 9
Reading: Capital I, ch. 15, sections 5-10 In class 8, on the first part of chapter 15, Harvey focused considerable attention on footnote 4, on pages 493-4. This footnote contains important theoretical material that situates Marx’s discussion of the technology of large-scale industry in his theory of historical materialism. In order to be succinct, I […]
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Capital Volume I: Class 8
Reading: Capital I, ch. 15, sections 1-4 In Marx’s time, large-scale machinery was the highest form of development of the means of production, relegating simple cooperation and manufacture to obsolescence. (We will bracket for now the question of how significant subsequent technological revolutions have been for the labor process.) It is characterized by a vast […]
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Capital Volume I: Class 7
Reading: Capital I, ch. 12-14 Part 4, which covers relative surplus value, begins by first describing the basic economics of relative surplus value and then providing the reader with the historical background for its emergence as a key tool for capitalists to increase surplus value. I will skip the discussion of the economics because, while […]
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Capital Volume 1: Class 6
Reading: Capital I, ch. 10-11 These chapters largely finish off Marx’s discussion of absolute surplus value by bringing us up through early- and late-modern European (mostly British) history into Marx’s period, in which industrial capitalism had established political-economic hegemony over the continent. His hint at the end of chapter 11 is that, while absolute surplus […]
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Capital Volume I: Class 5
Reading: Capital I, ch. 7-9 In my previous readings of Capital, I have glossed over some of Marx’s more subjective reactions to the economic processes he is describing, i.e. the fact that he hates them. The core purpose of Volume I is to analyze the extraction of surplus value from workers by capitalists and what […]
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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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