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Tag Archives: Marx

How Capitalism is Killing Itself

[embedded content] Short documentary on the limits of capitalism mostly based on an interview by Richard Wolf. I find the simplistic explanation of exploitation at the end (around minute 27:30) based on the time of work (prices proportional to labor incorporated) to be problematic (for a discussion of the Labor Theory of Value, LTV go here). At any rate, worth watching whether you agree with Wolf's interpretation of Marx and capitalism or not.

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Marx’s Dishonesty in his Quotation of Gladstone

In volume 1 of Capital in Chapter 25, Marx reproduces a selective quotation from William Gladstone on the condition of the working classes in England from a speech Gladstone gave in the House of Commons on 16 April 1863: “On April 16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget [sc. Gladstone said]: ‘From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per...

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My Critical Summaries of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital

Marx published volume 1 of Capital in German in 1867 (by the publisher Meissner of Hamburg), but this was the only volume of Capital, which was a proposed 4 volume work on economics, to be published in Marx’s lifetime. Volumes 2 and 3 were edited and published by Engels after the death of Marx. No English translation of volume 1 appeared in Marx’s lifetime either.In the summaries below, I have used these two translations of volume 1: Marx, Karl. 1906. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 33: A Critical Summary

Chapter 33 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Modern Theory of Colonisation” and examines how capitalism is established in European colonies. This is the final chapter of volume 1 of Capital.By colonies, Marx means those countries with “virgin soils, colonised by free immigrants” (Marx 1906: 838, n. 1), such as America or Australia.Marx is concerned with the theory of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862), an Englishman who helped to colonise New Zealand, and the author of England and...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 32: A Critical Summary

Chapter 32 of volume 1 of Capital is called the “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation” and is essentially Marx’s conclusion to Capital, since Chapter 33 is more of an appendix and addendum to the volume (Brewer 1984: 83).Chapter 32 is therefore Marx’s summing up of his vision of the past and future of capitalism, and contains a famous – and discredited – doomsday prediction of the collapse of capitalism.The tendency of “primitive accumulation of capital” which Marx has described in...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 31: A Critical Summary

Chapter 31 of volume 1 of Capital is called the “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.”This chapter contains Marx’s views on the relationship between imperialism and colonialism and early capitalist development in Europe, which some modern Marxists have used to argue that imperialist looting and theft of wealth was a necessary precondition for Western capitalism (Brewer 1984: 82; Harvey 2010: 297). And Marx indeed does seem to think that the many aspects of the imperialist exploitation of the...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 30: A Critical Summary

Chapter 30 of volume 1 of Capital is called the “Impact of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home Market for Industrial Capital.”Independent self-producing peasants in England were gradually driven off the land and into the cities to become an urban proletariat (Marx 1990: 908): “With the setting free of a part of the agricultural population, therefore, their former means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into material elements of variable...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 29: A Critical Summary

Chapter 29 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer” and argues that the true capitalist class in England emerged with the tenant capitalist farmers.Marx explains the process: “ … whence came the [sc. English] capitalists originally? For the expropriation of the agricultural population creates, directly, none by great landed proprietors. As far, however, as concerns the genesis of the farmer, we can, so to say, put our hand on it, because it is a slow process...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 28: A Critical Summary

Chapter 28 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament.”The creation of a vast new class of property-less proletarians as described in Chapter 27 presented immediate difficulties because there was not enough wage-labour to employ so many people (Marx 1990: 898): “On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wanted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves...

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 27: A Critical Summary

Chapter 27 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land” and examines the early history of the establishment of capitalism in England by the privatisation of communal property.Marx sketches the social and economic history of the later Middle Ages in England: “In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th...

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