Tag Archives: Marx

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This chapter begins Part 8 of Capital called “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” (comprising Chapters 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33).Chapter 26 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation” and examines how capital was first accumulated before surplus value. In other words, this looks at the historical process by which feudalism was transformed into capitalism, and how peasants were stripped of any means of production and made into free wage-labourers.Money and...

Chapter 24 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital” and deals with capitalist accumulation, as capital successfully expands and reproduces itself.Marx divides the chapter into five sections: (1) Capitalist Production on a Progressively increasing Scale.(2) Erroneous Conception by Political Economy of Reproduction on a Progressively increasing Scale.(3) Separation of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue. The Abstinence Theory.(4) Circumstances...

By David FieldsNote: The references below are drawn from The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker.Is Marx’s concern with aspects of alienation subsumed in his mature writings? To suggest so is a falsity. Marx’s depiction of the proletariat becoming, in the Hegelian sense, emancipated from the objective conditions of estranged labour, is not withered as the analysis moves toward the technical conditions of production. Marx’s humanism is still apparent.In Wages, Labour, and...

Chapter 23 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Simple Reproduction” and deals with capitalist accumulation on an unchanged base of capital (Brewer 1984: 67).This Chapter begins Part 7 of volume 1 called “The Process of Accumulation of Capital” (which includes Chapters 23, 24, and 25).For Marx, there is a process called the circulation of capital: “The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to...

Marx’s Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy) was a manuscript which he wrote from 1857–1858. These 800 manuscript pages by Marx on political economy were not even published until 1939 (Wheen 2001: 227), but they formed the basis of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) (Sperber 2014: 421).Marx had an interesting passage in the Grundrisse where he discusses technological unemployment: “Contradiction between the...