Tag Archives: Marx

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...

A Marxist called “Jehu” who writes at The Real Movement blog challenges me here with four questions: Jehu, “Four Questions for LK on Money,” The Real Movement, February 20, 2016. His four questions are as follows: (1) Did not Marx predict the collapse of production on the basis of exchange value?(2) Did this collapse occur in the 1930s just as Marx predicted it would?(3) To save capitalism was it not necessary to sever gold from fiat?(4) What was the implication of the collapse of the gold...

From Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859): “Direct barter, the spontaneous form of exchange, signifies the beginning of the transformation of use-values into commodities rather than the transformation of commodities into money. Exchange-value does not acquire an independent form, but is still directly tied to use-value. This is manifested in two ways. Use-value, not exchange-value, is the purpose of the whole system of production, and use-values accordingly cease to be use-values...

Chapter 22 of volume 1 of Capital is called “National Differences in Wages” and deals with the various factors that cause differences between national wage rates. For Marx’s views on how the value of labour-power is determined as a subsistence wage, see his analysis in Chapter 6 of volume 1.Marx reminds his readers of the discussion in Chapter 17 and the issue of how the subsistence wage may vary: “ … the quantum of the means of subsistence in which the price of labour is realised might...

Chapter 21 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Piece Wages” and deals with wages paid by the number of output goods produced.A “piece wage” is a wage payment by quantity of products or units produced by a worker.Time wages and piece wages both exist and sometimes side by side. Marx argues that “[w]ages by the piece are nothing else than a converted form of wages by time, just as wages by time are a converted form of the value or price of labour-power” (Marx 1906: 602).But piece wages conceal...

In Chapter 19 of volume 1 of Capital Marx quotes the Classical economics on wage determination: “Classical political economy borrowed from every-day life the category ‘price of labour’ without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes, i.e., the oscillations of the market price...