Marx: The Critique of Political EconomyA concept-organized master reference for the Grundrisse and Capital, Volumes I–III — from the forms of appearance to the actual relations

01The Commodity: Use-Value, Exchange-Value, Value

The elementary form of capitalist wealth, and the cell in which the whole architecture of appearance is already contained: a useful thing whose exchange relation points past every natural property to a purely social substance.

The corpus opens here, and the opening sentence already states the method: wealth appears as an immense collection of commodities, and the analysis begins with the form of appearance.

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 125.

The commodity is first taken at its most innocent, as an external useful thing.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 125.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities provide the material for a special branch of knowledge, namely the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use-values are only realized [verwirklicht] in use or in consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers [Träger] of … exchange-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 126.

Exchange-value then enters as something the thing seems to have, and immediately begins to dissolve under inspection: it presents itself as accidental and relative, yet behaves as if something lawful stands behind it.

Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind. This relation changes constantly with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e. an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 126.

It follows from this that, firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 127.

The decisive move rules out every natural property of the body of the commodity as the common element the exchange relation expresses.

This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into consideration only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e. turn them into use-values. But clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values. Within the exchange relation, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided only that it is present in the appropriate quantity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 127.

What remains after the abstraction is the substance of value, and it is nothing bodily at all.

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values [Warenwerte].

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 128.

Two boundary determinations complete the concept. A thing can be useful without being a value at all; value belongs only to products of labour that pass through the social form of exchange.

A thing can be a use-value without being a value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not mediated through labour. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc. fall into this category. A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity. He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values. … Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 131.

And the two poles do not sit peacefully side by side: the commodity carries an internal opposition that will drive the entire development of the value-form, of money, and eventually of crisis.

The internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. Hence the simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition between use-value and value which is contained within the commodity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 153.

Across the corpusThe commodity opens Volume I and never leaves the corpus: the Grundrisse reaches the same cell from the side of money (entry 04), Volume II treats the commodity as one phase-form of industrial capital in motion (entry 14), and Volume III returns to it at the very end, when the finished revenue forms have to be traced back to the components of commodity value (entries 16 and 21).

See also02 Socially necessary labour time · 03 The dual character of labour · 04 The value-form and money · 05 Fetishism

02Value as Socially Necessary Labour Time

The substance and measure of value: not labour time as such, but the labour time socially necessary under normal conditions of production with the average degree of skill and intensity — a social average that asserts itself behind the backs of the producers.

The definition arrives inside the first analysis of the commodity, and it is worth carrying whole, because everything in it is load-bearing: the homogeneity of social labour-power, the social average, and the normality conditions that make the measure historical rather than physiological.

However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour-power. Each of these units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labour-power and acts as such, i.e. only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 129.

The immediate corollary binds value to productivity inversely, which is the seed both of relative surplus-value (entry 09) and of the falling rate of profit (entry 18).

In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value. Inversely, the less the productivity of labour, the greater the labour-time necessary to produce an article, and the greater its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labour which finds its realization within the commodity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 131.

The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity. But it provides different quantities of use-values during equal periods of time; more, if productivity rises; fewer, if it falls.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 137.

Value is therefore not a property things acquire by being useful, but objectified abstract labour.

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified [vergegenständlicht] or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 129.

The measure is socially validated only in exchange, and the validation can fail retroactively: labour time individually well spent can prove socially superfluous. This recurrence in the chapter on money already contains the possibility of overproduction.

Let us suppose, finally, that every piece of linen on the market contains nothing but socially necessary labour-time. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole may contain superfluously expended labour-time. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total social labour-time has been expended in the form of weaving.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 202.

In the analysis of relative surplus-value the law stops being a definition and becomes coercion: it makes itself felt on the individual capitalist as an external necessity, which is how a social average disciplines agents who have never heard of it.

The law of the determination of value by labour-time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 436.

Volume III restates the measure at the level of a whole sphere of production, as market value, when the finished forms of competition have to be reconciled with the law of value.

Market value is to be viewed on the one hand as the average value of the commodities produced in a particular sphere, and on the other hand as the individual value of commodities produced under average conditions in the sphere in question, and forming the great mass of its commodities. Only in extraordinary situations do commodities produced under the worst conditions, or alternatively the most advantageous ones, govern the market value, which forms in turn the centre around which market prices fluctuate – these being the same for all commodities of the same species..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 279.

The Grundrisse had already run the concept against the Proudhonist time-chit and shown why value cannot be decreed into transparency: the average is real but dynamic, continually devaluing the labour time already embodied.

The time-chit, representing average labour time, would never correspond to or be convertible into actual labour time; i.e. the amount of labour time objectified in a commodity would never command a quantity of labour time equal to itself, and vice versa, but would command, rather, either more or less, just as at present every oscillation of market values expresses itself in a rise or fall of the gold or silver prices of commodities.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 139.

Across the corpusFirst stated at Capital, Volume I, page 129; recurs as social validation in the money chapter (Volume I, page 202); becomes coercive law in relative surplus-value (Volume I, page 436); is generalized to market value in Volume III (page 279); and is anticipated polemically in the Grundrisse critique of labour-money (page 139).

See also03 The dual character of labour · 09 Surplus-value · 17 Average profit · 13 Machinery and disposable time

03The Dual Character of Labour: Concrete and Abstract

The pivot Marx himself called the whole secret of the critical conception: the same act of labour counts twice, as concrete useful labour producing use-value and as expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract producing value.

The distinction is introduced on the two-fold nature of the labour embodied in commodities, and the corpus treats it as the point on which comprehension of political economy turns.

on it was seen that labour, too, has a dual character: in so far as it finds its expression in value, it no longer possesses the same characteristics as when it is the creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 132.

Concrete labours are as qualitatively different as the use-values they produce; without that difference there would be nothing to exchange.

As the coat and the linen are qualitatively different use-values, so also are the forms of labour through which their existence is mediated – tailoring and weaving. If the use-values were not qualitatively different, hence not the products of qualitatively different forms of useful labour, they would be absolutely incapable of confronting each other as commodities. Coats cannot be exchanged for coats, one use-value cannot be exchanged for another of the same kind.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 132.

Useful labour is a transhistorical condition of human existence; the point is precisely that this is not what makes it value-forming.

Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 133.

Against every labour-metaphysics, labour is not even the sole source of material wealth.

Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 134.

Abstraction from the determinate quality of the activity leaves the expenditure of human labour-power as such, and that expenditure is the substance of value.

If we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of the labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., and in this sense both human labour. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 134.

But the value of a commodity represents human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general. … More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labour, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour. The various proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers; these proportions therefore appear to the producers to have been handed down by tradition.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 135.

The summary formulation carries the double character whole.

On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 137.

The Grundrisse Introduction supplies the historical epistemology of the category: the abstraction “labour as such” becomes practically true only in a society where individuals pass with indifference from one labour to another, which is why the most abstract category is itself a historic product.

this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 104.

This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 105.

Across the corpusIntroduced at Capital, Volume I, pages 131–137, and presupposed everywhere after; the Grundrisse Introduction (pages 104–105) grounds the category historically, and the fetishism analysis (entry 05) shows what happens when the social character of abstract labour can appear only in the relation of things.

See also02 Socially necessary labour time · 05 Fetishism · 08 Living labour

04The Value-Form and Money

The analysis bourgeois economy never attempted: how value, a purely social substance, must take the form of a relation between things, and why that development terminates necessarily in money.

The program is announced as a task without precedent: not to reduce value to labour (classical economy did that) but to derive the form value takes.

Now, however, we have to perform a task never even attempted by bourgeois economics. That is, we have to show the origin of this money-form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 139.

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this simple form. Our real difficulty, therefore, is to analyse it. … The value of the first commodity is represented as relative value, in other words the commodity is in the relative form of value. The second commodity fulfils the function of equivalent, in other words it is in the equivalent form.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 139.

In the simple expression of value the equivalent commodity counts, in its very body, as the embodiment of abstract labour, and the inversions begin at once. The equivalent form has three peculiarities, and the second and third carry the whole social paradox.

Hence, in the value-relation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the form of the coat counts as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other. As a use-value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is identical with the coat, and therefore looks like the coat.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 143.

The equivalent form therefore possesses a second peculiarity: in it, concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 150.

Thus the equivalent form has a third peculiarity: private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 151.

The reason antiquity could not decipher the expression of value is that its secret is historical: the equality of human labours in general.

The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 152.

The general form of value is a joint social deed, and one commodity’s natural body becomes the visible incarnation of all human labour.

The general form of value, on the other hand, can only arise as the joint contribution of the whole world of commodities. A commodity only acquires a general expression of its value if, at the same time, all other commodities express their values in the same equivalent; and every newly emergent commodity must follow suit.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 159.

The physical form of the linen counts as the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all human labour. Weaving, the private labour which produces linen, acquires as a result a general social form, the form of equality with all other kinds of labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 159.

Money is then nothing mysterious in itself; the difficulty is entirely in the universal equivalent form.

The only difficulty in the concept of the money form is that of grasping the universal equivalent form, and hence the general form of value as such, form C. Form C can be reduced by working backwards to form B, the expanded form of value, and its constitutive element is form A: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or x commodity A = y commodity B. The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money-form.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 163.

Money necessarily crystallizes out of the process of exchange, in which different products of labour are in fact equated with each other, and thus converted into commodities. The historical broadening and deepening of the phenomenon of exchange develops the opposition between use-value and value which is latent in the nature of the commodity. The need to give an external expression to this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value, which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been achieved by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 181.

With money in place the inversion completes itself in everyday perception: commodities seem to be commensurable because money exists, whereas money exists because commodities are commensurable as values.

What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind. Without any initiative on their part, the commodities find their own value-configuration ready to hand, in the form of a physical commodity existing outside but also alongside them.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 187.

It is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. Quite the contrary. Because all commodities, as values, are objectified human labour, and therefore in themselves commensurable, their values can be communally measured in one and the same specific commodity, and this commodity can be converted into the common measure of their values, that is into money. Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 188.

Price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 195.

The Grundrisse states the social content of the money-form with a bluntness the published text distributes across chapters: in commodity society the individual’s social power exists as a thing he carries with him, and money itself becomes the community.

The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 156.

Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 158.

Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. The community of antiquity presupposes a quite different relation to, and on the part of, the individual. The development of money in its third role therefore smashes this community.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 225.

Across the corpusThe derivation runs at Capital, Volume I, pages 139–163; the retrospective methodological verdict on the form (the most abstract and most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production) sits at Volume I, page 174, and is gathered in entry 22; the Grundrisse money chapter (pages 156–225) carries the social ontology of the form.

See also01 The commodity · 05 Fetishism · 06 The general formula · 22 Essence and appearance

05The Fetishism of the Commodity

The founding statement of the corpus’s theory of appearance: in commodity production the definite social relation between producers assumes, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things — an objective illusion, not a mistake in their heads.

The section opens by revoking the innocence the commodity was granted on page 125.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 163.

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 164.

The central formulation, with the analogy to the religious world, deserves to be carried in full wherever the concept is used.

It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 165.

Two consequences follow: the social relations really do appear as what they are not, and the appearance is practically true — producers act through it, without knowing it.

To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 166.

Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 166.

Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 167.

The magnitude of value asserts itself as a law of nature precisely because the social process runs behind the backs of the producers.

The reason for this reduction is that in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him. The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery destroys the semblance of the merely accidental determination of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour, but by no means abolishes that determination’s material form.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 168.

Hence the standing of the economic categories themselves: objective forms of thought, socially valid for this mode of production and for no other.

The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 169.

The counter-image of the association of free men shows the fetish is historical, not anthropological; and the analysis states its own conditions of dissolution.

Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. … We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 171.

The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 173.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen, nevertheless find that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 177.

Volume III returns to the concept at the very end of the corpus and completes it: the finished revenue forms are the fetish raised to a system, the religion of everyday life. The full development is gathered in entry 21; the recurrence is marked here.

Capital-profit (or better still capital-interest), land–ground-rent, labour-wages, this economic trinity as the connection between the components of value and wealth in general and its sources, completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 968.

Across the corpusFirst statement at Capital, Volume I, pages 163–177; developed through the wage-form (entry 10), the cost-price and interest fetishes (entries 16 and 19), and completed in the trinity formula as the religion of everyday life (Capital, Volume III, pages 968–969; entry 21).

See also04 The value-form and money · 10 The wage-form · 19 Interest and M–M′ · 21 The trinity formula · 22 Essence and appearance

06M–C–M′: The General Formula for Capital and Its Contradiction

Capital first appears as a form of circulation: buying in order to sell dearer. The formula defines capital as self-valorizing value and immediately generates the contradiction whose solution is labour-power.

Alongside selling-in-order-to-buy appears its inversion, and the difference of form conceals a difference of world.

But alongside this form we find another form, which is quite distinct from the first: M–C–M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the re-conversion of commodities into money: buying in order to sell. Money which describes the latter course in its movement is transformed into capital, becomes capital, and, from the point of view of its function, already is capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 248.

The path C–M–C proceeds from the extreme constituted by one commodity, and ends with the extreme constituted by another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of needs, in short use-value, is therefore its final goal. The path M–C–M, however, proceeds from the extreme of money and finally returns to that same extreme. Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 250.

The complete form of this process is therefore M–C–M′, where M′ = M + ΔM, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call ‘surplus-value’.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 251.

C–M–C has its measure in need; M–C–M′ has no terminus at all, and its bearer, the capitalist, is this movement become conscious.

The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 253.

As the conscious bearer [Träger] of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing – the valorization of value – is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 254.

This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 254.

Value here becomes the subject of a process, money and commodity mere forms it passes through.

It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. … In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization [Selbstverwertung]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 255.

M–C–M′ is in fact therefore the general formula for capital, in the form in which it appears directly in the sphere of circulation.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 257.

Then the contradiction. Circulation of equivalents transfers value but creates none; even systematic cheating only redistributes what exists.

In so far, therefore, as the circulation of commodities involves a change only in the form of their values, it necessarily involves the exchange of equivalents, provided the phenomenon occurs in its purity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 260.

The formation of surplus-value, and therefore the transformation of money into capital, can consequently be explained neither by assuming that commodities are sold above their value, nor by assuming that they are bought at less than their value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 263.

A sells wine worth £40 to B, and obtains from him in exchange corn to the value of £50. A has converted his £40 into £50, has made more money out of less, and has transformed his commodities into capital. Let us examine this a little more closely. Before the exchange we had £40 of wine in the hands of A, and £50 worth of corn in those of B, a total value of £90. After the exchange we still have the same total value of £90. The value in circulation has not increased by one iota; all that has changed is its distribution between A and B. What appears on one side as a loss of value appears on the other side as surplus-value; what appears on one side as a minus appears on the other side as a plus. The same change would have taken place if A, without the disguise provided by the exchange, had directly stolen the £10 from B.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 265.

However much we twist and turn, the final conclusion remains the same. If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, we still have no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 266.

Yet surplus-value cannot arise outside circulation either, and the antinomy is stated in full rigour: it must happen both within circulation and not within it.

The commodity-owner can create value by his labour, but he cannot create values which can valorize themselves. He can increase the value of his commodity by adding fresh labour, and therefore more value, to the value in hand, by making leather into boots, for instance. The same material now has more value, because it contains a greater quantity of labour. The boots have therefore more value than the leather, but the value of the leather remains what it was. It has not valorized itself, it has not annexed surplus-value during the making of the boots.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 268.

Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation. We therefore have a double result.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 268.

The solution must be a commodity whose consumption is itself creation of value; the larval capitalist must find it on the market.

The money-owner, who is as yet only a capitalist in larval form, must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning. His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation. These are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 269.

Across the corpusPosed at Capital, Volume I, pages 248–269, and resolved in the purchase and consumption of labour-power (entry 07). The Grundrisse reaches the same threshold from money as such (pages 250–280 of the notebooks; entries 04 and 08), and Volume II generalizes the formula into the circuit of industrial capital (entry 14). M–M′, the formula’s truncation and consummate fetish, is gathered in entry 19.

See also07 Labour-power · 08 Living labour · 14 The circuits of capital · 19 Interest and M–M′

07Labour-Power: The Commodity Whose Use-Value Creates Value

The solution to the contradiction of the general formula: a commodity, sold freely and at its value, whose consumption is living labour and therefore creation of new value. Its presence on the market is not natural but the deposit of a whole history.

In order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification [Vergegenständlichung] of labour, hence a creation of value. The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour [Arbeitsvermögen], in other words labour-power [Arbeitskraft].

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 270.

We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 270.

The seller must remain the owner of himself: labour-power is sold for limited periods or the seller becomes a slave, not a commodity-owner.

For this relation to continue, the proprietor of labour-power must always sell it for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i.e. handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 271.

The double freedom of the wage labourer — free proprietor of his own capacity, and free of everything else — is the condition of the whole relation, and it is historical through and through.

For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization [Verwirklichung] of his labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 272.

One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 273.

It is otherwise with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 274.

The value of labour-power is determined like that of every other commodity, by the labour time necessary for its reproduction — including generational replacement — and it contains, unlike every other commodity, a historical and moral element.

The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. … Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 274.

The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e. his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 275.

On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country; in particular they depend on the conditions in which, and consequently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers has been formed. In contrast, therefore, with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 275.

In every country where the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power until it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, for example, at the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the worker advances the use-value of his labour-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he receives payment of the price. Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 278.

Its consumption takes place outside circulation, and the passage from the market to the hidden abode of production is staged as the exit from the Eden of the innate rights of man.

The process of the consumption of labour-power is at the same time the production process of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere of circulation. Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 279.

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. … Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 280.

He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but – a tanning.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 280.

Across the corpusEstablished at Capital, Volume I, pages 270–280. The historical production of the doubly free labourer is the subject of primitive accumulation (entry 12) and of the Grundrisse forms preceding capitalist production; the wage-form under which the sale appears is entry 10.

See also06 The general formula · 08 Living labour · 09 Surplus-value · 10 The wage-form · 12 Primitive accumulation

08Living Labour against Objectified Labour

The Grundrisse’s deepest stratum, presupposed silently by all three volumes: capital is objectified labour that commands living labour, and living labour is at once absolute poverty as object and the general possibility of wealth as activity.

Volume I grounds the distinction in the labour process itself: labour as purposive human activity, distinguished from every animal analogue by the ideal pre-existence of its result.

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 283.

But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 284.

The Grundrisse dissects the exchange between capital and labour into two qualitatively different acts, and the second is no exchange at all.

If we consider the exchange between capital and labour, then we find that it splits into two processes which are not only formally but also qualitatively different, and even contradictory: (1) The worker sells his commodity, labour, which has a use value, and, as commodity, also a price, like all other commodities, for a specific sum of exchange values, specific sum of money, which capital concedes to him. (2) The capitalist obtains labour itself, labour as value-positing activity, as productive labour; i.e. he obtains the productive force which maintains and multiplies capital, and which thereby becomes the productive force, the reproductive force of capital, a force belonging to capital itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 274.

The difference between the second act and the first – note that the particular process of the appropriation of labour by capital is the second act – is exactly the difference between the exchange of capital and labour, and exchange between commodities as it is mediated by money. In the exchange between capital and labour, the first act is an exchange, falls entirely within ordinary circulation; the second is a process qualitatively different from exchange, and only by misuse could it have been called any sort of exchange at all. It stands directly opposite exchange; essentially different category.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 275.

Then the double determination of labour on the far side of that exchange, in the notebooks’ most philosophical register.

Thus, it is not at all contradictory, or, rather, the in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 296.

Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [Namely, it is] general wealth (in contrast to capital in which it exists objectively, as reality) as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 296.

Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. In the simple production process – leaving aside the realization process – the transitoriness of the forms of things is used to posit their usefulness.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 361.

In the published text the same relation appears as the incorporation of living labour into the dead objectivity of capital.

By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation, into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belong to him. From his point of view, the labour process is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, i.e. of labour-power; but he can consume this labour-power only by adding the means of production to it. … Thus the product of this process belongs to him just as much as the wine which is the product of the process of fermentation going on in his cellar.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 292.

But the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes [verwertet] in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 300.

The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of nature which costs the worker nothing, but is very advantageous to the capitalist since it preserves the existing value of his capital. As long as trade is good, the capitalist is too absorbed in making profits to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 315.

On the capital side of the relation stands the endless and limitless drive that the Grundrisse derives from money as the general form of wealth.

However, as representative of the general form of wealth – money – capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary [Grenze] is and has to be a barrier [Schranke] for it. Else it would cease to be capital – money as self-reproductive. If ever it perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would itself have declined from exchange value to use value, from the general form of wealth to a specific, substantial mode of the same. Capital as such creates a specific surplus value because it cannot create an infinite one all at once; but it is the constant movement to create more of the same. The quantitative boundary of the surplus value appears to it as a mere natural barrier, as a necessity which it constantly tries to violate and beyond which it constantly seeks to go.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 334.

Across the corpusThe Grundrisse chapter on capital (pages 274–361) carries the concept at full philosophical depth; Capital, Volume I distributes it into the labour process (pages 283–292) and valorization (pages 300–317); the machinery analyses (entry 13) show the domination of objectified over living labour become a technical fact.

See also07 Labour-power · 09 Surplus-value · 13 Machinery and the general intellect · 03 The dual character of labour

09Surplus-Value: Absolute and Relative

The central category of the corpus: value created by living labour beyond the value of labour-power, appropriated without equivalent because the use-value of labour-power belongs to its buyer. Every later form — profit, interest, rent — is a mask of this one relation.

The aim of the capitalist production process is stated without euphemism.

His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 293.

What was really decisive for him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. … On the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day's labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 301.

This resolves the antinomy of entry 06 in both its clauses at once, and marks the exact difference between forming value and valorizing capital.

This whole course of events, the transformation of money into capital, both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined to the sphere of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 302.

If we now compare the process of creating value with the process of valorization, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point. If the process is not carried beyond the point where the value paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of creating value; but if it is continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of valorization.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 302.

The division of capital into constant and variable parts follows from the analysis, not from bookkeeping, and it is the distinction the profit form will later erase (entry 16).

That part of capital, therefore, which is turned into means of production, i.e. the raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour, does not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production. For this reason, I call it the constant part of capital, or more briefly, constant capital. On the other hand, that part of capital which is turned into labour-power does undergo an alteration of value in the process of production. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value and produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, and be more or less according to circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or more briefly, variable capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 317.

The activity of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above this. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production and the labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 317.

Necessary labour and surplus labour divide the working day; the form in which surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producer distinguishes the economic formations of society; and the rate of surplus-value measures the exploitation exactly.

I call the portion of the working day during which this reproduction takes place necessary labour-time, and the labour expended during that time necessary labour; necessary for the worker, because independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary for capital and the capitalist world, because the continued existence of the worker is the basis of that world. During the second period of the labour process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the worker does indeed expend labour-power, he does work, but his labour is no longer necessary labour, and he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing. This part of the working day I call surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time I give the name of surplus labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 325.

What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour – is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 325.

The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 326.

The sum of the necessary labour and the surplus labour, i.e. the sum of the periods of time during which the worker respectively replaces the value of his labour-power and produces the surplus-value, constitutes the absolute extent of his labour-time, i.e. the working day.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 339.

Absolute surplus-value is the extension of the working day, and the struggle over it is carried in the corpus’s own dramatis personae: the drive of capital, the voice of the worker, and an antinomy of right against right that only force decides.

But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 342.

Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker, which had previously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs. That is why you bought it. What appears on your side as the valorization of capital is on my side an excess expenditure of labour-power.’

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 342.

There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 344.

Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 376.

The history of the working day ends in a formulation that binds the emancipation struggles across the colour line into one sentence.

In the United States of America, every independent workers' movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of the locomotive.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 414.

The mass of surplus-value and its social generalization:

The mass of surplus-value produced is equal to the amount of the variable capital advanced multiplied by the rate of surplus-value; in other words: the mass of surplus-value is determined by the product of the number of labour-powers simultaneously exploited by the same capitalist and the degree of exploitation of each individual labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 418.

But it is different as soon as we view the production process as a process of valorization. The means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 425.

Relative surplus-value inverts the method: with the working day bounded, capital must cheapen labour-power itself by revolutionizing productivity, which makes the immanent drive toward technical revolution a value-relation and not a psychology.

I call that surplus-value which is produced by the lengthening of the working day, absolute surplus-value. In contrast to this, I call that surplus-value which arises from the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working day, relative surplus-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 432.

Capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 436.

The objective of the development of the productivity of labour within the context of capitalist production is the shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself, and the lengthening, thereby, of the other part of the day, in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 438.

Whichever of these is the cause of the increase, the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself. When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 447.

Two closing determinations: the productive worker defined by the production of surplus-value, and capital defined as command over unpaid labour.

The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorization of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. … The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital's direct means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 644.

Capital, therefore, is not only the command over labour, as Adam Smith thought. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 672.

The Grundrisse places the same category world-historically: the creation of surplus labour beyond immediate need is capital’s great historic quality, the ground of its civilizing role and of its dispensability alike.

The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 325.

Across the corpusDeveloped across Capital, Volume I, Parts Three through Six (pages 293–672); presupposed by the reproduction schemas of Volume II (entry 15); progressively masked through Volume III (entries 16, 17, 19, 20, 21). The Grundrisse anticipates both the category (pages 324–340) and its historical limit (entry 13).

See also07 Labour-power · 10 The wage-form · 11 Accumulation · 16 Cost price and profit · 18 The falling rate of profit

10The Wage-Form: Appearance Against Essence

The decisive middle rung of the ladder of appearance: the value of labour-power presents itself as the value of labour, and the division of the day into paid and unpaid labour becomes invisible in the very form of the transaction.

The ground of the illusion is stated first: labour is the substance and measure of value and can therefore have no value of its own; “value of labour” is an expression in which the essential relation can only appear inverted.

Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself. In the expression ‘value of labour’, the concept of value is not only completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its contrary. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions arise, nevertheless, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the forms of appearance of essential relations.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 677.

Then the two sentences on which the whole critique of everyday economic consciousness rests. They should be quoted together and in full: the first states what the form extinguishes, the second states what rests on the extinction.

The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid labour and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. Under the corvée system it is different. There the labour of the serf for himself, and his compulsory labour for the lord of the land, are demarcated very clearly both in space and time. In slave labour, even the part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of subsistence, in which he therefore actually works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All his labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage-labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 680.

All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 680.

The forms of the wage then do their own ideological work; piece-wages present exploitation as self-measurement, which is why Marx calls them the form most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production.

From what has been shown so far, it is apparent that the piece-wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 698.

Across the corpusAnalysed at Capital, Volume I, Part Six (pages 675–698). Presupposed by every Volume III mystification: cost price treats the wage as a mere input (entry 16), and the trinity formula’s labour–wages pairing (entry 21) is this form raised to a cosmology. The comparison of economic formations by the form in which surplus labour is extracted (Volume I, page 325; entry 09) is what the wage-form is built to conceal.

See also09 Surplus-value · 05 Fetishism · 16 Cost price · 21 The trinity formula · 22 Essence and appearance

11Accumulation, the General Law, and the Reserve Army

Reproduction turns the exchange of equivalents into appropriation without equivalent; accumulation turns the working population into the producer of its own superfluity; and the general law binds the growth of wealth at one pole to the growth of precariousness at the other.

Mere continuity does the first work: viewed as reproduction, every capital resolves into capitalized surplus-value, and the worker’s product confronts him as an alien power that hires him.

Therefore, entirely leaving aside all accumulation, the mere continuity of the production process, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and necessarily, converts all capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. Even if that capital was, on its entry into the process of production, the personal property of the man who employs it, and was originally acquired by his own labour, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialized either in the money-form or in some other way.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 715.

Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 716.

The laws of commodity exchange thereby invert into their opposite while remaining formally valid — the corpus’s cleanest demonstration that the apparent legality of the surface and the actual relation of appropriation are two different things.

The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 729.

It is quite evident from this that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, is now turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange, since, firstly, the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself merely a portion of the product of the labour of others which has been appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added surplus.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 729.

Originally the rights of property seemed to us to be grounded in a man's own labour. … Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour thus becomes the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 730.

The composition of capital gives the law its variable: as accumulation raises the productivity of labour, the constant part grows against the variable, and the demand for labour falls relatively while accumulation advances absolutely. This is the same movement that reappears in Volume III as the falling rate of profit (entry 18).

As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. … I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. … I call the value-composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 762.

The relative surplus population is therefore a product, a condition, and a lever of capitalist accumulation all at once.

But in fact it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 782.

The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 783.

But if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 784.

The general law itself, and its costs, carried whole.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. … The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 798.

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; … they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; … they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 799.

It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. … Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 799.

Across the corpusDeveloped at Capital, Volume I, Part Seven (pages 711–802). Volume II restates reproduction at the level of the total social capital (entry 15); Volume III converts the rising organic composition into the tendential fall of the profit rate (entry 18); the Grundrisse fragment on machines states the same dynamic as the moving contradiction (entry 13).

See also09 Surplus-value · 15 The reproduction schemas · 18 The falling rate of profit · 12 Primitive accumulation

12So-Called Primitive Accumulation and the Forms Preceding

The historical answer to the question the market cannot answer about itself: where the doubly free labourer and the money that hires him come from. In Capital, the English expropriations; in the Grundrisse, the dissolution of every earlier unity of the producer with the conditions of production.

The concept is defined by its result: the complete separation of the workers from the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour.

The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 874.

But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 875.

The history is not idyllic, and Volume I refuses to let the colonial and metropolitan ledgers be kept apart.

While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 925.

If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 926.

The chapter on the historical tendency then compresses the whole volume into two movements: centralization and socialization of labour on one side, and the expropriation of the expropriators on the other — with the precise asymmetry of the two expropriations marked.

Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 929.

But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 929.

In the former case, it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; but in this case, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 930.

The Grundrisse runs the same question backward through the pre-capitalist forms. The presupposition of capital is the separation of free labour from its objective conditions; in the original communal forms the labourer relates to the earth as his own inorganic body, through membership in a community.

Another presupposition is the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization – from the means of labour and the material for labour. Thus, above all, release of the worker from the soil as his natural workshop – hence dissolution of small, free landed property as well as of communal landownership resting on the oriental commune. In both forms, the worker relates to the objective conditions of his labour as to his property; this is the natural unity of labour with its material [sachlich] presuppositions.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 471.

The earth is the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community. They relate naïvely to it as the property of the community, of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour. Each individual conducts himself only as a link, as a member of this community as proprietor or possessor.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 472.

it is not in the least a contradiction to it that, as in most of the Asiatic landforms, the comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor; the real communities hence only as hereditary possessors. Because the unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities, where the individual is then in fact propertyless, or, property – i.e. the relation of the individual to the natural conditions of labour and of reproduction as belonging to him, as the objective, nature-given inorganic body of his subjectivity – appears mediated for him through a cession by the total unity – a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of the many communities – to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 472.

Membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appropriation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the individual is a private proprietor. He relates to his private property as land and soil, but at the same time as to his being as commune member; and his own sustenance as such is likewise the sustenance of the commune, and conversely etc.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 475.

The Asiatic, ancient, and Germanic forms differ in how the commune and the individual proprietor sit inside one another, and antiquity’s difference is condensed into a single sentence about cities.

The history of classical antiquity is the history of cities, but of cities founded on landed property and on agriculture; Asiatic history is a kind of indifferent unity of town and countryside (the really large cities must be regarded here merely as royal camps, as works of artifice [Superfötation] erected over the economic construction proper); the Middle Ages (Germanic period) begins with the land as the seat of history, whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside; the modern [age] is the urbanization of the countryside, not ruralization of the city as in antiquity.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 479.

Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual family chiefs settled in the forests, long distances apart, the commune exists, already from outward observation, only in the periodic gathering-together [Vereinigung] of the commune members, although their unity-in-itself is posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc. The commune thus appears as a coming-together [Vereinigung], not as a being-together [Verein]; as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity. The commune therefore does not in fact exist as a state or political body, as in classical antiquity, because it does not exist as a city.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 483.

Two formulations from these notebooks belong in any writing on this terrain: the reversal by which production, not the human being, became the aim; and the methodological point that it is the separation, not the original unity, that requires explanation.

Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?

Marx, Grundrisse, page 487.

It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 489.

And against the political-economic fable of patient saving:

The original formation of capital does not happen, as is sometimes imagined, with capital heaping up necessaries of life and instruments of labour and raw materials, in short, the objective conditions of labour which have already been unbound from the soil and animated by human labour. Capital does not create the objective conditions of labour. Rather, its original formation is that, through the historic process of the dissolution of the old mode of production, value existing as money-wealth is enabled, on one side, to buy the objective conditions of labour; on the other side, to exchange money for the living labour of the workers who have been set free. All these moments are present; their divorce is itself a historic process, a process of dissolution, and it is the latter which enables money to transform itself into capital.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 506.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume I, Part Eight (pages 873–940) carries the historical record; the Grundrisse Formen section (pages 471–514) carries the theoretical genesis. The two treatments differ in register and should be cited as what they are: the notebooks reconstruct the concept of the separation, the published volume documents one route by which it was accomplished.

See also07 Labour-power · 11 Accumulation · 20 Ground-rent

13Machinery, the General Intellect, and Disposable Time

Two treatments of the same machine: in Volume I, the inversion by which the worker becomes an appendage of the automaton; in the Grundrisse, the point where capital’s own development undermines labour time as the measure of wealth and produces disposable time it cannot tolerate.

Volume I marks the inversion inside the factory in the language of subject and object.

In one, the combined collective worker appears as the dominant subject [übergreifendes Subjekt], and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the other, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force. The first description is applicable to every possible employment of machinery on a large scale, the second is characteristic of its use by capital, and therefore of the modern factory system.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 544.

In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 548.

Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content. … it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 548.

And states the double tendency of large-scale industry at the level of society and nature.

On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 637.

The Grundrisse fragment on machines runs the same development to its conceptual end. Once absorbed into capital, the means of labour becomes an automatic system and the worker its conscious organ; knowledge itself confronts him as alien power.

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 692.

The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 693.

In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital’s] requirements.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 695.

Then the passages on which a whole century of reception hangs, carried in order and in full. Large industry reveals the disproportion between labour time expended and the product; direct labour ceases to be the great well-spring of wealth; and production founded on exchange value breaks down.

The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 704.

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 705.

As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 705.

With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 705.

The general intellect: social knowledge become a direct force of production, organs of the human brain in the machine.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 706.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 706.

The moving contradiction, stated whole — the sentence that binds this entry to the falling rate of profit (entry 18) and to the whole timenergy problem of measure.

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 706.

Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Marx, Grundrisse, page 706.

Wealth re-measured: disposable time, produced by capital despite itself, converted back into surplus labour by the relations of production.

The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 708.

It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 708.

The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 711.

Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 712.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume I, Part Four (pages 439–639) carries the historical and technical analysis; the Grundrisse fragment (pages 690–712) carries the speculative horizon the published text withholds. The two registers differ, and the difference is real: Volume I never repeats the breakdown formulation of page 705. Cite the notebooks as notebooks.

See also08 Living labour · 09 Surplus-value (relative) · 11 Accumulation · 18 The falling rate of profit

14The Circuits of Capital and Turnover

Volume II’s object: capital as motion. Industrial capital passes through money, productive, and commodity forms simultaneously; circulation adds no value but takes time; and the turnover apparatus produces its own layer of mystification in the annual rate of surplus-value.

Thus the formula for the circuit of money capital is M–C…P…C′–M′. The dots indicate that the circulation process is interrupted, while C′ and M′ denote an increase in C and M as the result of surplus-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 109.

The characteristic act of the circuit is the purchase of labour-power, and the class relation is already inside the “simple” money-relation M–L.

M–L is the characteristic moment of the transformation of money capital into productive capital, for it is the essential condition without which the value advanced in the money form cannot really be transformed into capital, into value-producing surplus-value. M–mp is necessary only in order to realize the mass of labour bought by way of M–L.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 113.

The class relation between capitalist and wage-labourer is thus already present, already presupposed, the moment that the two confront each other in the act M–L (L–M from the side of the worker). This is a sale and purchase, a money relation, but a sale and purchase in which it is presupposed that the buyer is a capitalist and the seller a wage-labourer; and this relation does in fact exist, because the conditions for the realization of labour-power, i.e. means of subsistence and means of production, are separated, as the property of another, from the possessor of labour-power.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 115.

The circuit demands continuity across qualitatively different phases; every interruption is a pathology with its own name.

The circuit of capital proceeds normally only as long as its various phases pass into each other without delay. If capital comes to a standstill in the first phase, M–C, money capital forms into a hoard; if this happens in the production phase, the means of production cease to function, and labour-power remains unoccupied; if in the last phase, C′–M′, unsaleable stocks of commodities obstruct the flow of circulation.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 133.

Each of the three figures presents the whole process from one side, and each taken alone breeds its own illusion; the truth is their unity in motion.

The general form of the circuit of industrial capital is the circuit of money capital, in so far as the capitalist mode of production is presupposed, i.e. within a specific state of society determined by capitalist production. Hence the capitalist production process is the basic pre-condition, it is prior to all else.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 143.

the entire circulation presents itself in the opposite form from that which it possessed in the circuit of money capital. There it was M–C–M (M–C. C–M), disregarding the value determination; here, again disregarding the value determination, it is C–M–C (C–M. M–C), i.e. the form of simple commodity circulation.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 145.

If we take all three forms together, then all the premises of the process appear as its result, as premises produced by the process itself. Each moment appears as a point of departure, of transit, and of return. The total process presents itself as the unity of the process of production and the process of circulation; the production process is the mediator of the circulation process, and vice versa.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 180.

In reality, however, each individual industrial capital is involved in all three at the same time. The three circuits, the forms of reproduction of the three varieties of capital, are continuously executed alongside one another. … Here, therefore, the entire circuit is the real unity of its three forms.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 181.

The real circuit of industrial capital in its continuity is therefore not only a unified process of circulation and production, but also a unity of all its three circuits. But it can only be such a unity in so far as each different part of the capital runs in succession through the successive phases of the circuit, can pass over from one phase and one functional form into the other; hence industrial capital, as the whole of these parts, exists simultaneously in its various phases and functions, and thus describes all three circuits at once.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 183.

Capital, as self-valorizing value, does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labour as wage-labour. It is a movement, a circulatory process through different stages, which itself in turn includes three different forms of the circulatory process. Hence it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing. Those who consider the autonomization [Verselbstständigung] of value as a mere abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 185.

Circulation time is a negative limit: it creates no value and constrains valorization, which is why capital continually revolutionizes it.

The expansion and contraction of the circulation time hence acts as a negative limit on the contraction or expansion of the production time, or of the scale on which a capital of a given magnitude can function. The more that the circulation metamorphoses of capital are only ideal, i.e. the closer the circulation time comes to zero, the more the capital functions, and the greater is its productivity and self-valorization. If a capitalist works to order, receives payment on the delivery of his product, and is paid in his own means of production, then his time of circulation approaches zero.

Capital’s circulation time generally restricts its production time, and hence its valorization process. Moreover, it restricts this in proportion to its duration.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 203.

Those circulation costs that proceed from the mere change in form of value, from circulation in its ideal sense, do not enter into the value of commodities. The portions of capital spent on them constitute mere deductions from the capital productively spent, as far as the capitalist is concerned. The circulation costs that we shall deal with now are different in nature. They can arise from production processes that are simply continued in the circulation sphere, and whose productive character is thus merely hidden by the circulation form.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 214.

The general law is that all circulation costs that arise simply from a change in form of the commodity cannot add any value to it. They are simply costs involved in realizing the value or transferring it from one form into another.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 225.

Transport is the boundary case that proves the rule: it sells the change of place itself and is productive.

But what the transport industry sells is the actual change of place itself. The useful effect produced is inseparably connected with the transport process, i.e. the production process specific to the transport industry. People and commodities travel together with the means of transport, and this journeying, the spatial movement of the means of transport, is precisely the production process accomplished by the transport industry. The useful effect can only be consumed during the production process; it does not exist as a thing of use distinct from this process, a thing which functions as an article of commerce and circulates as a commodity only after its production.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 135.

Turnover then gives the analysis its time-unit and its material cycle.

the overall time of circulation of a given capital is the sum of its circulation time proper and its production time. It is the period of time that elapses from the moment that the capital value is advanced in a particular form until the return of the capital value in process in the same form.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 233.

The circuit of capital, when this is taken not as an isolated act but as a periodic process, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is given by the sum of its production time and its circulation time. This period of time forms the capital’s turnover time. It thus measures the interval between one cyclical period of the total capital value and the next; the periodicity in the capital’s life-process, or, if you like, the time required for the renewal and repetition of the valorization and production process of the same capital value.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 235.

As the working day forms the natural measuring unit for the function of labour-power, so the year forms the natural measuring unit for the turnovers of capital in process. The natural basis for this measurement is that the most important food crops in the temperate zone, the native ground of capitalist production, are annual products.

If we call the year, as measurement unit of the turnover time, U, the turnover time of a particular capital u, and the number of its turnovers n, then n = U/u. If the turnover time u is three months, for example, then n = 12/3 = 4; the capital completes four turnovers in a year, or turns over four times. If u = 18 months, then n = 12/18 = 2/3; the capital only gets through two thirds of its turnover time in one year. If the turnover time amounts to several years, then it is reckoned in terms of multiples of a year.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 236.

It is only the function of a product as a means of labour in the production process that makes it fixed capital. It is in no way fixed capital in itself, just as it emerges from a process. A machine that is the product and thus the commodity of a machine-builder is part of his commodity capital. It only becomes fixed capital in the hands of its buyer, the capitalist who employs it productively.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 240.

We can assume that, for the most important branches of large-scale industry, this life cycle is now on average a ten-year one. The precise figure is not important here. The result is that the cycle of related turnovers, extending over a number of years, within which the capital is confined by its fixed component, is one of the material foundations for the periodic cycle in which business passes through successive periods of stagnation, moderate activity, over-excitement and crisis. The periods for which capital is invested certainly differ greatly, and do not coincide in time. But a crisis is always the starting-point of a large volume of new investment.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 264.

And produces its own mystification: the annual rate of surplus-value makes identical exploitation look unequal, an appearance Marx credits with helping destroy the Ricardian school. The essence–appearance mechanics here belong on the ladder with the Volume III forms.

The ratio of the total surplus-value annually produced to the value of the variable capital advanced, we call the annual rate of surplus-value. In the present case this is 5,000/500 = 1,000 percent

If we analyse this rate more closely, it is clear that it is equal to the rate of surplus-value that the variable capital advanced produces during one turnover period, multiplied by the number of turnovers of the variable capital (which is the same as the number of turnovers of the total circulating capital).

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 371.

This phenomenon makes it appear, moreover, as if the rate of surplus-value did not depend only on the amount of variable capital and the rate of exploitation of the labour-power set in motion by it, but also on inexplicable influences deriving from the circulation process; and in fact the phenomenon has been interpreted in this way, if not in this pure form, then at least in its more complicated and concealed form (that of the annual rate of profit). Since the beginning of the 1820s, this phenomenon has led to the complete destruction of the Ricardian school.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 372.

It is only the capital actually operating in the labour process which creates surplus-value and to which all the laws given for surplus-value apply, including the law that, with a given rate of surplus-value, the mass of surplus-value is given by the relative magnitude of the variable capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 373.

The volume’s standing question about money closes the dossier: not where surplus-value comes from, but where the money comes from to realize it.

Thus the question is not: where does surplus-value come from? But rather: where does the money come from which it is turned into?

In bourgeois economics, the existence of surplus-value is taken for granted. Thus not only is it presupposed, but it is also presupposed at the same time that a part of the mass of commodities cast into circulation consists of surplus product, and thus represents a value that the capitalist did not cast into circulation with his capital; that the capitalist therefore casts into circulation an excess over and above his capital, and withdraws this excess from it again.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 404.

Thus the capitalist class remains the sole starting-point of the money circulation. If it needs £400 for payment for means of production, and £100 for payment of labour-power, then it casts £500 into circulation. But the surplus-value contained in the product, given a rate of surplus-value of 100 per cent, makes up a value of £100. How can the capitalist class continue to extract £600 from circulation, if it only ever puts £500 in? Out of nothing, nothing comes. The entire capitalist class cannot extract anything from the circulation sphere that was not put into it already.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 408.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume II, Parts One and Two (pages 109–424). The circuit generalizes M–C–M′ (entry 06); the fixed/circulating distinction here must not be conflated with constant/variable (entry 09), a confusion Marx spends two chapters (10 and 11) prosecuting in Smith and Ricardo; the turnover mystification (page 372) prefigures the profit-rate mystifications of Volume III (entries 16 and 17).

See also06 The general formula · 15 The reproduction schemas · 16 Cost price · 22 Essence and appearance

15The Reproduction Schemas and the Two Departments

The corpus’s answer to the question no individual capital can pose: under what conditions can the total social capital reproduce itself — replace its constant part, feed its workers and capitalists, and expand — when every element must pass through purchase and sale?

The object shifts from the individual to the total social capital, whose figure is the circuit of commodity capital.

But each individual capital forms only a fraction of the total social capital, a fraction that has acquired independence and been endowed with individual life, so to speak, just as each individual capitalist is no more than an element of the capitalist class. The movement of the social capital is made up of the totality of movements of these autonomous fractions, the turnovers of the individual capitals.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 427.

This overall process involves both productive consumption (the immediate production process) together with the changes of form that mediate it (which considered in their material aspect are exchanges), and individual consumption, with the changes of form or exchanges which mediate this. It involves on the one hand the conversion of variable capital into labour-power and the consequent incorporation of labour-power into the capitalist production process. In this aspect, the worker enters the scene as the seller of his commodity, labour-power, and the capitalist as its buyer. On the other hand, however, the sale of commodities involves their purchase by the working class, i.e. the workers’ individual consumption. Here, the working class appears as a buyer of commodities, and the capitalists as sellers of commodities to the workers.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 428.

The circuits of the individual capitals, therefore, when considered as combined into the social capital, i.e. considered in their totality, do not encompass just the circulation of capital, but also commodity circulation in general. In its fundamentals, the latter can consist of only two components: (1) the specific circuit of capital, and (2) the circuit of those commodities that go into individual consumption, i.e. the commodities on which the workers spend their wages and the capitalists their surplus-value (or part of it).

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 428.

The predecessors are honoured and corrected: Quesnay’s Tableau as the great anticipation, Smith’s v+s dogma as the obstacle that made the problem invisible by dissolving constant capital into revenue.

Quesnay’s Tableau économique shows in a few broad lines how the annual result of national production, defined in terms of value, is distributed by circulation in such a way that, with other circumstances remaining the same, simple reproduction can take place, i.e. reproduction on the same scale.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 435.

Adam Smith's dogma that the price or 'exchangeable value' of every single commodity – and thus of all the commodities comprising the annual social product (he correctly assumes capitalist production everywhere) – is composed of, or 'resolves itself into', the three 'component parts' wages, profit and rent, can be reduced to the thesis that commodity value = v + s, i.e. the value of the variable capital advanced, plus the surplus-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 446.

The dogma that the prices of all commodities (and therefore of the annual commodity product) can be resolved into wages plus profit plus rent of land, assumes the form, even in the intermittent esoteric part of Smith’s work, that the value of any commodity, and thus of the society’s annual commodity product, = v+s, i.e. the capital value laid out on labour-power and constantly reproduced by the workers, plus the surplus-value added by the workers through their labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 448.

The apparatus itself: the two departments, the schema of simple reproduction, and the pivotal exchange whose condition is the equation on which everything balances.

The society’s total product, and thus its total production process, breaks down into two great departments:

I. Means of production: commodities that possess a form in which they either have to enter productive consumption, or at least can enter this.

II. Means of consumption: commodities that possess a form in which they enter the individual consumption of the capitalist and working classes.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 471.

For our investigation of simple reproduction, we intend to use the following schema, in which c = constant capital, v = variable capital, s = surplus-value, and the rate of valorization s/v is taken as 100 per cent.

The figures may be in millions of marks, francs or pounds sterling.

I. Production of means of production:

Capital 4,000c+1,000v = 5,000.

Commodity product 4,000c+1,000v+1,000s = 6,000,

existing in the form of means of production.

II. Production of means of consumption:

Capital 2,000c+500v = 2,500.

Commodity product 2,000c+500v+500s = 3,000,

existing in means of consumption.

The total annual commodity product, taken together, is thus:

I. 4,000c+1,000v+1,000s = 6,000 means of production.

II. 2,000c+500v+500s = 3,000 means of consumption.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 473.

We begin with the major exchange between the two departments. (1,000v+1,000s)I, values that exist in the hands of their producers in the natural form of means of production, are exchanged for 2,000 IIc, values that exist in the natural form of means of consumption.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 474.

The result of all this is that, in the case of simple reproduction, the value components v+s of the commodity capital in department I (and therefore a corresponding proportionate part of department I’s total commodity product) must be equal to the constant capital IIc similarly precipitated out by department II as a proportionate part of its total commodity product; in other words, I(v+s) = IIc.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 478.

Money mediates the whole at the level of classes, with the paradox that the capitalist class throws into circulation the money that realizes its own surplus-value.

In relation to the capitalist class as a whole, however, the proposition that it must itself cast into circulation the money needed to realize its surplus-value (and also to circulate its capital, constant and variable) is not only far from paradoxical, it is in fact a necessary condition of the overall mechanism. For here there are just two classes: the working class, which only disposes of its labour-power, and the capitalist class, which has the monopoly of the means of social production, and of money.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 497.

Even simple reproduction carries a crisis mechanism: fixed capital wears out over many years but is replaced discontinuously, so proportionality can fail with no fall in production.

There would be a crisis – a crisis of production – despite reproduction on a constant scale.

In short, if in the case of simple reproduction and with other circumstances remaining the same – i.e. particularly with the productivity, overall amount and intensity of labour remaining unchanged – a constant proportion is not assumed between the defunct fixed capital (that needing renewal) and the fixed capital which continues to operate in the old natural form (merely adding value to its products to replace its wear and tear), then in one case the amount of circulating components to be reproduced remains the same, but the amount of fixed components to be replaced will have increased; the total production of department I therefore has to grow, or else there would be an insufficient amount of reproduction, quite independent of the monetary relations.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 543.

If capitalist A, for example, sells the quantities of commodity product that he successfully produced in the course of a year or a number of years, then he thereby successively transforms that part of his commodity product that is the bearer of surplus-value – the surplus product – i.e. the surplus-value that he produced in the commodity form, into money, stores this away bit by bit, and in this way forms for himself potential new money capital; potential on account of its capacity and its destiny, which is to be converted into elements of productive capital. In fact, however, he only performs simple hoard formation, which is not an element of real reproduction.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 566.

We see now that the periodic renewal of the fixed capital portion of IIc (the entire capital value IIc being exchanged for elements to the value of I(v+s)), presupposes on the one hand a one-sided purchase of that fixed part of IIc which is transformed back from the money form into the natural form and to which corresponds a one-sided sale of Is; on the other hand it presupposes a one-sided sale on the part of IIc, the sale of that fixed value component (wear and tear) which is precipitated out in money and to which corresponds a one-sided purchase of Is. In order that the exchange should take place normally, it has to be assumed that the one-sided purchase by IIc is equal in value to its one-sided sale, and similarly that the one-sided sale of Is to IIc, section 1, is equal to its one-sided purchase from IIc, section 2 (p. 540). Otherwise, simple reproduction would be disrupted; the one-sided purchase at one point must be covered by a one-sided sale at another.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 570.

Expanded reproduction closes the volume: hoard formation, the accumulation schemas, and the condition that department I outrun the constant capital of department II.

A) Schema of simple reproduction

I. 4,000c+1,000v+1,000s = 6,000 / II. 2,000c+500v+500s = 3,000 Total = 9,000.

(B) Initial schema for reproduction on an expanded scale

I. 4,000c+1,000v+1,000s = 6,000 / II. 1,500c+750v+750s = 3,000 Total = 9,000.

If we assume that in schema (B) half the surplus-value in department I is accumulated, i.e. 500, then we get in the first place (1,000v+500s)I or 1,500 I(v+s) to be replaced by 1,500 IIc; there then remains in department I, 4,000c+500s, the latter having to be accumulated.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 586.

It is self-evident that, on the assumption of accumulation, I(v+s) is greater than IIc, and not equal to it as in simple reproduction; since (1) department I incorporates a part of its surplus product into its own productive capital and transforms five sixths of this into constant capital, so that it cannot simultaneously exchange this five sixths for means of consumption II; and (2) department I has to supply the material for the constant capital needed for accumulation within department II out of its surplus product.

Marx, Capital, Volume II, page 590.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume II, Part Three (pages 425–599). The schemas presuppose values, not prices of production, which is why they sit before the Volume III transformation (entry 17) in the architecture even though the manuscripts run the other way; the crisis mechanics here (pages 543, 570) belong beside the overproduction analysis of Volume III, Part Three (entry 18).

See also14 The circuits of capital · 11 Accumulation · 18 The falling rate of profit

16Cost Price and Profit: The First Mystification

The first Volume III form: the distinction between constant and variable capital vanishes inside cost price, surplus-value is computed on the total capital as profit, and the origin of the surplus becomes structurally invisible to the agents themselves.

Cost price is not a lie; it is a real category of capitalist calculation whose reality consists in erasing the one distinction that matters.

When we combine the various portions of commodity value that simply replace the capital value spent in the commodity’s production, under the heading of cost price, we express on the one hand the specific character of capitalist production. The capitalist cost of the commodity is measured by the expenditure of capital, whereas the actual cost of the commodity is measured by the expenditure of labour..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 118.

If I know that five-sixths of a commodity value of £600, i.e. £500, is simply an equivalent, a replacement value, for the capital of £500 that has been spent, and that this is therefore just sufficient to buy back, the material elements of this capital, I still neither know how this five-sixths of the commodity’s value which forms its cost price was produced, nor can I explain the origin of the last sixth that forms its surplus-value. Our investigation will show, however, that cost price does none the less, in the economy of capital, present the false semblance of an actual category of value production..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 119.

Because the surplus appears as an excess over the whole cost price, it seems to spring from all parts of the capital equally.

However this might be, the upshot is that the surplus-value springs simultaneously from all parts of the capital applied. The deduction may be substantially abbreviated, as in the clear and simple words of Malthus: ‘The capitalist… expects an equal profit upon all the parts of the capital which he advances.’ As this supposed derivative of the total capital advanced, the surplus-value takes on the transformed form of profit. A sum of value is therefore capital if it is invested in order to produce a profit, or alternatively profit arises because a sum of value is employed as capital..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 126.

If we call profit p, the formula C = c + v + s = k + s is converted into the formula C = k + p, or commodity value = cost price + profit. Profit, as we are originally faced with it, is thus the same thing as surplus-value, save in a mystified form, though one that necessarily arises from the capitalist mode of production. Because no distinction between constant and variable capital can be recognized in the apparent formation of the cost price, the origin of the change in value that occurs in the course of the production process is shifted from the variable capital to the capital as a whole.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 127.

From here the capitalist’s own practical illusion — profit as made in the sale, above an inner value of the commodity — follows naturally, together with the true statement of where profit in fact comes from.

From this standpoint alone, the capitalist is inclined to treat the cost price as the real inner value of the commodity, as it is the price he needs merely to preserve his capital. Added to this, however, is the fact that the cost price of the commodity is the purchase price which the capitalist has himself paid for its production, i.e. the purchase price determined by the production process itself. The excess value or surplus-value realized with the sale of the commodity thus appears to the capitalist as an excess of its sale price over its value, instead of an excess of its value over its cost price, so that the surplus-value concealed in the commodity is not simply realized by its sale, but actually derives from the sale itself..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 128.

The capitalist's profit, therefore, comes from the fact that he has something to sell for which he has not paid. The surplus-value or profit consists precisely in the excess of commodity value over its cost price, i.e. in the excess of the total sum of labour contained in the commodity over the sum of labour that is actually paid for.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 133.

Profit is surplus-value in a mystified form that is nonetheless necessary, born from the standpoint of production itself; consciousness inside the relation sees capital creating value.

It is the transformation of surplus-value into profit that is derived from the transformation of the rate of surplus-value into the profit rate, not the other way round. In actual fact, the rate of profit is the historical starting-point. Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are, relative to this, the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 134.

Thus even if the rate of profit is numerically different from the rate of surplus-value, while surplus-value and profit are in fact the same and even numerically identical, profit is still for all that a transformed form of surplus-value, a form in which its origin and the secret of its existence are veiled and obliterated. In point of fact, profit is the form of appearance of surplus-value, and the latter can be sifted out from the former only by analysis. In surplus-value, the relationship between capital and labour is laid bare. In the relationship between capital and profit, i.e. between capital and surplus-value as it appears on the one hand as an excess over the cost price of the commodity realized in the circulation process and on the other hand as an excess determined more precisely by its relationship to the total capital, capital appears as a relationship to itself, a relationship in which it is distinguished, as an original sum of value, from another new value that it posits..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 139.

It appears to consciousness as if capital creates this new value in the course of its movement through the production and circulation processes. But how this happens is now mystified, and appears to derive from hidden qualities that are inherent in capital itself. The further we trace out the valorization process of capital, the more is the capital relationship mystified and the less are the secrets of its internal organization laid bare..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 139.

The rate of profit and the rate of surplus-value are two different measures of one substance, and their quantitative divergence is the engine of every later confusion.

The rate of profit is thus determined by two major factors: the rate of surplus-value and the value composition of the capital. The effects of these two factors can be briefly summarized as follows, and we are able now to express the composition in percentages, since it is immaterial here in which of the two portions of capital the change originates..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 161.

The economy in constant capital that the profit rate enforces has its human ledger, and Marx keeps both books at once.

The contradictory and antithetical character of the capitalist mode of production leads it to count the squandering of the life and health of the worker, and the depression of his conditions of existence, as itself an economy in the use of constant capital, and hence a means for raising the rate of profit. Since the worker spends the greater part of his life in the production process, the conditions of this process are to a great extent conditions of his active life process itself, his conditions of life, and economy in these conditions of life is a method of increasing the profit rate..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 179.

If we consider capitalist production in the narrow sense and ignore the process of circulation and the excesses of competition, it is extremely sparing with the realized labour that is objectified in commodities. Yet it squanders human beings, living labour, more readily than does any other mode of production, squandering not only flesh and blood, but nerves and brain as well. In fact it is only through the most tremendous waste of individual development that the development of humanity in general is secured and pursued, in that epoch of history that directly precedes the conscious reconstruction of human society..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 182.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume III, Part One (pages 117–199). The distinction erased here was established at Volume I, page 317 (entry 09); the turnover mystification of Volume II, page 372 (entry 14) is this entry’s sibling; the next rung is average profit (entry 17).

See also09 Surplus-value · 17 Average profit · 22 Essence and appearance

17Average Profit, Prices of Production, and the Transformation

The second Volume III form: competition equalizes unequal profit rates into a general rate, values transform into prices of production, and each capital’s revenue is severed from the exploitation inside its own walls. The point is not that value theory fails here, but that this is how value must appear.

The problem is stated as a scandal for the law of value itself: equal exploitation, unequal profit rates.

We have shown, therefore, that in different branches of industry unequal profit rates prevail, corresponding to the different organic composition of capitals, and, within the indicated limits, corresponding also to their different turnover times; so that at a given rate of surplus-value it is only for capitals of the same organic composition – assuming equal turnover times – that the law holds good, as a general tendency, that profits stand in direct proportion to the amount of capital, and that capitals of equal size yield equal profits in the same period of time..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 252.

The above argument is true on the same basis as our whole investigation so far: that commodities are sold at their values. There is no doubt, however, that in actual fact, ignoring inessential, accidental circumstances that cancel each other out, no such variation in the average rate of profit exists between different branches of industry, and it could not exist without abolishing the entire system of capitalist production. The theory of value thus appears incompatible with the actual movement, incompatible with the actual phenomena of production, and it might seem that we must abandon all hope of understanding these phenomena..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 252.

The solution: the general rate of profit and prices of production, defined whole.

As a result of the differing organic composition of capitals applied in different branches of production, as a result therefore of the circumstance that according to the different percentage that the variable part forms in a total capital of a given size, very different amounts of labour are set in motion by capitals of equal size, so too very different amounts of surplus labour are appropriated by these capitals, or very different amounts of surplus-value are produced by them. The rates of profit prevailing in the different branches of production are accordingly originally very different..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 257.

These different rates of profit are balanced out by competition to give a general rate of profit which is the average of all these different rates.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 257.

The prices that arise when the average of the different rates of profit is drawn from the different spheres of production, and this average is added to the cost prices of these different spheres of production, are the prices of production. Their prerequisite is the existence of a general rate of profit, and this presupposes in turn that the profit rates in each particular sphere of production, taken by itself, are already reduced to their average rates..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 257.

The profit that falls to a capital of given size according to this general rate of profit, whatever its organic composition might be, we call the average profit. That price of a commodity which is equal to its cost price, plus the part of the annual average profit on the capital applied in its production (not simply the capital consumed in its production) that falls to its share according to its conditions of turnover, is its price of production..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 257.

The joint-stock image makes the social character of the average exact: every capital is a shareholder in the total social surplus-value.

The various different capitals here are in the position of shareholders in a joint-stock company, in which the dividends are evenly distributed for each 100 units, and hence are distinguished, as far as the individual capitalists are concerned, only according to the size of the capital that each of them has put into the common enterprise, according to his relative participation in this common enterprise, according to the number of his shares..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 258.

The aggregate equalities that keep the transformation anchored in value, and Marx’s own registered complication about cost prices.

The total price of commodities I-V would thus be the same as their total value, i.e. the sum of the cost prices I-V plus the sum of the surplus-value or profit produced; in point of fact, therefore, the monetary expression for the total quantity of labour, both past and newly added, contained in commodities I-V. And in the same manner, the sum of prices of production for the commodities produced in society as a whole – taking the totality of all branches of production – is equal to the sum of their values..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 259.

The sum of the profits for all the different spheres of production must accordingly be equal to the sum of surplus-values, and the sum of prices of production for the total social product must be equal to the sum of its values.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 273.

The development given above also involves a modification in the determination of a commodity’s cost price. It was originally assumed that the cost price of a commodity equalled the value of the commodities consumed in its production. But for the buyer of a commodity, it is the price of production that constitutes its cost price and can thus enter into forming the price of another commodity. As the price of production of a commodity can diverge from its value, so the cost price of a commodity, in which the price of production of other commodities is involved, can also stand above or below the portion of its total value that is formed by the value of the means of production going into it. It is necessary to bear in mind this modified significance of the cost price, and therefore to bear in mind too that if the cost price of a commodity is equated with the value of the means of production used up in producing it, it is always possible to go wrong..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 264.

The formula that the price of production of a commodity = k + p, cost price plus profit, can now be stated more exactly; since p = kp′ (where p′ is the general rate of profit), the price of production = k + kp′.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 265.

The historical and theoretical priority of value over price of production is asserted explicitly, against any reading that treats value as a redundant metaphysics.

The exchange of commodities at their values, or at approximately these values, thus corresponds to a much lower stage of development than the exchange at prices of production, for which a definite degree of capitalist development is needed..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 277.

Apart from the way in which the law of value governs prices and their movement, it is also quite apposite to view the values of commodities not only as theoretically prior to the prices of production, but also as historically prior to them..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 277.

The mechanism is competition and capital migration, and its result for consciousness is the concealment: the individual capitalist rightly no longer sees the origin, because competition does not show it to him.

Capital withdraws from a sphere with a low rate of profit and wends its way to others that yield higher profit. This constant migration, the distribution of capital between the different spheres according to where the profit rate is rising and where it is falling, is what produces a relationship between supply and demand such that the average profit is the same in the various different spheres, and values are therefore transformed into prices of production..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 297.

It is important for him only in so far as the quantity of surplus-value created in his own branch intervenes as a co-determinant in regulating the average profit. But this process takes place behind his back. He does not see it, he does not understand it, and it does not in fact interest him. The actual difference in magnitude between profit and surplus-value in the various spheres of production (and not merely between rate of profit and rate of surplus-value) now completely conceals the true nature and origin of profit, not only for the capitalist, who has here a particular interest in deceiving himself, but also for the worker. With the transformation of values into prices of production, the very basis for determining value is now removed from view..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 268.

The basic notion in this connection is that of average profit itself, the idea that capitals of equal size must yield equal profits in the same period of time. This is based in turn on the idea that capital in each sphere of production has to participate according to its size in the total surplus-value extorted from the workers by the total social capital; or that each particular capital should be viewed simply as a fragment of the total capital and each capitalist in fact as a shareholder in the whole social enterprise, partaking in the overall profit in proportion to the size of his share of capital..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 312.

He simply forgets (or rather he no longer sees it, since competition does not show it to him) that all these grounds for compensation that make themselves mutually felt in the reciprocal calculation of commodity prices by the capitalists in different branches of production are simply related to the fact that they all have an equal claim on the common booty, the total surplus-value, in proportion to their capital. It appears to them, rather, that the profit which they pocket is something different from the surplus-value they extort; that the grounds for compensation do not simply equalize their participation in the total surplus-value, but that they actually create profit itself, since profit seems to derive simply from the addition to the cost price made with one justification or another..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 312.

One consequence cuts against the vulgar wage theory forever: a general rise in wages lowers the rate of profit but leaves prices of production of average-composition commodities untouched.

A general rise in wages, everything else being equal, means a fall in the rate of surplus-value. For the average capital, profit and surplus-value coincide. Say that wages rise by 25 per cent. The same amount of labour which previously cost 20 to set in motion now costs 25. We then have a turnover value of 80c + 25ν + 15s, instead of 80c + 20ν + 20s. The labour set in motion by the variable capital still produces a value sum of 40, as before. But if ν rises from 20 to 25, the excess s or p is now only 15. A profit of 15 on 105 is 14 2/7 per cent, and this would be the new average rate of profit.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 302.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume III, Part Two (pages 241–313). Market value (Volume III, page 279) is gathered under entry 02; the equalization presupposes the mobility of capital and labour; the falling general rate this average produces over time is entry 18; the completed inversion of the value determination in consciousness is entries 21 and 22.

See also02 Socially necessary labour time · 16 Cost price · 18 The falling rate of profit · 21 The trinity formula

18The Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit

The law by which the actual asserts itself against the apparent in motion: the same rising productivity that is capital’s whole historical achievement expresses itself, at the level of the total capital, as a falling general rate of profit — not despite capitalist development but as its direct expression.

The law itself, as the direct consequence of the rising organic composition of capital established in Volume I (entry 11).

rising organic composition of the total capital, and the direct result of this is that the rate of surplus-value, with the level of exploitation of labour remaining the same or even rising, is expressed in a steadily falling general rate of profit. (We shall show later on why this fall does not present itself in such an absolute form, but rather more in the tendency to a progressive fall.)

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 318.

Its canonical statement makes the modality explicit: the fall is the profit-rate expression of the development of social productivity, peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.

The progressive tendency for the general rate of profit to fall is thus simply the expression, peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, of the progressive development of the social productivity of labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 319.

This does not mean that the rate of profit may not fall temporarily for other reasons as well, but it does prove that it is a self-evident necessity, deriving from the nature of the capitalist mode of production itself, that as it advances the general average rate of surplus-value must be expressed in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of living labour applied continuously declines in relation to the mass of objectified labour that it sets in motion, i.e. the productively consumed means of production, the part of this living labour that is unpaid and objectified in surplus-value must also stand in an ever-decreasing ratio to the value of the total capital applied. But this ratio between the mass of surplus-value and the total capital applied in fact constitutes the rate of profit, which must therefore steadily fall.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 319.

The law runs together with a rising absolute mass of employed labour and of profit: the double movement is part of the law, not an objection to it.

The number of workers employed by capital, i.e. the absolute mass of labour it sets in motion, and hence the absolute mass of surplus labour it absorbs, the mass of surplus-value it produces, and the absolute mass of profit it produces, can therefore grow, and progressively so, despite the progressive fall in the rate of profit. This not only can but must be the case – discounting transient fluctuations – on the basis of capitalist production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 324.

As the process of production and accumulation advances, therefore, the mass of surplus labour that can be and is appropriated must grow, and with it too the absolute mass of profit appropriated by the social capital. But the same laws of production and accumulation mean that the value of the constant capital increases along with its mass, and progressively more quickly than that of the variable portion of capital which is converted into living labour. The same laws, therefore, produce both a growing absolute mass of profit for the social capital, and a falling rate of profit.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 325.

Chapter 13 closes on the exactness the law demands of its own statement.

The level of exploitation of labour, the appropriation of surplus labour and surplus-value, can be increased by prolonging the working day and making work more intense. These points have been developed in detail in Volume 1, in connection with the production of absolute and relative surplus-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 336.

Why a tendency and not a straight line: the counteracting influences, announced as such and then enumerated. More intense exploitation and the cheapening of constant capital are treated inside the law’s own variables; the empirical register is marked where Marx marks it.

Counteracting influences must be at work, checking and cancelling the effect of the general law and giving it simply the character of a tendency, which is why we have described the fall in the general rate of profit as a tendential fall. The most general of these factors are as follows.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 339.

We simply make an empirical reference to this point here, as, like many other things that might be brought in, it has nothing to do with the general analysis of capital, but has its place in an account of competition, which is not dealt with in this work. It is none the less one of the most important factors in stemming the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 342.

In other words, the same development that raises the mass of constant capital in comparison with variable reduces the value of its elements, as a result of the higher productivity of labour, and hence prevents the value of the constant capital, even though this grows steadily, from growing in the same degree as its material volume, i.e. the material volume of the means of production that are set in motion by the same amount of labour-power. In certain cases, the mass of the constant capital elements may increase while their total value remains the same or even falls.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 343.

The creation of such a surplus population is inseparable from the development of labour productivity and is accelerated by it, the same development as is expressed in the decline in the profit rate. The more the capitalist mode of production is developed in a country, the more strikingly does the relative surplus population obtrude there.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 343.

In so far as foreign trade cheapens on the one hand the elements of constant capital and on the other the necessary means of subsistence into which variable capital is converted, it acts to raise the rate of profit by raising the rate of surplus-value and reducing the value of constant capital. It has a general effect in this direction in as much as it permits the scale of production to be expanded. In this way it accelerates accumulation, while it also accelerates the fall in the variable capital as against the constant, and hence the fall in the rate of profit.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 344.

This is the case with railways, for example. These do not therefore enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit, since they yield a profit rate less than the average. If they did go in, the average rate would fall much lower. From a theoretical point of view, it is possible to include them, and we should then obtain a profit rate lower than that which apparently exists and is really decisive for the capitalists, since it is precisely in these undertakings that the proportion of constant capital to variable is at its greatest.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 347.

The two negative formulations that guard the law against its commonest misreadings: the rate does not fall because labour becomes less productive, and not because the worker is less exploited.

The profit rate does not fall because labour becomes less productive but rather because it becomes more productive. The rise in the rate of surplus-value and the fall in the rate of profit are simply particular forms that express the growing productivity of labour in capitalist terms.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 347.

The rate of profit does not fall because the worker is less exploited, but rather because less labour is generally applied in relation to the capital invested. If a falling rate of profit coincides with a rise in the mass of profit, as we have shown, then a greater part of the annual product of labour is appropriated by the capitalist under the heading of capital (as replacement for the capital used up) and a relatively smaller part is appropriated under the heading of profit.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 354.

Chapter 15 then develops the internal contradictions. The fall and accelerated accumulation are one process seen from two sides; crises are the violent, momentary solutions; and the barrier is named in the corpus’s most quoted sentence about itself.

A fall in the profit rate, and accelerated accumulation, are simply different expressions of the same process, in so far as both express the development of productivity. Accumulation in turn accelerates the fall in the profit rate, in so far as it involves the concentration of workers on a large scale and hence a higher composition of capital. On the other hand the fall in the profit rate again accelerates the concentration of capital, and its centralization, by dispossessing the smaller capitalists and expropriating the final residue of direct producers who still have something left to expropriate.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 346.

Crises are never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the disturbed balance for the time being. To express this contradiction in the most general terms, it consists in the fact that the capitalist mode of production tends towards an absolute development of the productive forces irrespective of value and the surplus-value this contains, and even irrespective of the social relations within which capitalist production takes place; while on the other hand its purpose is to maintain the existing capital value and to valorize it to the utmost extent possible (i.e. an ever accelerated increase in this value). In its specific character it is directed towards using the existing capital value as a means for the greatest possible valorization of this value. The methods through which it attains this end involve a decline in the profit rate, the devaluation of the existing capital and the development of the productive forces of labour at the cost of the productive forces already produced.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 357.

Capitalist production constantly strives to overcome these immanent barriers, but it overcomes them only by means that set up the barriers afresh and on a more powerful scale.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 358.

The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-valorization appear as the starting and finishing point, as the motive and purpose of production; production is production only for capital, and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 358.

The barriers within which the maintenance and valorization of the capital-value has necessarily to move – and this in turn depends on the dispossession and impoverishment of the great mass of the producers – therefore come constantly into contradiction with the methods of production that capital must apply to its purpose and which set its course towards an unlimited expansion of production, to production as an end in itself, to an unrestricted development of the social productive powers of labour. The means – the unrestricted development of the forces of social production – comes into persistent conflict with the restricted end, the valorization of the existing capital. If the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production and for creating a corresponding world market, it is at the same time the constant contradiction between this historical task and the social relations of production corresponding to it.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 358.

The periodical devaluation of the existing capital, which is a means, immanent to the capitalist mode of production, for delaying the fall in the profit rate and accelerating the accumulation of capital value by the formation of new capital, disturbs the given conditions in which the circulation and reproduction process of capital takes place, and is therefore accompanied by sudden stoppages and crises in the production process.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 358.

Overproduction is specified rigorously as overproduction of capital, with absolute overaccumulation as its limit case, and the plethora of capital alongside a surplus population as its scandal.

The so-called plethora of capital is always basically reducible to a plethora of that capital for which the fall in the profit rate is not outweighed by its mass – and this is always the case with fresh offshoots of capital that are newly formed – or to the plethora in which these capitals, which are incapable of acting by themselves, are available to the leaders of great branches of business in the form of credit. This plethora of capital arises from the same causes that produce a relative surplus population and is therefore a phenomenon that complements this latter, even though the two things stand at opposite poles – unoccupied capital on the one hand and an unemployed working population on the other.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 359.

Overproduction of capital and not of individual commodities – though this overproduction of capital always involves overproduction of commodities – is nothing more than over-accumulation of capital. To understand what this over-accumulation is (we shall study it in more detail below), we have only to take it as an absolute. When would the overproduction of capital be absolute? And indeed we refer here to an overproduction which does not just extend to this or that or a few major areas of production, but is rather itself absolute in scope, so that it involves all fields of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 359.

There would be an absolute overproduction of capital as soon as no further additional capital could be employed for the purpose of capitalist production. But the purpose of capitalist production is the valorization of capital, i.e. appropriation of surplus labour, production of surplus-value, of profit. Thus as soon as capital has grown in such proportion to the working population that neither the absolute labour-time that this working population supplies nor its relative surplus labour-time can be extended (the latter would not be possible in any case in a situation where the demand for labour was so strong, and there was thus a tendency for wages to rise); where, therefore, the expanded capital produces only the same mass of surplus-value as before, there will be an absolute overproduction of capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 360.

The contradiction is not too much wealth, but wealth in its antagonistic forms; and the falling rate matters historically because profit is accumulation’s driving fire.

But the contradiction in this capitalist mode of production consists precisely in its tendency towards the absolute development of productive forces that come into continuous conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves, and can alone move. It is not that too many means of subsistence are produced in relation to the existing population. On the contrary. Too little is produced to satisfy the mass of the population in an adequate and humane way. Nor are too many means of production produced to employ the potential working population.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 366.

It is not that too much wealth is produced. But from time to time, too much wealth is produced in its capitalist, antagonistic forms. The barriers to the capitalist mode of production show themselves as follows: (1) in the way that the development of labour productivity involves a law, in the form of the falling rate of profit, that at a certain point confronts this development itself in a most hostile way and has constantly to be overcome by way of crises.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 366.

And if capital formation were to fall exclusively into the hands of a few existing big capitals, for whom the mass of profit outweighs the rate, the animating fire of production would be totally extinguished. It would die out. It is the rate of profit that is the driving force in capitalist production, and nothing is produced save what can be produced at a profit.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 368.

The Grundrisse had derived the law a decade before the Volume III manuscript and had already called it the most important law of modern political economy — and had already read in it the historical limit of the mode of production.

Presupposing the same surplus value, the same surplus labour in proportion to necessary labour, then, the rate of profit depends on the relation between the part of capital exchanged for living labour and the part existing in the form of raw material and means of production. Hence, the smaller the portion exchanged for living labour becomes, the smaller becomes the rate of profit. Thus, in the same proportion as capital takes up a larger place as capital in the production process relative to immediate labour, i.e. the more the relative surplus value grows – the value-creating power of capital – the more does the rate of profit fall.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 747.

This is in every respect the most important law of modern political economy, and the most essential for understanding the most difficult relations. It is the most important law from the historical standpoint.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 748.

Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 749.

The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 749.

And the notebooks’ general form of the barrier-dialectic stands behind both texts: capital treats every limit as a barrier to be ideally overcome, and thereby posits it anew.

But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 410.

Across the corpusFirst derived in the Grundrisse (pages 745–750), developed as law, counteraction, and contradiction at Capital, Volume III, Part Three (pages 315–375). Its premises run backward through the whole corpus: organic composition (Volume I, page 762; entry 11), relative surplus-value (entry 09), and the moving contradiction of the fragment on machines (entry 13), which states as a matter of measure what the falling rate states as a matter of profit.

See also11 Accumulation · 13 Machinery and disposable time · 17 Average profit · 15 Reproduction (crisis mechanics)

19Interest, Fictitious Capital, and M–M′

The third Volume III form, and the completed fetish: capital as a commodity whose price is interest, M–M′ as money that appears to breed money with the production process eliminated, and the credit system’s paper claims capitalized into a second, fictitious existence.

Money as capital becomes itself a commodity, and its “price,” interest, obeys no law of value: there is no natural rate.

On the basis of capitalist production, money – taken here as the independent expression of a sum of value, whether this actually exists in money or in commodities – can be transformed into capital, and through this transformation it is turned from a given, fixed value into a self-valorizing value capable of increasing itself. It produces profit, i.e. it enables the capitalist to extract and appropriate for himself a certain quantity of unpaid labour, surplus product and surplus-value. In this way the money receives, besides the use-value which it possesses as money, an additional use-value, namely the ability to function as capital. Its use-value here consists precisely in the profit that it produces when transformed into capital. In this capacity of potential capital, as a means to the production of profit, it becomes a commodity, but a commodity of a special kind. Or what comes to the same thing, capital becomes a commodity.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 459.

The prevailing average rate of interest in a country, as distinct from the constantly fluctuating market rate, cannot be determined by any law. There is no natural rate of interest, therefore, in the sense that economists speak of a natural rate of profit and a natural rate of wages.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 484.

The qualitative division of profit into interest and profit of enterprise re-stages exploitation as two innocent incomes: capital ownership earning outside production, and the functioning capitalist recast as a worker.

That his function as a capitalist consists in producing surplus-value, i.e. unpaid labour, and in the most economical conditions at that, is completely forgotten in the face of the antithesis that interest accrues to the capitalist even if he does not perform any function as capitalist, but is simply the owner of capital; while profit of enterprise, on the other hand, accrues to the functioning capitalist even if he is not the owner of the capital with which he functions. In the face of the antithetical form of the two parts into which profit and thus surplus-value divides, it is forgotten that both are simply parts of surplus-value and that such a division can in no way change its nature, its origin and its conditions of existence.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 504.

There is still a further distortion. While interest is simply one part of the profit, i.e. the surplus-value, extorted from the worker by the functioning capitalist, it now appears conversely as if interest is the specific fruit of capital, the original thing, while profit, now transformed into the form of profit of enterprise, appears as a mere accessory and trimming added in the reproduction process. The fetish character of capital and the representation of this capital fetish is now complete.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 516.

Chapter 24 is the summit of the corpus’s fetishism analysis and is carried nearly whole.

In interest-bearing capital, the capital relationship reaches its most superficial and fetishized form. Here we have M–M′, money that produces more money, self-valorizing value, without the process that mediates the two extremes. In commercial capital, M–C–M′, at least the general form of the capitalist movement is present, even though this takes place only in the circulation sphere, so that profit appears as merely profit upon alienation; but for all that, it presents itself as the product of a social relation, not the product of a mere thing. The form of commercial capital still exhibits a process, the unity of opposing phases, a movement that breaks down into two opposite procedures, the purchase and sale of commodities. This is obliterated in M–M′, the form of interest-bearing capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 515.

In interest-bearing capital, the movement of capital is abbreviated. The mediating process is omitted, and a capital of 1,000 is characterized as a thing that in itself is 1,000 and in a certain period is transformed into 1,100, just as wine in the cellar improves its use-value after a given period of time. Capital is now a thing, but the thing is capital. The money’s body is now by love possessed. As soon as it is lent, or else applied in the reproduction process (in so far as it yields interest to the functioning capitalist as its owner, separate from profit of enterprise), interest accrues to it no matter whether it is asleep or awake, at home or abroad, by day and by night. In interest-bearing capital, therefore (and all capital is money capital in its value expression, or is now taken as the expression of money capital), the hoarder’s most fervent wish is realized.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 515.

Capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest, of its own increase. The thing (money, commodity, value) is now already capital simply as a thing; the result of the overall reproduction process appears as a property devolving on a thing in itself.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 516.

In M–M′ we have the irrational form of capital, the misrepresentation and objectification of the relations of production, in its highest power.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 516.

In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this form it no longer bears any marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relationship of a thing, money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we have here only the form of this devoid of content. As in the case of labour-power, here the use-value of money is that of creating value, a greater value than is contained in itself. Money as such is already potentially self-valorizing value, and it is as such that it is lent, this being the form of sale for this particular commodity. Thus it becomes as completely the property of money to create value, to yield interest, as it is the property of a pear tree to bear pears.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 518.

The credit system doubles the picture: it is at once the abolition of capital as private property within capitalism, the principal lever of overproduction, and — together with the cooperative factories — a transition form; its dual character is stated as such.

In joint-stock companies, the function is separated from capital ownership, so labour is also completely separated from ownership of the means of production and of surplus labour. This result of capitalist production in its highest development is a necessary point of transition towards the transformation of capital back into the property of the producers, though no longer as the private property of individual producers, but rather as their property as associated producers, as directly social property. It is furthermore a point of transition towards the transformation of all functions formerly bound up with capital ownership in the reproduction process into simple functions of the associated producers, into social functions.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 568.

This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing contradiction, which presents itself prima facie as a mere point of transition to a new form of production. It presents itself as such a contradiction even in appearance. It gives rise to monopoly in certain spheres and hence provokes state intervention. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new kind of parasite in the guise of company promoters, speculators and merely nominal directors; an entire system of swindling and cheating with respect to the promotion of companies, issue of shares and share dealings. It is private production unchecked by private ownership.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 567.

The cooperative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e. they use the means of production to valorize their own labour.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 571.

Capitalist joint-stock companies as much as cooperative factories should be viewed as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, simply that in the one case the opposition is abolished in a negative way, and in the other in a positive way.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 572.

If the credit system appears as the principal lever of overproduction and excessive speculation in commerce, this is simply because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is now forced to its most extreme limit; and this is because a great part of the social capital is applied by those who are not its owners, and who therefore proceed quite unlike owners who, when they function themselves, anxiously weigh the limits of their private capital. This only goes to show how the valorization of capital founded on the antithetical character of capitalist production permits actual free development only up to a certain point, which is constantly broken through by the credit system. The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market, which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 572.

The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of others’ labour, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards a new mode of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 572.

Fictitious capital: once every regular revenue can be capitalized, claims on future surplus labour circulate as present capital, and the trace of the actual process vanishes into paper.

The form of interest-bearing capital makes any definite and regular monetary revenue appear as the interest on a capital, whether it actually derives from a capital or not. The money income is first transformed into interest, and with the interest we then have the capital from which it derives. Likewise, with interest-bearing capital, any sum of value appears as capital as soon as it is not spent as revenue; i.e. as a ‘principal’ in contrast to the possible or actual interest it can bear.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 595.

No matter how these transactions are multiplied, the capital of the national debt remains purely fictitious, and the moment these promissory notes become unsaleable, the illusion of this capital disappears. Yet this fictitious capital has its characteristic movement for all that, as we shall see soon.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 596.

The formation of fictitious capital is known as capitalization. Any regular periodic income can be capitalized by reckoning it up, on the basis of the average rate of interest, as the sum that a capital lent out at this interest rate would yield.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 597.

The shares in railway, mining, shipping companies, etc. represent real capital, i.e. capital invested and functioning in these enterprises, or the sum of money that was advanced by the shareholders to be spent in these enterprises as capital. It is in no way ruled out here that these shares may be simply a fraud. But the capital does not exist twice over, once as the capital value of the ownership titles, the shares, and then again as the capital actually invested or to be invested in the enterprises in question. It exists only in the latter form, and the share is nothing but an ownership title, pro rata, to the surplus-value which this capital is to realize.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 597.

All these securities actually represent nothing but accumulated claims, legal titles, to future production. Their money or capital value either does not represent capital at all, as in the case of national debts, or is determined independently of the real capital value they represent.

In all countries of capitalist production, there is a tremendous amount of so-called interest-bearing capital or ‘moneyed capital’ in this form. And an accumulation of money capital means for the most part nothing more than an accumulation of these claims to production, and an accumulation of the market price of these claims, of their illusory capital value.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 599.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume III, Parts Four and Five (pages 379–745); commercial capital (pages 379–447) supplies the preliminary step, profit appearing to arise in circulation. M–M′ truncates the general formula of entry 06; the fetish here completes the sequence begun at Volume I, page 165 (entry 05) and feeds directly into the trinity formula (entry 21).

See also06 The general formula · 05 Fetishism · 16 Cost price · 21 The trinity formula

20Ground-Rent and Landed Property

The fourth Volume III form: surplus profit fixed by the monopoly of landed property and paid over as rent, so that the earth itself appears to bear value. The analysis ends in the corpus’s single most compressed statement of its own method: the form of surplus-labour extraction as the innermost secret of the social structure.

The presupposition is monopoly in portions of the globe, and its modern form was manufactured by the expropriations of entry 12.

Landed property presupposes that certain persons enjoy the monopoly of disposing of particular portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others. Once this is given, it is a question of developing the economic value of this monopoly, i.e. valorizing it, on the basis of capitalist production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 752.

In the section on ‘Primitive Accumulation’ (Volume 1, Part 8) we saw how this mode of production presupposes on the one hand that the direct producers are freed from the position of a mere appendage of the soil (in the form of bondsmen, serfs, slaves, etc.) and on the other hand the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land. To that extent, the monopoly of landed property is a historical precondition for the capitalist mode of production and remains its permanent foundation, as with all previous modes of production based on the exploitation of the masses in one form or the other.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 753.

It is one of the great results of the capitalist mode of production that on the one hand it transforms agriculture from a merely empirical set of procedures, mechanically handed down and practised by the most undeveloped portion of society, into a conscious scientific application of agronomy, in so far as this is at all possible within the conditions of private property; that on the one hand it detaches landed property completely from relations of lordship and servitude, while on the other hand it completely separates the land as a condition of labour from landed property and the landlord, for whom moreover this land represents nothing but a certain monetary tax that his monopoly permits him to extract from the industrial capitalist, the farmer. It undoes the connection to such an extent that the landed proprietor can spend his entire life in Constantinople, while his landed property remains in Scotland.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 754.

Ground-rent is thus the form in which landed property is economically realized, valorized. We have together here, moreover, and confronting one another, all three classes that make up the framework of modern society – wage-labourer, industrial capitalist, landowner.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 756.

Differential rent in principle: surplus profit from a monopolizable natural condition, transformed into rent by landed property — the waterfall case carries the whole mechanism.

Firstly, the surplus profit of those producers who use natural water-power as their motive force behaves first of all just like any other surplus profit (this category has already been developed in our presentation of the price of production) which is not the chance result of transactions in the circulation process, of accidental fluctuations in market price. This surplus profit is thus similarly equal to the difference between the individual price of production of these favoured producers and the general social price of production in the sphere of production as a whole, which is what governs the market.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 780.

The surplus profits and the varying rates of surplus profit for different portions of capital value are formed in a uniform way in both cases. And rent is nothing but a form of this surplus profit, surplus profit in fact forming its substance. None the less, the second method does give rise to certain difficulties as regards the transformation of surplus profit into rent, this change in form that involves the transfer of surplus profits from the capitalist farmer to the proprietor of the land.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 813.

Absolute rent hangs on landed property acting as a barrier in its own right, and on the lower organic composition of agricultural capital.

Differential rent presupposes precisely the monopoly of landed property, landed property as a barrier to capital, for otherwise the surplus profit would not be transformed into ground-rent and would not accrue to the landlord instead of to the farmer. And landed property remains such a barrier even where rent in the form of differential rent disappears, i.e. on type A land.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 885.

whether this absolute rent is equal to the whole extra value over and above the price of production, or only to a part of this, agricultural products are always sold at a monopoly price, not because their price stands above their value but rather because it is equal to their value, or is below their value but above their price of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 897.

The essence of absolute rent consists in this: equally large capitals produce different amounts of surplus-value in different spheres of production according to their differing average composition, given an equal rate of surplus-value or equal exploitation of labour. In industry these different amounts of surplus-value are equalized to give the average profit and are divided uniformly between the individual capitals as aliquot parts of the total capital. Landed property, whenever production needs land, whether for agriculture or for the extraction of raw materials, blocks this equalization for the capitals invested on the land and captures a portion of surplus-value which would otherwise go into the equalization process, giving the general rate of profit. Rent then forms a part of the value of commodities, in particular of their surplus-value, which simply accrues to the landowners who extract it from the capitalists, instead of to the capitalist class who have extracted it from the workers.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 906.

The price of land is capitalized tribute, title made market; and the corpus’s ecological verdict on private property in the earth deserves quoting wherever land is discussed.

The fact that it is only the title a number of people have to property in the earth that enables them to appropriate a part of society’s surplus labour as tribute, and in an ever growing measure as production develops, is concealed by the fact that the capitalized rent, i.e. precisely this capitalized tribute, appears as the price of land, which can be bought and sold just like any other item of trade. For the buyer, therefore, his claim to rent does not appear as something obtained for nothing, without labour, risk or the entrepreneurial spirit of capital, but rather as the return for his equivalent.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 910.

From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 911.

Volume I’s agronomic register belongs beside it.

Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. … Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 638.

And the chapter on the genesis of capitalist ground-rent yields the sentence that states the method of the whole corpus in one breath.

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of state in each case.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 927.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume III, Part Six (pages 751–950). The Grundrisse Formen (entry 12) carry the pre-history of landed property; the trinity formula (entry 21) shows land–rent as one member of the completed surface; the page 927 formulation is gathered again in entry 22 as method.

See also12 Primitive accumulation · 17 Average profit (surplus profit) · 21 The trinity formula · 22 Essence and appearance

21The Trinity Formula and the Illusion Created by Competition

The completed surface of the system: capital–profit, land–rent, labour–wages, three revenues flowing from three apparently independent sources. Volume III ends by assembling every prior mystification into the religion of everyday life and dissolving it back into the one relation.

The formula, and its immediate absurdity when looked at closely: members of three incommensurable worlds, lawyer’s fees, beetroot and music.

Capital–profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land–ground-rent, labour–wages, this trinity form holds in itself all the mysteries of the social production process.

Since it is interest that appears as the specific and characteristic product of capital, as we have already seen, with profit of enterprise appearing in contrast as a wage independent of capital, this first trinity form can be reduced to a second: capital–interest, land–ground-rent, labour–wages, where profit, the form of surplus-value specifically characteristic to the capitalist mode of production, is fortunately set aside.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 953.

If we now look more closely at this economic three-in-one, we find, firstly, that the ostensible sources of the wealth annually available belong to completely disparate spheres and have not the slightest analogy with one another. Their mutual relationship is like that of lawyer’s fees, beetroot and music.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 953.

Each member dissolves on inspection. Capital is not a thing; land produces no value; labour in general is a mere spectre outside its social forms.

Capital, land, labour! But capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is the means of production as transformed into capital, these being no more capital in themselves than gold or silver are money. It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society, the products and conditions of activity of labour-power, which are rendered autonomous vis-à-vis this living labour-power and are personified in capital through this antithesis.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 953.

Lastly, as the third in the league, a mere spectre – labour, which is nothing but an abstraction and taken by itself cannot exist at all, or, if we take what is actually meant here, the entire productive activity of man, through which his metabolic interchange with nature is mediated.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 954.

The complete formula is then named for what it is, in the corpus’s single most concentrated statement of the fetish system.

Capital-profit (or better still capital-interest), land–ground-rent, labour-wages, this economic trinity as the connection between the components of value and wealth in general and its sources, completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 968.

the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 969.

Classical economy’s honour and its limit, and the reason the actual agents of production feel entirely at home in the estranged forms, are stated in one movement.

It is the great merit of classical economics to have dissolved this false appearance and deception … this religion of everyday life, by reducing interest to a part of profit and rent to the surplus above the average profit, so that they both coincide in surplus-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 969.

It is also quite natural, on the other hand, that the actual agents of production themselves feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of capital-interest, land-rent, labour-wages, for these are precisely the configurations of appearance in which they move, and with which they are daily involved. It is equally natural, therefore, that vulgar economics, which is nothing more than a didactic and more or less doctrinaire translation of the everyday notions of the actual agents of production, giving them a certain comprehensible arrangement, finds the natural basis of its fatuous self-importance established beyond all doubt precisely in this trinity, in which the entire inner connection is obliterated. This formula also corresponds to the self-interest of the dominant classes, since it preaches the natural necessity and perpetual justification of their sources of income and erects this into a dogma.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 969.

Chapter 50 then prosecutes the illusion created by competition: the value components of the commodity confront one another as independent revenues, and the real order of determination is inverted — revenue forms appear as the sources of value rather than as products of its division.

It is quite unnecessary to wade through this absurd process again for ground-rent. We can already see that if it is carried through in any consistent way, it makes profit and rent appear as mere surcharges, determined by incomprehensible laws, on top of a commodity price determined in the first place by wages. Competition, in other words, is burdened with explaining all the economists’ irrationalities, whereas it is supposed to be the economists who explain competition.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1005.

Firstly, because the commodity’s value components confront one another as independent revenues, which are related as such to three completely separate agents of production, labour, capital and the earth, and appear therefore to arise from these. Property in labour-power, capital and the earth is the reason why these different value components of the commodity fall to their respective proprietors, transforming them therefore into their revenues. But value does not arise from a transformation into revenue, it must rather be already in existence before it can be transformed into revenue and assume this form.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1007.

Under these assumptions, then, with the values of commodities being and appearing constant, with the value component of the commodity product that is reducible to revenue forming a constant quantity and always presenting itself as such, and finally with this given and constant portion of value always breaking down in the same proportions into wages, profit and rent – even on these assumptions, the real movement would necessarily appear in a distorted form: not as the dissolution of a value magnitude given in advance into three parts which assume the mutually independent forms of revenue, but conversely as the formation of this value magnitude from the sum of the component elements of wages, profit and ground-rent, taken as determined independently and separately.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1009.

The secret reason why these products of the dissolution of commodity value constantly appear as the premises of value formation itself is simply that the capitalist mode of production, like every other, constantly reproduces not only the material product but also the socio-economic relations, the formal economic determinants of its formation. Its result thus constantly appears as its premise, and its premises as its results.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1011.

Chapter 51 restores the actual order: relations of distribution are the reverse side of the relations of production, historical through and through.

The scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production proves the contrary, i.e. that this is a mode of production of a particular kind and a specific historical determinacy; that like any other particular mode of production it assumes a given level of social productive forces and of their forms of development as its historical precondition, a condition that is itself the historical result and product of a previous process and from which the new mode of production proceeds as its given foundation; that the relations of production corresponding to this specific and historically determined mode of production – relations into which men enter in their social life-process, in the production of their social life – have a specific, historical and transitory character; and that finally the relations of distribution are essentially identical with these relations of production, the reverse side of the same coin, so that the two things share the same historically transitory character.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1018.

The so-called relations of distribution, therefore, correspond to and arise from historically particular and specific social forms of the production process and of the relationships which men enter into among themselves in the process of reproducing their human life. The historical character of these relations of distribution is the historical character of the relations of production, and they simply express one side of these. The capitalist distribution is different from those forms of distribution that arise from other modes of production, and every form of distribution vanishes along with the particular form of production that it arises from and corresponds to.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1022.

And the corpus breaks off exactly where its politics would begin, mid-answer on the question of class.

The owners of mere labour-power, the owners of capital and the landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent – in other words wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners – form the three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1025.

The question to be answered next is: ‘What makes a class?’, and this arises automatically from answering another question: ‘What makes wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners the formative elements of the three great social classes?’

At first sight, the identity of revenues and revenue sources. For these are three great social groups whose components, the individuals forming them, live respectively from wages, profit and ground-rent, from the valorization of their labour-power, capital and landed property.

From this point of view, however, doctors and government officials would also form two classes, as they belong to two distinct social groups, the revenue of each group’s members flowing from its own source. The same would hold true for the infinite fragmentation of interests and positions into which the division of social labour splits not only workers but also capitalists and landowners – the latter, for instance, into vineyard-owners, field-owners, forest-owners, mine-owners, fishery-owners, etc.

(At this point the manuscript breaks off. – F. E.)

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 1025.

Across the corpusCapital, Volume III, Part Seven (pages 953–1026). Every member of the formula is a prior entry: profit (16), average profit (17), interest (19), rent (20), wages (10); the fetish analysis it completes begins at Volume I, page 165 (entry 05); the methodological sentence embedded in this part’s argument is gathered in entry 22.

See also05 Fetishism · 10 The wage-form · 19 Interest and M–M′ · 20 Ground-rent · 22 Essence and appearance

22Essence, Appearance, and the Method of Science

The methodological entry: why a critique of political economy must exist at all, and how it proceeds. Science exists because the form of appearance and the essence of things do not directly coincide; the critique moves by rising from the abstract to the concrete, against the grain of the finished forms.

The anchor sentence of the whole architecture sits inside the polemic against vulgar economy in the trinity chapter, and the passage is carried whole because the sentence lives in its context: vulgar economy is at home precisely where the inner connection is hidden.

Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that precisely in the estranged form of appearance of economic relations that involves these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions – and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence – that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, these relationships appearing all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner connections remain hidden, even though they are comprehensible to the popular mind.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 956.

The same standard had already sentenced classical political economy in Volume I: it read the content, but never asked why the content assumes that form — and the form it never interrogated is the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production.

But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 174.

The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 174.

Volume III states the working attitude of science against the plausibilities of everyday economic experience without apology.

As the reader will have recognized in dismay, the analysis of the real, inner connections of the capitalist production process is a very intricate thing and a work of great detail; it is one of the tasks of science to reduce the visible and merely apparent movement to the actual inner movement. Accordingly, it will be completely self-evident that, in the heads of the agents of capitalist production and circulation, ideas must necessarily form about the laws of production that diverge completely from these laws and are merely the expression in consciousness of the apparent movement. The ideas of a merchant, a stock-jobber or a banker are necessarily quite upside-down.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 428.

The 1857 Introduction gives the positive method. Beginning with the seemingly concrete yields a chaotic conception; the scientifically correct path rises from the simplest determinations back to the concrete as a totality of determinations.

Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 100.

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 101.

rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 101.

The categories themselves are historical: bourgeois society is the key to its predecessors and not the reverse, and the order of the categories follows their relation in modern society, not their historical sequence.

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up,

Marx, Grundrisse, page 105.

Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 105.

It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 107.

The dossier of appearances themselves is distributed across this document, and this entry is its map: the fetish as objective appearance (entry 05, Volume I, pages 163–177); the wage-form extinguishing the division of the day (entry 10, Volume I, page 680); profit appearing to consciousness as capital’s own creation (entry 16, Volume III, page 139); competition concealing the origin of average profit (entry 17, Volume III, page 312); the turnover inflecting the rate of surplus-value beyond recognition (entry 14, Volume II, page 372); M–M′ as the fetish consummated (entry 19, Volume III, pages 515–518); the revenue forms inverting determination itself (entry 21, Volume III, pages 1007–1011); and the formula that closes the circle, the specific form of surplus-labour extraction as the innermost secret of the whole social edifice (entry 20, Volume III, page 927).

Across the corpusThe method is stated prospectively in the Grundrisse Introduction (pages 100–107), practiced silently through Volume I, and stated retrospectively in Volume III (pages 428, 956). Marx’s verdicts on classical and vulgar economy (Volume I, page 174; Volume III, pages 956, 969) are the standard by which the corpus judges itself.

See also05 Fetishism · 01 The commodity · 21 The trinity formula