Circulation
Reading Capital: Contradictions in the General Formula
The sixth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Chapter Four left a riddle: capital returns as more money, yet exchange only swaps equal values and creates nothing. Chapter Five is the most lawyerly chapter in the book — Marx plays prosecutor against every easy explanation of profit, proving that surplus can arise neither inside the marketplace nor outside it, until the gain seems not merely unexplained but impossible. Then, in the last paragraph, he names the single narrow opening through which the whole of capitalism will pass. The objections this time run from gains-from-trade to unequal exchange.
Read more →Reading Capital: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
The fourth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Chapter Three settled what money is; here Marx shows what money does — and the answer is far more unsettling than ‘medium of exchange’ suggests. Money can make prices lie, it can break the link between selling and buying (where Marx plants the first seed of economic crisis and his quarrel with Say’s Law), and it can detach itself from goods to become an object of pursuit in its own right. The objections this time come from fiat money and the quantity theory; the replies, from endogenous money and the monetary theory of value.
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