Immiseration

Reading Capital: The Accumulation of Capital

The twelfth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering Part Seven — Chapters Twenty-Three through Twenty-Five, the climax of Volume One. Here Marx sets the system in motion through time, asking what happens when surplus-value is thrown back to breed more capital. Simple reproduction reveals that the wage is the worker’s own returned product and that all capital becomes congealed unpaid labour; accumulation proper exposes the drive to ‘accumulate, accumulate’ as competitive compulsion rather than greed; and the general law arrives at the industrial reserve army and the most famous and most fiercely contested passage Marx ever wrote, on the accumulation of wealth at one pole and misery at the other. The objections run from the failure of absolute immiseration to the nature of unemployment.