Marx
Reading Capital: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
The eighth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering the whole of Part Three — Chapters Seven through Eleven, the analytical and moral heart of the book. Having passed through the door marked ‘No admittance except on business,’ Marx shows how surplus-value is actually produced in the workshop, how it is measured, and how the hunger for it turns the length of the working day into a battlefield. The word that governs the part is absolute: here surplus is squeezed out by the crudest method, lengthening the day. The objections run from the transformation problem to automation to the historical fall in working hours.
Read more →Reading Capital: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power
The seventh entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, and the climax of Part Two. Five chapters of demolition have left only one possibility standing: somewhere on the market there must be a commodity whose use creates more value than it costs. Chapter Six names it — labour-power, the human capacity to work — sets out the strange double freedom of the worker who sells it, works out its price, and then leads buyer and seller off the bright street of exchange and down into the hidden abode of production. The objections this time run from rising wages to the freedom of contract.
Read more →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: The General Formula for Capital
The fifth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, and the first of Part Two. Here money stops serving exchange and begins serving itself: a person lays out money not to buy something to use but to end with more money than he began with. The result is capital — value in motion, self-expanding, endless — and the human capitalist is demoted to its conscious instrument. The chapter ends by setting a trap, the riddle of where the increment comes from, which the next chapter must spring. Critiques this time run from methodological individualism to Schumpeter’s growth engine.
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.
Read more →Reading Capital: Of Exchange
The third entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Chapter Two sets the commodities in motion and introduces the people who carry them. It is one of the shortest chapters in the book, but it does two distinctive things: it derives the legal person — owner, contract, rights-bearing individual — from the bare fact of exchange, and it tells the story of how money is actually born, as something a whole society stumbles into without meaning to. The major objections this time come from the anthropology of money and the theory of law.
Read more →Reading Capital: The Form of Value and the Fetishism of Commodities
The second entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Having found labor inside the commodity, Marx now asks how invisible value ever becomes visible — a chain of small logical steps that leads to money — and then pulls back the curtain on the whole arrangement in his famous account of commodity fetishism. Section 3 is the hardest stretch in the chapter and Section 4 the most beloved; together they finish Marx’s portrait of the commodity, with the central objections and replies set side by side.
Read more →Reading Capital: The Commodity and the Two-Fold Character of Labor
The first entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. We begin where he does, with the commodity and the labor behind it — use-value and value, socially necessary labor time, and the split between concrete and abstract labor — and set the major objections and replies side by side. These opening pages are the most contested in the history of economics, and almost everything in the thousand that follow is already loaded into them.
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