Profit

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.