A Guide to Marx's 'Capital' Vols I-III

209 Pages·2012·1.255 MB·English

by  Kenneth Smith

A Guide to Marx’s Capital
Vols I–III

A Guide to Marx’s Capital
Vols I–III
Kenneth Smith
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition fi rst published in UK and USA 2012
by ANTHEM PRESS
75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Kenneth Smith 2012
The author asserts the moral right to be identifi ed as the author of this work.
Cover design by Omid Asghari
Cover image © 2012 City of London, London Metropolitan Archives
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Kenneth (Kenneth Ronald)
A guide to Marx’s Capital, vols. I-III / Kenneth Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85728-506-5 (hbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85728-556-0
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. Kapital. I. Title.
HB501.M37S55 2012
335.4’1–dc23
2012031996
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 506 5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 506 8 (Hbk)
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 556 0 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 556 4 (Pbk)
This title is also available as an eBook.
In a few days I shall be 50. As that Prussian lieutenant said to you:
‘20 years of service and still lieutenant’, I can say: half a century
on my shoulders, and still a pauper. How right my mother was: ‘If
only Karell had made capital instead of etc.’
(Marx to Engels, 30 April 1868; emphasis added)
This book is dedicated to my mother,
Mrs Alice Smith (née Flynn)
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Reading Capital 1
A Note on Marx’s Method 8
A Note on Social Class 12
A Note on the English Translations of Capital 12
Part I: The Development of the Capitalist Mode
of Production 15
1. Absolute and Relative Surplus Value in Capital,
Vol. I, Ch. 10 and 12 18
2. Cooperation and the Division of Labour in Capital,
Vol. I, Ch. 13–14 23
3. Machinery and Modern Industry in Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 15 27
4. Primitive Accumulation in Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII,
Ch. 26–33 31
Part II: The Capitalist Mode of Production 37
5. Simple Reproduction in Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 7, 11 and 23 43
6. Extended Reproduction in Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 24 50
7. Simple Reproduction in Capital, Vol. II, Sections 1–8 55
8. Extended Reproduction in Capital, Vol. II,
Ch. 21, Section 3 60
9. The Precipitation of Fixed Capital in Capital, Vol. II,
Ch. 21, Sections 1–2; Ch. 20, Section 11 69
viii A GUIDE TO MARX’S CAPITAL
Part III: The Underdevelopment of the Capitalist
Mode of Production 81
10. Mercantilism and the Circuit of Industrial Capital in
Capital, Vol. II, Part I, Ch. 1–4 86
11. Credit and the Dissolution of the CMP in Capital,
Vol. III, Ch. 27 91
12. Rudolf Hilferding and ‘Finance Capital’: Capital,
Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2 97
13. Marx on Development and Underdevelopment in
Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 5 104
14. The Tendency of the Rate of Profi t to Fall in Capital,
Vol. III, Parts I–III, Ch. 1–15, but especially Ch. 14–15 111
Part IV: The Value Theory of Labour 121
15. The Rate of Profi t and the Rate of Surplus Value in
Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 9, Section 3, and Vol. III, Parts I and III 125
16. The Degree of Exploitation of Labour by Capital in
Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 9, Section 1; Ch. 6–7 133
17. The Labour Theory of Value and the Value Theory
of Labour in Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 1, Sections 1–3 142
18. The Reifi cation of Commodity Fetishism in Capital,
Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, and Vol. III, Ch. 24 156
Conclusion 171
Appendix: On Social Classes 179
Notes 192
Bibliography 196
Index 198
INTRODUCTION
Reading Capital
Marxists as divergent as Louis Althusser and Karl Korsch have recommended
reading Volume I of Marx’s Capital in a different order to that in which it is
published.1 Korsch (Three Essays on Marxism) suggests beginning with Capital,
Vol. I, Part III, Chapter 7, on ‘the labour-process and the process of producing
surplus value’ and then moving on more or less to the rest of Volume I; only
then does he suggest the reader return to Parts I and II. Althusser (Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays) suggests leaving aside Parts I and V, and reading
fi rst Parts II, III, IV, VI, VII and VIII, only then returning again to start at
the beginning. Even Marx himself suggested a more comprehensible order of
reading. In a letter dated 30 November 1867,2 addressed to his good friend Dr
Ludwig Kugelmann, shortly after the publication of the fi rst German edition
of Capital, Vol. I, Marx advises Kugelmann that he might tell his ‘good wife’
that the chapters ‘Working Day’ (Vol. I, Part III), ‘Co-operation’, ‘The Division
of Labour and Machinery’ (Part IV) and ‘Primitive Accumulation’ (Part VI)
were the most immediately readable – although he warns Kugelmann that
it would still probably be necessary for him to explain to his wife some of
the more ‘incomprehensible terminology’ in these sections (MECW, 1987,
42:490). While Marx gives slightly different advice to another woman, a Mrs
Wollmann, in a letter dated 19 March 1877;3 in which he advises her to start
with the last section of the French edition of Capital (the last but one in the
English translation), ‘The Process of Accumulation of Capital’.
All of these suggestions seem to have been made with much the same
intention; namely, to avoid the conceptually diffi cult Parts I and II of Vol. I, on
the subject of commodities and money, including Marx’s initial discussion of
the general form of value and the section on commodity fetishism. However,
this perfectly understandable intention leads to the peculiar result, in Korsch’s
case, of beginning Capital with the sections on the labour process and the
process of producing surplus value without fi rst having looked at Marx’s
preliminary discussion of value and the buying and selling of labour-power
itself. While in Althusser’s case, we fi nd the even more peculiar suggestion that