The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

249 Pages·1999·1.43 MB·English

by  Richard Marsden

The Nature of Capital
We embrace virtuality, but long for authenticity. We rush into the future, but yearn for
the past. The Nature of Capital aims to explain this tension at the heart of the current
disturbance of the spatial and temporal coordinates of social life.
It does so by re-reading Marx and Foucault through the lens of critical realism,
overturning the received wisdom that their social theories are fundamentally
incompatible. The result is an illuminating synthesis between Marx’s ‘social relations of
production’ and Foucault’s ‘disciplinary power’, from which the author constructs a
model of the material cause of our capacity to act: capital, society’s genetic code.
The book places Foucault’s concept of power at the heart of Marx’s analytic. The logic
of power and the law of value, the widening and ascending spirals of disciplinary
technologies and capital accumulation, interweave and adulterate each other. Foucault
explains the ‘how’ of power, Marx explains the ‘why’. Together, the book argues, they
define the operative logic of production relations at work shaping the condition of
postmodernity.
Original in conception and clearly written, this iconoclastic work will be welcomed by
students of, and researchers in, social, economic and political theory, critical organization
and management studies, and postmodernity.
Richard Marsden writes, edits and tutors at Athabasca University, Canada’s Open
University, where he is Associate Professor in Industrial Relations.
Routledge Studies in Social and
Political Thought
1 Hayek and After
Hayekian liberalism as a research programme
Jeremy Shearmur
2 Conflicts in Social Science
Edited by Anton van Harskamp
3 Political Thought of André Gorz
Adrian Little
4 Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy
John Girling
5 Freedom and Culture in Western Society
Hans Blokland
6 Freedom in Economics
New perspectives in normative analysis
Edited by Jean-François Laslier, Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and Alain Trannoy
7 Against Politics
On government, anarchy and order
Anthony de Jasay
8 Max Weber and Michel Foucault
Parallel life works
Arpad Szakolczai
9 The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights
G.B.Madison
10 On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Edited by W.S.F.Pickering, W.Watts Miller and N.J.Allen
11 Classical Individualism
The supreme importance of each human being
Tibor R.Machan
12 The Age of Reasons
Quixotism, sentimentalism and political economy in eighteenth-century Britain
Wendy Motooka
13 Individualism in Modern Thought
From Adam Smith to Hayek
Lorenzo Infantino
14 Property and Power in Social Theory
A study in intellectual rivalry
Dick Pels
15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory
A critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar
Nigel Pleasants
16 Marxism and Human Nature
Sean Sayers
17 Goffman and Social Organization
Studies in a sociological legacy
Edited by Greg Smith
18 Situating Hayek
Phenomenology in the neo-liberal project
Mark J.Smith
19 The Reading of Theoretical Texts
Peter Ekegren
20 The Nature of Capital
Marx after Foucault
Richard Marsden

The Nature of Capital
Marx after Foucault
Richard Marsden

London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or
Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
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© 1999 Richard Marsden
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
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
Marsden, Richard, 1952–
The nature of capital: Marx after Foucault/Richard
Marsden.
256 pp. 15.6×23.4 cm. (Routledge studies in social and political
thought: 20)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Capital. 2. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 3. Foucault, Michel.
I. Title. II. Series.
HB501.M3352 1999 99–17994
335.4’1–dc21 CIP
ISBN 0-203-16523-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-25963-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-19861-5 (Print Edition)
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To Barbara
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Contents
List of figures
x
List of tables
xi
Acknowledgements
xii
Apologia
xiv
Credits
xv

PART I Discovering what is real 1
1 Marketing postmodernity: ‘just like reality, only better’
3
2 Postmodernity and capital: a personal retrospective
14
3 Retroduction and realism: how to theorize
25
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PART II Conclusions in search of a premise: formulating the problem of
modernity 43
4 Beyond good and evil: the modern Manicheism
45
5 Everything pregnant with its contrary: nothing constant but change
60

PART III The unknown masterpiece: Marx’s model of capital 79
6 The inner connection: production, distribution and circulation
81
7 The nature of capital: surface, structure, movement
105
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PART IV Capital: society’s law of motion and microphysics 133
8 How labour is organized into a productive force: cost accounting, IR

and HRM 135
9 The promised ‘connected whole’: Marx, critical realism and

Foucault 162
10 Working capital to the surface: explaining the here and now
177
Notes
188
Bibliography
203
Index
217