A Companion To Marx's Capital, Volume 2
David Harvey
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 178168121X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of coming to a close and Marx’s work remains key in understanding the cycles that lead to recession. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s most foremost Marx scholars.
Based on his recent lectures, and following the success of his companion to the first volume of Capital, Harvey turns his attention to Volume 2, aiming to bring his depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and hitherto neglected text. Whereas Volume 1 focuses on production, Volume 2 looks at how the circuits of capital, the buying and selling of goods, realize value.
This is a must-read for everyone concerned to acquire a fuller understanding of Marx’s political economy.
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To increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, the competition subordinates every capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation. (C1,739) Pressures to equalize the rate of profit, so essential to the argument that leads into the theory of a falling profit rate, similarly presume the operation of.
Physical quantitative requirements for reproduction are automatically met. There are plenty of problems that derive from these assumptions. The complexities that arise from their relaxation are mind-boggling. Part 3 of Volume II presents a working model of how a capitalist mode of production as a whole gets reproduced through the continuous circulation of capital. It is clearly meant as the culmination of the argument in Volume II. It therefore parallels how Part 7 of Volume I brings together.
Department 1 (1,000s) is reinvested in expansion. Assuming the value composition of capital remains the same, the 500s that is reinvested will be used to purchase an extra 400c and 100v (giving totals of 4,400c + 1,100v) in department 1. Assuming the rate of surplus-value remains constant, then the surplus-value generated is now 1,100s and the total output in this department has increased from 6,000 to 6,600. This then forms the basis for accumulation in the following year. And so it goes from.
Money. But interest is very different, because it is a relation of money to money. There is no metamorphosis involved at all. The problem is also that money, as Marx insisted in Volume I (C1, 253), can be accumulated without limit. Interest-bearing capital, in short, seems to have the magical (fetish) power to grow at a compound rate (it is the goose that seems to have the power to lay its own golden eggs, as Marx put it in Volume I). I put money in a savings account and it grows as if by magic.
Capital in opposition to them. Joint-stock companies in general (developed with the credit system) have the tendency to separate this function of managerial work more and more from the possession of capital, whether one’s own or borrowed … (C3, 512) This leads to an interesting conclusion: The confusion between profit of enterprise and the wages of supervision or management originally arose from the antithetical form that the surplus of profit over interest assumes in opposition to this.