Capital Condensed

By Colin Chalmers

Humanity could easily satisfy everyone's needs without wrecking our planet. Instead, we find ourselves facing a climate crisis that threatens the future of our species in a world of growing inequality and insecurity. How did we get here? What can we do to change things?

Karl Marx wrote Ca

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beachy Head Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781838064655

Book preview

Contents

Thanks

Introduction

1 Commodities and money

2 Capital and labour power

3 Exploitation

4 Productivity

5 Subsumption

6 Wages

7 Accumulation

8 Origins

9 Circulation

10 Turnover time

11 Reproduction

12 Profit

13 Competition

14 The falling rate of profit

15 Commerce

16 Interest and fictitious capital

17 Rent

18 Appearance and reality

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References

Thanks

I would like thank my fellow members of the Capital reading group at Pelican House, London for the discussions I have had with them while writing this book. In particular I would like to thank Seth Wheeler for his encouragement since I first suggested the idea of a short guide to Capital aimed at activists and Jamila Squire for her help in making it happen. I would also like to thank Cosmo, James Clammer and Michael Roberts for their comments on a draft. All errors are of course mine.

Most of all I would like to thank Alison Whiteoak for her encouragement while I wrote this book. Without it I would likely still be complaining that no one had.

Colin Chalmers, September 2023

Introduction

This a short book about three long books. Its purpose is to provide an understanding of what Karl Marx called the ‘artistic whole’¹ of his writings as presented in Capital - the proposal that capitalism is a stage in history that creates the basis for a better world that we can only reach by moving beyond capital.

For some time humanity has had the capacity to produce enough wealth to meet everyone’s needs in an equitable and sustainable way. Instead, we find ourselves hurtling towards catastrophe, apparently unable to change course. Human use of fossil fuels is warming our planet with disastrous consequences. Human exploitation of nature is reducing biodiversity through soil depletion, deforestation, overfishing and the destruction of numerous habitats.

The ecological systems that maintain the narrow limits within which human and other life on earth can survive are being systematically weakened as we head towards ecological tipping points that will drastically change our climate for the worst, quickly.²

We know what needs to be done to avoid disaster. But we don’t do it. Oil companies keep expanding fossil fuel production, making huge profits in the full knowledge of what their actions mean for the world. Other companies ravage nature with no thought for the long-term damage they cause. Governments keep letting them.

What is it about our world that makes humanity act in ways that are obviously against its own interests? If we replace our current politicians with better politicians will things get better? Or is something more fundamental at work?

Marx wrote Capital to answer these questions. He argued that capital, the value capitalists accumulate by exploiting workers, cannot help but grow, whatever the cost to people or planet. This ecocidal process of expansion has created a world run by the need to make profit whatever the cost to human wellbeing or ecological health.

Capital is more a book about ecology than an economics book. It is a critique of the economists’ assumption that commodities, money and profit are as natural as clouds, hills and oceans. Economics takes the existence of class society, where a few people own the factories and fields that produce what we need and the rest of us have to work for them, as inevitable, natural and fair to all.

This is what Capital challenges. If ecology is the study of the fundamental relationships between humanity and the rest of nature then Capital is an ecology book.

Capital is divided into three volumes and 18 parts (some parts have been renamed in this book for clarity. Texts in quotation marks are quotes from the relevant part of Capital in its original English translation at the online Marxists Internet Archive).³

Marx started his scientific investigation into capital by gathering empirical evidence about capitalist society in order to understand its underlying laws. He did this by abstracting the fundamental categories of capitalism and seeing how they relate to each other (when a word or phrase is in bold it introduces a new category and links to Categories where the meanings of categories are listed).

The presentation of this investigation in Capital begins with the most basic category in capitalist society, the commodity.

Capitalism grew out of commodity production, which itself grew out of the exchange of products between early human communities. Communities producing more than they needed of some things exchanged this surplus with other communities for things they did not have but wanted.

For this exchange to happen there had to be a way of deciding how much of one product should be exchanged for an amount of another product. This is how commodities were born.

Marx shows how the contradiction within the commodity between being something that is useful and something that must be sold before it can be used implies the existence of other categories like money. As Capital progresses, new categories like capital, profit and interest are introduced until we arrive at a description of how capitalism appears to us in everyday life.

This is not a description of a static system. Capital must grow, and nothing can grow forever. By increasing what humans are capable of and connecting the world, capital creates the conditions for socialism or communism - Marx used the terms interchangeably - a classless society where production is run by associated producers for need, not profit. Capital shows the possibility and necessity of getting there.

Many people want to stop climate change, ecological destruction, exploitation and poverty by taming capital, making it work in the interests of the majority rather than a small minority. They argue for progressive governments that would improve the way capitalism works by increasing public investment, taxing the rich more, improving social welfare and taking an enlightened approach to climate change. If these people are right, and capitalism can solve our present crises by changing government policies, there is no need to abolish capital.

What Capital shows is that this is an impossible dream. Fighting for social justice and action on our climate emergency can win real victories, but as long as the capitalist relationship between workers and capitalists remains the fundamental relationship in a society those victories will be followed by greater defeats.

By showing how capital came into being and develops according to laws that cannot help but cause ecological destruction, inequality, debt and unemployment, Capital shows that until we take control of production away from capitalists, the crises caused by capital will cause disaster for billions.

Capitalism is not as universally accepted as you might think from consuming the capitalist-owned media. There are mass movements across the world challenging capitalist exploitation and destructiveness who see capital as the obstacle to a better world. A 2020 survey found that 56% of the world’s population believe capitalism is doing more harm than good.⁴

History, like ecology, has tipping points, when popular opposition to rulers can change societies fundamentally. As Ursula K. Le Guin has pointed out ‘We live in capitalism. Its powers seem inescapable. But then so did the divine rights of kings’. Capital shows that capital plays a transitory role in history between class society and a classless one, that another world is possible if we move beyond capital and that doing that is the task of our time in history.

1 Commodities and money

Any society where people produce things of use to each other produces and consumes wealth. In capitalist societies this wealth appears as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’ being produced, sold, bought and consumed. Our investigation therefore begins with an analysis of the commodity.

Every commodity has a dual nature. On the one hand, it has a use value because it is useful in satisfying a human want. This use value is the commodity’s natural form because the commodity would satisfy human wants in any society where products of human labour are produced and consumed. 

On the other hand, it also has an exchange value because, as a commodity, it must be exchanged before it can be consumed. Its exchange value is its social form because products of human labour only have an exchange value in societies based on commodity production, production for exchange. 

If we leave out of consideration commodities’ various use values, the property commodities have in common is that human labour has been spent producing them. This labour gives commodities their value. This value, how much a commodity is worth, can only be expressed in terms of the use value of another commodity, for instance a table being worth four chairs. The ratio in which a commodity exchanges with another commodity is its exchange value with that commodity. The exchange value of a commodity expresses its value, the amount of society’s labour it represents. 

This dual nature of commodities as something both useful and having value, reflects the dual nature of the labour that produces them. On the one hand labour is specific, useful, concrete labour that produces a specific use value. On the other hand it is the expenditure of human labour as such, abstract labour, a part of society’s total labour. 

The value of a commodity depends on the amount of abstract labour contained in it measured in time. This does not mean that the slower or less efficiently labour is carried out the more value is created. The value of a commodity is determined by the normal amount of labour time it takes to produce it in a particular society at a particular time, the socially necessary abstract labour time, rather than the amount of concrete labour it actually takes to produce. This is why the law of value states that a commodity’s value is determined by the socially necessary abstract labour time needed to produce it. 

Different concrete labours need different skills and abilities that take different amounts of labour to teach and learn. An increased intensity of labour creates more commodities and more