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