A Guide to Marx's 'Capital' Vols I-III (Key Issues in Modern Sociology) book cover

A Guide to Marx's 'Capital' Vols I-III (Key Issues in Modern Sociology)

Author(s): Kenneth Smith (Author)

Publisher: Anthem Press
Publication Date: 15 Nov. 2012
Language: English
Print length: 208 pages
ISBN-10: 0857285564
ISBN-13: 9780857285560

Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive guide to all three volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, with advice on further reading and points for further discussion. Recognizing the contemporary relevance of ‘Capital’ in the midst of the current financial crisis, Kenneth Smith has produced an essential guide to Marx’s ideas, particularly on the subject of the circulation of money-capital. This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of ‘Capital’ in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’, which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected would develop. While the guide can be read as a book in its own right, it also contains detailed references to Volumes I–III so that students, seminars and discussion groups can easily make connections between Smith’s explanations and the relevant parts of ‘Capital’.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Select Guide Rating

About the Author

The Smith Group is an amalgamation of Senior Credit managers and financial analysts, certified in the area of credit analysis and credit management and repair. The group, based in Houston Texas, has 20 plus years of international as well as domestic credit experience.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Guide to Marx's Capital Vols I-III

Name: A Guide to Marx's 'Capital' Vols I-III (Key Issues in Modern Sociology)
Author: Kenneth Smith (Author)
ISBN: 9780857285560

By Kenneth Smith

Wimbledon Publishing Company

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,
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 Profit 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 Profit 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 Reification 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,

CHAPTER 1

ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE SURPLUS VALUE INCAPITAL,VOL. I, CH. 10 AND 12

It is obviously possible to extend the length of the working day from 7 or 8 hours, to 10, 12, 14, 16 or even 18 hours, and this was done as a matter of course at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and is still done to a greater or lesser extent in other parts of the world today in the form of so-called 'overtime' and 'over-working'. However, this process is not without its limits. Firstly, of course, there are only so many hours in the day; although on rare occasions a labourer might well be made to work for longer than 24 hours at one time, by definition the working day itself cannot be extended beyond 24 hours per day. Secondly, labourers must eat and rest in order to renew themselves and reproduce their capacity to labour, and it is not only in the interest of the labourers themselves that they should do this; it is also in the interests of the capitalists who employ them. A continuous supply of labour is just as essential to the capitalist mode of production as it is to any other and a labourer who has rested is likely to make fewer, less costly, mistakes than a labourer who is exhausted. Of course, although capital needs a continuous supply of labour generally speaking, where the supply of labour is plentiful, it is possible to work individual labourers to death and replace them with fresh labour in the form of entirely new labourers. This happened to some extent in the development of European capitalism (Urry 1981, 124); and the pattern of reproducing what Marx calls labour-power (as opposed to reproducing the labourers themselves) is characteristic of slave labour whenever the cost of such labour is sufficiently cheap.

When labour is scarce, however, labourers themselves become a valuable commodity. A slave becomes a valuable investment to a slave-owner when the slave costs more to buy than the value of the labour that can be extracted from the slave by working him or her to death. A slave might well cost more than the price of a horse or a cow, being able to provide a greater return for the owner than any other similar investment could, and this is the reason why slaves are often better looked after than other so-called 'free' labourers (whose 'freedom' might well consist of nothing more than the fact that they are free to starve unless they are willing to work on terms dictated by the capitalist). Even free labourers, however, are of value to capitalism where they possess certain skills that cannot easily be reproduced or when these skills are in short supply. Here again, it is the scarcity of a particular type of labour – of certain skills – that compels capitalism to allow the labourer to reproduce him or herself not only as a labourer, but also as a person. All of these factors then served to reduce the length of the working day from 24 hours to, say, 18 (in which the labourer is allowed to eat or sleep for 6 hours per day), or to 17 or even 16 (where the labourer is not compelled to eat on the job), while other moral objections, e.g. to the overworking of women and children or to working adult male labourers to an unnaturally early death, also served to further reduce the length of the normal working day from 16 hours to 14, 12 or 10 hours per day. (For more on all of this see Marx's extensive discussion of the history of the English Factory Acts; 1974a, 222–86 [1976, 340–416].)

On the other hand, however, when competition between capitalists makes it necessary to obtain a normal rate of profit or degree of exploitation of labour-power, or when the greed of the capitalists for surplus profits over and above what can be produced in a normal working day makes it desirable from the point of the capitalist to extend the length of the working day, the capitalist has an interest in increasing the length of that part of the working day that the labour works for the capitalist over and above the hours the labourers work simply to reproduce their own wages. However, when the length of the working day is limited for some reason, e.g. by laws regulating the exploitation of labour, this becomes no longer possible. How then is the capitalist to extend his or her share of the working day without extending the actual length of the working day itself? Obviously this can only be done by shortening the number of hours that labourers spend simply in order to reproduce themselves and/or their families.

When the working day is 12 hours long and the labourers work to reproduce themselves for 6 hours and then work a further 6 hours for the capitalist, and when the length of the working day is unregulated in any way by law, the capitalist can extend the length of his or her share of the working day to 9 hours by simply extending the absolute length of the working day from 12 hours to 15. However, when the length of the working day is fixed at 12 hours, by law or for some other reason, the capitalists can only extend to 9 hours the period during which the labourer works for them by reducing to 3 hours the period during which the labourer works to reproduce him or herself. This can be done in one of the following three ways:

(i) The labourer's income...

View on Amazon

A Guide to Marx's 'Capital' Vols I-III (Key Issues in Modern Sociology)