Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capital

Abstract

Marx’s goal in Volume Two of Capital is to show that what circulates in a capitalist economy is capital and to flesh out the consequences. This is a taller order than it might seem, just because the pitfalls in getting to know capital are so many. A natural way of looking at the production and distribution of wealth in a capitalist society is to break it down into a generalized circulation of wealth whose basic forms are money and commodities, buying and selling, accompanying a process of production that, without any determining social form, simply transforms material inputs to create new wealth. This pictures a capitalist economy as a commercial and industrial one. Oddly the picture excludes capital itself, for capital is not simply commodities, money or the use-values needed for production (raw materials, labor, instruments of production). It does not belong to the nature of any of those to produce surplus value (profits, rents, interest), yet bearing surplus value is what defines capital.¹