Capital as Automatic Subject

 

By M.Gouldhawke, revised June 2, 2023 (originally published March 26, 2022)

Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi was a Swiss historian and political economist who influenced the later German communist thinker Karl Marx.

In particular, Sismondi’s concept of capital, put forward in his 1819 book, New Principles of Political Economy, was a point of reference for Marx’s 1867 book, Capital Volume 1.

In New Principles, Sismondi explained that “The formation of society and the introduction of exchange has allowed the almost indefinite multiplication of this grain, this fruitful portion of accumulated wealth, and it is this that we have named capital.”

“The solitary man could only labour together with land and animals,” Sismondi wrote, “but in society, the rich man could make the poor man labour.”

As Sismondi further detailed, “The wheat that he [the capitalist farmer] had harvested beyond what he needed to consume for his own labour, and beyond what he needed to sow in order to maintain its exploitation at the same level, was wealth that he could give out, dissipate, consume in idleness, without becoming poorer: it was revenue; but once he had employed it to feed productive workers; once he had exchanged it against labour, or against the future fruits of the labour of his plowmen, his weavers, and his miners, it was a permanent, multiplying value, which no longer perished; it was capital.” 

“However,” Sismondi clarified, “this value detached from that of the product which had created it, remaining like a metaphysical and insubstantial quantity, always in the possession of the same [capitalist] farmer, for whom it only took on different forms.”

All of the changes in this value’s form across multiple exchanges, from wheat to wages, to the products of labour, to money, and then to wheat and wages once again, did not alter capital as a process, did not remove it from the hands of the capitalist who had first accumulated it. For Sismondi, capital was a circular process within a class-relation.¹

Eventually, within the society-wide interaction between consumption and production, the point is reached where, according to Sismondi, “the circle can expand and change into a spiral.”²

This geometrical description of exponential capitalist accumulation influenced Marx, as he referenced it in both his Grundrisse notebooks and his later published work, Capital Volume 1.³

In a footnote in Volume 1, Marx also referenced and partially quoted Sismondi’s definition of capital as permanently multiplying value.

In the first edition of Capital, published in German in 1867, Marx did not usually translate his footnote reference quotes from their original languages. With Sismondi’s description of capital, however, Marx made an exception, translating the French into German. In doing so, he even added the term ‘self-multiplying’. 

Marx transformed Sismondi’s partial sentence, “it was a permanent, multiplying value, which no longer perished; it was capital”, into “Capital… permanent self-multiplying [sich vervielfältigender] value.” This is also how it still appears in the current English and German editions of Capital, despite being a misquote.⁴

Marx also didn’t properly indicate the extent to which he was using only a partial (mis)quotation of the last part of Sismondi’s run-on sentence, which had begun with mention of the capitalist employer and his employees, and the class relation between them. Marx was intentionally hiding and modifying Sismondi’s mention of class from the German readers of Capital. But why?

Personification

Throughout Capital, Marx typically introduces social forms first and people afterwards. First, the commodity and money, then their possessors. First, capital, then the capitalist. Initially, the contradictions of capital as a form, then workers, the possessors of labour-power. First, the capital-relation, the separation of proletarians from the means of (re)production, then the State, which tries to turn proletarians into workers, and without which capital ultimately lacks the power to compel labour. ⁵

At each stage of the presentation, social forms and the things that represent them are first presented as if they had a life of their own and a social life with each other, independently from people. Then it’s revealed that it is actually us as people who give life to these forms through our actions, and that in doing so, proletarians are dominated by capital through the capitalist class as a whole, as well as by each particular capitalist.⁶

Social forms are denaturalized through the very structure of Marx’s presentation. Wealth need not take the form of commodities and capital, and we need not be workers, dominated by capitalists. The capitalist system is transitory, not natural or pre-ordained.⁷

Under capitalism, persons exist for one another merely as commodity possessors, as personifications of economic relations.⁸

With generalized commodity production and exchange, there is a “personification of things and an objectification of persons.”⁹

The capitalist is introduced by Marx as the “conscious bearer” of the movement of capital, as a possessor of money who purchases in order to sell, not simply to hoard.¹⁰

Marx made certain choices in his method of presentation, for example, to start from the commodity rather than value, and to start with social forms rather than persons. In doing so, he was breaking from and critiquing the political economy of his time.¹¹

Perpetual Motion

Marx introduces his ‘General Formula for Capital’ (chapter four in English, French, and the second to fourth German editions) as the circuit of money to commodity to more money.

M—C—M’ being “the form in which it [capital] appears directly in the sphere of circulation,” but not yet production.

Money, “this ultimate product of commodity circulation,” wrote Marx, is also “the first form of appearance of capital.”¹²

Money is transformed into commodities, then commodities are turned back into money. Buying in order to sell. Capital is value which valorizes itself, surplus-value being the new value which capital adds to itself. 

As Marx puts it in the first French edition of Capital, “It goes without saying that the circulation M—C—M would be a bizarre procedure, if one wished by such a detour to exchange equivalent sums of money.”¹³

The purpose of the process must be to increase the quantity of value, since the quality of the starting and end points is the same, both points being money. If one already has a hundred dollars and only wants a hundred, it’s easier to simply hold onto it than throw it back onto the market.

Marx then introduces the capitalist as the personification of this process, as the person whose subjective aim is the valorization of value. The capitalist as the conscious representative of capital.

What’s crucial to note here, with regard to Marx’s misquoting of Sismondi, is that workers, owners of their own peculiar commodity labour-power, had yet to be fully introduced, and would not be formally presented until the end of chapter six, two chapters later (or two sub-chapters later in German editions). Marx had yet to take us from the surface sphere of circulation into the hidden abode of production.¹⁴

“The ceaseless augmentation of value,” explained Marx, “which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation.”

Marx attached to this sentence a footnote quoting the Italian political economist Ferdinando Galiani, who had written that “Things possess an infinite quality when moving in a circle which they lack when advancing in a straight line.”¹⁵

In another footnote, Marx quotes Aristotle on ‘chrematistics’, where riches are not a means to an end, but an end in itself, the aim being “absolute wealth”, an infinite increase in money.¹⁶

Abstraction

Workers had already been briefly mentioned even in the first chapter of Capital with regard to their average skill level and the systematic division of labour within each factory, which Marx pointed out was not brought about by the workers themselves exchanging products with each other.¹⁷

Marx also referred to wages in his footnotes to the first chapter, where he explained that they were not yet the matter at hand.¹⁸

To abstract away from something, as Marx did with class divisions in the early part of his book, does not mean to deny their existence, or to construct a fanciful castle in the sky. In fact, the opposite is implied. In order to abstract away from something, social form or otherwise, it must first exist, which is also to say it must be presupposed, only later to be explicitly included as something that was there all along. 

Once introduced, categories such as the wage-labourer, the capitalist, capital, price and money can be read backwards into the earlier chapters and earlier parts of each chapter, where they were in fact always part of the analysis from the very beginning. Marx starts from a capitalist society with his very first line. He does not construct an imaginary simple commodity society where use-values are directly bartered against each other in the absence of money or workers.¹⁹

Subjectivity

Coming back to the subject of Marx’s introduction of capital as a social form, we see that In the first German edition of Capital Volume 1, Marx wrote that value “constantly passes from one form into the other without losing itself in this movement, and thus transforms itself into an automatic, self-processing subject.” [sich selbst prozessirendes Subjekt] 

In the second German edition, the term “self-processing” is then removed by Marx, leaving only the phrase “automatic subject”.²⁰

In the first French edition of Capital Volume 1, translated by Joseph Roy, but overseen and edited by Marx himself, the sentences in chapter four are somewhat modified and the word “subject” is removed entirely. ²¹

Instead it’s written that capital, as a process, presents value as an “automatic substance, endowed with a life of its own, which, while unceasingly exchanging its forms, also changes in size, and spontaneously, as a mother value, produces a new sprout, a surplus-value, and finally increases by its own virtue.”²²

Marx wasn’t bold enough to add the word ‘self’ to his Sismondi quote about permanently multiplying value in its original language, where he’d more easily get caught, so he didn’t bother trying. Which makes his added flourish in the original German seem all the more redundant.

In all the various editions of Volume 1, Marx describes value, in its form as capital, as having “acquired the occult ability to add value to itself,” to bring forth offspring, or at least lay “golden eggs.”

In German and English (but not French), value is described as the overarching (übergreifende) or “dominant subject” of the process of capital, in which value changes forms between money and commodity, preserves and expands itself, and requires, above all, an independent form, by which its identity with itself can be stated. 

That form is money. First like Galiani’s circle and then like Sismondi’s permanently multiplying spiral of value, money is both the “starting-point and the conclusion of every valorization process.”²³

Yet, capital as a form and process, has internal contradictions. Buying in order to sell, by itself, is not a sufficient means to increase value, since “The capitalist class of a given country, taken as a whole,cannot defraud itself.”²⁴

Merchants’ capital and interest-bearing capital are derivative forms of the primary form of capital, industrial capital, a form where something additional must take place, beyond just buying and selling, beyond just the circulation of money and commodities. The exchange of equivalents (or non-equivalent sums), on its own, is not a means to increase value, because eventually, as much would be lost as had been gained.²⁵

“The commodity-owner,” explains Marx, “can create value by his labour, but he cannot create values which can valorize themselves.” 

The money-owner (the capitalist) must be able to find a commodity which has the special use-value of creating new value. This commodity is labour-power, the capacity for labour, and the industrial capitalist is lucky enough to find it on the market (thanks to the State, properly introduced much later in the book). The consumption of labour-power’s use-value is the production process.²⁶

Finally we catch up with Sismondi’s capitalist farmer, who, once he somehow found a society to live in, was able to make his employees work for the benefit of his capital.

For Sismondi, capitalists and workers were part of his initial description of capital. For Marx, the human content of the capital form was not initially presented, but had still been hiding there all along. 

Marx introduced first the commodity form, then its possessors. Next the capital form, then the capitalists, and then the workers. Marx turned Sismondi’s formulation around and added his own twist. In doing so, he allowed us to see how the most general form (the commodity) splits and fuses into other forms, how the form itself conceals its own content, how human beings act as personifications of social relations, and how we mistakenly ascribe agency to the forms that we ourselves create and enact in daily life. ²⁷

However, it is not just our individual subjective ascription of agency to social forms that gives them their effectual power, but also the overall social and material structure of capitalist society, through human action, unified in separation and mediated through things as well as through human thought. 

Capitalism follows an inverted course from the one described in the Bible. In the beginning there is the deed, and only later the word. Commodity possessors don’t need to know anything about value or form fetishism in order to live and act on the surface realm of prices and in the inner realms of production and reproduction.²⁸

Class Struggle

Is capital really a subject, in the sense of being an agent that can decide to act in certain ways upon others, these others being both capitalists and workers? If capital is automatic, in the sense of only having one possible aim, generating surplus-value, what sense is there in ascribing agency to it? 

Maybe Marx was instead being ironic, not literal, in referring to capital as a subject, as a goose laying golden eggs. Perhaps he was hinting at the objective fetish character of capital and the subjective fetishism that attaches to it, something he would explicitly mention in later chapters (and volumes) dealing with production.

Scholar Søren Mau, in his recent book Mute Compulsion, writes that he doesn’t find attempts by other scholars to conceptualise capital as a subject convincing, “for several reasons.”

These reasons being, firstly because “capital is bound to do certain things in a way that a subject – at least in the Hegelian sense – is not,” and secondly, because of the “inextricable tie between capital and its underlying social relations and practices.”

As Mau reminds us, “capital can never free itself from the subjective praxis that undergirds it.”²⁹

For Marx, both capitalists and workers act as personifications of social relations (capital in general in the case of capitalists, and the commodity labour-power exchanged against variable capital in the case of workers). 

Capital can only do one thing (increase its value), but at the same time, it can’t do anything at all without human agents, just like commodities can’t take themselves to market.

Both capitalists and workers make their daily decisions to act as capital and labour-power, rather than go broke and starve. Unlike capital as a process of surplus-value generation, capitalists and workers could do something different. They just typically make the choice that seems most beneficial to them under their current circumstances, the choice to act in accordance with capital. 

Sometimes workers do choose differently, and not just to go gentle into that good night. Sometimes they consciously withdraw their labour efficiency, also known as the act of sabotage, which includes going on strike and other social actions, not just individual acts of destruction. Sometimes the unemployed (as well as the employed) seize the food, clothing and shelter they need, directly, rather than going through the mediation of the capitalist middle-man, his jobs and wages.³⁰

“Between equal rights, force decides,” as Marx puts it. In other words, capitalist production involves class struggle, even if the surface realm of circulation takes the form of a legal exchange between equals, in a limited sense.³¹

“For ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies,” explains Marx, “the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital.”³²

The State

Karl Held and Audrey Hill in 1993 further explained this aspect of the State, writing that “As the ideal collective capitalist the state provides the real capitalists, the owners of the means of production, with those necessary conditions for competition which are not reproduced in competition.”

“As a social state with social services, it preserves the class of competitors with no property [workers/proletarians], so that it can continue being useful as a means for private property.” Held and Hill argued.³³

In saying so, they were building in part on the ideas of Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels.

Marx described the English Parliament as a “permanent trade union of the capitalists against the workers.”

Engels called the State, “the ideal personification of the total national capital.”³⁴

The collective capitalist in the form of the State can choose to make certain sacrifices (for good or bad) in order to preserve capital as a whole, under compulsion from the revolt of proletarians or other factors, such as competition between capitalists.

Unlike capital itself, which can only do one thing (compel each capitalist to pursue surplus-value in competition with his fellow capitalists), individual capitalists can make certain choices, within the limits of competition. They can try to outmaneuver their competitors by increasing efficiency and lowering prices, and even by competing over employees on the labour market.

Capital for Marx was not a static thing, but an ongoing process, “a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.”³⁵

Given competition, and the freedom of consumers (including capitalists) to purchase from one capitalist and not another, the success of the individual capitalist is never guaranteed, and his ruin is always on the horizon. Capital can continue without any particular capitalist, but it’s nothing without many capitalists actively personifying capital in their actions, and the State regulating competition.

Competition

Sismondi’s concept of competition had been an early influence on Marx too, as shown in Marx’s critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1847 book, The Poverty of Philosophy.

After using a quote from Sismondi’s book, Etudes Vol.II, Marx had written that “It is important to emphasize the point that what determines value is not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could possibly be produced in, and the minimum is ascertained by competition.”³⁶

This was a point Marx would return to in Capital Volume 1, where he wrote that “the value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually objectified in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary to produce it.”³⁷

In other words, the magnitude of value of any given commodity is not a quantity of labour embodied inside that item by an individual worker or by a group of workers in a single enterprise, but is rather a social relation between all commodity producers, who are in competition with each other to reproduce more copies of each type of commodity. Each producer is subjected to the prices of the market and their commodities only have value by virtue of belonging to a commodity type that their competitors are also producing.

The State works to ensure that such competition runs relatively smoothly, arbitrating legal disputes between capitalists, providing essential infrastructure, regulating its use, and protecting private property from proletarians with police.

Fetishism

Capital, as a social form, has a fetish character, which itself takes two forms, money creating more money, and the power of cooperative labour socially objectified as the power of capital.³⁸

These inversions are real, not mere illusions. Capital, money and the commodity have a socially objective fetish character, which in turn necessarily reproduces fetishism, a form of consciousness that takes what is only social and particular as something natural and eternal.

Workers really can’t combine their creative capacities unless they’re employed by capital.

On the other hand, an investor or industrial capitalist really can use money to make more money. But what doesn’t immediately appear on the surface of circulation is that the source of surplus-value is in production (including the consumption of labour-power used in services labour, when that labour-power is exchanged against variable capital.)

As Marx explained in Volume 3, “Capital is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society, the products and conditions of activity of labour-power, which are rendered autonomous vis-a-vis this living labour-power and are personified in capital through this antithesis.”

“It is not only the workers’ products which are transformed into independent powers, the products as masters and buyers of their producers,” wrote Marx, “but the social powers and interconnecting form of this labour also confront them as properties of their product.”³⁹

In a speech made in English, later made into the pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit, Marx used two analogies to explain the inversion of the fetish character of capitalist social forms.

Firstly, the Sun appears to move around the Earth, despite the opposite actually being the case (and the rotation of the Earth being the immediate cause, not its revolution around the sun). Secondly, water appears as the opposite of flame, since it can douse a fire, despite water being composed of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen, that in themselves are either flammable or a necessary component of fire.⁴⁰

These appearances are obviously real, not illusions imposed on us by anyone, but at the same time they can be understood as possibly leading to an inverted consciousness of their inner content.

It really does take money to make money, just as it really takes something more than money to make money. Capital really does have power, really does employ workers, rather than the workers simply employing the means of production themselves. The form doesn’t exist without its content any more than the content can exist without any form.

However, there is nothing natural or permanent about capitalist relations, because they’re social. Things weren’t always this way and won’t necessarily continue this way infinitely into the future. With capitalism’s current spiral of ecological destruction, its eternity seems less secure than ever. The only problem is that capital could take us down with it.⁴¹

Reproduction

The capitalist process of production doesn’t just produce commodities and surplus-value, but also “reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer,” as Marx reminds us toward the end of Volume 1.⁴²

Capitalism isn’t just a system of production but also reproduction.

The early French economists, the Physiocrats, in analyzing the reproduction of the economic system, were able to discover before Sismondi that “the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people,” as Marx observed.

However, Marx argued that the Physiocrats were grasping at surplus-value without first having understood value, without having been able to fully uncover surplus-value’s “secret” or “mystery.”⁴³

This mystery was not in the existence of classes, but in the particular generality of the content of value, and in why this content, labour, assumes a unique social form under capitalism.

The self-valorization of capital is a process based in the class-relation, and in reproducing that relation. It does not abstract away from classes in reality, the way we might do so in thought.⁴⁴

Our struggle against capital is not just to interpret or reproduce the world but to change it. Our fight is not to seize the ready-made machinery of the capitalist economy (or the State) and try to wield it for our own purposes, but to qualitatively change our social relations, before it’s too late.⁴⁵

Automation

The fetish character of capital, money and the commodity is not just a matter of all people being equally subject to the same social force, even if we all share a planet. Competition and class do not negate each other, but play off each other.

Marx argued that “in the society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other…”⁴⁶

Marx’s concept of capital as an automatic subject is also not solely derived from his play on Sismondi’s words. 

In the 1763 Physiocrat text Rural Philosophy, we find the phrase that “The whole magic of well-ordered society is that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself.”⁴⁷

Other French thinkers who followed after the Physiocrats and Sismondi in analyzing capital were quoted by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (which were unpublished during his lifetime). I’ve expanded some of those quotes below to provide further context.

Constantin Pecqueur in 1842 had written that “Thanks to this substitution [the rich substituting the labour of others for their own], the material element, which can do nothing to create wealth without the other element, labour, receives the magic property of being fertile for them [the rich] as if they themselves had contributed this indispensable element.”⁴⁸

Eugène Buret in 1840, in a more class-conciliatory tone, had written that “When we study the most active causes of poverty, we recognize that they are almost all independent of the will of individuals, and that we have no right to accuse anyone of their disastrous action.”

He claimed that these causes of poverty, “are, if you like, everyone’s fault, since they are due to institutions, to social habits that today’s men did not create, and that they maintain rather out of ignorance and tradition than out of ill will.”

“The master who buys the labour of the labourer at a price so low that it hardly suffices for the most pressing needs, is responsible neither for the insufficiency of the wages, nor for the too lengthy duration of the labour, and himself undergoes the law he imposes, only he feels it less severely than the poor wage-earner,” wrote Buret.

“In a word,” Buret argued, “it is not so much from men that misery comes, as from the power of things…”⁴⁹

In saying so, Buret sounded more like a value-form theorist of today than a political economist of almost two centuries ago. That is to say, he would sound like that if current value-form theorists tended to talk about poverty as a social form, alongside the economic forms they more typically discuss.

But this would also require talking about class, not just an amorphous ‘people’ facing a problem of textual interpretation. A certain class of people, as proletarians (not just workers), caught between a Locke and a hard place, which is to say, between property and capital.⁵⁰

Beyond just those kinds of theorists, “Contrary to what many believe, class is not a marxist concept,” as the anarchist Alfredo Maria Bonanno pointed out back in 1988.

“While we reject the marxist claims as to the historic role of the industrial working class above all the other exploited,” Bonanno argued, “it is obvious that society is still divided into opposing classes.” ⁵¹

Not only is class still an objective factor, but also the general, society-wide power of capital still operates through individual persons.

Capital as a perpetual process, and capitalists and workers acting as personifications of social relations, does not negate the subjective element, or the personal responsibility for capitalist exploitation, any more than systemic racism negates the subjectivity and personal responsibility of racism at the person-to-person level. 

As the Métis marxist Howard Adams explained, “Prejudice may be both subjective and objective at the same time.”⁵²

The concrete particular, whether in relation to class or racism, is one of (if not the only) painful modes of expression of the abstract whole. Individual capitalists and racists may be compelled to make certain choices, but the choice remains theirs, and they still possess a share of the responsibility for their own actions.

Capital may not be a subject, though it could be automatic in a certain sense. But as Buret at least admitted, it just kind of feels different depending on how you’re placed under the system, and not just in your head but in your gut.⁵³

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Notes:

1. Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, Nouveaux Principes D’Economie Politique (originally 1819 / 1827 edition), pg. 88-89, “La formation de la société, et l’introduction des échanges, permit de multiplier presque indéfiniment cette semence, cette portion fructifiante de la richesse accumulée, et c’est elle qu’on a nommée le capital. Le solitaire ne pouvait faire travailler de concert avec lui que la terre et les animaux; mais dans la société l’homme riche put faire travailler l’homme pauvre. […] Le blé qu’il avait récolté par delà celui qu’il devait manger pendant son propre travail, et par delà celui qu’il devait semer pour maintenir son exploitation au même point, était une richesse qu’il pouvait donner, dissiper, consommer dans l’oisiveté, sans en devenir plus pauvre: c’était un revenu; mais une fois qu’il l’avait employé à nourrir des ouvriers productifs; une fois qu’il l’avait échangé contre le travail, ou contre les fruits à venir du travail de ses laboureurs, de ses tisserands, de ses mineurs, c’était une valeur permanente, multipliante, et qui ne périssait plus; c’était un capital. Or, cette valeur se détachait de celle de la denrée qui l’avait créée; elle demeurait comme une quantité métaphysique et insubstantielle, toujours dans la possession de ce même cultivateur, pour qui elle revêtait seulement des formes différentes.”

2. Sismondi, Nouveaux Principes D’Economie Politique (1819/1827), pg. 119-120, “C’est ainsi que la dépense nationale, limitée par le revenu, doit absorber, dans le fonds de consommation, la totalité de la production. La consommation absolue détermine une reproduction égale ou supérieure. C’est dans ce point que le cercle peut s’étendre et se changer en spirale: l’année passée avait produit et consommé comme dix; on peut se flatter que l’année prochaine, en produisant comme onze, consommera aussi comme onze.”

3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books (1973/93), pg.266, 620, 746, “Exchange value posited as the unity of commodity and money is capital, and this positing itself appears as the circulation of capital. (Which is, however, a spiral, an expanding curve, not a simple circle.)”; Marx, Capital Volume 1, Penguin Books (1976/90), pg.727, 780, “Looked at concretely, accumulation can be resolved into the production of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The cycle of simple reproduction alters its form and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral.”

4. Marx, Das Kapital (1867), pg.117; Marx, Capital Vol.1 (1976/90), pg.256; Marx, Das Kapital (1890), http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me23/me23_161.htm ; The original English translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling from 1887 instead uses a proper partial quotation from the original French, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm ; Marx, Grundrisse, pg.261, “…’self-multiplying’ does not belong here as yet…”

5. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.874

6. Marx, Capital Vol.3, Penguin Books (1981/91), pg.298-299; Fred Moseley (editor), Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, pg.306

7. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.93, “They do show that, within the ruling classes themselves, the foreboding is emerging that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.”

8. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.178-179

9. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.209

10. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.254

11. Karl Marx, Introduction of 1857, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm

12. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.247, 251, 257;  Søren Mau, The Transition to Capital in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (2018), Historical Materialism, 26:1

13. Karl Marx, Le Capital (1872), “Il va sans dire que la circulation A—M—A serait un procédé bizarre, si l’on voulait par un semblable détour échanger des sommes d’argent équivalentes, 100 l. st., par exemple, contre 100 l. st.”, https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Capital/Livre_I/Section_2

14. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.132, 135, 279; Once Marx got to his chapters on production, he included in his footnotes another quote from Sismondi’s New Principles, “But, in the social order, wealth has acquired the power of reproducing itself through the labour of others.” But in his initial introduction of capital in chapter 4, there were not yet any formally introduced “others” (until the introduction of the sale and purchase of labour-power in chapter 6), Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.712; Søren Mau, The Transition to Capital in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (2018), Historical Materialism, 26:1

15. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.255; Quoted by Marx in Italian in the German 1867 first edition and 1872 second edition of Capital as “Questo infinito che le cose non hanno in progresso, hanno in giro.”, a partial quote from a sentence in Ferdinando Galiani’s book, Della Moneta (1751)

16. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.253-254

17. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.129-130, 132

18. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.135

19. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion (2023), Verso Books, pg.212-213; EndNotes, The Moving Contradiction: The Systematic Dialectic of Capital as a Dialectic of Class Struggle’, EndNotes 2: Misery and the Value Form (2010), pg.116, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-moving-contradiction ; Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.125

20. Marx, Das Kapital (1867), Zweites Kapitel, “Er geht beständig aus der einen Form in die andre über, ohne sich in dieser Bewegung zu verlieren und verwandelt sich so in ein automatisches, in sich selbst prozessirendes Subjekt.”, https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/marx_kapital01_1867/?p=134 ; Marx, Das Kapital, zweite Auflage (1872), vierte Auflage (1890), “Er geht beständig aus der einen Form in die andre über, ohne sich in dieser Bewegung zu verlieren, und verwandelt sich so in ein automatisches Subjekt.”, http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me23/me23_161.htm 

21. Peter Hudis, The Death of the Death of the Subject (2004), Historical Materialism, 12:3; Marx, Le Capital, (1872), https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Capital/Livre_I/Section_2

22. Marx, Le Capital, (1872), “Si l’on s’arrête soit à l’une soit à l’autre de ces formes, dans lesquelles elle se manifeste tour à tour, on arrive aux deux définitions: le capital est argent, le capital est marchandise mais, en fait, la valeur se présente ici comme une substance automatique, douée d’une vie propre, qui, tout en échangeant ses formes sans cesse, change aussi de grandeur, et, spontanément, en tant que valeur mère, produit une pousse nouvelle, une plus-value, et finalement s’accroît par sa propre vertu.”, https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Capital/Livre_I/Section_2

23. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.255

24. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.266

25. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.263, 266

26. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.268-270, 873-940

27. Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life (1969), https://libcom.org/article/reproduction-daily-life-fredy-perlman

28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,  The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), “These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.”;

Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1973/93), pg.403, “The three processes of which capital forms the unity are external; they are separate in time and space. As such, the transition from one into the other, i.e. their unity as regards the individual capitalists, is accidental. Despite their inner unity, they exist independently alongside one another, each as the presupposition of the other.”;

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861-63), “Separation appears as the normal relation in this society. Where therefore it does not in fact apply, it is presumed and, as has just been shown, so far correctly; for (as distinct for example from conditions in Ancient Rome or Norway or in the north-west of the United States) in this society unity appears as accidental, separation as normal; and consequently separation is maintained as the relation even when one person unites the separate functions.”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/add1.htm ;

Evald Ilyenkov, Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital (1960), “Unity thus conceived is realised not through similarity of phenomena to each other but, on the contrary, through their difference and opposition.”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1c.htm ;

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), “The phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world, of a global social praxis that has split up into reality on the one hand and image on the other.”, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/tsots01.html ;

John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (1978), “Poulantzas is unable to develop a theory of the unity-in-separation of politics and economics precisely because he rejects the task of historical materialist theory to grasp as a totality the capitalist development which provides the basis for that unity.”;

John 1:1

29. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion (2023), pg.39-44

30.  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage (1916), Industrial Workers of the World Publishing Bureau, https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Flynn/Sabotage/ ; Poor People’s Movements, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1977); M.Gouldhawke, The Great Depression & Radical History in Vancouver (2002), https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2020/04/24/the-great-depression-radical-history-in-vancouver-2002/ ; M.Gouldhawke, Squatting in Vancouver – A Brief Overview (2002), https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2019/12/07/squatting-in-vancouver-a-brief-overview/ ; Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night (1951), https://www.openculture.com/2018/09/hear-dylan-thomas-recite-classic-poem-not-go-gentle-good-night.html

31. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.344

32. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.416 ; Curiously, Mau abstracts away from workers having compelled the State to pass such laws, mentioning only the State and capital (- M.Gouldhawke); Mau, Mute Compulsion (2023), pg.146, 253-254; M.Gouldhawke, Doctrine of the Corpse Betrayed by its Spirit (2022), https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2022/10/22/doctrine-of-the-corpse-betrayed-by-its-spirit/

33. Karl Held and Audrey Hill, The Democratic State: Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty (1993), https://en.gegenstandpunkt.com/books/chapter-5-ideal-collective-capitalist-social-state

34. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.903, “It is evident that only against its will, and under the pressure of the masses, did the English Parliament give up the laws against strikes and trade unions, after it had itself, with shameless egoism, held the position of a permanent trade union of the capitalists against the workers throughout five centuries.”; Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877), “The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm

35. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.932

36. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01b.htm

37. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.676-677

38. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.449-453

39. Marx, Capital Vol.3, 1981, pg. 953-954; Moseley (editor), Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, pg.306

40. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (1865); Marx, in this speech, made the minor technical mistake of describing hydrogen and oxygen as “two highly inflammable gases,” although the intended meaning still comes across. – M. Gouldhawke

41. M.Gouldhawke, Head Hits Concrete (2021), https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/head-hits-concrete/

42. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.724

43. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.672

44. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.173-175

45. Ernest Cœurderoy, Hurrah !!! ou la Révolution par les Cosaques (published 1854), “The Sword will cut the Gordian knot of the European situation; the Word and the Pen have only described it!”, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Hurrah_!!!/Chapitre_IV ; Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach (published 1888, written 1845), “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm ; Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm

46. Marx, Capital Vol.1, pg.477

47. Philosophe Rurale… (1763), pg.50, Anonymously attributed, but seemingly written jointly by François Quesnay and his disciple Victor de Riqueti marquis de Mirabeau, also quoted by Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy (1962)

48. Constantin Pecqueur, Théorie nouvelle d’économie sociale et politique, ou Études sur l’organisation des sociétés (1842), pg.412, partially quoted in Karl Marx, Early Writings (1964), McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, pg.97

49. Eugène Buret, De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (1840), pg.82, partially quoted by Marx in Early Writings (1964), pg.99

50. Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky (1877)   https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm ; M.Gouldhawke, From Red River to Unist’ot’en (2019), https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2019/01/24/red-river-to/

51. Alfredo Maria Bonanno, A Question of Class, first published in English in Insurrection, Issue Five, 1988, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-a-question-of-class

52. Howard Adams, chapter in the book, Racial Oppression in Canada (1988)

53. M.Gouldhawke, Room For Critique (2022), https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2022/02/20/room-for-critique/ , Doctrine of the Corpse Betrayed by its Spirit (2022), https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2022/10/22/doctrine-of-the-corpse-betrayed-by-its-spirit/

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