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The Method of Capital and its Structure (Il Programma Comunista, No. 17, 1969) |
The method applied in Capital, which is reflected in the work’s seemingly bewildering structure, was defined by Marx in the most general terms in the 3rd paragraph of the Introduction (1857) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, entitled The Method of Political Economy (emphasis added):
«It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc (...) Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality».Noting that, beginning from the ‘living totality’, the classical economists have always ended up finding a ‘small number of determinant, abstract, general relations’, on the basis of which they constructed ‘economic systems that rose from the simple to the concrete’, Marx concludes:
«The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse (...) Along the first path [starting from the concrete and the complex], the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second [from the simple and abstract to the concrete], the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought».The movement from Books I and II – which deal respectively with ‘The Process of Production of Capital’ and ‘The Process of Circulation of Capital’ – to Book III, which deals with ‘The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole’, is precisely that movement from the simple and abstract to the concrete and complex, which Marx defines above as ‘the scientifically correct method’. But it is only because the ‘abstract determinations’ have been rationally established in the first part that the second, ‘the overall process’, no longer appears as an inextricable chaos (contrary to what occurs in political economy, which Marx undertook the critique for revolutionary ends), but as a ‘rich totality’.
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What, then, is the ‘abstract determination’ from which Marx sets out and which allows him to arrive at an intelligible representation of empirical, concrete reality? This determination – as he himself repeatedly insists – is capital in general:
«I abstract from the multitude of real capitals and from the competition between them, which is nothing but the relation of capital to itself as the capital of others, and which therefore cannot be elucidated without elucidating the very notion of capital in general» (Letter to Kugelmann). «The introduction of many capitals must not interfere with the investigation here. The relation of the many will, rather, be explained after what they all have in common, the quality of being capital, has been examined» (Grundrisse...). «The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it [is] the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself, whose abstract, reflected image [is] its concept, [is] the foundation of bourgeois society. The sharp formulation of the basic presuppositions of the relation must bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself» (Idem)without, however, we might add, ever managing to overcome the capitalist relation as described in Book I; a leap that can only be made by social revolution, whose condition and point of departure is the political revolution of the proletariat.
What distinguishes capital-in-general from all other forms of wealth is the fact that it is a value creator of surplus value. Marx’s point of departure therefore implies that he begins with value itself. This is why the first part of Book I is entitled: Commodities and Money.
He must then examine how simple value transforms itself into a value creator of surplus value: this is the subject of the second part entitled: ‘The Transformation of Money into Capital’ (which includes the chapters entitled: ‘Part III – The Production of Absolute Surplus Value’; ‘Part IV – The Production of Relative Surplus Value’; ‘Part V – The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus Value’; ‘Part VI – Wages’, respectively).
Finally, he must examine how the production of surplus value implies not only the simple reproduction of capital, but its expansion, and therefore of the entire capitalist relation: this is the subject of Part VII, entitled ‘The Accumulation of Capital’ (which includes Chapter XXIV, entitled ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’).
It is therefore perfectly accurate to say, as stated in Elements of Marxist Economics:
«The First Book covers the complete field of Marx’s doctrine on capitalism’ and is ‘the constructive framework’ of the whole, because ‘[it] carries out the economic study of the whole process, from the first exchange to barter on through the birth and accumulation of capital to the conclusion that capitalism will be succeeded by a social economy and not a mercantile one, traced out lapidarily in the penultimate chapter, as we shall see at the appropriate time. The data, the study and the laws of circulation [the subject of Book II] are already fully understood in this development».Contained in Book I, the ‘abstract determinations’ of the process of circulation will be taken up and developed in Book II, which contains: ‘Part I – The Metamorphoses of Capital and their Circuits’; ‘Part II – The Turnover of Capital’; ‘Part III – The Reproduction and Circulation of the Aggregate Social Capital’.
When we reach the end of Book II, the analysis of capital in general is complete. What will be the subject of Book III? Once again, Marx himself tells us in the introductory sentences of Chapter I of this book:
«In Book I we analysed the phenomena which constitute the process of capitalist production as such, as the immediate productive process, with no regard for any of the secondary effects of outside influences. But this immediate process of production does not exhaust the life span of capital. It is supplemented in the actual world by the process of circulation, which was the object of study in Book II. «In the latter, namely in Part III, which treated the process of circulation as a medium for the process of social reproduction, it developed that the capitalist process of production taken as a whole represents a synthesis of the processes of production and circulation. Considering what this third book treats, it cannot confine itself to general reflection relative to this synthesis. On the contrary, it must locate and describe the concrete forms which grow out of the movements of capital as a whole. In their actual movement capitals confront each other in such concrete shape, for which the form of capital in the immediate process of production, just as its form in the process of circulation, appear only as special instances. The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves».In this Book III, therefore, not only will we see Marxist categories – value, surplus value, constant capital, variable capital, rate of surplus value – reappear under the guise of bourgeois categories – profit, cost of production, rate of profit – as in the first three parts; but we will also see in the following three parts (culminating in the short Part VII – ‘Revenues’) the transient forms of existence analysed in Book II – money-capital, productive capital, commodity-capital – crystallise into particular forms of existence – bank capital, industrial capital, commercial capital –; we will see surplus value, already metamorphosed into profit, further divided into interest and profit of enterprise, and surplus profit converted into ground rent. Having reached this point in the ‘reproduction of the concrete by way of thought’, Marx indicates, in the primitive plan of Capital formulated in the last paragraph of ‘The Method of Political Economy’ quoted above, that it was necessary to address: ‘The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. The world market and crises’.
Determined by logical considerations, the overall structure of capital thus naturally finds historical justification, which Marx defines as follows:
«[In the analysis of capital in general], we are still concerned neither with a particular form of capital, nor with an individual capital as distinct from other individual capitals etc. We are present at the process of its becoming. This dialectical process is only the ideal expression of the real movement through which capital comes into being. The later relations are to be regarded as developments coming out of this germ» (Grundrisse...).That said, all previous study of Marx’s method irrevocably destroys the loophole of the impotent or self-interested detractors of Capital who, claiming that it ‘describes 19th-century competitive capitalism’, casually conclude that it is an ‘outdated’ work, incapable of explaining to us the monopoly capitalism of the 20th century! Even if we assume that none of the categories and empirical forms of capital treated in Book III are observable ‘on the surface’ of contemporary bourgeois society (which is obviously false), the scientific analysis of capital in general in Books I and II would still remain entirely valid. This is why the claim to analyse ‘the concrete capitalism of our days’ starting directly from it and abstracting from the results of Books I and II can only result, on the scientific level, in a miserable abortion and, on the socio-political level, in a regurgitation of the absurd demands and reforms that, in the past, were falsely presented as socialism (as in the case of two contemporary works, considered fundamental by the ‘leftists’: Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy and Unequal Exchange – a highly suggestive title – by Emmanuel).
All this methodological introduction should therefore not be considered as a superfluous hors d’oeuvre, much less a mere ornament: intended to guide comrades who are tackling the study of Marx’s fundamental work in the apparent labyrinth of its composition ‘in successive spirals’, it also justifies the way in which the preface to the Elements of Marxist Economics defined the task that lies ahead for us, modest pupils of the masters of scientific socialism: to draw, like them, verification, control of the general theory, and proof of its effectiveness from the study of the particular current phenomena of capitalist development, because, as a scientific method, the method of Capital is also necessarily an experimental method.
Thus framed, also as a useful guide for comrades, the problem of ‘method’, the report delved into a brilliant illustration of the links between Books I and III and the fundamental laws formulated therein, the full text of which will appear in the international theoretical journal ‘Programme Communiste’.