Reading Marx’s Grundrisse – 7

alienated capital and alienated labour.
sherlochome and marriaty. last story get killed each other.
end of one will the end of the other.
we cannot get ride of capital without getting ride of alienated labour. vice versa.
[5:00]
How nature of capital works.
Circulation process.
Circulation of money. Money circulated in relation to commodity exchange. Inverse movement. Money does not disappear. It remains and continues to circulate in permanent basis.
Money capital circulation.
Endless accumulation of capital. Speed of circulation.
Capital is a process which is a process of money in motion and value in motion.
p517. alien capital
[10:00]
He talking on that page about production and how production integrate with circulation in general.
He asks the question how long capital remain in the sphere of production process depends on technological conditions.
Technological change affect in which the speed of production process.
p.518.
Velocity of turnover. Big argument in vol2. Turnover time.
[15:00]
Different capital have different turn overtime. Agriculture p519. It is in annual turnover time. If you making ice cream or something like that, its turnover time is much shorter.
You put seed in ground, then nothing happening. Sometime pesticides or fertilizer applied. Then nothing happening. Then last harvest happens.
So in any production there are moments at which nothing is happening. nothing is happening means you are loosing value. So introduced the term devaluation.
2. the duration of circulation process. Putting money in cultivation and the time when you get back your money. Different termerality in circulation process.
Realization of value produced in marker. How much time it will take in the marketing.
[20:00]
Value cannot be created from circulation per say. – marx general argument. Activities of merchant capitalist, retailers will not create value. Their activities are deductions in value.
But for transportation is different. Certain amount value will be created during the process of circulation produce material change of location. That adds value.
Transport, communication and movement of space are very different now.
Change of location creates value.
Transport involves labour. Labour power. They produce more change in location. Value should be greater after that. Surplus value can be extracted from Transport, communication industries.
[25:00]
How many innovations are really about revolutionizing the productive forces which are actually in able to create change of location. Innovation in transport and communication sectors are crucially important.
P524. [p449]
Cost of circulation.
Necessary cost of circulation.
“Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier.”
“creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time ”
Annihilation of space by time
DH found that this is not correct translation. Correct translation is Annihilation of space through time.
It is through time, because time is a measure of value. Big question is not space itself, but how fast you can move in space.
[30:00]
How long you take to get from a to b. so number of miles dont matter. How many minutes or hours to take you to converse that miles matters.
Annihilation of space through time, means the measure of space is how long you take to converse? that space.
How long to transverse that many revolutions in tech are really all about.
Lot of innovation in the history of capital is about reducing space in less and less time movement.
Spacial friction is a barrier. Capital have to find ways to overcome these barriers.
Road construction. Who builds the roads, why it is built, what purpose, what happening to it.
P525 [449].
“
highways originally fall to the community,
“
who needs the roads.
[35:00]
P529. Special class of road workers forms by state. Extracting surplus value from these special kind of workers.
Return of capital is divided into interest and profit.
Road paying for itself depends on the traffic through that.
[40:00]
State planning and work. Finance from private. – channel tunnel.
p.530(455). First railway between liverpool and manchester had became a necessity of production. Liverpool cotton brokers and manchester manufacturers.
“Capital as such – its being posited with the necessary scope –
will produce roads only when the production of roads has become a necessity
for the producers, especially for productive capital itself; a condition for the”

waves of investments. First entrepreneurs if get bankrupts second or third waves of entrepreneurs will find previous investment has use value and invest again to get profit. Eg london underground system. Initial tunnels setup financed from US. Companies became bankrupted. They lost money. The tunnels are sitting there. Others then took it.
[45:00]
Another group take over. Long history.

“ A road itself may so increase the force of production that it creates new traffic which then makes the road profitable.”
create demand.
How needs are created,
Investment creates the needs, rather than need creating investment.
P533. (456)
Fixed capital.
“The result of our digression is, incidentally, that the production of the means
of communication, of the physical conditions of circulation, is put into the
category of the production of fixed capital, and hence does not constitutespecial case.”

“Circulation proceeds in space and time.”

transformation of a product into a commodity. – the bringing of the product to the market.
Only on the market is it a commodity.

Suppose the act of making the transition from commodity to
money is fixed by contract,
transition from the state of money into that of commodity;
time which elapses during this presupposed act. This belongs to the cost of production.
Quite different is the time which generally passes before the commodity makes its transition into money;
the time during which it remains a commodity, but not a real value. This is pure loss.

circulation appears as an essential process of capital.
M – c and c – m.
transformation of the commodity into money. The constant continuity of the
process, the unobstructed and fluid transition of value from one form into the
other, or from one phase of the process into the next, appears as a fundamental
condition for production based on capital to a much greater degree than for all
earlier forms of production.
[50:00]
P535. (460)
[actually brought about. The suspension of this chance element by
capital itself is credit.]

Credit system has very important role.

[Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form,
the form adapted to capital, in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the
expression of lack of credit.]

It is not in parasatic mode.

[Capital is now posited, however, as not merely sustaining itself formally, but
as realizing itself as value, as value relating to itself as value in every one of
the moments of its metamorphosis, in which it appears at one time as money, at
another time as commodity, then again as exchange value, then again as use
value. The passage from one moment to the other appears as a particular
process, but each of these processes is the transition to the other. Capital is
thus posited as value-in-process, which is capital in every moment. [25] It is
thus posited as circulating capital; in every moment capital, and circulating
from one form into the next.]

Capital is thus posited as value-in-process. Capital is something which is circulating through these different moments.

P538-39.
Until now value is always defined as direct relation of labour to capital.

[traveled in specific amounts of time (even spatial distance reduces itself to
time; the important thing e.g. is not the market’s distance in space, but the
speed – the amount of time – with which it can be reached), by that much the
velocity of circulation, the time in which it is accomplished, is a determinant of
how many products can be produced in a given period of time; how often capital
can be realized in a given period of time, how often it can reproduce and
multiply its value.]

[Thus a moment enters into value-determination which indeed does not come out of the direct relation of labour to capital.]
[55:00]
That moment is the frequency, the same capital can repeat production process.
The mass of value.
One time in a year. And 4 times a year. You produce 4times value. If you can speed up you can produce massive amount of value. Its not just how fast is the production, but how fast you can realize value. How fast you can turn it into money capital and put it into the production process.
So the speed of circulation is very important in accelerating the mass value.
How much the history of capital is about speedup.
Mass of value is accelerating. This speeding up is its characteristics.
Technology is very much about accelerating turn over time accomplishing speedup.
Value determination.
labour time is value positing activity.
Circulation time is a time of devaluation. Technology to stop the devaluation.
Tendency to reduce circulation time is enormous. P539.
[1:00:00]
(464)
Circulation time is a barrier to productivity of labour and increase necessary labour time and decreases surplus labour and decreases surplus value. It is a barrier to self realization process of capital. Capital have to reduce that.
“the universalizing tendency of capital”
[1:05:00]
(465)
The development of science alone – i.e. the most solid form of
wealth, both its product and its producer – was sufficient to dissolve these
communities. But the development of science, this ideal and at the same time
practical wealth, is only one aspect, one form in which the development of the
human productive forces, i.e. of wealth, appears. Considered ideally, the
dissolution of a given form of consciousness sufficed to kill a whole epoch. [dh: interesting]

That means you have to kill capitalism.
Idealists says lets change everybody’s mind then everything changes. Marx is not saying that. Without the dissolution of capitalistic form of consciousness market form of consciousness we will never get to socialism. But by telling this to all dont change it. Because daily life and material circumstances that has to produce and reinforce and reconstitute capitalist consciousness. In other words a way of life is about the consciousness and producing that consciousness. We cannot change that consciousness without changing the way of life. We cannot change life without changing our consciousness. Marx’s dialectical at work. “consciousness sufficed to kill a whole epoch”
one of those forms of consciousness which dissolved preceding order was science. Have to dissolve scientific thinking of economists.

P542. Universal development of the individual.
[1:10:00]

“Not an ideal or imagined universality of the individual, but the universality of his real and ideal relations. Hence also the grasping of his own history as a process, and the recognition of nature (equally present as practical power over nature) as his real body.” (466)

P544.
Surplus value multiplied by the number of times the production process can be repeated in a given period of time. This number the frequency of this repetition is the coefficient of the production process of the surplus value created through it.
Coefficient of value production.

It follows from the relation of circulation time to the production process that the
sum of values produced, or the total realization of capital in a given epoch, is
determined not simply by the new value which it creates in the production
process, or by the surplus time realized in the production process, but rather by
this surplus time (surplus value) multiplied by the number which expresses how
often the production process of capital can be repeated within a given period of
time. The number which expresses this frequency of repetition may be regarded
as the coefficient of the production process or of the surplus value created
through it.
(469)
[1:15:00]
The number of times, the speedup expresses a coefficient.
Reduction of circulation time. Reducing devaluation time.
Capital is constantly working on the maintenance of this continuity. That is only assured by smooth transition from one form to another, time to take do those all, and temporality. He says credit system is used for smooth out many of this differentiation.
maintenance of continuity and speeding up is a necessity.
P548.
Capital must spend some time like cocoon before take off as a butterfly.
Production capital is the cocoon. Commodity capital like caterpillar moves around. Capital in money form is like butterfly.
[1:20:00]
P552. (476)Competition. He did not go through it thoroughly.
Competition generally, this essential locomotive
force of the bourgeois economy,
not as an economic laws, but rather the consequence.
Competition is an enforcer of the laws of motion of capital. But it does not explain those laws. What if enforcer goes on sleep. Eg becomes monopoly power, or restructured then laws of motion does not work very well. End up in different laws of motion.
Eg, Competition of equalization of rate of profit. This competition was blunt in Bretonwood era. Because each nation state working as an entity working on its own fiscal policy. So competition between nation was limited. By 1990 international competition become dominant.
[1:25:00]
P559.
the laws of capital are completely realized
only within unlimited competition and industrial production.

Marx was working on the theory when you have unlimited competition and industrial production.
These are conditions of the realization of capital.
P585. Alienated productive power of labour.
[1:30:00]
All social power of production are productive power of capital. And it appears as its subjects.
Labour creates capital through the production of surplus value. It cannot get access to its necessary labour, its own form of substinance. It cannot access that without creating surplus value to capitalist. Capital uses its domination over labour to reorganize production process and says I built this world. The labourers has no part in it. They have been alienated.
Westworld story.
Marx saying, productive power seems belong to capital, but its not. It with labour. When labour become conscious of this powers it can utilize those powers in radically different ways.
P585. There cant be a capitalist for every worker. There is bunch of workers for capitalist.
[1:35:00]
P587. P590 (512). He says
“But only capital has subjugated historical progress to the service of wealth.”
P488 he talked about wealth.
Marx is always in favour of richest development of individual. The problem right now is that the historical progress has been subjugated to the service of wealth.
Richest development of individual cannot arise in a society where the imprisonment in wage labour, existence of debt peonage, general alienation of whole section of the population. we cannot imagine that world is the end point what the world is about. we created a world in pursuit of wealth some people are astonishingly wealthy because the poverty of the labourer exceedingly grows.
[1:40:00]
Poverty of the worker creates that kind of wealth.
For some people its great, but not great for all. Full development of individual not for workers. All individuals should able to explore their potentiality. Temporality of all of this. Speeding up.
Marx says you have to work in all fronts.
Change in consciousness needed for changes in practices. But other issues are there. Our daily practices also embedded in institutional arrangements. Also some tech configurations. Changes in relation to nature, technology, institutions, consciousness, production practices etc. so many different fronts. This is not an impossible thing.
In 1970s we saw world completely different way than today. That time we believed revolution was at the corner. But it became neoliberal revolution not the socialist. How this change happened.
Book – milinda cooper – family values. Family values of ford’s time 1960s-70s. Family is reconfigured 30-40 years of neoliberal policies. If you look relation to nature, technology, institutions, consciousness, production etc it is a real transformation. Counter revolutionary.
We are all neoliberal, without knowing it.
How the transformation from brettonwood, fordist world to neoliberal world.
The virus changed all our behavior.

Mode of production in steel is different from mode of production in agriculture.