Capital, Volume II

Capital, Volume II, subtitled The Process of Circulation of Capital, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1885. It is divided into three parts:^[1]

1. The Metamorphoses of Capital and Their Circuits
2. The Turnover of Capital
3. The Reproduction and Circulation of the Aggregate Social Capital

In Volume II, the main ideas behind the marketplace are to be found: how value and surplus-value are realized. Its dramatis personae, not so much the worker and the industrialist (as in Volume I), but rather the money owner (and money lender), the wholesale merchant, the trader and the entrepreneur or 'functioning capitalist.' Moreover, workers appear in Volume II, essentially as buyers of consumer goods and, therefore, as sellers of the commodity labour power, rather than producers of value and surplus-value (although, this latter quality, established in Volume I, remains the solid foundation on which the whole of the unfolding analysis is based).

Reading Volume II is of monumental significance to understanding the theoretical construction of Marx's whole argument. Marx himself quite precisely clarified this place, in a letter sent to Engels on 30 April 1868: 'In Book 1. . . we content ourselves with the assumption that if in the self-expansion process €100 becomes €110, the latter will find already in existence in the market the elements into which it will change once more. But now we investigate the conditions under which these elements are found at hand, namely the social intertwining of the different capitals, of the component parts of capital and of revenue (= s).' This intertwining, conceived as a movement of commodities and of money, enabled Marx to work out at least the essential elements, if not the definitive form of a coherent theory of the trade cycle, based upon the inevitability of periodic disequilibrium between supply and demand under the capitalist mode of production (Mandel, 1978, Intro to Vol. II of Capital).

Volume II of Capital has indeed been not only a 'sealed book', but also a forgotten one. To a large extent, it remains so to this very day.

Part 3 is the point of departure for a topic given its Marxist treatment later in detail by, among others, Rosa Luxemburg.

See also

• The Accumulation of Capital
• Das Kapital
  • Capital, Volume I
  • Capital, Volume III
• Marxian economics

References

Further reading

• Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Étienne. Reading Capital. London: Verso, 2009.
• Louis Althusser (1969) How to Read Marx's Capital from Marxism Today, October 1969, 302-305. Originally appeared (in French) in Humanité on April 21, 1969.
• Bottomore, Tom, ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Fine, Ben. Marx's Capital. 5th ed. London: Pluto, 2010.
• Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx's Capital. London: Verso, 2010.
• Harvey, David. The Limits of Capital. London: Verso, 2006.
• Mandel, Ernest. Marxist Economic Theory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
• Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Shipside, Steve. Karl Marx's Das Kapital: A Modern-day Interpretation of a True Classic. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2009. ISBN 978-1-906821-04-3
• Wheen, Francis. Marx's Das Kapital--A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006. ISBN 0802143946; ISBN 978-0802143945.

External links