Capital¶
Metadata¶
- Author: [[Karl Marx, Ernest Mandel, and Ben Fowkes]]
- ASIN: B002XHNMN0
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002XHNMN0
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
If one tries to find some basic common kernel in ‘all’ anatomy, one leaves the realm of that specific science and enters another: biology or biochemistry. In the same way, if one tries to discover basic working hypotheses valid for ‘all’ economic systems, one passes from the realm of economic theory to that of the science of social structures: historical materialism. — location: 275 ^ref-64395
the capitalist mode of production emerge historically from the growth of commodity production: without simple commodity production no capitalism can come into existence. — location: 294 ^ref-20411
It would thus be completely mistaken to consider, for example, Hellenistic slave society or the classical Islamic Empire – two forms of society with strongly developed petty commodity production, money economy and international trade – as being ruled by the ‘law of value’. — location: 304 ^ref-60541
Precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth. — location: 354 ^ref-57092
Only the growth of bourgeois society and its contradictions, above all the struggle between capital and labour, enabled Marx to assimilate, combine and transform these sciences in the specific way and the specific direction he did. — location: 380 ^ref-30864
the distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ in no sense implies that ‘appearance’ is less ‘real’ then ‘essence’. — location: 398 ^ref-9089
capitalism, as the only economic organization based upon generalized commodity production. — location: 413 ^ref-25987
Only if the reproduction of this concrete totality in man’s thought comes nearer to the real material totality is thought really scientific. — location: 420 ^ref-63104
unity of historical and logical analysis is the way in which Marx and Engels understood their own method. — location: 437 ^ref-25120
Marx’s Capital appears as a giant compared to any subsequent or contemporary work of economic analysis. — location: 442 ^ref-48768
the achievement is truly impressive. It is precisely because of Marx’s capacity to discover the long-term laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production in its essence, irrespective of thousands of ‘impurities’ and of secondary aspects, that his long-term predictions – the laws of accumulation of capital, stepped-up technological progress, accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labour, growing concentration and centralization of capital, transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labour-power, declining rate of profit, increased rate of surplus value, periodically recurrent recessions, inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labour, — location: 447 ^ref-61298
in fact it is his strikingly stoical attitude towards all the miseries surrounding him, rather than any special bitterness born from material hardship, that permeates his mature work. — location: 511 ^ref-57292
Joan Robinson does not understand that Volumes 1 and 3 of Capital are at different levels of abstraction, deal with different questions, and make different assumptions in order to clarify the specific dynamics which allow answers to these questions. — location: 561 ^ref-46505
A basic difference between the capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production is that under capitalism capital not only appropriates surplus-value; it produces surplus-value. — location: 605 ^ref-36395
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. — location: 5050 ^ref-45244