Questions
to Consider
Class
III: Capital Accumulation, Unemployment,
Crises and Wars
March 26,
2017
All page
references are to the 1976 Vintage Edition of Capital,Vol. I
Chapter
23: Simple Reproduction
1.Discuss
this passage: “If production has a
capitalist form, so too will reproduction.
Just as in the capitalist mode of production the labor process appears
only as a means toward the process of valorization, so in the case of
reproduction it appears only as a means of reproducing the value advanced as
capital, i.e. as self-valorizing value.
The economic character of capitalist becomes firmly fixed to a man only
if his money constantly functions as capital.” (p. 711)
2.What is “simple
reproduction”? (p. 712)
3.What the “real
foundation and the starting-point of the process of capitalist production”? (p.
716)
4.What is
the difference between the worker’s “productive consumption” and “individual
consumption”? (p. 717)
5. What is “the
capital-relation itself”? (p. 724)
Chapter
24: The Transformation of Surplus-Value
into Capital
1.What is the
“accumulation of capital” or reproduction on an increasing scale?
2.Discuss
this passage: “Adam Smith, at the end of
a quite preposterous analysis, comes to the absurd conclusion that even though
each individual capital is divided into a constant and variable part, the capital of society can be entirely
resolved into variable capital i.e. is it laid out exclusively in the payment
of wages.”(p. 737) Why does Marx think
that this view of accumulation is erroneous?
3. Discuss
this passage: “But in so far as he is
capital personified, his [the capitalist’s] motivating force is not the
acquisition and enjoyment of use-values but the acquisition and augmentation of
exchange-values. He is fanatically intent
on the valorization of value; consequently
he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake . . . What
appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the
effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog.”(p. 739)
4.Discuss
the context in which Marx quotes the following from a member of
parliament, Mr. Stapleton: “The desired goal of English capital is no
longer Continental wages, oh no, it is
Chinese wages.” (p. 749, f.n. 41)
Chapter
25: The General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation
1.What is “the
organic composition of capital”? (p. 762)
2. What is “the
differentia specifica” of capitalist production?
3. Discuss
this passage: “The rise of wages is
therefore confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of
the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale.”(p.
771)
4.Why does a
relative diminution of the variable part of capital occur in the course of the
further progress of accumulation and the concentration accompanying it?(p. 772)
5.What is
the difference between the concentration and the centralization of capital?(p.
779)
6.Discuss
this passage: “In any given branch of
industry centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual
capitals invested there were fused into a single capital. In a given society this limit would be
reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a
single capitalist or a single capitalist company.” (p.779)
7.why does
the accumulation of capital take place through a continuing increase of its
constant component at the expense of its variable component?”(p. 781)
8. Why does
capital accumulation constantly produce a “relatively redundant working population
i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for
its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population”? (p. 782)
9. What is
the “peculiar cyclical path of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier
period of human history”? (p. 785)
10. Why does
Marx say that the “industrial reserve army” or the “relative surplus population
“ is “the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labor
does its work”? (p. 792)
11.What are
the different forms of existence of the relative surplus population?
12. What is “the absolute general law of
capitalist accumulation”? (p. 798)
No comments:
Post a Comment