Capital: Volume 1, Chapters 4-6 by Karl Marx

Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital

- "The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital...World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold...money. This ultimate product of commodity circulation is the first form of appearance of capital." - 247

- Money vs. capital

1. money: direct form of circulation, C-M-C, "selling in order to buy" - 247
2. capital: M-C-M, "buying in order to sell" - 248
3. "In the cycle C-M-C, therefore, the expenditure of money has nothing to do with its reflux. In M-C-M on the other hand the reflux of the money is conditioned by the very manner in which it is expended. Without this reflux, the operation fails" - 250

- surplus value of capital: "The complete form of this process is therefore M-C-M', where M' = M + Δ M, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call 'surplus-value'." - 251

- "it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making." - 254

- M-M': interest-bearing loan - 257

Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula

1. "all that happens in exchange...is a metamorphosis, a mere change in the form of the commodity. The same value, i.e. the same quantity of objectified social labour, remains throughout in the hands of the same commodity-owner, first in the shape of his own commodity, then in the shape of the money into which the commodity had been transformed, and finally in the shape of the commodity into which this money had been re-converted", change in form does not imply change in magnitude of value - 260
2. "In its pure form, the exchange of commodities is an exchange of equivalents, and thus it is not a method of increasing value." - 261
3. "all owners of commodities sell their goods to each other at 10 per cent above their value, which is exactly the same as if they sold them at their true value." - 263
4. circulation does not produce surplus value, "If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, we still have no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no value." - 266
5. surplus-value "can only be derived from the twofold advantage gained, over both the selling and the buying producers, by the merchant who parasitically inserts himself between them. It is in this sense that [Benjamin] Franklin says 'war is robbery, commerce is cheating'." - 267
6. M-C-M' = merchants' capital; M-M' = usurers' capital
7. Aristotle on usury (lending money with interest) in the Nicomachean Ethics , "the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented. For it originated for the exchange of commodities, but interest makes out of money, more money. Hence its name [toxos(Greek): interest, offspring] For the offspring resembles the parent. But interest is money, so that of all modes of making a living, this is the most contrary to Nature." - 267
8. "Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation. We therefore have a double result." - 268

Chapter 6: The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

1. labour-power: "In order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value. The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour" - 270
2. "labour-power can appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity...He must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i.e. handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily. In this way he manages both to alienate his labour-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it." - 271
3. "this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labour-power." - 273
4. value of labour-power: "the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner." - 274
5. "In every country where the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power until it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract...the worker advance the use-value of his labour-power to the capitalist...Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist." - 278
6. "The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others." - 280

Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 2 by Karl Marx

Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange

• "In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own...The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property." - 178
• "For the owner, his commodity possesses no direct use-value.... It has use-value for others; but for himself its only direct use-value is as a bearer of exchange-value" - 179
• "only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent." - 180
• "The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the latter." - 182
• requirements of the money-form: "Only a material whose every sample possesses the same uniform quality can be an adequate form of appearance of value, that is a material embodiment of abstract and therefore equal human labour. On the other hand, since the difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the money commodity must be capable of purely quantitative differentiation, it must therefore be divisible at will, and it must also be possible to assemble it again from its component parts. Gold and silver possess these properties of nature." - 184
• "Money, like every other commodity, cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively in other commodities." - 186
• "This physical object, gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money. Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way." - 187
• "The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish." - 187

Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 1 by Karl Marx

Chapter 1: The Commodity

- The two factors of the commodity: use-value and value (substance/magnitude of value)

1. "an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind." - 125
2. "It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself...which is the use-value or useful thing." - 126
3. exchange value: "the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind." - 126
4. "the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values." -127
5. use value: change in quality exchange-value: change in quantity
6. "Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour" - 128
7. "The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is therefore its value." - 128
8. magnitude of value: "the quantity of the 'value-forming substance', the labour, contained in the article." - 129
9. commodities produces in the same time have the same value - 130
10. productivity up, labor time down, value down - 131
11. "A thing can be a use-value without being a value." - "Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc." - 131

- The dual character of the labour embodied in commodities

1. use-values must differ to "confront each other as commodities" for exchange; ex. linen and coat - 132
2. "The totality of heterogeneous use-values or physical commodities reflects a totality of similarly heterogeneous forms of useful labour, which differ in order, genus, species and variety: in short, a social division of labour." - 132
3. "Labour...as the creator of use-values...is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature" - 133
4. "the same change in productivity which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the amount of use-values produced by it, also brings about a reduction in the value of this increased total amount" - 137

- The value-form, or exchange-value

1. "The relative form of value and the equivalent form are two inseparable moments, which belong to and mutually condition each other; but, at the same time, they are mutually exclusive or opposed extremes; i.e. poles of the expression of value." - 139-40
2. "Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value but is not itself value."; labor --coagulation--> object = value - 142
3. to be valued, objects require a value-relation with a different commodity; alone, they have only use-value
4. use-value: linen not= coat; value: linen = coat - 143
5. relative value: "value of commodity A [linen], thus expressed in the use-value of commodity B [coat]" - 144
6. "The relative value of a commodity may vary, although its value remains constant. Its relative value may remain constant, although its value varies" - 146
7. equivalent form: "The commodity linen brings to view its own existence as a value through the fact that the coat can be equated with the linen although it has not assumed a form of value distinct from its own physical form."; "the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other commodities." - 147; iron as a measure of weight, the body of the coat as a measure of value alone - 149
   
8. "The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion." - 152
9. "the relative expression of value of the commodity is incomplete, because the series of its representations never comes to an end." - 156
10. expanded form of value: "when a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities." - 158
11. currency as the ultimate equivalent form, "The general relative form of value imposes the character of universal equivalent on the linen, which is the commodity excluded, as equivalent, from the whole world of commodities...The physical form of the linen counts as the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all human labour." - 159
12. "The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money-form." - 163

- The fetishism of the commodity and its secret

1. the commodity-form "is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things." - 165
2. commodity production resembling religion, "the fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities", "the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own" - 165
3. "Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic." - 167
4. "The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form." - 173

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

• "Redefining opportunities and responsibilities for millions of people in a society absent of mass formal employment is likely to be the single most pressing social issue of the coming century" - intro. xv
• "We are entering a new phase in world history -- one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population." - intro. xvi
• "By directly eliminating human labor from the production process and by creating a reserve army of unemployed workers whose wages could be bid down lower and lower, the capitalists were inadvertently digging their own grave, as there would be fewer and fewer consumers with sufficient purchasing power to buy their products." - 17
• "As productivity soared in the 1920s and a growing number of workers were handed pink slips, sales dropped off dramatically....The business community hoped that by convincing those still working to buy more and save less, they could empty their warehouses and shelves and keep the American economy going. Their crusade to turn American workers into 'mass' consumers became known as the gospel of consumption." - 18
• "The metamorphosis of consumption from vice to virtue is one of the most important yet least examined phenomena of the twentieth century." - 19
• "The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction." - 20, Charles Kettering of General Motors
• "Let us remember that the automatic machine...is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor." - 78, Norbert Weiner
• "The [unions] failed to come to grips with the central dynamic of the automation revolution -- management's single-minded determination to replace workers with machines wherever possible, and, by so doing, reduce labor costs, increase control over production, and improve profit margins." - 86
• "The productivity gains in agriculture were so swift and effective that by the late 1920s economic instability was no longer fueled by crop failures, but, rather, by overproduction." - 109
• "Ever since the depression years of the 1930s, price and commodity supports have been used to both artificially prop up the price of farm commodities and pay farmers not to produce in order to curtail production. Again, Say's law, that supply creates is own demand, has proven wrong." - 113
• "While natural vanilla sells on the world market for about $1200 per pound, Escagenetics says it can sell its genetically engineered version for less than $25 per pound....For the tiny island nations of the Indian Ocean, the indoor farming of vanilla is likely to mean economic catastrophe." - 124
• "The human price of commercial progress is likely to be staggering. Hundreds of millions of farmers across the globe face the prospect of permanent elimination from the economic process. Their marginalization could lead to social upheaval on a global scale and the reorganization of social and political life along radically new lines in the coming century." - 127
• "For more than forty years, the service sector has been absorbing the job losses in the manufacturing industries." - 141
• "While some employees welcome the new freedom that comes with less supervision [by telecommuting], others say they miss the camaraderie and social interaction that comes with face-to-face office operations." - 150
• "Increasingly, American workers are being forced to settle for dead-end jobs just to survive." - 167
• "The mounting statistics reveal a workforce in retreat in virtually every sector. Forced to compete with automation on the one hand and a global labor pool on the other, American workers find themselves squeezed ever closer to the margins of economic survival." - 168
• "Some of the blame for the current plight of American workers can be traced to the emergence of a single global marketplace in the 1970s and 80s." - ?
• "Across the country U.S. corporations are creating a new two-tier system of employment, composed of a 'core' staff of permanent full-time employees augmented by a peripheral pool of part-time or contingent workers." - 190
• "Americans, perhaps more than any other people in the world, define themselves in relationship to their work. From early childhood, youngsters are constantly asked what they would like to be when they grow up." - 195
• "The death of the global labor force is being internalized by millions of workers who experience their own individual deaths, daily, at the hands of profit-driven employers and a disinterested government....With each new indignity, their confidence and self-esteem suffer another blow. They become expendable, then irrelevant, and finally invisible in the new high-tech world of global commerce and trade." - 197
• "Worldwide, more than a billion jobs will have to be created over the next ten years to provide an income for all the new job entrants in both developing and developed nations. With new information and telecommunication technologies, robotics, and automation fast eliminating jobs in every industry and sector, the likelihood of finding enough work for the hundreds of millions of new job entrants appears slim." - 206-7
• "We are rapidly approaching a historic crossroad in human history. Global corporations are now capable of producing unprecedented volume of goods and services with ever smaller workforce. The new technologies are bringing us into an era of near workerless production at the very moment in history when population is surging to unprecedented levels. The clash between rising population pressures and falling job opportunities will shape the geopolitics of the emerging high-tech global economy well into the next century." - 207
• "For a growing number of wealthier Americans, living inside walled communities is a way of 'internalizing their economic position and privilege and excluding others from sharing it." - 212
• "Rarely, in their public statements, do any of the leaders of the extreme right broach the issue of technology displacement....The growing tide of immigration from east to west in Europe, and from south to north in the Americas, reflects in part the changing dynamics of the global economy and the emergence of a new world order that is forcing millions of workers to move across national borders in search of an ever-dwindling supply of manufacturing and service jobs." - 215
• "Automation threatens to render possible the reversal of the relation between free time and working time: the possibility of working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time. The result would be a radical transvaluation of values, and a mode of existence incompatible with traditional culture. Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility." - 221, Herbert Marcuse
• "Despite the American workers' just claim to a piece of the productivity pie, the business community has steadfastly held the line against any attempts to shorten the workweek and increase wages to accommodate the rapid gains in productivity." - 228
• "At the same time that the need for human labor is disappearing, the role of government is undergoing a similar diminution. Today, global companies have begun to eclipse and subsume the power of nations. Transnational enterprises have increasingly usurped the traditional role of the state, and now exercise unparalleled control over global resources, labor pools, and markets." - 236
• "The very idea of broadening one's loyalties and affiliations beyond the narrow confines of the marketplace and nation-state to include the human species and the planet is revolutionary and portends vast changes in the structuring of society." - 246-7
• "The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion." - 288