IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-14319-1_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capital

In: The Circulation of Capital

Author

Listed:
  • Patrick Murray

Abstract

Marx’s goal in Volume Two of Capital is to show that what circulates in a capitalist economy is capital and to flesh out the consequences. This is a taller order than it might seem, just because the pitfalls in getting to know capital are so many. A natural way of looking at the production and distribution of wealth in a capitalist society is to break it down into a generalized circulation of wealth whose basic forms are money and commodities, buying and selling, accompanying a process of production that, without any determining social form, simply transforms material inputs to create new wealth. This pictures a capitalist economy as a commercial and industrial one. Oddly the picture excludes capital itself, for capital is not simply commodities, money or the use-values needed for production (raw materials, labor, instruments of production). It does not belong to the nature of any of those to produce surplus value (profits, rents, interest), yet bearing surplus value is what defines capital.1

Suggested Citation

  • Patrick Murray, 1998. "Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capital," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Christopher J. Arthur & Geert Reuten (ed.), The Circulation of Capital, chapter 3, pages 33-66, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-14319-1_3
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-14319-1_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-14319-1_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.