Chapter 20. Section 13. Destutt de Tracy
Section 13 is drawn from a different manuscript and is a digression, a polemic against Destutt de Tracy.
Destutt was an early 19th century liberal. In Capital volume 1 Marx calls him a “fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire”. He was made a count under Bonaparte and a peer under the restored Bourbons, but kept a slight distance from both regimes. Continue reading
Chapter 20. Sections 11-12. Fixed capital. Gold.
Section 11 deals with depreciation charges and replacement of fixed capital, section 12 with reproduction of gold. Continue reading
Chapter 20. Sections 9 and 10. How and when capital for one becomes revenue for another; and when it doesn’t
In section 9, Marx returns to Smith’s claim that the total product “resolves into” v + s: there is nothing new here apart from a side-reference to Ramsay.
At the start of section 10, in yet another discussion of Smith’s error about equating total product with (v + s), Marx discusses “roundaboutness” (not under that name). Continue reading
Chapter 20, Section 6-8: The exchanges of “the collective capitalist” with its collective self.
Section 6 is entitled “The Constant Capital in Department 1”; section 7, “Variable Capital and Surplus Value in the Two Departments”; section 8, “The Constant Capital in Both Departments”.
All are again concerned with the circulation of money from the capitalist back to the capitalist. All are short. Continue reading
Chapter 20, Section 5: The flow of money from capitalist back to capitalist.
Section 5 goes further into chasing the movement from hand to hand of money as the commodities circulate.
Marx assumes here “the general law… that the money that commodity producers [i.e. in this simplified scheme, capitalists] advance returns to them in the normal course of commodity circulation” [488]. Continue reading
Chapter 20. Simple Reproduction, sections 1 to 4.
Chapter 20 is by far the longest chapter of volume 2, nearly a hundred pages. Sections 1 to 4 cover the basic relations which Marx derives:
c2 = v1 + s1
v2b < s2a
… and an important discussion of “underconsumption” at the end of section 4. Continue reading
Marx's Capital, volumes 1, 2, and 3 