A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1 Quotes

“One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“Woodrow Wilson, that great liberal president of the United States who sought to found the League of Nations, put it this way in a lecture he delivered at Columbia University in 1907: Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“The accumulation of money as unlimited social power is an essential feature of a capitalist mode of production. When people seek to accumulate that social power, they start to behave in a very different way. Once the universal equivalent becomes a representation of all socially necessary labor-time, the potentialities for further accumulation are limitless.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Once you can hang a price tag on something, you can in principle put a price tag on anything, including conscience and honor, to say nothing of body parts and children.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process—a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx’s view, a serious error.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Capitalism is nothing if it is not on the move. Marx is incredibly appreciative of that, and he sets out to evoke the transformative dynamism of capital. That’s why it is so very strange that he’s often depicted as a static thinker who reduces capitalism to a structural configuration. No, what Marx seeks out in Capital is a conceptual apparatus, a deep structure, that explains the way in which motion is actually instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. Consequently, many of his concepts are formulated around relations rather than stand-alone principles; they are about transformative activity.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Capital is process, and that is that.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“But now, in the circulation M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son…Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. (256)”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“It is therefore only at the money moment—the moment of capitalist universality—that we can tell where we are in relation to value and surplus-value.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“As Marx amusingly put it elsewhere, in boom economies everybody acts like a Protestant—they act on pure faith. When the crash comes, though, everyone dives for cover in the “Catholicism” of the monetary base, real gold.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“There is a big difference between the circulation of money as a mediator of commodity exchange and money used as capital. Not all money is capital. A monetized society is not necessarily a capitalist society. If everything revolved around the C-M-C circulation process, then money would be merely a mediator, nothing more. Capital emerges when money is put into circulation in order to get more money.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“The sale of indulgences is sometimes regarded as one of the first major waves of capitalist commodification. It certainly laid the basis for all that hoarded wealth in the Vatican. Talk about the commodification of conscience and honor!”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“But the ability to hold the means of exchange (in defiance of Say’s law) also awakens a passion, a “lust for gold.” “The hoarding drive,” he says, “is boundless in its nature.” Witness Christopher Columbus: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise” (229–30). Here Marx, quoting Columbus, returns to the idea that once you can hang a price tag on something, you can hang it on anything—even a person’s soul, as his allusion to the Catholic Church’s infamous medieval practice of selling indulgences (i.e., papal pardons that promised entry into heaven) suggests: Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it. (229)”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“If everybody in the world suddenly decided not to use their credit cards for three days, the whole global economy would be in serious trouble. (Recall how we were all urged to get out our credit cards after 9/11 and get back to shopping.) Which is why so much effort is put toward getting money out of our pockets and keeping it circulating.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“The difficulty,” he says, “lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money” (186): What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities universally express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. (187, emphasis added)”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx’s supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values, you have first to understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences—social, environmental, political and the like. If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself. So Marx insists that we must understand what commodity values and the social necessities that determine them are all about.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Marx inverted Hegel’s dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx’s terms, it is a fetish construct.”
― David Harvey, A Companion To Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition

“This leaves us with the logical rationale, which I find much more persuasive. It focuses on the methodology at work as the argument unfolds: the dialectical and relational opposition between use-value and exchange-value as embodied in the commodity; the externalization of that opposition in the money-form as a way to represent value and facilitate commodity exchange; the internalization of this contradiction by the money-form as both a medium of circulation and a measure of value; and the resolution of that contradiction through the emergence of relations between debtors and creditors in the use of money as a means of payment.”
― David Harvey, A Companion To Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition

“The facts of the Great Depression made a dominant economic theory that denied the possibility of generalized crisis untenable.”
― David Harvey, A Companion To Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition

“the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Here Marx simply assumes that proletarianization has already occurred and that a functioning labor market already exists. But he does, however, want to make “one thing” clear: Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

“Yes, indeed, individual laborers will have rights over their own body and individual legal rights in the labor market. In principle they have the right to sell their labor-power to whomsoever they choose and the right to buy whatever they want in the marketplace with the wages they receive. Creating such a world is what the capitalist form of imperial politics has been about for the past two hundred years.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital