After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity

For Monday, more from the first volume of Marx’s Capital: Part I, chapter iii (”Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”). I, for one, am immediately struck by the coordinating conjunction (or is it a disjunction?), that very eighteenth-century or.

This third chapter concludes Part I. Again, you might also peek at the short chapter which begins Part II and posits M-C-M’ as “the general formula of capital,” but only if you have time and inclination and didn’t do so for our last meeting.

Chapter iii of Capital at marxists.org: link.

Dipping a toe into Karl Marx’s Capital, we are planning on reading Part I, Chapter 1 (”The Commodity”). It might help to also read Marx’s preface to the first German edition, where we find the following: “The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very simple and slight in content. Nevertheless, the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it” (Penguin ed. pp. 89-90). The multiple volumes of Capital, David Harvey claims, are an exercise in content delivery.

There’s much more about money in Part I, and we may choose to read chapters 2 and 3 for next time. Those with some extra time and the desire to look ahead might sample Part II, Chapter 4 (”The General Formula for Capital”), in which Marx treats C-M-C and M-C-M circuits.

Capital at Marxists.org:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume35/index.htm