Capital, Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital

with Mary Boger

Volume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. In Volume I Marx demystifies “the commodity” by identifying the real sources of the production of wealth, namely, the human subject through our labor and nature. Capital subsumes these as commodities which are consumed within the process of production. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that ensures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? In Volume II, The Process of Circulation of Capital, we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole.

We will begin our study of Volume II study by situating this volume in relation to the historical process of development of capitalist society which is premised on its specific social form of societal re-production, the production of capital. To do so we will study the closing sections of the Penguin edition of Volume I, specifically, Part VIII: “So-called Primitive Accumulation” and the “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production”.

Join us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world.

MARY BOGER, an ethnographic researcher, has been teaching Capital since the first School for Marxist Education opened in 1975. Her major concerns are centrality of labor, shifts in the global working class, advancing international solidarity that can challenge the prerogatives of globalized capital and begin to shift our resources and activities towards remediation of nature and reclamation of our human species capacities. Mary has an MA in Economics, PhD in Sociology (A Ghetto State of Ghettos: Palestinians under Israeli Citizenship).

All events are sliding scale—choose the level at which you choose to contribute to The Marxist Education Project. No one is denied admission to any event or class because of an inability to pay. Send an email to info@marxedproject.org to obtain an entry url to any event or class presented by The Marxist Education Project.