Capital, Volume 2

The Process of Circulation of Capital
Edited by Frederick Engels

Volume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature, the two sources of wealth, 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 insures 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? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint, in Volume II 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. Here, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices, wages, interests, rents, dividends, rates of profit, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts!

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.

The CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers, students, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits.

Admissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.