Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

From the book: “…a potential tendency for capital in searching to maximise its monetary profit to be drawn to invest in areas that produce no value or surplus value at all. Taken to extremes, either of these tendencies [the first being the problem of technology reducing value creation] could be fatal to the reproduction of capital. In combination, and the contemporary evidence is that both trends are discernible, they could be catastrophic” (Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey, Oxford University Press, p.105).

Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

From the book: “…a potential tendency for capital in searching to maximise its monetary profit to be drawn to invest in areas that produce no value or surplus value at all. Taken to extremes, either of these tendencies [the first being the problem of technology reducing value creation] could be fatal to the reproduction of capital. In combination, and the contemporary evidence is that both trends are discernible, they could be catastrophic” (Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey, Oxford University Press, p.105).

Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

From the book: “…a potential tendency for capital in searching to maximise its monetary profit to be drawn to invest in areas that produce no value or surplus value at all. Taken to extremes, either of these tendencies [the first being the problem of technology reducing value creation] could be fatal to the reproduction of capital. In combination, and the contemporary evidence is that both trends are discernible, they could be catastrophic” (Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey, Oxford University Press, p.105).

Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

From the book: “…a potential tendency for capital in searching to maximise its monetary profit to be drawn to invest in areas that produce no value or surplus value at all. Taken to extremes, either of these tendencies [the first being the problem of technology reducing value creation] could be fatal to the reproduction of capital. In combination, and the contemporary evidence is that both trends are discernible, they could be catastrophic” (Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey, Oxford University Press, p.105).

No Blood for Oil!

In his book George Caffentzis shows how Marxism accounts for the peculiar role that the oil industry plays in contemporary capitalism as generator of ecological devastation, war and exploitation.

Marx’s Grundrisse

Marx viewed all his economic laws as tendencies and it is hard to deny that those tendencies are becoming more and more the realities of today’s capitalism. However, to understand our society we need to do more than reading and accepting his concepts, we must critically analyze them and look for the way of thinking that produced them. It is with this goal in my mind that we should embark on a journey through the long and complex sentences of The German Ideology and the Grundrisse.