Love this quote, but I also do disagree a little with Marx here in that capital does not require wage-labour. Industrial capital does, but there were plenty ways before to create and augment capital before it married production and started realizing crazy superprofits and stuff.
I would support Marx here and in a way that is historical connecting his point with yours.
Marx did not look at any meaningless capital here, but did have the specific capitalist changes in history in mind and the manifest was result of association of some socialists which talked to the proletariat in specifics.
While there might be other forms the wage labour is very constituent for capitalism at that point and not only for industrial capital, even though the latter pushed with the bourgeosie their mark onto all spheres of exchange (and production).
However it is right that there are some non wage based forms e.g. prison labour/slavery in the US. Would still like to know which you might mean :)
The point I want to do is that the context and audience of texts and the boundaries we make for arguments (how specific or general we want to be) is quite important for Marx's texts.
I'm thinking more capital in forms before the industrial revolution. Marx and co seem to think that historical capitalism only kicked off during the industrial revolution, and required wage-labour and total factor markets in land, labour, and money to do so. Braudel, Arrghi and a few other historians would argue that the systemic cycles of accumulation of capital predate the industrial revolution by a few centuries, and can actually be placed in Renaissance Italy as their origins, and that capital accumulation primarily happened (in the second phases of all these cycles) through financialization and M-M' rather than M-C-M'. Production is a specific form of capital accumulation that doesn't emerge (in a big way, anyway, it was visible in 14th century Florence for sure with cloth production) until the Industrial Revolution, but there were capitalists focused on capital accumulation rather than use value and political power for centuries before that time.
This also kind of has implications for Lenin's understanding of imperialism and financialization, as it would imply it's not the "highest stage" of capitalism but merely a cyclical phase at the end of a systemic accumulation cycle, a "sign of autumn" in the verbage of Braudel. Like, it happened with the Spanish/Genoese, happened with the Dutch, the British (during said financilization phase of British hegemony Lenin wrote that work) and is happening again with the US (which is very clearly in its financilization rather than production stage) as hegemony slips away to China.
Lots of great answers here but seems like we're missing what is potentially my favorite (hopeful) contradiction of capitalism.
> The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
:inshallah-script:
Love this quote, but I also do disagree a little with Marx here in that capital does not require wage-labour. Industrial capital does, but there were plenty ways before to create and augment capital before it married production and started realizing crazy superprofits and stuff.
I would support Marx here and in a way that is historical connecting his point with yours.
Marx did not look at any meaningless capital here, but did have the specific capitalist changes in history in mind and the manifest was result of association of some socialists which talked to the proletariat in specifics.
While there might be other forms the wage labour is very constituent for capitalism at that point and not only for industrial capital, even though the latter pushed with the bourgeosie their mark onto all spheres of exchange (and production).
However it is right that there are some non wage based forms e.g. prison labour/slavery in the US. Would still like to know which you might mean :)
The point I want to do is that the context and audience of texts and the boundaries we make for arguments (how specific or general we want to be) is quite important for Marx's texts.
I'm thinking more capital in forms before the industrial revolution. Marx and co seem to think that historical capitalism only kicked off during the industrial revolution, and required wage-labour and total factor markets in land, labour, and money to do so. Braudel, Arrghi and a few other historians would argue that the systemic cycles of accumulation of capital predate the industrial revolution by a few centuries, and can actually be placed in Renaissance Italy as their origins, and that capital accumulation primarily happened (in the second phases of all these cycles) through financialization and M-M' rather than M-C-M'. Production is a specific form of capital accumulation that doesn't emerge (in a big way, anyway, it was visible in 14th century Florence for sure with cloth production) until the Industrial Revolution, but there were capitalists focused on capital accumulation rather than use value and political power for centuries before that time.
This also kind of has implications for Lenin's understanding of imperialism and financialization, as it would imply it's not the "highest stage" of capitalism but merely a cyclical phase at the end of a systemic accumulation cycle, a "sign of autumn" in the verbage of Braudel. Like, it happened with the Spanish/Genoese, happened with the Dutch, the British (during said financilization phase of British hegemony Lenin wrote that work) and is happening again with the US (which is very clearly in its financilization rather than production stage) as hegemony slips away to China.