The Unfinished System of Karl Marx

This chapter argues that the main subject of Capital, Volume III is the distribution of surplus-value: in other words the division of the total amount of surplus-value into individual component parts, first into equal rates of profit across branches of production, followed by the further division of surplus-value into commercial profit, interest and rent. Furthermore, Marx’s analysis of the distribution of surplus-value is based on the fundamental premise that the total amount of surplus-value has already been determined by the prior analysis contained in Volume I. The main question addressed in Volume III, then, is how this pre-determined total amount of surplus-value is divided into its component parts. The analysis of these individual component parts does not in any way affect the size of total surplus-value, as this total surplus-value is taken as a pre-determined given in this analysis. The chapter reviews all seven parts of Volume III, providing substantial textual evidence for these two main assertions.

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other.

This contribution seeks to reconstruct and discuss, in an exemplary way, the evolution and use of the categories ‘joint-stock company’ and ‘share capital’ in Marx’s writings. The material considered, starting with 1844, is categorised into four periods, and guided by the two main questions: does financialisation under conditions of globalisation represent a new phenomenon, or merely the unfolding of capital relations and processes as already analysed by Marx? What are the implications of the answer to this question? In answering both questions, the impact of the second MEGA edition is of particular significance. These elaborations show how joint-stock companies and share capital have been transformed with the development of the capitalist mode of production, and how their role in the economy has changed, becoming and determining the new normality in it. Connected with this development, financialisation has developed as such. The analysis passes, then, into a more precise definition and theoretical explanation of ‘capital oligarchies’, into a conclusion on the cultural challenges facing more and more emancipatory-solidary actors, and thus into an argument for renewed engagement with the reception of Capital, Volume III in the context of a renewed ‘imperialism debate’ which will be of decisive importance for the revolutionary movement.

This contribution incorporates core lessons of capitalist crisis formation as explained in Volume III of Capital, but also recognises gaps in how crisis tendencies are explained—gaps filled by Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence on the articulation between capitalist and non-capitalist relations, and by David Harvey’s addition of space, time and ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Applied to South Africa, these concepts help to clarify the longer-term character of capitalist crisis and social resistance. The need to transcend the capitalist mode of production in the world’s most economically unequal and racially stratified society—with its manifold gender- and ecologically-exploitative power relations, tied to extreme uneven and combined development—is obvious. The repeated capitalist crises facing South Africa and the world constitute—as Marx, Luxemburg and Harvey demonstrate—the final nail in the coffin.