Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula (258) What distinguishes the form of circulation relevant to capital production (M-C-M)? An inverted order of succession of the two antithetical processes: sale and purchase This inversion has no existence for 2 of the 3 people involved [92] To answer the question, “Does capital lay its own golden eggs?,” Marx starts with examining the contradictions within M-C-M + ΔM Fundamental question: where does the increment, surplus value, come from? [93] Classical liberal economics holds that M-C must be equivalent to…
Nothing [but us] is sacred
From Literature
from the books: Capital, vol. 1, 1867, Ch. 4, Karl Marx and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 2010, David Harvey
Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital (247) Capital starts with circulation of commodities Production of commodities and their circulation in developed form: trade World trade begins in 16th century Money (ultimate product of commodity circulation) is the first form of appearance of capital Capital first confronts landed property in the form of money In form of monetary wealth, merchants’ capital and usurers’ capital All new capital steps onto the stage (i.e. onto the market) in the shape of money, money that has to be shaped into capital by definite processes First distinction…
from the books: Capital, vol. 1, 1867, Ch. 3, Karl Marx and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 2010, David Harvey
Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 3 1. The Measure of Values Gold acts as a universal measure of value, and only through performing this function does gold, the specific equivalent commodity, become money Money as the measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value inherent to commodities: labor-time (189) The expression of the value of a commodity in gold looks like this: x commodity a = y money commodity This is its money-form, or price This kind of equation (with gold as the equivalent form)…
from the books: Capital, vol. 1, 1867, Ch. 2, Karl Marx and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 2010, David Harvey
Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 2 [47] Marx’s purpose: define socially necessary conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and create a firmer ground to consider the money-form in chapter 3 (178) The “guardians” of commodities must place themselves in relation to each other as persons whose will resides in those objects in order for those objects to enter into relations as commodities The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property (a juridical relation) The content of this juridical relation (or relation of two wills) is determined…
from the books: Capital, vol. 1, 1867, Ch. 1, Karl Marx and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 2010, David Harvey
Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 1, section 1 (126) It is the commodities’ physical bodies that are the useful things, or use-values Commercial knowledge of commodities: special branch of knowledge grounded in use-value of commodities Use-values are only realized in use or consumption Use-value is material content of wealth Also, in capitalist mode of production, use-values are the material bearers of exchange-value (127) From the fact that a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x polish, y silk, and z gold the valid exchange…
Truth and the Individual in Robert Musil’s Blackbird
In The Analysis of Sensations, physicist Ernst Mach at once shatters the realist’s conception of the world and the self. Polemicizing against Rene Descartes’ dualism, and classical rationalism in general, Mach reduces all of reality to localized, yet fully relativized complexes of sense data.[1] His universe is one in which the permanent is illusory and “facts” are mere descriptions of the relations between dynamic connections of sensations. There is no “I”, no ego, no Truth—at least not in any tangible sense. Robert Musil and his Austrian contemporaries warily absorbed Mach’s theory. It ripped the stable metaphysical rug from beneath their…
Filarete’s Conduits and the Production of Space
The Renaissance hospital constitutes a space in which rational organization confronts, conceals, and controls socially constructed objects of contamination and contagion. At the core of its architectonic function, Milan’s Ospedale Maggiore works to purify the impure body through a masquerading act, which disturbs and detaches the immaterial subject from its contaminated embodiment. Architects and humanists conceive of complex sanitary networks that permeate the building’s space, while remaining hidden, or closeted, behind porous walls. Extending the hydraulic metaphor to relations of bodies in space, one understands the hospital’s power relations as constituted by mechanisms that permit and block certain objects from…
Psychological Solipsism and Salvation in Schnitzler
Vienna at the turn of the century witnessed a newly evolved variation on the old Protagorean mantra, “Man is the measure of all things.” As Carl E. Schorske explains in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, “psychological man” now occupied that central, precarious position in the age-old search for truth. Political and social dissonance, coupled with a new aesthetic and understanding of reality, spawned a movement inward—into the psyche—among the Viennese intelligentsia. Channeling much of its artistic and scientific energies inward, a generation of creative thinkers expressed the, often bleak, ramifications of “psychological man” in various ways. Arthur Schnitzler, the son of a bourgeois…
The Missing Voice in Bruce Lenthall’s Radio’s America
In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall uproots his reader from the 21st century, propelling her into the Depression era and the dawn of modern mass culture. Lenthall discusses the complex arena of American society during the 1930s and 1940s, an amorphous domain that continually blurs the once distinct lines of the public and private spheres. Radio, Lenthall claims, propagated and sustained a new mode of discussion—one that enabled a few voices to influence the masses at unprecedented levels. The reader gains insight into radio’s communicative implications through different key players: public intellectuals, political figures, students of communication, aural artists, and citizens…
Cloacal Imagery and the Development of Artist and Text in Joyce’s Portrait
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains an orgy of sensations. Writing in the early 20th century, Joyce touched a nerve in his readership through his liberal use of cloacal imagery. More than an exercise in inclusive realism, writing raw, seemingly unpleasant sensory facts into the bildungsroman serves to highlight a key aspect in Stephen Dedalus’ development as an artist. A crisis of identity afflicts the novel’s protagonist, as he struggles with various social institutions over ownership of his self, oscillating between extremes of mind and body to stake his claim. Stephen fixates on and…
theorem serum 