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101 " This brings us back to Marx’s method. One of the most important things to glean from a careful study of Volume I is how Marx’s method works. I personally think this is just as important as the propositions he derives about how capitalism works, because once you have learned the method and become both practiced in its execution and confident in its power, then you can use it to understand almost anything. "
― David Harvey , A Companion to Marx's Capital
102 " Finance capital increasingly looked abroad for higher rates of return. "
― David Harvey , A Brief History of Neoliberalism
103 " It assumed that values were a self-evident and universal truth, failing to see that the value character of the products of labour becomes firmly established only when they act as magnitudes of value. These magnitudes vary continually, independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them. (167–8) "
104 " Investments in social and physical infrastructures create geographical concentrations of relative advantage to which capital is inevitably drawn. The free gifts of nature and human nature need to be produced before they can be gifted to capital. "
― David Harvey , Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason
105 " Capitalism is nothing if it is not on the move. Marx is incredibly appreciative of that, and he sets out to evoke the transformative dynamism of capital. That’s why it is so very strange that he’s often depicted as a static thinker who reduces capitalism to a structural configuration. No, what Marx seeks out in Capital is a conceptual apparatus, a deep structure, that explains the way in which motion is actually instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. Consequently, many of his concepts are formulated around relations rather than stand-alone principles; they are about transformative activity. "
106 " Volcker, Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xaioping all took minority arguments that had long been in circulation and made them majoritarian (though in no case without a protracted struggle). "
107 " Volcker and Thatcher both plucked from the shadows of relative obscurity a particular doctrine that went under the name of ‘neoliberalism’ and transformed it into the central guiding principle of economic thought and management. "
108 " Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development…Consequently, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values. It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly. (168–9) "
109 " The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc. (174, "
110 " Use-values exist in the physical material world of things that can be described in Newtonian and Cartesian terms of absolute space and time. Exchange-values lie in the relative space-time of motion and exchange of commodities, while values can be understood only in terms of the relational space-time of the world market. (The immaterial relational value of socially necessary labor times comes into being within the evolving space-time of capitalist global development.) But as Marx has already convincingly shown, values cannot exist without exchange-values, and exchange cannot exist without use-values. The three concepts are dialectically integrated with one another. "
111 " This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. "
112 " Consider, secondly, the relation between capital and labour that the production of surplus value presupposes. Like any other commodity, labour power exchanges in the market place according to the normal rules of exchange. But we have seen that neither the capitalist nor the labourer can truly afford to let the market for labour power operate unhampered, and that both sides are forced at certain moments to take class action. The working class must struggle to preserve and reproduce itself not only physically but also socially, morally and culturally. The capitalist class must necessarily inflict a violence upon the working class in order to sustain accumulation, at the same time as it must also check its own excesses and resist those demands on the part of the working class that threaten accumulation. The relation between capital and labour is both symbiotic and contradictory. The contradiction is the fount of class struggle. This also generates internal contradictions within the capitalist form of accumulation at the same time as it helps to explain much of the unfolding of capitalist history. "
― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital
113 " have long thought that the political economists selected the wrong Defoe story. Moll Flanders is a far better model for how commodity production and circulation work. Moll behaves like the quintessential commodity for sale. She is constantly speculating on the desires of others, and others are constantly speculating on her desires (the great moment occurs when, effectively broke, she spends every last penny on hiring a grand outfit including coach and horses and appropriate jewelry to go to a ball where she enamors a young nobleman and elopes with him that night, only to find out the next morning that he is broke too, at which point they both see the humor of it all and amicably part ways). She travels the world (even goes to colonial Virginia), spends time in debtors’ prison; her fortune fluctuates up and down. She circulates like a monetary object in a sea of commodity exchanges. Moll Flanders is a much better analogy for the way capitalism, particularly the speculative Wall Street variety, really works. "
114 " Powerful corporations in alliance with an interventionist state were seen to be running the world in individually oppressive and socially unjust ways. "
115 " The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes” (187). But there is one other vital point to this chapter. With the “magic” and “fetish” of money firmly in place, men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. "
116 " Marx is engaged in a critique of classical liberal political economy. He therefore finds it necessary to accept the theses of liberalism (and, by extension to our own times, neoliberalism) in order to show that the classical political economists were profoundly wrong even in their own terms. "
