The Limits to Capital QUOTES

1 " The extension of exchange puts producers into relations of reciprocal dependency. But they relate to each other by way of the products they exchange rather than directly as social beings. Social relationships are expressed as relationships between things. On the other hand, the things themselves exchange according to their value, which is measured in terms of abstract labour. And abstract labour becomes the measure of value through a specific social process. The 'fetishism of commodities' describes a state in which 'the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things' (Capital, vol. 1, p. 73). "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

2 " We saw this contradiction in action in Marx's analysis of struggles over the length of the working day. Individual capitalists, we there discovered, each of them acting in his or her own self-interest and locked in competitive struggle with each other, can produce an aggregative result which goes against their class interest seen as a whole. By their individual action they can endanger the basis for accumulation. And since accumulation is the means whereby the capitalist class reproduces itself, they can endanger the basis for their own reproduction. They are then forced to constitute themselves as a class — usually through the agency of the state — and to put limits upon their own competition. But in so doing they are forced to intervene in the exchange process — in this instance in the labour market -- and thereby to offend the rules of individuality and freedom in exchange. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

3 " Marx defines the commodity form of circulation (commodity—money —commodity, or C—M—C, for short) as an exchange of use values (the use of shoes against bread, for example) which depends essentially upon the qualities of the goods being exchanged. Money functions here as a convenient intermediary. We now encounter a form of circulation, M—C—M, which begins and ends with exactly the same commodity. The only possible motivation for putting money into circulation on a repeated basis is to obtain more of it at the end than was possessed at the beginning. A quantitative relation replaces the exchange of qualities. Money is thrown into circulation to make more money — a profit. And money that circulates in this way is called capital. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

4 " Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production? "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

5 " The rule that governs the behaviour of all capitalists is, then, 'accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake' (Capital, vol. 1, p. 595). And this rule, enforced by competition, operates independently of the individual will of the capitalist. It is the hallmark of individual behaviour, and thereby stamps itself as the distinguishing characteristic of all members in the class of capitalists. It also binds all capitalists together, for they all have a common need: to promote the conditions for progressive accumulation. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

6 " The individual', Marx suggests, consequently 'carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket' (Grundrisse, p. 157). This social power is 'alienable without restriction or conditions', and it can become, therefore, the 'private power of private persons' (Capital, vol. 1, pp. 110, 132). Greed for that social power leads to appropriation, stealing, hoarding, accumulation — all become possible. Marx goes to considerable lengths, particularly in the Grundrisse (see particularly pp. 145-72), to describe the disruptive effects of monetization, through social power relations, on traditional societies. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

7 " The essence of the neo-classical argument is that competition for productive factors — land, labour and capital — forces entrepreneurs to pay an amount equal to the value that the marginal (last employed) unit of each factor creates. Given a particular technological state and relative factor supplies (scarcities), then competition ensures that each factor 'gets what it creates', that 'exploitation of a factor cannot occur.' It is then a short step to infer that the distributive shares of rent, wages, interest, etc., are socially just fair shares. The political implication is that there is no point in, or call for, class struggle, and that government intervention should be confined largely to ensuring that perfect competition prevails. In the lexicons of many Marxist writers, this qualifies as 'vulgar political economy' with a vengeance. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

8 " Separating land, labour and capital as independent and seemingly autonomous factors of production had a double advantage for the ruling classes since it permitted them to proclaim 'the physical necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue' at the same time as it suppressed any notion of exploitation since the act of production could in principle be portrayed as the harmonious assembly of separate and independent factors of production. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

9 " As holders of money, labourers are free to buy as they please, and they have to be treated as consumers with autonomous tastes and preferences. We should not make light of this (Grundrisse, p. 283). Situations frequently arise in which labourers can and do exercise choice, and the manner in which they do so has important implications. And even if, as is usually the case, they are locked into buying only those commodities capitalists are prepared to sell, at prices capitalists dictate, the illusion of freedom of choice in the market plays a very important ideological role. It provides fertile soil for theories of consumer sovereignty as well as for that particular interpretation of poverty that puts the blame fairly and squarely upon the victim for failure to budget for survival properly. There are, in addition, abundant opportunities here for various secondary forms of exploitation (landlords, retail merchants, savings institutions), which may again divert attention from what Marx considered to be the central form of exploitation in production. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

10 " The competition for accumulation requires that the capitalists inflict a daily violence upon the working class in the work place. The intensity of that violence is not under individual capitalists' control, particularly if competition is unregulated. The restless search for relative surplus value raises the productivity of labour at the same time as it devalues and depreciates labour power, to say nothing of the loss of dignity, of sense of control over the work process of the perpetual harassment by overseers and the necessity to conform to the dictates of the machine. As individuals, workers are scarcely in a position to resist, most particularly since a rising productivity has the habit of 'freeing' a certain number of them into the ranks of the unemployed. Workers can develop the power to resist only by class action of some kind — either spontaneous acts of violence (the machine-breakings, burnings and mob fury of earlier eras, which have by no means disappeared) or the creation of organizations (such as the unions) capable of waging a collective class struggle. The capitalists' compulsion to capture ever more relative surplus value does not pass unchallenged. The battle is joined once more, and the main lines of class struggle form around questions such as the application of machinery, the speed and intensity of the labour process, the employment of women and children, the conditions of labour and the rights of the worker in the work place. The fact that struggles over such issues are a part of daily life in capitalist society attests to the fact that the quest for relative surplus value is omnipresent and that the necessary violence that that quest implies is bound to provoke some kind of class response on the part of the workers. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

11 " The behaviour of the individual capitalist does not depend on 'the good or ill will of the individual' because 'free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist' (Capital, vol. 1, p. 270). In so far as individuals adopt the role of capitalist, they are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive as part of their subjective being. Avarice and greed, and the predilections of the miser, find scope for expression in such a context, but capitalism is not founded on such character traits — competition imposes them willy-nilly on the unfortunate participants. "

― David Harvey , The Limits to Capital

12 " 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