William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
Accumulation The increase of any given amount of capital by the addition of commodities embodying surplus value, or of money received in exchange for such commodities, over the amount of capital taken as a basis for computation, and their incorporation into that capital.
Accumulation, Primitive The amassing of wealth through the expropriation of people from the soil, piracy, colonial plunder, slave-trading. It comprises any mode of acquiring goods that is not derived from an exchange of equivalents in the market. By primitive is meant not that it always precedes in time capitalist accumulation, but that it precedes the exploitation of wage-labor as a process in industry. Primitive accumulation may be found contemporaneously with capitalist appropriation. Within a cycle, though, of the use of capital in production, it precedes the use of wage-labor to produce a surplus-value to be realized in exchange.
Appropriation The taking over of economic goods without the payment of an equivalent; to be distinguished from exploitation (q.v.) and expropriation.
Bourgeois A member of the capitalist class, that is, a person whose revenues are derived from the ownership of functioning means of production, or of that amount of money which can acquire such means of production. He is distinguished from the landowner, the wage-worker, and the self-employed man.
Bourgeoisie The class of which each bourgeois is a member.
Capital Commodities or money (the money serving to purchase commodities) having the property of increasing in quantity of value by reason of the addition of surplus-value to their original quantity of value.
Capital, Bankers’ Money loaned to industrial, merchant, or landed capitalists, which permits the industrial capitalist to consume a greater quantity of labor-power and thus incorporate more surplus-value into his capital. His payment for this loan cannot exceed the totality of surplus-value it produces, for the repayment is made only from that source. Merchant capitalists repay at second remove, since they obtain divisions of larger quantities of surplus value. Landed capitalists repay out of two species of rents, themselves partitions of surplus value, but in a special manner due to monopoly (see Rent).
Capital, Circulating Capital, as viewed by the capitalist, composed usually of raw materials, wages payments, and other disbursements that have to be renewed at frequent intervals. It is based on the rate of turnover and is a bookkeeping distinction. It does not represent an economic category like constant capital. Non-Marxian economists view it as an economic distinction for purposes of analysis.
Capital, Circulation The commodities belonging to a capitalist which have left the production process and are now circulating or seeking to circulate, that is, to be exchanged against money or more commodities.
Capital, Composition of The proportions of a capital represented by its material aspects (constant capital) and the amount used to buy labor-power (variable capital). Sometimes called the “organic composition” of capital. If the constant capital exceeds the variable, it is termed a high organic composition; if the reverse, a low organic composition.
Capital, Constant That part of capital which is represented by the means of production, that is, all physical objects in production: the materials of production as distinguished from labor-power. This includes the factory itself, for example. It has the unique property that its value can only be transferred by labor-power into a new product, but it can never be increased by such production.
Capital, Fixed That part of Capital, as viewed by the capitalist, that requires replacement or renewal at long intervals. Its replacement, in its entirety, constitutes a cycle of investment for the capitalist. He considers the circulating capital by the number of cycles it can go through before the turnover in fixed capital is completed. It usually comprises buildings and heavy machinery, ships, locomotives, mining equipment, etc.
Capital, Form of The objects in which capital manifests itself in the course of accumulation. Money, means of production, variable capital or wages, products for sale, are phases through which capital must go in order to increase.
Capital, Industrial That capital which consumes labor-power, which it purchases from workers, and for which it pays value, but which in the process of production obtains more hours consumption of this labor-power than the value it paid. This addition arises because labor-power is the unique source of value.
Capital, Merchant Money or commodities, which, in consideration of the service rendered producing capitalists in the circulation of commodities, receive a portion of the surplus-value absorbed by productive capital, but this reward does not permit the total surplus-value shared to be increased beyond its original amount: partition and not addition is its mode of action.
Capital, Variable That part of capital used to purchase labor-power. It is termed variable, since it alters in quantity with the consumption of the labor-power, once the value of the labor-power itself has been consumed, and the additional time of the worker is given gratis to the purchaser for value of his labor-power.
Capitalism The production of an immense number of commodities, for a profit, which profit is obtained by the purchase of labor-power by the capitalist engaged in production. (See Surplus-Value.) It shares with other modes of production the commodity form of exchange and the use of money, but it is distinguished from them by the use of abstract labor-power, which, in turn, assumes a social or co-operative form of labor, a working together in mass.
Category In Marxian economic theory (not in dialectical materialism) that abstract concept, such as Capital, or Value, which summarizes a common quality of certain objects or economic actions, and thus distinguishes them in this quality from other objects without these qualities. A category is a class of things, that not merely have these common properties but are defined by them.
Centralization The control, or ownership, of a number of capitals in each of which concentration (q.v.) has already taken place. Thus centralization may absorb capitals that are themselves representative of a centralization process further back. It is a mode of acquisition that can be repeated in ever-widening circles.
Circulation The purchase and sale of commodities, usually by means of money. The means whereby, after a series of movements from buyer to seller, articles are finally distributed for consumption.
Circulation, Capital Buying in order to sell, or, mathematically, money into commodities into more money (M—C—M’).
Circulation, Commodities The sale of commodities for money, the object of which sale is to acquire more commodities. The mode, therefore, of distributing goods for consumption, and the transformation of commodities into their equivalent; their taking shape in this equivalent as commodities, and thus passing out of the form of merely being use-values. The double operation, which converts the equivalent again into another use-value, is termed by Marx the “complete metamorphosis.” He means that the original quality of the commodity has been transformed by this selling and buying into a commodity having a totally different quality, another use-value.
Circulation, Medium of A means whereby commodity circulation is effected; it must be either a general equivalent for other values, or, more usually, the universal equivalent, money.
Circulation, Simple The conversion of a commodity that is not wanted by its producer into one that is wanted for its use, and with no other object in mind.
Class A group of persons related in a specific manner to the mode of production, and, by extension of meaning, a sub-class in the sphere of circulation. Thus a group of persons who are related to means of production as owners are called the capitalist class; persons who sell their labor-power for their means of subsistence and sell it in the process of production are termed the working-class or the proletariat. The notion of classes overlaps. For example, landowners who hire peasants, by reason of their relation to a means of production, the land, are a common class with capitalists as purchasers of labor-power, but an opposed class as collectors of rent. Classes are thus in functional relations to each other, about means of production or in the sphere of circulation. A merchant is a member of the employing class as against his help, but a contender for part of surplus-value against the industrial capitalist. But a shoestring promoter, who lives off surplus-value, but exploits nobody and owns no capital, is called declassed, for he is in no constant relation to persons of another group, connected with the production or appropriation of surplus-value. In capitalism (q.v.) the referent of economic (not social) class is always surplus-value.
Class Consciousness The awareness by any class that its interests require a certain mode of action.
Class Struggle The economic conflict of groups for surplus-value. These struggles are of two kinds:
Primary—the struggle between workers who sell labor-power and capitalists who buy it, either as to hours of labor, intensity of labor, class organization, or conditions of labor. For these there is no economic criterion, the issue resolving itself into mass of force.
Secondary—the struggle of classes against each other for the division of surplus-value. None of these groups are sellers of labor-power. According to Marx, history is another name for class struggles, so far as its variables are concerned.
Coin Money in its employment as currency, that is, as moving from hand to hand. Marx makes no distinction in this use of the difference between its metallic form and its paper representative so that his context must be carefully read as his definition is functional only.
Commodity Any object that is of some use and that contains value (q.v.) and which because it has a value may be exchanged. It is a hybrid of a natural quality, utility, and a social quality, the amount of necessary social labor-time required for its fashioning. It is composed of natural goods, or materials and social effort. It is not a commodity, though, even if it has both these attributes if it is produced for the consumption of the maker. Thus the third factor of intention to sell is required. It must find another object in which it may realize its imminent value, by way of an exchange.
Composition, Organic The division of a capital into constant and variable; the proportions of these two divisions. By a high organic composition is meant a larger proportion of constant capital to variable.
Composition, Technical The composition of capital by mass of means of production and living labor-power, as distinguished from the organic composition which is defined as the proportion of value of constant to variable capital.
Concentration The accumulation of capital in ever larger amounts. This process may come from two points of departure, the exploitation of wage labor or the forcing out of business and the acquiring of the assets of small non-exploiters and the use of them as additional capital. It is often used interchangeably with centralization but the distinction is too useful to be obscured.
Co-operation Outside of the usual mercantile sense of a union of consumers to distribute merchandise without a middleman, Marx uses it to indicate the collective working together of labor, social labor, that is, and the use of collective power therein, the sum of which labor is greater than the total of the individual labors expended; this extra labor is the gift of the workers to the capitalist, since it represents a quantity over and above that which would be attributable to each laborer working alone.
Crisis A period in which means of production are produced in far smaller quantities than in a previous period, and in which unemployment also prevails to a much greater extent and in which wages or conditions of labor are worsened. Its effect in the sphere of circulation is the sharp reduction of sales of consumption goods and a diminution of their production. It is characterized by declining prices. In the financial superstructure, it leads to restrictions and defaults of credits, repudiation of commercial and financial obligations, and consequent bankruptcies.
Currency Money in its function of serving the movement of commodities and in so doing always moving further away from the exchanges taken as a base for calculating its movements. Hoarded money, for example, is not currency.
Cycle The alternate epochs in which the capitalists accumulate at an increasing rate and those of crises (q.v.). Cycles usually begin with a slow recovery from a previous crisis, at first uncertain and unevenly distributed, and end with extremely rapid accumulation, a more generalized activity and high employment. Their lengths are uneven but cycles tend to be completed in less time as the tendential rate of profits to go lower manifests itself increasingly.
Dialectic That property whereby any object or relation in motion is changed in character by that very motion. Changes may be either qualitative or quantitative; qualitative changes can originate by a change in the quantity of the object of which it is an attribute, and quantitative changes can be induced by an altered quality in the object of which it expresses weight or substance. At a given point, every quality and quantity must become the opposite of what it was previously. That point is not to be determined always in the same way, nor is it always a unit of an ordered series. This concept is used by no economists other than the Marxian.
Economics The study of the relations of the production of wealth, apart from physics or chemistry, and of the modes of its distribution, but excluding from its purview those social and political factors, particularly juridical and class relations, in which this production and distribution are affected. It is distinguished from Political Economy, which comprehends the economic activities in a social reference. Hence Economics is abstract study of economic activities, isolated for the sake of theoretical exposition. In bourgeois usage, economics and political economy are effectively the same science, though some economists distinguish them formally, like the Marxians.
Exploitation The consumption of labor-power sold by a worker, by its purchaser, the capitalist; therefore the employment of a worker by the payment of wages. Only labor can be exploited, and only by way of a purchase of its laboring-power for a given time. The term is wrongly used to mean appropriation, as of surplus-value rating as capital and itself derived from unpaid labor-power.
Expropriation The taking over of property previously held and not created immediately in the labor-process. A worker’s surplus-value is appropriated, a worker is exploited by reason of the consumption of his labor-power by another, but a petty land-owner or businessman is expropriated. The yeomanry, or freehold owners of land, were expropriated but the rural labor of the feudal manor was merely ejected. Marx’s use of “expropriation” is extremely specific, for it deprived former owners of the capacity for self-employment and left them only labor-power to sell.
Fetichism A term derived from the idea that an object contains a spiritual person and must be adored or appeased. Marxian usage is the same. Any attribution of a social relationship to inanimate objects, which assumes that these social relationships are physical properties of the object, is a fetichism. Thus the idea that gold is inherently more valuable than iron, or that pearls naturally command a higher price than bread, would be fetichisms. Fetichism is always a mask which conceals a social relation and is always the reverse of the truth.
Ideal That attribute whereby one economic function serves to bring out in a more general manner the economic possibilities of another. For example, a promissory note is an ideal means of purchase, since it is a more general function of the services of coin; money in the abstract is an ideal form of gold.
Interest That part of the surplus-value paid to the banker or moneylender or investor for his provision of a money capital, over and above the return of the capital itself. It does not receive the average rate of profit, but less.
Labor The utilization of his labor-power by the worker in the course of production. The term is used popularly to characterize the working class.
Labor, Abstract The undifferentiated use of labor-power which creates value as against the concrete labor that produces only a use-value.
Labor, Concrete The specific activity of labor, the making of specific articles by the worker, as for example tailoring, stonecutting, as opposed to undifferentiated labor. The use-value or utility of any object, apart from any question of exchangeability, is due to concrete labor.
Labor, Counted That labor which is of social utility, which is an expression of socially necessary labor, and which is measured by the social labor-time required for its reproduction.
Labor, Dead Means of production or constant capital which embody previously expended labor. They have a value already incorporated in them and this value is preserved by living labor.
Labor, Living Labor expended in the process of production; the creator of new value and the preserver of old value by transferring its use-value to the objects in which it gives new value.
Labor-power The capacity, physical and mental, to perform labor. It is sold in the abstract for a given number of hours per day, and utilized as concrete labor by its consumer, the capitalist. It is distinguished from labor, which is its manifestation, and it itself is a product of previous labor which has been embodied in the means of subsistence which have reproduced it. It is, therefore, a commodity.
Labor-power, Value of The amount of socially necessary labor incorporated in the means of subsistence of laborers, defined as the traditional amount required for fairly extended periods in a defined area, such as a country or large region.
Labor Time The number of hours, or minutes, necessary to the production of any commodity and the value of that commodity, though not the expression of that value in exchange.
Labor, Wasted Labor put into an object that is of no social utility, or that excess of labor put into an object above what would be required for its reproduction. Such labor is not embodied as value, since it has made objects but not commodities. It is not an aliquot part of total socially necessary labor.
Management The art of utilizing labor in the capitalist system, that is, the organization of production in order to obtain the largest mass and highest rate of surplus-value. Marxian usage differs from the standard use, in that it differentiates management from production itself, since a management that achieved the greatest production and the finest quality might be inefficient management in the capitalist system and would be if it produced no surplus-value.
Manufacture Utilization of co-operative forms of production, with the use of only hand-manipulated machines, as against power machines. Marx differentiates it from machine capitalism, whereas most economists use the terms interchangeably.
Materialism, Historical The theory that modes of production are decisive for the economic structure of society, and that this economic structure conditions significant historical events.
Materialization The concrete form of any immanent economic attribute, as the manifestation of value as exchange value, or the manifestation of abstract labor in money.
Means of Exchange Marxian usage excludes money from this definition. A commodity is a means of exchange since it is produced only so that by reason of it another use-value can be acquired.
Means of Payment Marxian usage is more restricted than the ordinary; it excludes currency and is confined to orders to pay either in the present (check), in the future (promissory notes, etc.).
Means of Production Constant capital (q.v.).
Means of Subsistence Similar to the ordinary definition, except that it is usually employed to identify the goods required to reproduce labor-power and is the determinant of its value.
Money The equivalent form of value in its most generalized form, a universalization of the general equivalent (see Value, General equivalent). Its commodity form is that of precious metal, gold, sometimes also silver, its token commodity form, copper, bronze, or nickel; these concrete forms of money manifest commodity value. There is also money of account whereby other commodities or objects having a price are spoken of as so much money.
Political Economy The production or distribution of wealth in terms of the class relations and the legal and social and political expressions of those class relations in any given society at a determined epoch. (See Economics.)
Price The expression of value in money, the value-form carried to its furthest development (see Money). Price does not coincide with value, although it is an expression thereof. Value is the standard which price seeks to express but it can discover that correspondence only in the market. A more rigorous definition would be that price is the social mode of exploration, to realize the most generalized equivalent of value, subject to social contradictions.
Productivity The magnitude of useful articles that can be fashioned in a given time.
Proletariat Members of the working class or of the clerical sections of the working class who are sellers of labor-power and have no effective means of self-employment. This class, by extension, includes such self-employers as hucksters, newsboys, etc., whose earnings do not arise from ownership of capital, and the quantity of which, as a social average, does not exceed that of comparable workers.
Profit The ratio of surplus value to the total capital employed, both constant and variable. It is always smaller as a rate than surplus-value, always equal as a mass.
Property The allocation of goods to certain persons, whether natural persons or artificial persons (corporations), of which goods they have the exclusive disposition for use and sale subject to a legal code that defines the limits of such use and sale. It is applied, by extension, to cover the same relation of persons to claims on goods, as in investments. Property is divided into such as is not used to exploit another person, as consumption goods or individual tools of a self-employed person, and capital, that is, commodities employed to obtain surplus-value, whether by directly purchasing labor-power or sharing in surplus-value.
Realization Marxian usage limits it to the obtaining of a commodity or money as the manifestation of immanent value in the commodity exchanged.
Reproduction, Simple The consumption of the increments of capital by the capitalist so that at the end of any given period, his original capital remains intact but is not increased; in the course of time he will have consumed his original investment and the capital which he then possesses will have been entirely furnished out of surplus-value, but its quantity will be equal to the original capital so consumed. (See accumulation.)
Value The average, socially necessary, homogeneous, abstract labor-power embodied in the totality of commodities and measured by the quantity of time of such labor. Every commodity is conceived of as embodying a given number of units of this value. This value, although the substance of labor-time, is not a property of the commodity, but a congealed labor-power, as separated from labor itself, as a commodity, in the specific class relations of capitalism. It would not exist in communist society.
Value, Absolute Any value considered as its own quantity and not as measured for comparison against any other value. For Marx all value is absolute, objective, and social.
Value, Exchange The expression of value, which is immanent, by way of another commodity as a useful thing, hence the expression of immanent value as a definite quantity in terms of some other commodity which permits it to emerge as realized value. Illustration, a commodity has two hours units of social labor-time attributable to it, it is realized in the body of another commodity embodying the same labor-time.
Value, Immanent Value prior to its manifestation in exchange.
Value, Individual A loose expression probably best defined as the exchange-value appearance of any given commodity irrespective of its intrinsic value; a realization of immanent value by a useful commodity whose labor-time is not equivalent to the aliquot part of social capital of the commodity whose value it expresses.
Value, Intrinsic The value implicit in all commodities, although not recognizable in a corresponding price, and remaining true of that commodity irrespective of deviations from that value either in exchange-value or price-form. It is an aliquot part of total value and is not disturbed by any fluctuations in its realization.
Value, Substance of The labor-time incorporated in the commodity as defined above under “value.”
Value, Use Those attributes of any commodity that adapt it to specific wants, such as shape in bowls, transparency in window glass: colloquially used in Marxian terminology to mean the objects themselves as physical goods and not as commodities.
Value-Form Exchange-value.
Value-Form, Elementary The expression of the value of any one commodity by way of the body of any one other.
Value-Form, Equivalent A commodity considered as directly exchangeable with other commodities. It is a character of the commodity in any given relation and is not inherent. It is at the opposite pole of its value relation with the commodity whose value it expresses as a useful object; that object is the relative form (q.v.).
Value-Form, Expanded or Extended or Total The expression of the value of a commodity occurring in many other useful objects. It is no longer accidental like the elementary form, for it is predictable, owing to its repetition in the number of objects expressing its value.
Value-Form, General The expression of value of any number of commodities by way of a single useful object. This precedes the use of money, which is the universal equivalent, replacing the general equivalent, but retaining the same form of value.
Value-Form, Relative The commodity whose value is being expressed by another object. It would be more exact to speak of the relative pole of value, rather than the relative form.
Value, Surplus Value produced by a laborer over and above the value required to reproduce the means of subsistence of that laborer. This latter is the value of his labor-power.
Value, Surplus, Absolute The increase of working hours over and above the former surplus of such time over the number of hours required for the worker to reproduce his labor-power through means of subsistence.
Value, Surplus, Relative That increased time devoted by the laborer to the employer within a given working day over and above the previous time so donated, and usually arrived at by an increased intensity of labor, or by a larger employment of constant capital, and thus by increasing productivity in any given hour, enabling the worker to reproduce his means of subsistence in less time.
Wages The money-expression of the payment for that portion the working day which is devoted by the laborer to reproducing his own labor-power, and is apparently a compensation for the entire working-day.
Wealth A term for all products of labor and natural goods as well; all use-values. It excludes such claims upon products as are embodied in titles to land, etc., which do not add to the sum of usevalues but merely register the right to engross some.
1. These terms are defined only where they differ from dictionary usage or from that of customary economics.