Knowing Capital

Reading Capital? Is it a matter of interpreting the text as a unified whole? Can we approach it objectively if we follow the directive to seek out its "Logic" (with a capital L)? And what if we shift Capital out of the role of the object of our reading and instead make our need to read it the object that Capital itself must account for? In Capital, Marx unfolds for the first time in history the reproduction in thought of the necessity that determines the historical reason for the existence of the capitalist mode of production and the action of the working class as the bearer of its revolutionary overcoming in the development of the community of freely associated individuals; that is, of individuals capable of governing their actions by objectively knowing their own determinations beyond all apparent externality. From Capital onwards, all reproduction in thought that advances on the determinations deployed in it is a process of recognition from a social point of view. Yet the point is not merely to read Capital, nor even simply to study it. It is truly about confronting the real forms of capital ourselves in order to understand them, with the power we acquire by having the ideal reproduction of them developed in Capital. This book is organized into two sections. The first mirrors the author's own process of inquiry as he moves through the concrete forms he confronts. The second reflects the nature of the process of recognition from a social standpoint, wherein the analytical quest and the subsequent unfolding of necessity reveal their own progression; they find their guide in existing knowledge while simultaneously confronting the very same concrete reality that such knowledge addresses. This volume represents the first step in the development of the work. It explores the determinations of the commodity, ultimately recognizing it as the simplest form assumed by the general social relation within the capitalist mode of production. Which is equivalent to saying that this first step advances to recognizing itself as an expression of the consciousness that affirms itself in its freedom, not by abstractly denying its determinations, but by knowing its necessity insofar as it determines it as a consciousness alienated in the social powers of its own material product.