such as supply and demand and the state of competition. When demand and supply are in equilibrium, he argued, they cease to explain anything, while the coercive laws of competition function as the enforcer rather than the determinant of the general laws of motion of capital. This immediately provokes the thought of what happens when the enforcement mechanism is lacking, as happens under conditions of monopolization, and what happens when we include spatial competition in our thinking, which is, as has long been known, always a form of monopolistic competition (as in the case of inter-urban competition). Finally, Marx depicts consumption as a “singularity”—those unique instances that together make up a common mode of life—which in being chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable, is therefore, in Marx’s view, generally outside of the field of political economy (the study of use values, he declares on the first page of Capital, is the business of history and not of political economy), and therefore potentially dangerous for capital. Hardt and Negri have therefore recently been at pains to revive this concept, for they see singularities, which both arise from the proliferation of the common and always point back to the common, as a key part of resistance.
Marx also identified another level—that of the metabolic relation to nature, which is a universal condition of all forms of human society and therefore broadly irrelevant to an understanding of the general laws of motion of capital understood as a specific social and historical construct. Environmental issues have a shadowy presence throughout Capital for this reason (which does not imply that Marx thought them unimportant or insignificant, any more than he dismissed consumption as irrelevant in the grander scheme of things).10
Throughout most of Capital, Marx sticks broadly to the framework outlined in the Grundrisse. He focuses sharply on the generality of production of surplus value and excludes everything else. He recognizes from time to time that there are problems in so doing. There is, he notes, some “double positing” going on—land, labor, money, and commodities are crucial facts of production, while interest, rents, wages, and profits are excluded from the analysis as particularities of distribution.
The virtue of Marx’s approach is that it allows a very clear account of the general laws of motion of capital to be constructed in a way that abstracts from the specific and particular conditions of his time (such as the crises of 1847–48 and 1857–58). This is why we can still read him today in ways that are relevant to our own times. But this approach imposes costs. To begin with, Marx makes clear that the analysis of an actually existing capitalist society/situation requires a dialectical integration of the universal, the general, the particular, and the singular aspects of a society construed as a working, organic totality. We cannot hope, therefore, to explain actual events (such as the crisis of 2007–09) simply in terms of the general laws of motion of capital (this is one of my objections to those who try to cram the facts of the present crisis into some theory of the falling rate of profit). But, conversely, we cannot attempt such an explanation without reference to the general laws of motion (though Marx himself appears to do so in his account in Capital of the “independent and autonomous” financial and commercial crisis of 1847–48, or even more dramatically in his historical studies of The Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France, where the general laws of motion of capital are never mentioned).11
Secondly, the abstractions within Marx’s chosen level of generality start to fracture as the argument in Capital progresses. There are many examples of this, but the one that is most conspicuous, and in any case most germane to the argument here, relates to Marx’s handling of the credit system. Several times in Volume 1 and repeatedly in Volume 2, Marx invokes the credit system only to lay it aside as a fact of distribution that he is not prepared yet to confront. The general laws of motion he studies in Volume 2, particularly those of fixed capital circulation (including investment in the built environment) and working periods, production periods, circulation times, and turnover times, all end up not only invoking but necessitating the credit system. He is very explicit on this point. When commenting on how the money capital advanced must always be greater than that applied in surplus-value production in order to deal with differential turnover times, he notes how changes in turnover times can “set free” some of the money earlier advanced. “This money capital that is set free by the mechanism of the turnover movement (together with the money capital set free by the successive reflux of the fixed capital and that needed for variable capital in every labor process) must play a significant role, as soon as the credit system has developed, and must also form one of the foundations for this.”12 In this and other similar comments it is made clear that the credit system becomes absolutely necessary for capital circulation, and that some accounting of the credit system has to be incorporated into the general laws of motion of capital. But when we get to the analysis of the credit system in Volume 3, we find that the interest rate (a particularity) is set jointly by supply and demand and by the state of competition—two specificities that have earlier been totally excluded from the theoretical level of generality at which Marx prefers to work.
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