Presentation by Andy Blunden at Historical Materialism, Istanbul, 5 April 2026
Marx grasped the content of Capital chiefly through a critical appropriation of political economy, especially that of David Ricardo. But the structure of Capital is drawn from the penultimate chapter of Hegel’s Logic, entitled “The Idea of Cognition.” Capital also reflects the structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with three distinct but interlacing structural formations.
First, Marx conceives of capitalism in three successive layers, each characterised by a unique ethical principle, as in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The first part of Volume One, the first three chapters, is bourgeois society, in which independent producers exchange commodities at their value. The second layer is productive capitalism, occupying the rest of Capital up to Part IV of Volume Three. Productive capitalism is characterised by selling products of capitalist industry at cost of production plus profit. The third and final layer is finance capital, in which capital is loaned at interest without releasing ownership, irrespective of whether the capital is used productively. All three ethical principles operate within modern capitalism, and are identified by a study of their historical genesis.
Second, productive capitalism is conceived in terms of a syllogism, in which the immediate production of capital is joined with the circulation of capital to reproduce capitalist production as a whole. This syllogism constitutes the second structural formation in Das Kapital.
The third structural formation of Das Kapital will be a revelation for Marxists. Of the 18 Parts of Das Kapital, each Part being composed of 3 or 4 chapters, 15 have a specific internal structure which constitutes the fine structure of Das Kapital. Each of these 15 parts builds on the Parts which have gone before, as in Hegel’s Logic. The remaining 3 Parts and some odd chapters take up various historical, ideological or political issues, but do not bear materially on the structure of the whole work. These chapters however can only be made sense of in the context of the structure.
Each Part identifies a unit (or embryo or cell-form) which captures some problem or phenomenon, characterising it as a whole, in a nutshell so to speak. Generally, Marx identifies a universal unit, and then identifies one or more particular units.
Once this structure is grasped, you will find that the whole of Das Kapital becomes for you an open book.
The subject matter is social labour, and insofar as labour is offered for exchange, value. Bourgeois society is a precondition for productive capitalism and has existed since antiquity although only in relatively recent times subsumed by capital. Any given community, at whatever stage of development of its productive forces, has a certain quantity of social labour at its disposal. The quantity of social labour is called its value, which measures itself by socially necessary labour time. This time may be allocated in one or another way, subject to the availability of labourers, but the total value of the social labour in a community is fixed. Volume One of Das Kapital determines this quantity, and nothing in the remaining two volumes changes that, including the composition of constant and variable capital.
A single unit of capital is not in itself capable reproducing the conditions for its own productive existence. On its own it would soon exhaust its resources and die. The process of circulation of capital dealt with in Volume Two shows how the circulation of capital, in commerce, and throughout the entire social body, reproduces the conditions for the reproduction of capitalism.
After paying the costs of production, including the workers’ living expenses, the capitalists divide the social surplus amongst themselves according to the quantity of capital invested; nothing to do with value. This sharing of surplus is effected by the banking system. The banks create capital, but they cannot create value. The distribution of surplus between capitalist producers takes place within the constraints of a fixed total value.
As a result, the industrial capitalist who has transformed the worker into a mere instrument, is himself transformed by finance capital into a salaried operative. Finance capital is capital in its purest form because here capital generates interest irrespective of whether it is used productively. It appears to grow of itself.
I will now outline the 15 units which make up the fine structure of Das Kapital.
The unit of Part I, bourgeois society, is the commodity: bourgeois society is nothing but innumerable commodity exchanges. Alongside particular commodities - shoes, coats, loaves of bread, etc - there emerges the universal commodity, money. Money is the universal commodity because it is exchangeable with any particular commodity in any circumstances. Bourgeois society is not capitalism, but is a logical and historical precondition for capitalism and is sublated into industrial capitalism.
The unit of Part II, the founding unit of industrial capitalism, is the individual who buys in order to sell more dearly; Marx calls this unit Mr. Moneybags and describes him as the embryo of capital. The industrial capitalist who creates surplus value by employing industrial workers is the universal unit. The usurer and the commercial capitalist who simply lay claim to already-existing surplus are particular capitalists, albeit historical precedents of industrial capitalism.
The unit of Part III is the sine qua non of productive capital ‒ the unpaid labour time, worked every day by the labourers over and above the time necessary to produce the equivalent of their subsistence for the day. The surplus value appropriated by forcing the labourer to work unpaid labour time will be redistributed among the various sectors of the capitalist class, and subsequently shared with landowners and finance capitalists. Its total is equal to the total of unpaid labour time of all the workers involved in the cooperative production process.
The unit of Part IV is the necessary labour time required to produce the equivalent of the workers’ daily needs. This is determined by the progressive development of the productive forces as a whole, outside the control of the individual capital which purchases the labour power.
In Part V the unit is productive labour: “it is no longer necessary for you to do manual work yourself; enough, if you are an organ of the collective labourer.”
Part VI is the daily wage paid to the worker for the use of their labour-power for an entire working day. Its value however remains the necessary labour time. Marx isolates this unit to analyse the various particular forms of payment which serve to disguise the nature of the value of the worker’s labour-power.
This completes Volume One, the immediate production of capital.
Volume Two deals with how the entire capitalist social formation is reproduced through the circulation of capital.
The basic unit set out in Part I, is the circuit of a single unit of capital from money-capital to productive capital to commodity-capital and back to money-capital. This universal unit is interlaced with the particular units being the circuit of commodity-capital and the circuit of productive capital.
Part II is the turnover time, the time required for each circuit of capital, making the denominator for the rate of profit.
The Part III is the generalisation of the circuit of capital so as to reproduce the entire capitalist social formation. Capital must not only renew itself, but must renew the entire social formation.
The first three parts of Volume Three will complete the analysis of productive capitalism.
The unit of Part I is the cost-price of the product to the capitalist plus the profit, based on the total capital invested, irrespective of its division into constant capital and wages. Cost-price and price of production are the appearances of the economic categories under the rule of capital.
The unit of Part II is the average rate of profit, the total social surplus divided by the total capital invested in a given period of time, generalised by the joint action of the commodity market and the capital market and applies to all units of capital whether productive or commercial.
The rate of profit can be equalised only by industries which are inherently more profitable cross-subsidising those sectors which have a large quota of constant capital to sustain. This happens by commodities being sold above or below their value and by the movement of capital on the capital market.
The unit of Part III is the accumulated mass of material and machinery which must be engaged in production in order to maintain the rate of surplus value; thus the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.
This completes the structure of productive capital.
Part IV is the commercial capitalist, a capitalist firm which buys the products of industrial capital in order to sell more dearly, a necessary component of productive capitalism. In its pure form, however, commercial capital deals solely with forms of credit. It is speculative and does not contribute to creation of the social surplus at all.
Part V is the finance capitalist, a capitalist firm which lends money-capital without relinquishing ownership, and charges interest for its use. This is the universal form of finance capital; particular forms of finance capital include those firms who hire out the use of infrastructure such as warehouses or roads or platforms like Facebook or Google Earth.
In finance capital, function is divorced from ownership. The interest of finance capital in the expansion of credit serves only as a burden on the back of productive capital and the source of a new class antagonism.
Part VI, the last of the 15 units of Das Kapital, is the private landowner, a unit which plays no part in production whatsoever, but charges a levy on productive capital by means of its monopoly control of land. The private landowner is a redundant class, surviving only on the basis of an inherited monopoly of the land.
As can be seen, the writing of Das Kapital entails a critical study of Economic Science as it existed at the time, and isolating a series of distinct phenomena or problems which together constitute the nature of the whole process, and in each case identifying a single unit, which expresses the nature of that problem or phenomenon in a nutshell - like the elements of chemistry or the organisms of biology, in their simplest form as molecules or embryos, working together in a kind of ecosystem. Any phenomenon will be manifested in an array of such entities, but analysis will determine that one such unit which is the universal - the hydrogen atom or the single cell. All the aspects and problems can be revealed beginning from the examination of these units or germ cells.
The scientist must be able to determine which unit is fundamental to the domain of phenomena concerned: in this case, first of all: the commodity, Mr. Moneybags and the Banker. And then arrange the various units in order so as to reveal the conditions of existence of each successive unit in terms of simpler units. This is the method perfected by Hegel in his Logic.
Despite the conviction of many Marxists that Das Kapital is some kind of mirror of the Logic, as if Marx thought that capitalism was logical, every one of the categories of Das Kapital is an economic category, the content of which is represented in its units, ultimately social labour. Logic, on the other hand, is a science with no definite content whatsoever, just human practice in general. Every positive science has definite content, content which is captured in its units.
Nor was Hegel under the illusion that modern society was based on a “empty concept.” The content of the Philosophy of Right was not Being, but private property. Marx differed with Hegel on this point, and began from the active exchange of commodities, rather than simple private property.
Das Kapital is a work of science, but its categories are derived not just by analysis of modern society as it is found here and now, but from a study of the history of the development of modern economy. Its categories are both historical and logical. Marx’s use of history I call “categorical genealogy” and is key to Marx’s use of the dialectic.