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chapter 11 primitive accumulation There is a marked shift in tone, content and method in part 8 of Capital. To begin with, it goes against the central presumption of the rest of the book, established back in chapter 2, where Marx accepts Adam Smith’s theoretical world of atomistic market exchange in which freedom, equality, property and Bentham rule in such a way that all commodity exchanges occur in a noncoercive environment of properly functioning liberal institutions. Smith knew perfectly well that this is not how the world actually is, but he accepted it as a convenient and compelling fiction on which to build a normative political economic theory. Marx, as we have seen, takes this all on board in order to deconstruct its utopianism. By this strategem, Marx was able to show, as we saw in the last chapter, that the closer we get to a regime of liberal market action, the more we will find ourselves confronting two significant consequences. The minor consequence is that the decentrali...

Considerable attention has been paid in the preceding chapters to the various ways in which relative and absolute surplus-value can be procured. When Marx sets up a conceptual bifurcation of this kind, he invariably brings the duality back into a state of unity: finally, there is only one surplus-value, and its two forms are conditional on each other. It would be impossible to gain absolute surplus-value without an adequate technological and organizational basis. Conversely, relative surplus-value would have no meaning without a length of working day that allowed the appropriation of absolute surplus-value. The difference is only one of capitalist strategy that “makes itself felt whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value” (646). As usually happens when Marx moves to a point of synthesis, he both highlights materials already presented and takes them to a different vantage point whence it is possible to see the terrain of capitalism in a novel way. The new perspec...