Capital Condensed: a Short Guide to Marx’s Capital for our age of Global Crises. Colin Chalmers, Beachy Head Press 2023. 140 pages, £11.23 ppbk
Communists always welcome the promotion of Karl Marx’s scientific thinking. His explanation of capitalism, now decaying as a social system, is the essential basis for an effective political struggle by the working class. Since the publication of Marx’s Capital, reviews and summaries have regularly appeared, marked by their immediate context. Friedrich Engels’ review of Capital,[1] published after capitalism had created a European and North American industrial and commercial working class, aimed to promote the building of an international working-class movement. Later, for example, Emile Burns’ Introduction to Marxism (1939)[2] was further concerned with imperialist war and urged for a dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialisation of the means of production.
Since the mid-20th century however, most western assessments of Marx have been decidedly different. We find many supposedly sympathetic academic publications praising Marx faintly to damn his analysis on all sorts of specious grounds or delivering educated sermons on Marx’s ‘incomplete’ project.[3] Differently, Chalmers’ laudable aim is to encourage young people to apply Marx’s method to their thinking and at the end of his booklet, he advertises his Capital reading groups (p111).
The key difficulty with Chalmers’ work is that the fact that capital is now in its imperialist stage is ignored, yet Marx’s Capital provides us with a full explanation of the material forces that would develop into imperialism, of state monopoly capital, a development that Lenin was able to substantiate. Chalmers refers to imperialism only after p82, but capital as imperialism is where the book should have started. Chalmers’ summary has expunged any connection to a workers’ revolution as the necessary response to their exploitation by capitalism. Capital is essentially a political book, and it is this neglect that spoils Chalmers account. His book’s subtitle refers to ‘our age of global crises’, yet we find nothing about contemporary reality, bar an opening reference to the environmental crisis. On page 1 he refers to the ‘human exploitation’ of nature. However, he then simply and fashionably asserts that Marx’s ‘Capital is more a book about ecology than an economics book’(p2), stating that an ‘ecocidal process of expansion’ (p2) is the character of capitalism today. His summary of Marx’s explanation of capital then follows in 18 short chapters but without slightest reference to this dramatic opening shot.
What are we to think of a ‘condensed’ version of capitalism that ignores its final stage, as imperialism, and avoids its disastrous environmental consequences, after a first nominal mention? Capital provides us with the keys to understanding the present, but Chalmers does not demonstrate this. Chalmers’ handbook is well intentioned, but he isolates the content of Capital from the present. For such a compressed text he generally provides an acceptable summary of the raw concepts in that work.
Taken on its own restricted terms however, with its narrow focus on the ‘economic’ aspect of the work, there are careless expressions that should not have been allowed. Marx’s approach was a genuinely scientific endeavour and carelessness in the use of the concepts and relations he explained must be avoided. The following slips have been made. Chalmers writes ‘value is measured in labour’ (p11), when of course value is only measured in money. He should say that value is the result of the socially necessary labour time performed by waged labour. He thus carelessly refers to the ‘amount of labour needed to produce the commodity’, not the time of abstract social labour performed (p18). Next, he apparently relapses into accepting the quantity theory of money (p12), a theory that wrongly assumes that commodities have no value before exchange. Subsequently he seems to treat trade credit as the only form of credit, until clarified on p99. He calls the ‘fetishism’ of commodities ‘an illusion’ (p15), a subjective error, rather than a real social force resulting from the commodities’ possession of value.
Later we are confusingly told that an increasing annual turnover of capital produces an ‘annual rate of profit’ that is ‘higher or lower than the rate of profit’ (p76-77). Here Chalmers muddles the annual mass of profit extracted, with the rate of profit on the same continuously reinvested capital sum within the same period. This weakness, the failure to treat simultaneously both the proportions and the absolute sums of a social product, reappears in his presentation of the interest rate. Chalmers states that ‘the rate of interest cannot be consistently higher than the functioning capitalist’s rate of profit without them going out of business’ (p96). However, this depends entirely on the mass of loans taken as ratio of total capital invested, and so the mass of interest paid out of the total surplus value. The rate of interest cannot simply be directly compared to the rate of profit for any valid conclusion of this sort to be drawn, unless the capitalist had no capital of his own, and only financiers existed.
The definitions of fictitious capital and the process of financial valuation are unsatisfactory. Fictitious capital is a paper claim against expected future capitalist exploitation, a confidence in potential exploitation that is then itself calculated and sold as a financial asset. The money sums claimed are estimated by the two dimensions of avarice, its extent and intensity, multiplying the number of claims by the expected return to the type of venture. This is speculation. It is not ‘the transformation of potential future earnings into commodities with the use value of being able to give their owner a profit’ (p100), whatever that might mean.
Chalmers provides a readable, bare bones, of Capital for the novice, which has evidently required some study, and which includes the important reminder that individual capitals have their own rates of exploitation and so individual rates of profit (p79 et seq), as a contribution to the formation of the general rate. This point is usually forgotten by observers drawing upon Marx when generalising about business in their reports on the class struggle. Chalmers correctly ensures that the reader understands that capital constantly builds up its own barrier to the development of the forces of production, by explaining the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
The booklet is readable, with a list of definitions at the end to aid the reader. Every book however has its own flaws. The motivated reader will be frustrated by Chalmer’s failure to provide references to the very many useful direct quotes from Marx that he uses in the text. The only three provided have no page or editions indicated. How is the reader going to follow all this through, even in Chalmers own reading groups? Nevertheless, putting aside the points made above, and given the very few such summaries available to young readers today, we conclude that if this book – as a starter – encourages the newcomer to deepen their study of Marx and Engels writings, then Chalmers’ effort will have been worthwhile. However, should a second printing ever be planned it would be hoped that these observations are considered.
Paul Bullock
[1] Engels’ review is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867/reviews-capital/dwochenblatt.htm. His Synopsis is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/
[2] Burns E, Introduction to Marxism, Gollancz 1939, Lawrence and Wishart 1971
[3] Eg Albritton R Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx, Pluto 2007
