#heilbroner

Why does Marx begin Das Kapital with the commodity? Why not the business firm, the marketplace, or the system as a whole?

Capital can, and indeed must, assume physical form, but its meaning can only be grasped if we perceive these material objects as embodying and symbolizing an expanding totality. A human being cannot exist without flesh and blood, but the essence of humanness is that flesh and blood are in the service of an organizing purpose, a life force. So it is with capital. Without the organizing purpose of expansion, capital dissolves into material building blocks that are necessary but not sufficient to define its life purpose.

The New Deal had swept in on a wave of antibusiness sentiment; values and standards that had become virtually sacrosanct were suddenly held up to skeptical scrutiny and criticism. The whole conception of “business rights,” “property rights,” and “the role of government” was rudely shaken; within a few years business was asked to forget its traditions of unquestioned preeminence and to adopt a new philosophy of cooperation with labor unions, acceptance of new rules and regulations, reform of many of its practices. Little wonder that it regarded the government in Washington as inimical, biased, and downright radical. And no wonder, in such an atmosphere, that its eagerness to undertake large-scale investment was dampened by the uneasiness it felt in this unfamiliar climate. Hence every effort of the government to undertake a program of sufficient magnitude to mop up all the unemployed—probably a program at least twice as large as it did in fact undertake—was assailed as further evidence of Socialist design. And at the same time, the halfway measures the government did employ were just enough to frighten business away from undertaking a full-scale effort by itself. It was a situation not unlike that found in medicine; the medicine cured the patient of one illness, only to weaken him with its side effects. Government spending never truly cured the economy—not because it was economically unsound, but because it was ideologically upsetting.

Multinationals have brought two changes to the overall internationalization of capital. First, they have changed its geographic flows. In the days of classic imperialism, as we have seen, the objective of capitalist expansion was focused mainly on gaining access to raw materials or to markets for basic commodities, like textiles. The multinationals have turned away from these basic commodities toward the sorts of high-technology goods in which they are world leaders, such as computers and pharmaceuticals. The result has been a striking shift in the overseas allocation of capital. In 1897 almost half of American overseas capital was invested in plantations, railways, or mining properties. Today only a small fraction of our foreign investment is in those fields. Instead, the bulk of our overseas capital has moved into manufacturing, and three-quarters of the flow of international investment goes to Europe and Canada and other developed capitalist lands. So, too, the great preponderance of French or Japanese or German international investment seeks out locations in the developed world (including the United States), rather than in the old colonial parts of the globe.

[T]he process of empire building brought with it prosperity for the empire builders. No small part of the gain in working-class amenities which had so pleased the Committee on Depression was the result of sweated labor overseas: the colonies were now the proletariat’s proletariat. No wonder imperialism was a popular policy. Throughout all of this, the officialdom of economics stood to one side, watching the process of imperial growth with equanimity, and confining its remarks to the effect that new possessions might have on the course of trade. Again it was the critics of the underworld that focused attention on this new phenomenon of history. For, as they looked at the worldwide race for domination, they saw something very different from the mere exciting clash of politics or the inexplicable whims of personalities in power. They saw a whole new direction to the drift of capitalism; in fact, they saw imperialism as signaling a change in the fundamental character of capitalism itself. Still more significant, they divined in the new restless process of expansion the most dangerous tendency that capitalism had yet revealed—a tendency that led to war.

We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.

[H]e who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter

The absence of the idea of gain as a normal guide for daily life—in fact the positive disrepute in which the idea was held by the Church—constituted one enormous difference between the strange world of the tenth to sixteenth centuries and the world that began, a century or two before Adam Smith, to resemble our own. But there was an even more fundamental difference. The idea of "making a living” had not yet come into being. Economic life and social life were one and the same thing. Work was not yet a means to an end—the end being money and the things it buys. Work was an end in itself, encompassing, of course, money and commodities, but engaged in as a part of a tradition, as a natural way of life. In a word, the great social invention of “the market” had not yet been made.