The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx’s critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism .
The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour.
The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time.
The social relations of capitalism have penetrated slowly into all spheres of life to make wage labour the general condition of existence only in fairly recent times.
Capital creates space-time .
Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.
There is, in short, no ‘spatial fix’ that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.
Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism.
The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.
Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class.
If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.
But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained.
Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.
When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate.
Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.
Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.
The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.
If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, than capitalism is not long for this world.
The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast – chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.
There’s a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn’t have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.