Marx’s Biggest Idea, or Six Features of Capital (On the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital)

• Authors: Kozlowski Michal
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

150th anniversary of Marx’s Das Kapital calls for yet another contemporary evaluation of Karl Marx’s legacy. The article argues that Marx’s most important and the longest standing contribution into social science is not „historical materialism” nor any particular form of “critical theory” – it is the concept of capital as a specific mode of creating value. The article seeks to extract the six major features of capital as described by Marx and demonstrate their conceptual originality and novelty. It also shows how numerous contemporary social scientist borrow and apply this category to the fields quite remote from Marx’s own research terrain. But the fact of multiplicity of capitals and quite remarkable homologies between them should not lead us to premature conclusion namely that the social world can be adequately represented as a system or hierarchy of capitals.

Keywords

EN

Karl Marx; Capital; Social Relation; Social Resource; Division of Labor; Exploitation; Symbolic Capital; Production; Political Economy; Theory of Value; Social Science; Valorization

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Warszawski
• Journal: Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 21-27

Dates

published

2017-12-15

Contributors

author

Kozlowski Michal

• Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw

References

• Bourdieu, Pierre. “The forms of capital”. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson. New York-Westport-London, Greenwood Press, 1986.
• Engels, Frederick. Origins of Family The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Alternate translation. New York: International Publishers, 1933.
• Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London- New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Locke, John. Second Treatise of the Government. Cambridge, Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1980.
• Marx, Karl. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, London, 1976.
• Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. Collected Works. Vol.42, London: Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book, 2010.

Identifiers

DOI

10.26319/2912