English

Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory Of The Economic Power Of Capital

Despite a decade of crisis and social unrest, capitalism is in many ways stronger than ever before. Never before have such a large share of the global population and such large parts of life been so tightly woven into the social logic that Karl Marx identified as the ‘all-dominating economic power in bourgeois society’: capital. Capital is not a certain category of things, but rather a process in which things are used in a certain way, namely as a means of making money, i.e., purchasing and selling with the aim of accumulating wealth in its abstract, monetary form. In other words, capital is the valorisation of value. This thesis is an attempt to contribute to the explanation of how capital maintains its position as the ruling principle of the organisation of the reproduction of society. Earlier attempts to answer this question has tended to rely on the (often implicit) assumption that power essentially comes in two fundamental forms: violence and ideology. From such a perspective, the power of capital is explained with reference to either the guaranteeing of property rights by means of (the threat of) state violence or the ideological legitimisation of capitalist relations of prod

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