Capitalist Production and the Law of Value

It is always impressive to read how sharply Marx distinguishes three different historical characters, as presented in the forms of a commodity economy, the labour process and the capitalist economy, in just a small number of pages of chs. 6 and 7 of the first volume of Capital . In ch. 6 Marx has defined free workers in the double sense as an essential precondition for capitalist production in his theory of the transformation of money into capital. In ch. 7, after that definition however, he does not immediately analyse the capitalist process of production. In the first section of ch. 7, Marx investigates the labour process as the universal condition common to all forms of society. This is noteworthy, since the substantial content of capitalist production is designed to be studied from this ch. 7. The distinction between the labour process in general and the capitalist process of production is unique to Marxian economics, and important for Marxian socialism as well as for the economic theory. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.