Book contents
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present
- Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class
- Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets in Contemporary India
- Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class Analysis in/for the Global South
- Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India
- Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States
- Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
- Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging Zone of Global Horticulture
- Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India through Marx’s Method
- Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s ‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’
- Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
- Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism
- Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
- Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/Visible Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry
- Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee
- Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber-Field’ in COVID Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter Seven - Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2022
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present
- Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class
- Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets in Contemporary India
- Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class Analysis in/for the Global South
- Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India
- Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States
- Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
- Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging Zone of Global Horticulture
- Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India through Marx’s Method
- Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s ‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’
- Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
- Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism
- Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
- Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/Visible Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry
- Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee
- Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber-Field’ in COVID Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Abstract
There has been a tendency in academic scholarship of the contemporary capitalist system not only to limit analyses to the confines of specific disciplines with established concepts, analytical categories and methods, but also to focus on realms of production, exchange and finance as distinct from each other. This decoupling is clear within economics with the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘financial’. By contrast, the integrated nature of production, exchange and finance is stressed by Marx in Capital, Volume II as he examines economic reproduction in its totality. While Volume II is centred on the market place, as opposed to production in Volume I or finance in Volume III, it has at its heart the notion of the commodity as the unity and contradiction between use-value and exchange-value. Volume II develops Marx's reproduction schema by examining the constant intertwining of appearance and disappearance of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital from the sphere of circulation into the sphere of production and back again. In doing so, this schema highlights the unity and contradiction between the two spheres and provides clear guidance for identifying both sites and subjects of research that have largely been analysed separately. This chapter elucidates the influence of Volume II on recent analyses of the changing social relations of production of coffee commodity chains that examine not only the relationships between merchants, traders and workers that transform and transport coffee into an object for consumption, but also the money-owner, money-lender and money-manager operating on international financial exchanges as their interests and operations interact with those of commodity chain actors.
Introduction
Marx begins his analysis in Capital, Volume I with the commodity. The commodity, or more precisely its production by commodified and exploited labour, has been the subject of much study by scholars inspired by Marx's analysis. Notable are contributions inspired by world systems approaches that have tackled the historical political economy of capitalism through in-depth studies in the evolution of the ways in which the production and exchange of single commodities have been organized globally.
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- Marx in the Field , pp. 91 - 102Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021