Capital Volume One Essay

Karl Marx and Immanuel Wallerstein both use their works to tackle the idea of capitalism. Marx’s “Capital, Volume One” presents the key features of capitalism and defines capitalism in a rather basic way. Wallerstein’s Modern World-System theory defines capitalism in a similar way to Marx, but also expands upon this idea, bringing it to a world scale. Both Marx and Wallerstein define capitalism as the need for an endless accumulation of capital, but Wallerstein’s theory extends this idea and states that capitalism needs a global economy with a presence of core, peripheral and semi-peripheral states, all working with each other. Marx formed the basis to Wallerstein’s theory, so it is appropriate to start with him. Marx begins his book, “Capital,

The first is the simplest form of circulation, where a commodity is exchanged for money that is later exchanged for a different commodity. This form of circulation focuses on use-value, where someone has a surplus of one commodity and sells it to someone who has a greater use-value for this commodity in order to have enough money to buy a different commodity that has a high use-value to the original seller. In this situation, specialization is a key factor as different people specialize in different commodities and trade their commodities to buy others. The general formula of capital is the second kind of circulation, the one most seen in capitalist societies. In this, money is used to buy a commodity in order to later sell that commodity at a higher price, making a surplus-value (profit). This begins the capitalistic cycle where someone is repetitively buying some commodity solely to sell it, hoping to make a positive surplus-value. This general formula of capital is M → C → M’ where M is the money used to buy a commodity, C, and where M’ is the original exchange-value plus the surplus-value. (Marx 1867: 329-336) This type of circulation is essentially Marx’s basic idea of capitalism, where there is a never-ending lust for profit causing this cycle to occur over and over