Capital

Capital is often described as money, factories, machinery, raw materials and other wealth used to make a profit. But these things are not capital by themselves. They become capital only under a particular set of social relations.

Capital is a social relation, not a thing

For instance, the existence of Black workers and fertile lands in the South more than a century ago did not create the wealthy slaveholders. Only a social system could do that — only the social recognition of slavery, with its laws, customs, chains, prisons and executioners, could maintain the slave system. In the same way, the massive machinery and other means of production in existence today do not by themselves equal capital. They are only the form capital takes under capitalism. As Marx put it, “A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital.”

The essence of capital is its social relation to the worker. The domination of the means of production over the producer is possible only because history, customs, culture, the courts and the prisons all dictate that it be so.

Capital is wealth that must expand

But capital is not simply accumulated wealth. It is wealth put to work to produce more wealth for its owner. The capitalist advances money to buy machinery, raw materials and workers’ labor power, and production returns more value than the capitalist started with. The source of that added value is living labor: workers produce more value during the working day than they receive back in wages.

Capital therefore has to keep moving and expanding. A capitalist who stops accumulating will eventually be overtaken by competitors who do not.

The monopolies are stored-up human labor

Consider the billions and billions of dollars worth of Jeff Bezos’ and Amazon’s capital. There are not enough one-dollar bills in existence to equal the value of Amazon — but dollars are only the name of the game, not the game itself.

In reality the billionaire monopolies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Nvidia are tremendous aggregations of the crystallized labor of millions upon millions of people over decades. They even represent stored-up human labor from centuries earlier. Their production is thoroughly social: workers spread across the world depend on one another’s labor, and mines, factories, warehouses, transportation systems, computer networks and generations of accumulated knowledge are all bound together in one enormous social process.

Yet this socially produced wealth is privately owned. The billionaires’ legal possession of it all gives them the right to do as they like with it. And they like profits.

Dead labor rules the living

Thus the achievements, sweat, blood, tears and daily grind of the living, and practically all the stored-up production of the dead — dead labor, so to speak — are used to enslave the living laborers today. In the words of Karl Marx, “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

Capital therefore appears to workers as an independent power standing over them. But this power is the product of human labor itself.

In a rational world the living laborer would be the master of the dead labor of the past. Capital would then no longer be capital — the possession of the capitalist. It would be transformed, reborn into its true form and essence: the accomplishments and creation of all of humanity, used by all of humanity for all of humanity.

Additional reading

Wage-Labour and Capital — by Karl Marx (1847). The source of this page’s core point — that a machine, or a human being, becomes capital or a slave only under definite social conditions — and an accessible introduction to how capital exploits wage labor.

Why Marx was right about capitalism needing to have periodic crises — by Mike Treen (2022). Why capitalism’s roughly decade-long booms and busts are not accidents or policy failures but are built into a system driven to expand production beyond what the market can absorb — crises of overproduction.