ABSTRACT
The title of Marx’s book is of course Capital, thereby clearly indicating the centrality of the concept of capital in his theory of capitalism. As Marx put it in the Grundrisse, the first draft of Capital:
The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it [is] the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself, whose abstract, reflected image [is] its concept …, [is] the foundation of bourgeois society.
(Marx 1973, 331; brackets in the text; emphasis added, including in the quotations below) In Capital, Marx introduced his central concept of capital in Part 2 of Volume 1, which is entitled “The Transformation of Money into Capital.” Chapter 4 is entitled “The General Formula for Capital,” and this general formula for capital is expressed symbolically as: https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315774206/66fb8276-83e7-4a35-a853-4938d60cf2cc/content/eqn_3.tif"/> M - C - M ′ w h e r e M ′ = M + Δ M in which M represents the initial money capital advanced to purchase means of production and labor-power, C represents commodities, M' represents the final money capital recovered through the sale of commodities, and ΔM represents the increment of money that emerges at the end of this circuit.