Capitalist

Character Analysis

For most of Das Kapital, the capitalist is just capital personified (10.1.5). And capital is just the process of pursuing surplus-value, which is just Marx's fancy way of saying that capital is the process of making money.

Clear? No? Yeah, let's dig a little deeper.

Magic Formula

Let's look at that Chapter 4 formula describing capital and thus describing the capitalist: M-C-M'. In circulation (the movement of commodities in exchange), M-C-M' is the process or "circuit" of buying in order to sell. M stands for money, C stands for commodity, and M', or M-prime (yeah, Karl's totally into this kind of thing), stands for more money than the first M. You start off with moolah, and you buy a commodity—getting you to the C in the middle of M-C-M'—and then you sell that commodity to gain more moolah than you started with. Moolah prime.

Basically, it's like buying a baseball card and selling it once its value goes up.

Capitalists do their thing in the M-C-M' circuit, and the circuit has no limit (4.17), which means that the capitalists can just keep wheeling and dealing until the economy crashes or climate change kills us all. You have to start off with some money in order to get in on the M-C-M' action, and Marx suggests elsewhere that the original wads of cash entered the system in the form of theft or usurer's capital (now called finance capital, like interest on savings). Because a capitalist is a capitalist, he or she will keep undertaking M-C-M' to gain the extra money at the destination of the circuit.

Let comrade Marx tell you how it is:

M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the re-conversion of commodities into money: buying in order to sell. Money which describes the latter course in its movement is transformed into capital, becomes capital, and, from the point of view of its function, already is capital. (4.4)

And let him keep telling you how it is:

The process M-C-M does not therefore owe its content to any qualitative difference between its extremes, for they are both money, but solely to quantitative changes. More money is finally withdrawn from circulation than was thrown into it at the beginning [...] The complete form of this process is therefore M-C-M', where M' = M + ΔM, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call 'surplus-value'. (4.15)

In case you didn't catch that, Karl's basically saying that capital—or the capitalist—is the very process of seeking more money.

I've Got a Business to Run

Now, Marx's depiction of capitalists is kind of impersonal, but that's intentional: he thinks that's exactly the way to look at them. As he says, "It is evident that [the increasing of profit] does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist" (10.5.8).

So it doesn't matter if the capitalists are good guys or bad guys, or if they're nice or mean people. What matters is that competition forces each capitalist to steer toward profit as much as possible, because if he or she doesn't, his or her competitors surely will, and that will drive him or her out of business. The pressure of competition coerces each capitalist into profit-maximizing action: "Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him" (10.5.8).

Someone's Smirking

Still, on rare occasions, Marx does make it personal. When he describes capitalists, it's clear he doesn't like them at all. He paints the picture of a capitalist as someone who "smirks self-importantly and is intent on business" (6.23).

We wonder if Marx smirked when he wrote that.

He certainly quotes plenty of them in Chapter 10 to illustrate their opposition to factory reform. For example, consider E. F. Sanderson, owner of steel rolling-mills and forges, on the topic of ending child labor at night: "Great difficulty would be caused by preventing the boys under 18 from working at night. The chief would be the increase of cost from employing men instead of boys. I cannot say what this would be, but probably it would not be enough to enable the manufacturers to raise the price of steel, and consequently [the cost] would fall on [the adult male workers]" (10.4.10).

Well, that certainly speaks for itself.