The Grammar of Capital

Karl Marx’s Capital does not start with the commodity, it starts with wealth. This has enormous consequences, both theoretically and politically. To start with the commodity leads into the analysis of capitalism as a system of domination. To start with wealth and its movement in-against-and-beyond the commodity form takes the reader into a world of struggle. In Capital there are two antagonistic categorial series. The familiar series of the forms of domination: commodity, value, abstract labor, money, person, capital, profit, interest, rent. These forms have their own grammar: a positive logic that imposes itself on the flow of life. But there is also a series of subversive categories rebelling against the logical chain of derivation: wealth, use value, concrete labor or doing, anti-person, and so on. Here is a negative, defetishizing, detotalizing grammar that moves against the rigid cohesion of the first series.