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Introduction. Actes du séminaire du premier livre du Capital : centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes (2022 – 2023)

Kaveh Boveiri

Le fétichisme numérique : lire Marx à l’ère du capitalisme dématérialisé

Laurence McFalls
This short essay suggests a possible update of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism for the contemporary age of digitalization and artificial intelligence. While the fictitious commodification of goods, notably that of human work transformed into labour power to be sold on the market, was necessary to capitalist accumulation, the advent of digital data and the extraction of their surplus value through metadata (ultimately including artificial intelligence) as one of contemporary capitalism’s major, if not primary, sources of accumulation requires that we rethink the place of (intellectual) labour in Marx’s thought. The autonomisation of digital processes for generating surplus value is leading to the human being’s complete alienation and crushing the modern subject, reduced today to the source and product of algorithms that are anything but revolutionary.

Marx et la méthode critique de l’économie politique

Étienne Simard
The article aims to identify the method employed in Book I of Capital. Since Karl Marx says little about his methodology, the author attempts to compensate for this by examining numerous commentaries on the work. Particular attention is given to the idea of continuity in this method, with a special focus on the contribution of Galvano della Volpe to the question.

Que faire des lois économiques naturelles dans Le Capital

Pierre-Olivier Lessard
While Marx is well known for having effectively criticized the naturalization of economic laws by bourgeois political economy, his own repeated use of the concept of “natural economic law,” within the first volume of Capital, is much less so. The aim of this short article is precisely to give an account of this use—at first sight paradoxical—by placing it in the context of his broader critique of political economy. Through the analysis of key extracts, we shall see that this critique operates through a double movement of denaturalization/naturalization of the capitalist economy, whose common function is to discredit the discourses that the capitalist and his theoretical interpreter hold on the world. It will thus be demonstrated that the naturalization of the economy produces a priori indeterminate effects and that their political content actually depends on the type of “nature” (fixed versus mutable) to which it refers.

L’armée industrielle de réserve chez Marx : retour sur l’un des facteurs de la loi générale de l’accumulation capitaliste

Nathan Brullemans
This article seeks to reassess the argumentative role played by the concept of the industrial reserve army (IRA) in Marx’s theory of accumulation. Marx considers the IRA to be a constituent part of the general law of accumulation. Marx’s great originality lies in exposing the structural integration of the phenomena of overpopulation with the imperatives of accumulation. The IRA is not just a result, but also a condition of possibility for accumulation in general, by allowing wages to be regulated in a combinatory manner with the other parameters of exploitation. Our reading of Marx thus conceives the formation of working-class overpopulation as a dynamic process that is linked to historically situated strategies of accumulation, what the author of Capital called “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption.” Marx’s vision of the IRA, however, is far from economistic. When the degree of overpopulation is unable to regulate itself, political and “extra-economic” means can be mobilized to limit labor mobility or force the integration of new populations into the proletariat pool.

Entre schéma historique et analyse spécifique : quel concept de contradiction ?

Christophe Gagnon-Richard
This paper focuses on the concept of contradiction in Marx’s work, especially in the first book of Capital. This survey aims to highlight the gap between two uses of this concept that coexist in Marx. The first one employs it in a general historical theory that explains the transitions from one mode of production to another through the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production of a given era. The second one uses it to describe the contradictory course of capitalist accumulation by showing how it is problematic according to its very own criteria. In this paper, we attempt to show that the second use does not necessarily imply the first one and that it must be preferred when reclaiming Marx’s concept of contradiction, as it avoids the deterministic and mechanistic deficiencies of the first use.

« Mirage » ou « Miroir ». Sur deux formulations d’une phrase dans deux postfaces du premier livre du Capital

Kaveh Boveiri
The current paper proposes an interpretation of a formulation made by Marx but found uniquely in the version of book one of Capital supervised personally by him.