Capital Redefined Audiobook - Episode 8 - Chapter 4
Channel: Common Alternatives
Date: 27/12/2023

Chapter 4 The modular architecture of capital

Abstract
This chapter introduces a modular framework that draws on the intersections between the Marxian theory of capital, critical realism, and the Aristotelian fourfold causation theory. The framework provides an inclusive approach that incorporates elements from these three theories, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of capital and its dynamics. It examines the concept of capital as ‘fetish value’ and its destructive operations, highlighting its erasure of ‘true value’ and the undermining of life’s self-sustenance. Capital is redefined as both “the product and the infra-process of perverting the fundamental causes of true value into the causes of fetish value. As the product, it is the corporeal manifestation of fetish value, and as the infra-process, it is essentially the abstraction and appropriation of fundamental commons.” The chapter redefines key Marxian concepts such as abstraction, reification, fetishization, and appropriation to illustrate the nature and architecture of capital. It delves into the infra-processes of de/commonization, which highlight how capital emerges and sustains itself through civilizing mechanisms, while also examining how counter-capital movements that aim to restore and reinvent true value can be incorporated into our theory of value.

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