On Karl Marx’s Thought Of Capital Of Power

As an important theory in the theoretical edifice of Marx’s political economy,Marx’s idea of the power of capital condenses Marx’s critical attitude towards the capitalist mode of production,labor relations,class contradictions,the laws of capitalist development and capitalist private ownership.Throughout the recent years,the research results of the basic theory of Marx’s political economy can be found that the academic community is paying more and more attention to Marx’s idea of the power of capital.An examination of Marx’s idea of the power of capital shows that capital is not a purely political economy concept,but rather participates as a power relation in shaping bourgeois society throughout the process of capitalist production,becoming the supreme power that dominates bourgeois society.The discursive shift from capital to the perspective of examining the power of capital highlights Marx’s profound thinking behind the fact that capital has become a power relation,i.e.,that capital is not a mere thing,but a social relation mediated by things between people,and that the power relation is the most essential of this social relation.Obviously,in the course of Marx’s study of capitalist society,he did not simply study the mechanism of operation,the inner laws and the fundamental contradictions of capitalist economic life,nor did he readily make a profound mockery and criticism of the tragic situation of the capitalists’ enslavement of the hired workers,but he exposed the stage-by-stage nature of capital on the historical level.It has been proved that the transformation of capital from a factor of production to a factor of power in social relations did not come about out of nowhere.The process of enclosure and the establishment of capitalist private rights to land resulted in the "liberation" of a large number of peasants from the land in British society,and at the same time facilitated a major restructuring of the domestic industrial structure in the United Kingdom,with capital becoming a powerful force in shaping the face of the new relations of production.It is by examining the history of capital development from the process of historical natural development that Marx was able to analyze the historical position of capital and make a correct evaluation of it in a rational and scientific manner,and to perceive the power attributes of capital in the capitalist relations of production from the history of the generation of capital,so as to incorporate them into Capital,a masterpiece of political economy.On the one hand,as "the fruit of a lifetime of scientific research",Capital condenses all of Marx’s efforts and wisdom,and the idea of the power of capital contained in Capital is precisely the embodiment of Marx’s wisdom.In Das Kapital and its manuscripts,Marx’s exposure of the power of capital is gradual,following the sequence of "capital powerlessness","the power of capital",and "capital as power".This conceptual change shows the process of Marx’s understanding of capital from shallow to deep,and at the same time characterizes the process of expansion and deepening of capitalist production from point to point,from region to world.In Marx’s idea of the power of capital,there are four main forms of capital power: first,the power of money as purchasing power;second,the power to manage,supervise and regulate as a management function;third,the technological power of accumulated "dead labor" to dominate the "living labor" of wage labor;and fourth,the social power to control bourgeois society.In the production process,the power of capital manifests itself in acts of private power on behalf of the personification of capital,such as increasing the intensity of labor,lengthening the working day and adopting the factory system.In essence,the generation of capital power stems from the intrinsic prescriptive nature of capital for the multiplication of value,and its expansion is subordinated to the fundamental purpose of capital multiplication.Thus,the expansion of the private power of individual capitalists is manifested in the process of capitalists’ exploitation and capitalization of surplus value,and the higher the degree of capitalization,the more the capitalists’ appropriation of social wealth,the greater their private power.However,under the logic of capital,the expansion of the private power of the capitalist inevitably leads to the socialization of inherent contradictions,which increasingly becomes a fundamental contradiction that is difficult to resolve within capitalism.On the other hand,an examination of the analytical progression of Marx’s ideas on the power of capital must be based on Marx’s analysis of the logical reasoning of Capital on the nature of capital in Capital.In Capital and its manuscripts,Marx regarded capital as the economic power that dominates everything in bourgeois society.Behind the linkage of "goods" based on the "vast accumulation of commodities" is the capitalist’s use of the element of commodities as an intermediary of power to realize domination,possession,and control over the real world.From a static point of view,the dominant social wealth of the capitalist mode of production is manifested in the huge accumulation of commodities,and this is the basis for exposing the secret of capital’s power.It is from the most intuitive material carrier of "commodities" that Marx exposes the unequal power of capitalist value exchange.Behind the capitalist exchange of commodities is an unequal exchange relationship shaped by the capitalists’ possession of the huge means of production.From a dynamic point of view,Marx examines the process,forms and principles of domination and rule of capital power in each of the four links of production,circulation,distribution and consumption,including the internal logic of the power of commodity exchange and the power relations of human beings mediated by objects,to explain in depth and trace the reality of the process of the construction of the power of capital,and to probe into the root of why capital can become the supreme power of the world of the capitalists.In addition to this,the Marxian idea of the power of capital projects the inherent mechanism by which the employed worker becomes completely enslaved,dominated and ruled.Under capitalist privatization,the power of capital must achieve its overall domination over the working class through the vast array of commodities created by the working class,and it is only through the constant production of commodities by the working class that the power of capital can continue to dominate the working class.In criticizing the process of capitalist production,Marx further exposes the true nature of the power of capital: the power of capital creates a world for itself according to its own face,constructing "the economic and class domination of free competition and of the social and political systems compatible with free competition" based on the system of surplus-value production.Viewed from a modern perspective,Marx’s idea of the power of capital exposes the inherent logic of power relations implicit in the social relations of production of capitalist societies in the industrial era,and provides a profound theoretical perspective for examining the platformization and digitization of capital.In the digital era,the digitization and platformization of capital power has become a new form of capital power,and all the elements of capital under the control of capital power have been transformed from the material elements of the industrial era to the data elements based on advanced technology carriers in the information era.Based on this change,Marx’s idea of capital power has continued to exert its profound theoretical value and become a theoretical guide for understanding the type of capital and its role under the conditions of socialist market economy.