Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2022
Abstract
Capital exists in a great variety of forms and configurations both historically and in the contemporary period. Yet, appropriate concepts and frameworks for capturing this diversity remain underdeveloped. This chapter argues that a fruitful methodological approach to grapple with this diversity of capital is by deploying a key but underexplored concept in Marx of ‘fraktions’ – fractions of capital. This concept highlights a relatively cohesive group within a class having a comparatively distinct location within the process of capitalist social reproduction and concrete sociopolitical interests which may be contradictory to other strata, even as it shares with them the same relationship to productive property and the process of accumulation. The chapter proposes three dimensions along which fractions within a class can be identified: a spatial dimension which identifies capital-accumulating classes in various locations; a scalar dimension which highlights the existence of capital at different scales of operation and a social origin dimension, which recognizes that modern capitalist classes transmute from prior social groups and that their origins stamp their current form in determinate ways. Using this framework and drawing from a variety of examples from the Global South, including the author's own fieldwork in rural and small-town Pakistani Punjab, the analysis highlights how a more concrete study of the different forms of capital can be undertaken which is sensitive to both the specificities of capital in different contexts as well as the threads that bind social groups despite their diversities.
Introduction
One of the main criticisms levelled against Marx's conception of class is its highly abstract nature. Throughout much of the three volumes of Capital, as well as in his most widely read works, he simplifies the class structure of capitalist society to the bourgeoisie and proletariat, sometimes including ‘landowners’ as a separate group. This simplified schema was obviously created as a necessary abstraction since the subject matter of Capital is not the concrete class structure of specific capitalist societies but an analysis of the ‘laws of motion’ – to use his own expression – of capital in general.
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