Capital as a social relation

Anwar Shaikh

pp. 72-78

in: John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, Peter Newman (eds), Marxian economics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

Taken by itself, a sharp stone is simply a relic of some ancient and inexorable geological process. But appropriated as a cutting instrument, it is a tool or, in a somewhat more murderous vein, a weapon. As a stone, it is a natural object. But as a tool or weapon, it is an eminently social object whose natural form is merely the carrier of the social relations which, so to speak, happen to have seized upon it.