"For Marx, capitalist domination does not reside exclusively within the workplace, nor is its full purview captured through its exercise by individual capitalists — although capitalism does indeed breed such 'republican' forms of domination. According to Marx, domination also resides, impersonally, within the practice of exchange itself. Even here, however, we need to be careful. Marx does not condemn the market as such, as some have recently suggested.
Early in Capital, Marx draws a distinction between selling in order to buy and buying in order to sell. Selling in order to buy has a rational logic and purpose. Captured in the circuit C–M–C (commodities transformed into money and back into commodities), selling in order to buy involves the sale of one’s commodities (including the wage-earner’s capacity to labor) in order to acquire money, to then in turn purchase goods or services for consumption and enjoyment. This circuit is very different than buying in order to sell, although completely imbricated with it. Depicted in the circuit M–C–M, buying in order to sell involves starting with money and using it to acquire commodities, labor power, and raw materials, in order to produce and sell different commodities — for more money.
Whereas selling in order to buy terminates with a 'rational' purpose, buying in order to sell has an 'irrational' logic to it. Buying in order to sell would be pointless if all the capitalist got from the process was the same amount of money they threw into exchange — that is, if M=M. Buying in order to sell only makes sense if more money is gained at the end of the process than what was thrown into it, only if M–C–M*, where M<M*. Buying in order to sell therefore does have a purpose — the ceaseless accumulation of money — but it is an irrational, arbitrary one. It requires the endless accumulation of money for its own sake. It is an end without an end, a purpose that can never be satisfied or resolved. Production is undertaken not to feed the hungry, house the desolate, or free the captive; rather, production is undertaken to yield more production, without regard to who is consuming its products or how. A host of contemporary ills follow from such an activity: the constant attempt to get more labor out of workers, the disemploying and stratifying (read: racialized and gendered) effects of organizational and technological change among businesses, and the remorseless degradation of the environment."
- Matthew Dimick, from "The Constitution Can Be a Weapon in the Battle Against Oligarchy." Jacobin, 25 October 2022.
