F.E.D. Dialectics: Part 11. Marxian Theory Series. The «Aufheben» Character of the Expanded Reproduction of Capital. GLOBAL STRATEGICHYPOTHESES.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Part 11. Marxian Theory Series. The «Aufheben» Character of the Expanded Reproduction of Capital. GLOBAL STRATEGICHYPOTHESES.

Part 11. Marxian Theory Series.

The «Aufheben» [Dialectical]

Character

of the

Expanded Self-Reproduction of

[Industrial] Capital.

GLOBAL STRATEGICHYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure, and my honor, as an elected member of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.] General Council, and as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, Foundation discourses on key elements of Seldonian Psychohistorical Theory.

This 11th text in this such series is posted below [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia, to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].

Seldon –

“An individual capital, and, likewise, higher-scale aggregates thereof, up to the total social capital of an individual nation-state, and even beyond that, to the scale of aggregations of the global social capital of the world market, in each whorl in the helix of its “normal – successful – course”, the course of its --

^M—C<^L_OMP^{…P…C’— M’}

-- production-circulation-accumulation process, is an «aufheben» process, that is, a dialectical process, oft unrecognized as such.”

“In that process, capital-value, determinately, negates itself, in each of its steps of ‘“meta-morphosis”’ [cf. Marx], from Money-Capital to Commodity-Capital to Productive Capital to value-expanded Commodity Capital again, and thence to value-expanded Money-Capital again.”

“But also, in the first two of those steps, capital-value also conserves itself quantitatively, despite the qualitative change of its change of form, from M to C.”*

*[“The [deeper, capitalists’ – M.D.] use-value of money is that it can function as capital; it can [via wage-labor – M.D.:] ‘produce in its movement a definite surplus-value… besides conserving its original value’ [Marx: Capital III; my emphases – M.D.]. The capital commodity [e.g., money sold as capital via bank loans – M.D.] is distinct from other commodities in that [Marx: Capital III; my emphases – M.D.:] ‘the consumption of its use-value not only maintains its value and use-value but in fact increases it’.”

[Beverly Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, Verso, Brooklyn, NY, 2024, p. 172].]

“In the ellipsis dots after P, for Productive Capital, in Marx’s ‘capital-praxis algebra’, given above, for describing this process generically, capital-value continues to conserve itself, but also with an increment of itself added to itself, an increment of surplus-value –

^{C’ = C +}^D^C

^{M’ = M +}^D^M

-- so that it also elevates itself, quantitatively, to a new, higher, expanded scale of operation, e.g., from the very start of the succeeding whorl, thus fulfilling all three “moments” of the, dialectical, «aufheben» process.”

“But is this process just some kind of merely-quantitative “«aufheben»” process, and some merely flat-cyclical, circular, un-helical process, with changes of form, but no real ‘onto-dynamasis’; no qualitative expansion of ‘social kinds’; of ‘socio-ontology’?”

“No. Most decidedly NO!”

“There is also, quite regularly, and as a core part of the immanent essence of the industrial-capital ‘social relation of human-societal self-re-production’, a qualitative, socio-ontological advance in successive helical whorls, e.g., in the kinds of capital plant and equipment in use, and in the kinds of natural science in use, in successive scales of the P variable of Marx’s ‘capital-praxis algebra’ – in the technological kinds of the advancing ‘social self-force of human-societal self-re-production’, and in the ontological layer/scale depth of Nature that each successive Production technology, during the era of the capital-relation’s social predominance, appropriates up into the noospheric zone and stratum of ‘human Nature’.”

“There is also a – ‘qualo-quantitative’ – «aufheben» ontic process at work in these whorls of capital-value self-expansion, and of [‘qualo-quanto-fractal’] self-extension of scale.”

“There is such at work in the way in which earlier technologies’ equipments, and earlier scales of human Nature’s appropriation of pre-human/exo-human Nature, are determinately negated, but are also conserved and elevated up into the technological equipments of later, higher scales, of deeper pre-human/exo-human Nature appropriation, by human society.”

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, please see --

www.dialectics.info

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –