After posting the three earlier “observations,” it occurred to me that I wasn’t quite right. I had misunderstood the role of the last Part in each of the three volumes of Capital. Not all of the Parts are perfect fits for the model set by Part I of Volume One, but each is a unique layer in the logico-historical reconstruction of capitalism. So all 17 of the parts of Capital are essential parts of the reconstruction of Political Economy. The last Part in each Volume completes one circle.
“Circle”? Hegel says that the Encyclopaedia is a “circle of circles.” The Encyclopaedia begins with Being – everything that is – whether fact or fiction. The Encyclopaedia then goes through the Logic, Nature and Spirit (which begins with living matter) up to Art, Religion and Philosophy, the unity of which is Being again but this time, not an abstraction, but encompassing the entirety of human practice. The Logic, Nature and Spirit, each do the same kind of circle in their own narrative.
Well Capital does the same. In the beginning of Volume One wealth presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.” At the end of Volume One, the same quantity of social labour presents itself as an accumulation of capital!
Volumes Two and Three do similar circles.
And the whole three volumes of Capital. A Critique of Political Economy does the same. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith stated that “Wages, profit, and rent, are the three original sources of all revenue as well as of all exchangeable value,” and having travelled through all the categories of political economy by immanent critique, Marx arrives at the final Part of Volume Three: “Revenues and their Sources” – the Trinity Formula. Capital thus completes the reconstruction of political economy as promised in “The Method of Political Economy” in the Grundrisse.