Abstract

Wolf investigates the consequences of the missing elaboration of the reproduction of labour power for the enlarged reproduction of capital. The issue of the forms of reproduction of labour power, which Marx skipped in his drafts for Volume II, raises issues of both gender and ecology for an adequate analysis of the comprehensive reproduction process of capital in Volume III. This leads him to identify a deeper absence of ‘living labour’ in Marx’s dialectical presentation of the forms of reproduction of capital, as it dominates modern societies. The missing elaboration of the cycle of metamorphoses undergone by variable capital and labour power is reconstructed on the level of Marx’s analysis of the metamorphoses of capital, on that of the comprehensive process of capital, as well as in the transition to the economic surface of the trinity formula. This absence is simultaneously regarded as a symptom of the specific concentration of Marx’s critique of political economy on issues of economics, and of the need to supplement his reconstruction of the comprehensive process of capital leading to his reconstruction of the economic surface of modern capitalist societies by other dimensions of material reproduction, as in the dimensions of gender, of ecology, and geography. This leads to the idea of supplementing the critique of political economy with other critiques following its paradigm but not dependent on it.