Language Sciences 33 (2011) 689–694

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Language Sciences

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate / langsci

Value for money? Putting Marx through the mill

Peter E JonesCommunication Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 4 May 2011

Keywords:CommoditiesLabour theory of valueIntegrationismMarxian economics

0388-0001/$ - see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.langsci.2011.04.016

E-mail address: P.E.Jones@shu.ac.uk

a b s t r a c t

Marx’s analysis of commodities and the labour theory of value is examined in light of theintegrationist principle that signification is a product of communication. An interrogationof Marx’s version of the labour theory of value seems to suggest that his treatment is com-patible with integrationist principles. Marx’s position appears to be exceptionally wellthought through and free from the uncritical banalities, reifications and mystifications thatare all too common in economic theorising.

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1. Integrationism and economics

Roy Harris’s integrationist excursions into the realm of economics, as typically telling and insightful as they are, have sofar been brief and sporadic, largely parenthetical in relation to other lines of argument (as, for example, in relation to theinvariance of the sign in Harris, 1996, p. 91). But economic theory is certainly fair game for integrationism, as Harris notesin the same passage: ‘Economic behaviour is itself a case of communicational behaviour’ (1996, p. 91). It is from that notethat I take my cue here.

Interestingly, in one of these passing references, Harris hints at his own preferences in the domain of economic theory:

‘the integrationist’s claim that signification is a product of communication, rather than a value predetermined by anyfixed code, is by no means a refusal to accept that traditions of sign-making exist (any more than claiming that economicvalue is a product of human labour involves denying the existence of traditional practices of production, exchange, pay-ment, etc.). But it is a refusal to erect such traditions into theoretical systems which can be invoked to explain and delimitin advance what it is possible for a sign to signify’ (1996, p. 245; my emphasis).

The wording implies that Harris is endorsing or, at least, entertaining the view that ‘economic value is a product of humanlabour’, a view commonly known as ‘the labour theory of value’. But Harris does not go on to elaborate on this remark.

This, then, is my pretext for taking a closer look from an integrationist, or at least would-be integrationist, perspective atone classic statement of this economic doctrine, namely the famous (indeed, infamous) analysis of the commodity in KarlMarx’s Capital (Marx, 1973), one of the ‘books that shook the world’ (Wheen, 2006). My explorations will not be going veryfar, the apprehensive reader might be relieved to know, given the legendary difficulty of the text. But I thought it might beentertaining to see whether Marx’s theory of value is compatible to any degree with the principles of integrationist semiol-ogy. To that end, I will give an account of Marx’s initial approach to the problem which I will scrutinize, probe, poke andworry on the basis of the principles and categories of Harris (1996).

Leaving to one side any consideration of the political context and implications of Marx’s work, let us then plunge intoCapital and see what we find.

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2. The oddity of the commodity

The opening sentence to Marx’s Capital is as follows:

‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘‘immense collection of com-modities’’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysisof the commodity’ (1973, p. 125).

Marx notes that a commodity can be seen from two different sides depending on the kinds of activity in which it is in-volved. The wedding ring has (or may have) a use in the wedding ceremony (its ‘use-value’ in Marx’s terms). But it may bebought and sold at a particular price (its ‘exchange-value’). Thus, objects, by virtue of the web of social connections spunaround them, become the two-sided, or two-faced, entities we call commodities.

Marx is not primarily interested in the use-value (i.e. usefulness) of commodities, merely noting that its being useful (tosomebody) is essential to the commodity’s having exchange-value since things which nobody wants would not fetch a priceat all. What Marx is interested in is how products come to have an exchange-value in the first place and how particularexchange-values are determined.

He immediately discounts any possibility that the uses or usefulness of an object could account for its value, for howwould you measure or compare usefulness? Is a chair as useful as a loaf of bread? Is a diamond more useful than a dictio-nary? In particular circumstances we may be able to answer such questions on the basis of pressing need: if I want to knowthe standard spelling of a word the dictionary will be useful and the diamond not at all. But no matter how pressing my spell-ing need, the diamond will still set me back a lot more than the dictionary. The scarcity or abundance of objects, on the otherhand, will be a factor in what people will pay for them, as the ticket tout knows well. But that cannot explain differences inprice between commodities when they are equally abundant. There may be no shortage of toilet paper or HD TV sets, but youwill fork out 50p for one and £500 for the other.

Of course, there is nothing stopping you letting go of something for peanuts if you are so inclined. If you own a TV retailbusiness you could flog your new Panasonic 30’’ model for 50p a throw. But you would not be in the retail business for verylong if you do. So an account of exchange-value cannot possibly be about individuals making choices of this kind but must beabout the kind of practices that you have to engage in order to stay in business. Giving products away or, conversely, beinguncompetitive on price, would not keep the firm afloat. The ‘objectivity of commodities as values’ (Marx, 1973, p. 138) issomething that the retailer (and all the other players in the economic game) can neither alter nor ignore. In terms of com-municational philosophy, then, Marx is not a ‘choice theorist’ (Harris, 1996, Chapter 3). Nor is he basing his account on theintentions of the people concerned (Harris, 1996, Chapter 4). In Harris’s terms, Marx has begun his analysis of the commodity‘by investigating the restrictions imposed on participants by the integrational relations obtaining between one communica-tion process and another’ (1996, p. 43).

Although the concept of ‘exchange-value’ has been illustrated above by mentioning the price of commodities, Marxleaves money out of the equation to start with. His reason is simple: money is also a commodity and it comes intothe picture only because it also has ‘exchange-value’. So ‘exchange-value’ needs to be explained first before we canunderstand how a commodity can come to play the role of money and what that role is. Before we can understandhow it is that commodities change hands for money, we must first understand how commodities change hands withoutmoney:

‘Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchangefor use-values of another kind’ (1973, p. 126).

In other words, ‘exchange-value’ does not ‘appear’ at all – there would be no such thing – if products were not exchanged.In self-sufficient family units who grow, make and consume all their own produce, for example, no exchange takes place,hence no exchange-value. But if they produce more than they can use, or have a need for products which they do not makethemselves, they may exchange their surplus for the surplus products of other families or communities. Exchange-value willthereby ‘appear’ in the acts of equating a certain type and number of products from family A with a certain type and numberof products from family B.

Despite the discomfort we might feel at this talk of exchange-value ‘appearing’ (as if it was hanging about some-where waiting for its entrance cue), we might just take him to mean that this ‘quantitative relation’ is the phenom-enon of economic value in its most simple and basic form and, consequently, the starting point of his investigation.If we were to give his approach an integrationist spin we might say that exchange-value is a very particular com-municational phenomenon. When A and B exchange their products they are jointly creating signs of a very specifickind. The nub of the process is in a circumstantially enacted equivalence between numbers of products of differentkinds.

Marx’s account continues:

‘Let us now take two commodities, for example corn and iron. Whatever their exchange relation may be, it can always berepresented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance 1 quarter ofcorn = x cwt of iron’ (1973, p. 127).

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Marx explores this equivalence:

‘What does this equation signify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things,in 1 quarter of corn and similarly in x cwt of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither theone nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing’ (1973, p,127).

This ‘third thing’ Marx will call ‘value’ and will, on that basis, refer to commodities as ‘values’ (1973, p. 126). His argumentis that exchange-value (the relation of equivalence between two commodities as above) ‘cannot be anything other than themode of expression, the ‘‘form of appearance’’, of a content distinguishable from it’ (1973, p. 127), that content being ‘value’.

3. Marx on the ropes?

Now at this point it looks as if we may have something to get our integrationist teeth into. Does Marx’s case even faintlyhold up in integrationist terms? In particular, from the pragmatic ‘equating’ of corn and iron in the act of exchange does itnecessarily follow that ‘a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things’?

At first glance this sounds like an unwarranted metaphysical assertion. Marx seems to have mistaken the contextualizedsign-making of the act of exchange (in which individuals, in the furtherance of their own goals, ‘equate’ their different prod-ucts) for a situation in which some ‘element’ already present within these products ‘expresses itself’ by means of their act ofexchange. Marx appears to be guilty of a crude reification – even a ‘fetishism’ – by inventing some substance, some myste-rious ‘third’ element allegedly intrinsic to the product itself that determines the proportion in which it is exchanged for otherproducts. He seems to be explaining human behaviour on the basis of the economic properties of things rather than explain-ing these properties on the basis of human behaviour.

Furthermore, has not the example of family A above already demonstrated that products do not actually contain ex-change-value as an intrinsic property at all since they simply do not have exchange-value until they are exchanged. Andif they have no exchange-value they cannot have any ‘value’ either; there is simply no ‘common element’ floating roundin the first place.

So what ‘common element’ could Marx possibly have in mind? Things take an even more mysterious turn when heannounces:

‘This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities’ (1973, p.127).

This extraordinary claim might look like a further step in the process of mystification which Marx is forced to take as aresult of his initial reification: first we have a mythical ‘element’ which expresses itself as exchange-value and then it turnsout that actually we do not have an element so much as a will ‘o the wisp. Our integrationist probing seems to have caughtMarx in a clear case of attempted, but unsuccessful, sleight of hand.

4. Exchange-value as integration

How could we re-cast Marx’s account in integrationist terms? Perhaps we could argue that what, following Marx, we havebeen referring to as ‘the exchange-value’ of a commodity is not the sign of, and certainly not the ‘appearance’ of or ‘expres-sion’ of, an ‘element’ of some kind which the commodity contains in advance of the exchange. Rather, exchange-value is acommunicational construct, a dimension merely of the human activity of exchanging commodities. More specifically, it is anintegrational ‘value’, i.e. a semiological means by which the activities of the separate parties to the exchange are integrated inpractice. Since it is a function of the exchange, it is inseparable from the act of exchange itself and cannot be an independentsubstance or ‘content’. The attribution of an exchange-value (a value in exchange) to their products by the parties concernedis their way (perhaps the only way open to them) of ending up with the products they need on the basis of the products theyhave. Accordingly, it makes no sense whatever to think of the signs by which the behaviours of the parties are integrated inthe exchange as signs of something existing independently of the exchange: rather, in the act of exchange the corn is made into a‘sign’ of the iron, and, simultaneously, the iron into a ‘sign’ of the corn.

The sceptical integrationist may go on to point out that there many different kinds of ‘equivalence’ which may be be-stowed on things as a function of their role in integrating human activities. Some of these types of equivalence may beviewed as substitutions of one kind or another. As Harris (1996, p. 125) argues, casino chips may serve as equivalents for,or substitutes for, money while on casino premises. Or, in some cases a diagram of a machine may substitute for the realmachine (1996, p. 125). Or in some cases the written word sheep may substitute for the spoken word or vice versa. In allcases, the equivalence (or substitution-relation) concerned is not the reflection or expression of some intrinsic or inherentsameness, identity or ‘common element’ in the phenomena being equated but a semiological construct created via the con-textualized integration of relevant activities.

Similarly, then, Marx’s equation signifies not the presence of an identical element, some ‘third thing’, but the simple factthat, under specific circumstances created and defined by particular parameters of human action, one thing may besubstitutable for another. The equivalence concerned in this case is a function of a particular activity context. Marx’s mistake,

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on this interpretation, is to take the contextualized integrational equivalence for the appearance of a substance or elementalready in place before the integrating is achieved.

Marx’s horse has fallen at the first hurdle. Or has it? Let’s look a little further.

5. Weighty measures: Marx bounces back?

Marx might counter the objection to his analysis by pointing out that the objector has set out an interesting case but onewhich has not taken us very far. In particular, the integrationist re-formulation of the phenomenon of exchange-value hasnot told us much about exactly what activities are being integrated through the signs created in the act of exchange. Norhave we been told why these activities, whatever they are, require, in order that the exchange might take place at all, thecreation of signs which take precisely this form, namely the form of a quantitative equivalence between use-values ofany type you like. Finally, and most importantly, the objector has not given any leads on the very thing that Marx is attempt-ing to explain, namely the proportions in which different commodities are exchanged for one another.

Furthermore, Marx may argue that the objector, in taking exchange-value as a semiological ‘value’ created in the act ofexchange itself rather than as the appearance of a property of the products exchanged, has overlooked the fact that ‘the prop-erties of a thing do not arise from its relations to other things, they are, on the contrary, merely activated by such relations’(1973, p. 149). In illustration of his point Marx offers an analogy:

‘A sugar-loaf, because it is a body, is heavy and therefore possesses weight; but we can neither take a look at this weightnor touch it’ (1973, p. 148).

Suppose, by use of a set of weighing scales, we establish that a certain quantity of iron weighs the same as the sugar-loaf:

‘When we throw both of them into the scales, we see in reality that considered as weight they are the same, and thereforethat, taken in the appropriate proportions, they have the same weight’ (1973, p. 149).

Thus on the one hand we have our completely different objects – the sugar-loaf and the lump of iron. But on the otherhand, ‘considered as weight, they are the same: there is an ‘identical magnitude’ in respect of weight in each. Thus, we havefound our ‘common element’, our ‘third thing’, which is different from both the sugar-loaf and the iron, and this third thing isweight. Of course, we cannot isolate weight from the objects which have it; we cannot put the sugar-loaf’s sugar-loafiness onone side and examine its weight separately. On the other hand, when we make these two objects interact with one anothervia the mechanism of the weighing scales, we see that the sugar-loaf and the iron recognize one another, so to speak, asequals; they address one another, as it were, in the language of weight in complete abstraction from all those properties thatotherwise differentiate them.

Furthermore, although we may agree that it is people (and not weighing scales) who are doing the weighing and mea-suring here (a nod to Harris, 2009, Chapter 14), we cannot get away from the fact that measuring the weight of objects pre-supposes that objects have certain natural affinities and properties independently of and prior to our interventions which weexploit in order to further our particular ends. In other words, while we are the creators of weights and measures we are notthe creators of weight per se, or, to be more exact, of the natural property or relation on which our weighing practices de-pend. Thus, we have identified a property of objects which ‘expresses itself’ in our actions of weighing and measuring them.In Marx’s Hegelian terminology, weight is the ‘form of appearance’ of this property.

So if we are prepared to entertain the existence of a ‘common element’ (in this case the property underlying weight) as aprecondition of our contextualized communicative acts of measuring weight (by means of scales and standards of weightsand measures) without accusations of reification and mystification, then why should we not entertain the possibility that a‘common element’ underlies the contextualized communicative acts of equating commodities in exchange? Just as weight isnot created in the act of weighing, nor is value created in the act of exchange, Marx might say. And just as this common ele-ment we call ‘weight’ does not show itself separately unless and until one weighty object is put into a relation with anothersuch object, then value remains similarly invisible unless and until the object containing it is put into relation with othervalue-containing objects via exchange. At this point, as Marx puts it, ‘the analogy ceases’ (1973, p. 149). Weight is a ‘naturalproperty common to both bodies’, he argues, while value is ‘a supra-natural property’, ‘something purely social’ (1973, p.149).

But the objector is not convinced. Marx’s argument may have some force for weight but he has entirely failed to justifythe relevance of the analogy to his hypothetical ‘supra-natural’ element, value. Let us grant that weight is (or expresses) anatural property of the object, a property independent of human observation or interference. But that cannot apply to theputative value ‘element’ which, as ‘something purely social’, is clearly entirely dependent on human action. Marx’s pointabout properties being ‘activated’ rather than created may, again, have some truth to it for natural processes but is wayoff when it comes to semiological ones. Indeed, to go back to our example of family A, unless a very particular ‘communi-cational infrastructure’ (Harris, 1996, p. 24) is in place, products are not commodities at all and therefore have no exchange-value (hence no value). So the analogy does not lead us anywhere.

But Marx’s position might be defended by extending his analogy still further. After all, we should acknowledge the factthat it is possible to create circumstances in which heavy objects are weightless. During space flight or in conditions of rapiddownward acceleration, objects have no weight. But we would not want to conclude from this that the property underlying

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weight was a creation of ours in particular circumstances. We might rather be inclined to conclude that a property intrinsicto objects (i.e. ‘mass’) ‘appears’ or ‘expresses itself’ in different ways depending on the context. That the products made byfamily A have no exchange-value (no value) within the family does not mean, therefore, that these products do not have aproperty which, under different circumstances, may ‘appear’ as exchange-value. From this point of view, the claim that ex-change-value is a semiotic value created in and by the act of exchange itself is therefore OK provided that we understand it tomean what we mean by saying that the weight of an object is a semiological value created in and through the act of weigh-ing: just as objects need to have some property (mass) as a precondition of our weighing them, then commodities need tohave some property (value) as a precondition of us exchanging them in definite proportions. In weighing objects, as inexchanging them on the market, we are not ‘creating’ this property but ‘activating’ it.

6. The ‘third thing’?

Let’s say that our objector remains sceptical but is unable to see any point in continuing the argument on this basis. Solet’s just get down to brass tacks: what is this ‘common element’ that Marx claims is making itself manifest in the act ofexchange?

We’ve already established that as use-values ‘commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they canonly differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value’ (1973, p. 128). From this, Marx moves to hisconclusion:

‘If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour’ (1973, p.128).

Marx argues that the value of the commodity, a property which is not created but ‘activated’ in the act of exchange, de-pends upon its being the product of a certain amount of expenditure of human effort. Now, obviously, all goods produced inany form of community at any point in history require people to put time and effort in. But only under certain very specialsocial conditions do the goods produced become commodities, which means that it is only under these conditions that thetime and effort put in by the producers turns into value:

‘Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who workindependently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour ofsociety. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specificsocial characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange. In other words, the labour of the privateindividual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act ofexchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers’ (1973, p. 166).

On that basis, Marx is able to take on board the integrationist’s insistence on the necessary role of the act of exchange inthe creation of exchange-value as a semiological construct by seeing exchange-value as the pragmatically unavoidablemeans via which private labours (the time and effort that individual producers are putting into their products, i.e. the ‘com-mon element’) are integrated – ‘reconciled’ you might say – as they pass into the wider sphere of society as a whole:

‘It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinctfrom their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility’ (1973, p. 166).

On this basis it is easy to understand the quantitative relations between qualitatively different products:

‘How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘‘value-forming substance’’,the labour contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured onthe particular scale of hours, days etc’ (1973, p. 129).

But Marx gives this point a further twist. It would be quite wrong, he argues, to think that you could tot up the days, hoursand minutes that you spent making some article and expect to get back the equivalent of your labour time in a correspondingnumber of somebody else’s products: ‘if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to pro-duce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need moretime to complete the article’ (1973, p. 129).

Marx’s attack on this naive version of a ‘labour theory of value’, and on the ‘shallow utopianism of the idea of ‘‘labour-money’’ in a society founded on the production of commodities’ (1973, p. 188, fn) actually makes interesting reading froman integrationist viewpoint. Marx shows that the actual time it takes to produce a commodity is not the ‘value-forming sub-stance’. In effect, to think that x hours of actual labour should automatically translate into y amount of value assumes thekind of ‘invariance’ relation between a sign and what it signifies that is characteristic of segregationist thinking (Harris,1996, Chapter 7). And secondly, such a naive view overlooks the specific ‘integrational relations between communicationprocesses’ (Harris, 1996, p. 43) which are involved in the production of commodities. More specifically, the ‘relevant generalpriorities of presupposition’ (Harris, 1996, p. 43) between communication processes are not understood. For what is notgrasped is that, in exchanging their products on the market, the independent producers are competing against one anotherfor a share of the total social product. If it takes me two days to make a pair of shoes then I will want more goods in exchange

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for my time than will the person who could make a pair of equal quality in one day. So the one-day shoemaker will naturallyfind it easier to exchange his or her product on the market than I will and if I want to stay in business at all I will either haveto accept the same payment as the one-day merchant or find some way of speeding up production. The ‘value-forming sub-stance’, then, is not labour time as such, as something that can be determined independently of the acts of exchange, but‘socially necessary labour time’ (1973, p. 129), that is ‘the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the condi-tions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in thatsociety’ (1973, p. 129). Value, therefore, is not labour time as could be physically observed and measured, but ‘a supra-nat-ural property’, ‘something purely social’.

7. Integrating Marx: value as macrosocial conformity?

Translating Marx’s account of value into more palatable integrationist terms, we could perhaps say that it is a highly spe-cific semiological function created through very particular ‘macrosocial practices’ (Harris, 1996, p. 29). The act of exchange ofcommodities, indeed the very existence of products of labour as commodities, presupposes a very particular ‘communica-tional infrastructure’ (Harris, 1996, p. 24) whose ‘existence predetermines the range of communicational possibilities’ which,in turn, ‘structures our communication universe’ (1996, p. 24). But the individuals caught up in this infrastructure, eventhough they create it and maintain it, may not be aware of what it is that they have created or how it works. As Harris argues,there are ‘macrosocial practices, or features of such practices, of which there is no general awareness at all’ (1996, p. 31).Exchange-value, of course, is clearly not such a feature, since people are very much aware of what items cost, although theyhave little influence over it. Value, however, is quite a different matter. Here, arguably, we have a case of a macrosocial phe-nomenon ‘that may be brought about by the voluntary behaviour of individuals, even though those individuals are quiteunaware of the phenomenon or their contribution to it’ (1996, p. 30). In the case of value, then, we have a case of ‘macrosocialconformity (with the proviso that this is not understood in the sense of conscious alignment)’ (1996, p. 30). This is a goodway, I think, to understand what Marx means by commodities’ ‘objectivity as values’ (1973, p. 166).

It is the macrosocial practices of independent (private) production of goods followed by general (social) exchange ofgoods on the market that induces the macrosocial conformity Marx calls ‘socially necessary labour time’. In this way, throughthis massive macrosocial cyclotron, the expenditure of labour power on the part of particular individuals becomes trans-formed, transmogrified into an abstract property of the products they have produced. But this property is not created inthe act of exchange. On the contrary, the proportions in which commodities exchange on the market can only be explainedby appeal to this property. On the other hand, the value property does not exist independently of exchange since it is only inthese many times repeated communicational acts of exchange that the time and effort that private individuals have put in isweighed on the scale of social necessity and thereby attains a socially recognizable and socially measurable form.

8. Balance sheet

My interrogation of Marx’s version of the labour theory of value seems to suggest that his treatment is compatible withintegrationist principles. But I am sure that other, and more astute, integrationists, or those less sympathetic to Marx’s ap-proach, may disagree and find problems in his account which have passed me by. I can only hope that they continue thedebate and take up from where I have left off.

Obviously I have only scratched the surface of Marx’s economic analysis here. But Marx’s account of value is crucial to thewhole of his further dissection of capitalist production and directly underlies his treatment of money, price, capital and, mostcrucially of all, surplus value. If we were to detect a problem with his explanation of value, then the theoretical edificeerected on it would surely fall. On the other hand, the fact that Marx’s position has, arguably, held up well against my criticalprobing may mean that it is exceptionally well thought through and free from the uncritical banalities, reifications and mys-tifications that are all too common in economic theorising. In that case, Marx would be an interesting and perhaps unex-pected example not of an integrationist avant la lettre, surely, but of a thinker whose theoretical creations may offer astarting point, and open up valuable perspectives, for a future integrationist critique of economics.

References

Harris, R., 1996. Signs, Language and Communication. Routledge, London.Harris, R., 2009. After Epistemology. Bright Pen, Gamlingay.Marx, K., 1973. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Penguin.Wheen, F., 2006. Marx’s Das Kapital. A Biography. Atlantic Books, London.