The Mystery of Capital

But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned

Thus the term “capital” begins to do two jobs simultaneously, capturing the physical dimension of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value.

A set of detailed and precise legal rules governs this entire process. Formal property records and titles thus represent our shared concept of what is economically meaningful about any asset.

What they wanted to understand was what capital is and how it is produced and accumulated.

is a world where ownership of assets is difficult to trace and validate and is governed by no legally recognizable set of rules; where the assets’ potentially useful economic attributes have not been described or organized; where they cannot be used to obtain surplus value through multiple transactions because their unfixed nature and uncertainty l

jar? In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations.

looking at the law from an extralegal point of view, to better understand how it functions and what effects it produces.

What was required was an external man-made process that allowed us, first, to identify the potential of the weight of the water to do additional work and, second, to convert this potential energy into electricity, which can then be used to create surplus value. The additional value we obtain from the lake is not a value of the lake itself (like a p

What creates capital in the West, in other words, is an implicit process buried in the intricacies of its formal property systems.