from traditional society. It is also necessary to chart its upper limit, the path of its
transition to another society that comes after capital. What will this other society look like? This question is of great importance for the construction of a general theory of capital. Considering these two limits dictates the structure of our book. It consists of three parts devoted to the origin, the peak and the decline of capital.
The first part of the book is devoted to the lower limit, the origin of capital from traditional society. It is impossible to develop a theory of capital without a concept of money and prices. The path to capital inevitably leads through exchange value, so we must return to the labor theory of value and the marginal utility theory to find their common ground. The lower limit of capital can only be understood by turning to abstract questions about human culture, its origins and its development. Here we must repeat after Albert Einstein:
“The initial hypotheses become steadily more abstract and remote from experience. On the other hand, it gets nearer to the grand aim of all science, which is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms. Meanwhile, the train of thought leading from the axioms to the empirical facts or verifiable consequences gets steadily longer and more subtle. The theoretical scientist is compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by purely mathematical, formal considerations in his search for a theory, because the physical experience of the experimenter cannot lead him up to the regions of highest abstraction” (Einstein 1954, p. 282).
In order to clarify the starting points of the general theory of capital, we are in many cases forced to resort to formal and abstract reasoning. However, there are no mathematical formulas in our book.
The second part of the book examines capital at its peak. Paradoxically, at least since the 19th century, the opponents of capital have contributed no less to its success than the capitalists themselves. Marx developed and began to implement a strategy in favor of the working class. Antonio Negri even calls Lenin a “factory of strategy” (Negri 2014). Insofar as the ultimate goal of Marx and Lenin’s strategy was the “emancipation of labor,” it has not been yet achieved. Soviet socialism and Western capitalism have been unable to solve the problem of coordinating personal and public interests. The East could not cope with the dictatorship of the plan just as the West cannot cope with market anarchy. The mixed economy that Paul Samuelson hoped for (cf. Samuelson and Nordhaus 2010, pp. xvi-xvii) offers no answer. The “mixed economy” is a purely external combination of planned and market approaches, it does not provide an understanding of the inherent processes and therefore does not allow us to change society. We need a new model that takes into account the deep laws underlying the advance of technologies, institutions and ideas.