Capital’s humpback bridge: ‘financialisation’ and the rate of turnover in Marx’s economic theory

The article aims to shed light on the role played by the ‘rate of turnover’ of capital in Marx’s economic theory. Oddly enough, such a concept has been neglected by most of Marx’s scholars and exegetes, as is demonstrated by the small number of scientific works dealing with it. Yet the rate of turnover is a key category in Marxian analysis, because it enables Marx to address the impact of the improvement in finance and other unproductive industries on the capitalist process of creation (and realisation) of surplus value. The evidence from the new philological edition of Marx and Engel’s writings (MEGA2) further strengthens this insight. The main goal of the article is threefold: first, to bridge the gap in the literature dealing with volume Two of Capital; second, to provide a re-definition of several Marxian concepts in the light of the role played by the rate of turnover of capital; third, to analyse the effect of the developments in the banking and finance industry on the turnover rate and thereby on the general rate of profit.