ABSTRACT
Marx's concept of capital is sometimes interpreted as a "social relation". It is more correct to say that capital requires the social relation of wage-labour than to say that capital is a social relation. The latter formulation does not explicitly include the defining characteristic of Marx's concept of capital—money becoming more money. Marx's concept of capital in term of money is very different from the concept of capital in neoclassical economics, which is defined in terms of heterogeneous physical goods – as quantities of material inputs to production. Marx criticized a similar general and physical concept of capital of the classical economists: Capital would be only a new name for a thing as old as the human race, since every form of labour, including the least developed … presupposes that the product of prior labour is used as means for direct, living labour.
