The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics

This chapter briefly talks about Marxs assumption of politics. For one, there was Marxs stress in the Grundrisse about capitals tendency to create new needs for workers, on which, he noted, the contemporary power of capital rests. There is no mention of this in Capital. How could such an important source of capitals power be reconciled with the assumption that the workers necessary needs were constant? Clearly, this was a critical assumption to be removed in that book on wage-labour that Marx had promised. Well, of course, the explanation is the assumption that Marx introduced at the level of capital-in-general - the premise that the quantity of means of subsistence for workers can be treated as given for a given period in a given country.