Capital personnifié
Here’s the translation: The formula by which Marx, in *Capital*, grasps the capitalist not as a person driven by appetite, but as the "conscious bearer" of an impersonal movement: a value that valorizes itself, whose sole motive is the ever-growing appropriation of abstract wealth. In this figure, the means—money, exchange-value—becomes the subject, and man is no more than the place where this movement becomes self-aware. The boundless nature of acquisition is thus not a temperamental flaw that might be moderated, but the logic of a form: buying to sell at a higher price closes in on its own starting point and admits no end.
Ce n’est qu’autant que l’appropriation toujours croissante de la richesse abstraite est le seul motif déterminant de ses opérations, qu’il fonctionne comme capitaliste, ou, si l’on veut, comme capital personnifié, doué de conscience et de volonté.
Here’s the idiomatic English translation, preserving all Markdown, links, transliterations, and symbols:
The phrase encapsulates an inversion. Normally, man is the subject and money the tool; here, the tool has become the subject, and man its instrument. Marx writes that the capitalist “functions” as such only insofar as he serves as a conduit for a movement that surpasses him—value striving to expand. His consciousness and will are no longer the source of this movement but the place where it becomes aware of itself. Hence the almost theological term: personified capital, an abstraction that has taken on flesh.
This shift sets Marx apart from ancient wisdom. Aristotle classifies wealth among the means and locates disorder in the soul that mistakes it for an end: the remedy is a better-regulated choice, a return to the sovereign good, which alone is sought for its own sake. Marx does not dispute this diagnosis; he relocates its source. The boundless no longer resides in a particular desire: one could extinguish it within oneself without halting the movement, for it is the social form—not the subject—that is without end.
To be distinguished from the commodity fetishism of Capital’s first volume, its close relative. Fetishism describes the inert thing that appears to bear social value within itself; personified capital describes the moving subject that appropriates this value and makes it grow. The former is the thing that seems alive; the latter, the movement that uses man as its organ. Personified capital ≠ miser: the miser hoards and withholds; personified capital only preserves itself by perpetually reinvesting.