ON THE LAWS OF CONCENTRATION 5 movement does when considered from the point of view of a part of the aggregate movement of social capital, hence in its interconnection with the movements of its other parts.6 He adds: Every individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class. The movement of the social capital consists of the totality of the movements of its individualised fractional parts, the turnovers of the individual capitals.7 The self-expansion of individual capital is accomplished through the appropriation of surplus value by maximizing the rate of profit, while the movement of the social capital leads to the equalisation of rates of profit. Individual capital is a thing as well as a relation, and so is the social capital; moreover, the social capital denotes another dimension of social relation, namely, the relation between industrial, financial and commercial branches, and also between branches, sectors and departments of the productive system.8 It is also to be noted that in a capitalist economy, state capital is an. integral part of social capital. In juridical form. state capital is indeed different from private joint-stock capital, but its movements determine, and are determined by, the movements of social capital. Concentration The other name of self-expansion of individual capital is concentration of capital, according to Marx. It has nothing to do with the statistical concept of concentration ratio on the pattern of Gini, Lorenz or Atkinson. The concentration of capital in the Marxian sense is measured in absolute terms with reference to a single individual capital, without regard to the rest of the individual capitals; in other words, it is not a ratio of any two magnitudes. At one place Marx says that "simple concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour... is identical with accumulation,"9 and at another he equates "the rate of self-expansion of the total capital" with "the rate of profit.5'10 " Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of the means of production, with a corresponding command over a arger or smaller labour-army," says Marx. "Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."11 Clearly, by concentration Marx does not mean anything like the Gini coefficient or