ABSTRACT
170 171Karl Marx unveiled his theory of the enterprise or firm over the entire three volumes of Capital. One reason for the extensive and evolving presentation of the enterprise in Capital is that “every site exhibits a changing configuration of class and nonclass processes. In Marxian theory nothing can be fixed in the notion of what an enterprise or state means” (Resnick and Wolff 1987a, 165). Marx addressed a variety of different types of enterprises but mostly focused on three types of capitalist enterprises, those being industrial or productive, merchant, and money lending enterprises. For Marx it was the varied class processes that constituted these enterprises that made them worth differentiating and were vital for his understanding of capitalism more generally. 1
