The Day Marx Sank Into My Bones — A Bookkeeper’s Awakening
When I was 22, I was assigned to the cost accounting section in the production control division of a steel mill. There, I worked on calculating the costs of blast furnace operations and accounting for the entire plant. It was my first encounter with industrial bookkeeping and hands-on cost accounting.
We added up the cost of materials, labor, and overhead to calculate the value of “work in process.”
These were then transformed into “finished goods,” and when sold, they became “sales,” which flowed into cash or accounts receivable. Soon, “gross profit” and “marginal profit” emerged from the numbers.
At that moment, a diagram I had seen in my student days flashed across my mind—a passage from Das Kapital:
G → W → P → W′ → G′
(Money → Commodity → Production → New Commodity → More Money)
I shivered.
Wasn’t this precisely the “movement of capital” that Marx described?
Cost accounting was not just about numbers. It was a numerical portrait of that very movement—a visible trajectory of value, inscribed line by line in the ledger.
Bookkeeping, I realized, doesn’t merely list figures.
It reflects, with astonishing fidelity, the dynamic, self-expanding motion of capital itself.
On one side: material costs. On the other: cash.
Work in process becomes finished goods. Goods are sold, and the proceeds are recorded as receivables. Then they’re collected, reinvested, and the cycle begins anew.
This cycle never stops.
Capital seeks endlessly to expand itself as value, and the accountant follows its every step-faithfully, line by line, without omission.
In that moment, I didn’t just understand Das Kapital.
I felt it.
It didn’t sit in my head; it settled in my gut.
Philosophy and accounting had shaken hands.
Marx’s abstractions, once so distant, had taken form, right in front of me, in the structure of a journal entry.
Then other concepts from Marx surfaced:
the “turnover period of capital,” the “organic composition of capital.”
The time it took for resources to move from raw materials to work in progress, to finished goods, to sales, and finally to cash—this was nothing other than the production cycle I observed every day on the factory floor.
Balancing machinery and raw materials against labor costs; wasn’t that precisely the question of capital’s composition?
To optimize this balance was, in essence, to adjust capital’s organic structure.
Marx didn’t construct his ideas in a vacuum.
He walked, as I did, between the ledger and the factory floor. I am certain of that now.
Epilogue
Fifty-five years have passed.
That experience remains the core of my professional life, and the origin of what I now share as the Bookkeeping Whisperer.
