Chapter 20, Parts 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Part 5: The Mediation of the Exchanges by Monetary Circulation

Here Marx is concerned to highlight the law already expounded in various ways in parts 1-4, as well as throughout Volume II, and which I'll outline first: “the money that commodity producers advance returns to them in the normal course of commodity circulation” (488). This law includes within itself two other laws, which I'll outline second: only capitalists can “advance” money in the first place, and only capitalists can realize surplus value (497).

i. Money's Reflux to the Capitalist Class

The means of money’s reflux to the capitalist class are sometimes convoluted: when Department I pays out wages (v), that money comes back to it only by way of Department II, from which the workers purchase means of subsistence, which money is then used to buy means of production from Department I. On the other hand, we have already seen the direct reflux of money to the capitalist that happens in Department II: the capitalist pays wages to the proletariat who must use that money to buy back the work of his own hands (means of subsistence).

Under the assumption of simple reproduction, however, no capitalist is getting “enriched” (490): the movement of commodities and money from Department I to II, and intra-departmentally, is a zero-sum game which operates on the presupposition of equaling itself out. E.g., the exchange (mentioned above) of Department I’s [1,000v + 1,000s] for Department II’s 2,000c: simple reproduction operates on the presupposition that these exchanges are of equal value, and only in this way can both Department I and Department II reproduce themselves.

The proletariat plays a crucial role in monetary circulation: it sets forth huge sums of money, in the form of wages used for subsistence into the economy.

Also quite important is the role of anticipation in money-circulation.
(a) The transactions between Departments requires one or the other department to advance the money for purchase on the presupposition of the realization of its products (493).
(b) The nature of the transactions therefore also make necessary the capitalist’s “anticipatory consumption” of his surplus value (which takes time to be produced and then realized).

ii. Capitalists and the Realization of Surplus Value

This indicates a broader point about circulation: the money necessary for the realization of surplus value is cast into the economy by the capitalist class itself. This constitutes a “necessary condition of the overall mechanism” (497): the proletariat is incapable of spending money on surplus goods since it survives only by way of wages for means of subsistence (v). The capitalist does this by anticipatory consumption—individually consuming means of his subsistence by spending money he does not yet have—and anticipatory production—advancing money towards the purchase of the elements of productive capital, i.e. labor power or the means of production.

(Here we can note the temporal essence of capital—as a flow dependent upon a materialist practice of the future.)

Part 6: The Constant Capital in Department I

Now on to Department I’s 4,000c, which is consumed in the same way as Department II’s “immediate,” intra-departmental consumption of the [500v + 500s].

That 4,000c consists entirely of means of production, and therefore operates for immediate consumption by its own producers, thereby continuing to produce the means of production for the rest of the social whole (the 2,000c by which Department II functions).

Marx notes that some of this intra-departmentally consumed product refluxes back into the particular branch of production or even individual business from which it came. The other parts change place from one branch of industry to another, the “mutual exchange between the different individual constant portions of capital in Department I” (500). This distribution of means of production seems to occur according to use-value, insofar as the exchange happens on the basis of the “natural form” of constant capital.

Another ATR reference: “if production were social,” there would be the same kind of recurring redistribution of constant capital throughout the branches of Department I production, a “constant to and fro.”

Part 7: Variable Capital and Surplus-Value in the Two Departments

In the abstraction “simple reproduction,” the total value of the means of consumption must equal the total produced value. This is because, in “simple reproduction,” everything which is produced is destined for individual consumption—destined, i.e., either for the reproduction of the worker (by means of “v”) or for the reproduction of the capitalist (by means of “s”). Again the question must be asked: to what extent is “simple reproduction” capitalist in the first place if it is ultimately oriented towards consumption?

Marx then turns to analyze the total “social working day,”—that is to say, “the labor spent by the entire working class over a whole year” (502)—which therefore consists of all “v” + all “s”. That total social working day is “[1,000v + 1,000s]” (from department I) + “[500v + 500s]” (from Department II). This amounts to a total value of 3,000. At the same time, we must note that, of this 3,000, only 1,000 is expended in Department II (500v + 500s). And this means that two-thirds of the entire labor spent by the working class in the course of a year—a value of 2,000—is spent on the production of means of production in Department I. But it is therefore precisely the role of constant capital “c” that requires unpacking from out of the formulae about the two departments of production—how it functions within the production process of Departments I and II.

First of all, we have to recognize that none of the total annual labor expended in the course of the year—none of the social working day—is producing the value of the constant capital which is functioning in that year. All the value produced in that year (Department I’s 2,000[v+s] and Department II’s 1,000[v+s]) is an addition to the constant capital value (Department I’s 4,000c and Department II’s 2,000c). (The new “c” value of means of production being produced will function only sometime in the future—again we see the role of a productive “anticipation” at work.)

This means that both Department I and Department II inherit constant capital and its value and preserve it in the new product—either in producing means of production or means of consumption (cf. 509). This materially determines the production process from year to year, giving it a momentum and a material past, the weight of which it constantly feels. (In Heideggerian terms, the social whole is “thrown.”) For example: the total product of Department II is 3,000: 2,000c + [500v + 500s]. The labor of production does not create the value “2,000c” but instead transfers and preserves it into the total product of value 3,000. The same holds for the production of new means of production which will function at some time in the future as constant capital.

What’s at stake in here is therefore the constant return of a dead, material past—of past “social working days”—within the current social working day. This is what Marx called, in Ch 24 of Vol I, the “weight of the past.”

(So there really aren’t any “new” years for capitalism. It’s the same year of labor repeated over and over again in the form of the material repetition of dead labor by living labor; and the adding of the “new” is only a means of repeating living labor’s domination by dead labor, reestablishing its entrenchment within its alienation. Capitalism therefore just repeats the same year (maybe the same week, too?) over and over again, with the exception of “crisis”. Here we could at least expand, and at most disrupt, the analysis of capitalist time that Negri provides in Time for Revolution.)

Part 8: The Constant Capital in Both Departments

Here Marx expands upon many of the points of Part 7 regarding the inheriting/preserving of constant capital value, concentrating now on the production of means of production. In the abstraction “simple reproduction,” the value of what is consumed in the course of using up the means of production must equal the value of the newly-created means of production for the reproduction of the social whole (508). This new creation of the means of production each year, therefore, must be materially suited (in its use-value) towards replacing and sustaining what is used up.

Finally, Marx finishes with an interesting polemic against bourgeois economics. The point about the role of constant capital within production is crucial for combating the bourgeois sense of capitalism as an a-historical system when considered as totality (509). In other words, what comes into view in the analysis of constant capital is the historicality of the social whole itself. Marx’s method, in contradistinction from Proudhon, is to consider the collective capitalist, and so to consider the total social capital as the “share capital of all individual capitalists together” (509). In so doing, capitalism comes to appear as a process of the interactions of social forces—both differentially between capitalists as those who control the total social capital, and antagonistically between capitalists and proletariat, upon which antagonism such control is possible in the first place.

Part 9: A Look Back at Adam Smith, Storch and Ramsay

Marx then carries forth this polemic in specifics. Here the distinction and analysis of constant capital appears as crucial to both avoiding and condemning bourgeois economics—since it is crucial to understanding the reproduction of the social whole itself. Throughout bourgeois economics Marx sees the consequences of the muddled distinction, beginning in Smith, between fixed/circulating/constant/variable capital, a muddling that makes a coherent picture of reproduction impossible.