Chapter VI. The Costs of Circulation
The transformations of the forms of capital from commodities into money and from money into commodities are at the same time transactions of the capitalist, acts of purchase and sale. The time in which these transformations of forms take place constitutes subjectively, from the standpoint of the capitalist, the time of purchase and sale; it is the time during which he performs the functions of a seller and buyer in the market. Just as the time of circulation of capital is a necessary segment of its time of reproduction, so the time in which the capitalist buys and sells and scours the market is a necessary part of the time in which he functions as a capitalist, i. e., as personified capital. It is a part of his business hours.
(Since we have assumed that commodities are bought and sold at their values, these acts constitute merely the conversion of a certain value from one form into another, from the commodity form into the money form or from the money form into the commodity form — a change in the state of being. If commodities are sold at their values, then the magnitudes of value in the hands of the buyer and seller remain unchanged. Only the form of existence of value is changed. If the commodities are not sold at their values, then the sum of the converted values remains unchanged; the plus on one side is a minus on the other.
The metamorphoses C — M and M — C are transactions between buyers and sellers; they require time to conclude their bargains, the more so as a struggle goes on in which each seeks to get the best of the other, and it is businessmen who face one another here; and "WHEN
GREEK MEETS GREEK THEN COMES THE TUG OF WAR" . a To effect a change in the state of being costs time and labour power, not for the purpose of creating value, however, but in order to accomplish the conversion of value
" A paraphrase of "When Greeks join'd Greeks then was the tug of war!" (Nathaniel Lee, The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great, Act IV, Scene 2).
from one form into another. The mutual attempt to appropriate an extra slice of this value on this occasion changes nothing. This labour, increased by the evil designs on either side, does not create any value, just as the work performed in a judicial proceeding does not increase the value of the subject-matter of the suit. Matters stand with this labour— which is a necessary element in the capitalist process of production as a whole, including circulation or included by it — as they stand, say, with the work of combustion of some substance used for the generation of heat. This work of combustion does not generate any heat, although it is a necessary element in the process of combustion. In order, e. g., to consume coal as fuel, I must combine it with oxygen, and for this purpose must transform it from the solid into the gaseous state (for in the carbonic acid gas, the result of the combustion, coal is in the gaseous state); consequently, I must bring about a physical change in the form of its existence or in its state of being. The separation of carbon molecules, which are united into a solid mass, and the splitting up of these molecules into their separate atoms must precede the new combination, and this requires a certain expenditure of energy which thus is not transformed into heat but taken from it. Therefore, if the owners of the commodities are not capitalists but independent direct producers, the time employed in buying and selling is a diminution of their labour time, and for this reason such transactions used to be deferred (in ancient and mediaeval times) to holidays.
Of course the dimensions assumed by the conversion of commodities in the hands of the capitalists cannot transform this labour— which does not create any value but is merely instrumental in changing the form of value — into labour productive of value. Nor can the miracle of this transubstantiation be accomplished by a transposition, i.e., by the industrial capitalists making this "work of combustion" the exclusive business of third persons, who are paid by them, instead of performing it themselves. These third persons will of course not tender their labour power to the capitalists out of sheer love for them. It is a matter of indifference to the rent collector of a real-estate owner or the messenger of a bank that their labour does not add one iota or tittle to the value of either the rent or the gold pieces carried to another bank by the bagful.)[10]'
To the capitalist who has others working for him, buying and sell-
101 The text in parentheses is taken from a note at the end of Manuscript VIII.
ing becomes a primary function. Since he appropriates the product of many on a large social scale, he must sell it on the same scale and then reconvert it from money into elements of production. Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant's capital gives rise to an illusion. But without going into this at length here this much is plain from the start: If by a division of labour a function, unproductive in itself although a necessary element of reproduction, is transformed from an incidental occupation of many into the exclusive occupation of a few, into their special business, the nature of this function itself is not changed. One merchant (here considered a mere agent attending to the change of form of commodities, a mere buyer and seller) may by his operations shorten the time of purchase and sale for many producers. In such case he should be regarded as a machine which reduces useless expenditure of energy or helps to set production time free.U)
In order to simplify the matter (since we shall not discuss the merchant as a capitalist and merchant's capital until later) we shall assume that this buying and selling agent is a man who sells his labour. He expends his labour power and labour time in the operations C — M and M — C. And he makes his living that way, just as another does by spinning or by making pills. He performs a necessary function, because the process of reproduction itself includes unproductive functions. He works as well as the next man, but intrinsically his labour creates neither value nor product. He belongs himself to the faux frais of production. His usefulness does not consist in transforming an unproductive function into a productive one, nor unproductive into productive labour. It would be a miracle if such a transformation could be accomplished by the mere transfer of a function. His useful-ii) "The costs of commerce, although necessary, must be regarded as an onerous outlay" (Qùesnay, Analyse du Tableau économique, in Daire, Physiocrates, Part I, Paris, 1846, p. 71). According to Quesnay, the "profit" which the competition among merchants produces, in that it compels them "to content themselves with a smaller reward or gain ... is, strictly speaking, nothing but a prevention of loss for the seller at first hand and for the buyer-consumer. Now, a prevention of loss on the costs of commerce is not a real product or an accession of wealth through commerce, if considered simply as an exchange, whether with or without the cost of transportation" (pp. 145, 146). "The costs of commerce are always paid by those who sell the products and who would enjoy the full prices paid for them by the buyers, if there were no intermediate expenses" (p. 163). The proprietors and producers are "salariants" (payers of wages), the merchants are "salariés" (recipients of wages) (p. 164, Quesnay, Dialogues sur le Commerce et sur les Travaux des Artisans, in Daire, Physiocrates, Part I, Paris, 1846).[21] [Marx quotes Quesnay in French.] ness consists rather in the fact that a smaller part of society's labour power and labour time is tied up in this unproductive function. More. We shall assume that he is a mere wage labourer, maybe even one of the better paid. Whatever his pay, as a wage labourer he works part of his time for nothing. He may receive daily the value of the product of eight working hours, yet functions ten. But the two hours of surplus labour he performs do not produce value any more than his eight hours of necessary labour, although by means of the latter a part of the social product is transferred to him. In the first place, looking at it from the standpoint of society, labour power is used up now as before for ten hours in a mere function of circulation. It cannot be used for anything else, not for productive labour. In the second place, however, society does not pay for those two hours of surplus labour, although they are spent by the individual who performs this labour. Society does not appropriate any extra product or value thereby. But the costs of circulation, which he represents, are reduced by one-fifth, from ten hours to eight. Society does not pay any equivalent for one-fifth of this active time of circulation, of which he is the agent. But if this man is employed by a capitalist, then the non-payment of these two hours reduces the costs of circulation of his capital, which constitute a deduction from his income. For the capitalist this is a positive gain, because the negative limit for the self-expansion of his capital value is thereby reduced. So long as small independent producers of commodities spend a part of their own time in buying and selling, this represents nothing but time spent during the intervals between their productive function or diminution of their time of production.
Endnotes
[10] phlet Some Illustrations of Mr. McCulloch's Principles of Political Economy (Edin-
[21] ritory that is now occupied by Peru, Equador, Bolivia and the northern part of Chile. It was a slave-owning state with considerable remnants of the primitive-communal system. The dominant tribe of the Incas was subdivided into 100 gentile communities which gradually assumed the character of rural (neighbouring) communities with a self-sustained natural economy. Social product was not produced as a commodity, but the movement of its various kinds between communities, though not in the form of trade, already played an important role.— 121, 153 21 Marx copied out passages from Quesnay's work Analyse du Tableau économique in one of his notebooks compiled in London between 1859 and 1863 and in Notebook C (Beiheft C); the latter also contains excerpts from Dialogues sur le commerce et sur les travaux des artisans.— 135