2. Bookkeeping
At all events the time consumed for this purpose constitutes one of the costs of circulation which adds nothing to the converted values. It is the cost of converting them from the commodity form into the money form. The capitalist producer of commodities acting as an agent of circulation differs from the direct producer of commodities only in the fact that he buys and sells on a larger scale and therefore his function as such agent assumes greater dimensions. And if the volume of his business compels or enables him to buy (hire) circulation agents of his own to serve as wage labourers, the nature of the case is not changed thereby. A certain amount of labour power and labour time must be expended in the process of circulation (so far as it is merely a change of form). But this now appears as an additional outlay of capital. A part of the variable capital must be laid out in the purchase of this labour power functioning only in circulation. This advance of capital creates neither product nor value. It reduces pro tanto the dimensions in which the advanced capital functions productively. It is as though one part of the product were transformed into a machine which buys and sells the rest of the product. This machine brings about a reduction of the product. It does not participate in the production process, although it can diminish the labour power, etc., spent on circulation. It constitutes merely a part of the costs of circulation.
2. Bookkeeping
Apart from the actual buying and selling, labour time is expended in bookkeeping, which besides absorbs objectified labour such as pens, ink, paper, desks, office paraphernalia. This function, therefore, exacts the expenditure on the one hand of labour power and on the other of instruments of labour. It is the same condition of things as obtains in the case of the time of purchase and sale.
As unity within its circuits, as value in motion, whether in the sphere of production or in either phase of the sphere of circulation, capital exists ideally only in the form of money of account, primarily in the mind of the producer of commodities, the capitalist producer of commodities. This movement is fixed and controlled by bookkeeping, which also includes the determination of prices, or the calculation of the prices of commodities. The movement of production, especially of the production of surplus value — in which the commodities figure only as depositories of value, as the names of things whose ideal existence as values is crystallised in money of account — thus is symboli-cally reflected in imagination. So long as the individual producer of commodities keeps account only in his head (for instance, a peasant; the bookkeeping tenant farmer was not produced until the rise of capitalist agriculture), or books his expenditures, receipts, due dates of payments, etc., only incidentally, outside of his production time, it is palpably clear that this function and the instruments of labour consumed by it, such as paper, etc., represent additional consumption of labour time and instruments of labour which are necessary, but constitute a deduction from the time available for productive consumption as well as from the instruments of labour which function in the real process of production, enter into the creation of products and value.[12]' The nature of the function itself is not changed — neither by the dimensions which it assumes on account of its concentration in the hands of the capitalist producer of commodities and the fact that instead of appearing as the function of many small commodity producers it appears as the function of one capitalist, as a function within a process of large-scale production; nor by its divorcement from those productive functions of which it formed an appendage, nor by its conversion into an independent function of special agents exclusively entrusted with it.
Division of labour and assumption of independence do not make a function one that creates products and value if it was not so intrinsically, hence before it became independent. If a capitalist invests his capital anew, he must invest a part of it in hiring a bookkeeper, etc., and in the wherewithal of bookkeeping. If his capital is already functioning, is engaged in the process of its own constant reproduction, he must continually reconvert a part of his product into a bookkeeper, clerks, and the like, by transforming that part into money. That part of his capital is withdrawn from the process of production and belongs in the costs of circulation, deductions from the total yield (including the labour power itself that is expended exclusively for this function). But there is a certain difference between the costs incidental to bookkeeping, or the unproductive expenditure of labour time on the one hand and those of mere buying and selling time on the other. The latter arise only from the definite social form of the process of production, from the fact that it is the process of production of commodities. Bookkeeping, as the control and ideal synthesis of the process, be-
[12] In the Middle Ages we find bookkeeping for agriculture only in the monasteries. But we have seen (Buch I, S. 343)(1) that a bookkeeper was installed for agriculture as early as the primitive Indian communities. Bookkeeping is there made the independent and exclusive function of a communal officer. This division of labour saves time, effort, and expense, but production and bookkeeping in the sphere of production remain as much two different things as the cargo of a ship and the bill of lading. In the person of the bookkeeper, a part of the labour power of the community is withdrawn from production, and the costs of his function are not made good by his own labour but by a deduction from the communal product. What is true of the bookkeeper of an Indian community is true mutatis mutandis of the bookkeeper of the capitalist. //From Manuscript 11.// comes the more necessary the more the process assumes a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is therefore more necessary in capitalist production than in the scattered production of han-dicraft and peasant economy, more necessary in collective production than in capitalist production. But the costs of bookkeeping drop as production becomes concentrated and bookkeeping becomes social. We are concerned here only with the general character of the costs of circulation, which arise out of the metamorphosis of forms alone. It is superfluous to discuss here all their forms in detail. But how forms which belong in the sphere of pure changes of the form of value and hence originate from the particular social form of the process of production, forms which in the case of the individual commodity producer are only transient, barely perceptible elements, run alongside his productive functions or become intertwined with them — how these can strike the eye as the huge costs of circulation can be seen from just the money taken in and paid out when these operations have become independent and concentrated on a large scale as the exclusive function of banks, etc., or of cashiers in individual businesses. But it must be firmly borne in mind that these costs of circulation are not changed in character by their change in appearance.
Endnotes
[12] A copy of this book, which belonged to Engels (1850 edition) and contained Marx's remarks, has survived. From the 1824 edition Marx copied out passages in one of his Manchester notebooks for 1845.— 18