Back, bitches.

Near the end of Chapter one, Marx demonstrates the simple idea that in the chain of

M-C (P) -C`- M`. M-C (P) -C`- M`. M-C (P) ...etc.

that one could either begin with M (money capital) and end with M`; C (commodity capital) and end with C`; or P and end with P.

Is it simply arbitrary how one chooses to break up this series? Isn't it the case that all of these elements merely mutually presuppose one another in an unending cycle of reproduction?

Marx writes that M-C is "not the presupposition, but is rather posited or conditioned by the production process. However, this holds only for this individual capital." In other words, gathering money is a form of preparation, but if you gather money you better damn well have a production process at hand to convert that money into commodities and more money. A capitalist won't get a loan without an idea of how to use that money to make more money. But this is from the standpoint of an individual capitalist.

What about the standpoint of total social capital? "The general form of the circuit of industrial capital is the circuit of money capital, insofar as the capitalist mode of production is presupposed" (143). Why is this so? I can only guess it has something to do with this line:

"The circuit made by money-capital is therefore the most one-sided, and thus the most striking and typical form in which the circuit of industrial capital appears, the capital whose aim and compelling motive — the self-expansion of value, the making of money, and accumulation — is thus conspicuously revealed (buying to sell dearer)" (140).

What does Marx mean? Only money has the ability to mask the changes done to it, to obliterate the past. When you turn one hundred into $102 does not appear as the $100 principal + $2 increment. It appears as $102. It appears, in fetishized form, as "money breeding money."

On another level, it makes sense that in capital, the imperative is to make money for money's sake, not to produce for production's sake, not to make commodities for commodities' sake. When we speak of total social capital, we are talking about the competition between individual capitals. What drives competition? Not the scarcity of commodities or the imperative to produce. It is the imperative to accumulate wealth.

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Other comments:

Pages 116 - 118: Marx comments that the M-C-P-C`-M` chain presumes the prior separation between free workers and the means of production. This is the gap filled by primitive accumulation. But it also begs the question (sorry, I'm importing my own intellectual interests here) of what about commodity production that does not presume free labor? Bonded labor, slavery, etc? I suppose those forms assume the separation from the means of production, but they do not presuppose the same iterated process of reproduction that signifies free, wage labor.

Page 120: Marx makes an argument that prioritizes exchange and markets over production itself. Or rather, he makes the midas touch argument: once you touch capitalism, you become capitalism. This is the argument of both the development and underdevelopment schools: "wherever it takes root capitalist production destroys all forms of commodity production which are based either on the self-employment of the producers, or merely on the sale of the excess product as commodities."

At the same time, Marx makes room for the possibility of uneven and combined development -- noncapitalist and precapitalist PRODUCTION for capitalist MARKETS: "at first apparently without affecting the mode of production itself. Such was for instance the first effect of capitalist world commerce on such nations as the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, etc."

What is the difference between commodity production and capitalist commodity production in this sentence?

"Capitalist production first makes the production of commodities general and then, by degrees, transforms all commodity production into capitalist commodity production."

128-9: Marx on how the money form obliterates difference.

130: Money has two functions. One, to circulate; two, to "breed" more money. But this second function is actually a function of commodities, not money.

132: The antinomy between real and formal arises once again.

"The change in value pertains exclusively to the metamorphosis P, the process of production, which thus appears as a real metamorphosis of capital, as compared with the merely formal metamorphosis of circulation."

134: "The yarn cannot be sold until it has been spun." Capital can only take on one appearance at a time. They are mutually exclusive. This implies the need for temporal sensitivity.

136: Marx seems to give a definition of industry as:

"The capital which assumes this forms in the course of its total circuit and then discards them and in each of them performs the function corresponding to the particular form, is industrial capital, industrial here in the sense it comprises every branch of industry run on a capitalist basis."

and

"Industrial capital is the only mode of existence of capital in which not only the appropriation of surplus-value, or surplus-product, but simultaneously its creation is a function of capital."

How do we understand this in relation to industry's other: agriculture? What escapes capital in agriculture? Land? The soil? It'll be interesting to see in Volume III.