Capital, Vol. II: The Process of Circulation of Capital
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 1 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~260,000 words · 1,251 passages
Cite this work
- APAKarl Marx. (n.d.). Capital, Vol. II: The Process of Circulation of Capital. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-ii-the-process-of-circulation-of-capital
- MLAKarl Marx. "Capital, Vol. II: The Process of Circulation of Capital." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-ii-the-process-of-circulation-of-capital.
- ChicagoKarl Marx. Capital, Vol. II: The Process of Circulation of Capital. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-ii-the-process-of-circulation-of-capital.
What it is about
The second volume of Capital: not production but circulation — how capital passes from money to commodity and back to money, how long that takes, and how an economy as a whole can reproduce itself year after year.
Context and history
Marx did not publish it. Engels assembled it from the manuscripts and brought it out in 1885, two years after Marx's death. It is the least read of the three volumes and the most technical; the reproduction schemes at the end are the ground on which Rosa Luxemburg and her opponents later argued whether capitalist accumulation can sustain itself.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The circulation process1 of capital takes place in three stages, which, according to the presentation of the matter m Volume I, form the following series : First stage: The capitalist appears as a buyer on the commodity and labor market; his money is transformed into commodities, or it goes through the circulation process M-C. Second stage: Productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist. He acts in the capacity of a capitalist producer of commodities; his capital passes through the process of production. The result is a commodity of more value than that of the elements composing it. Third stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his commodities are exchanged for money, or they pass through the circulation process C-M. 1 From Manuscript II. 32 Capital. Hence the formula for the circulation process of money capital is: M-C ...P ...C'-M', the dots indicating the points where the process of circulation was interrupted, and C' and M' designating C and M increased by surplus value. The first and third stages were discussed in Volume I only in so far as it was required for an understanding of the second stage, the process of production of capital. For this reason, the various forms which capital assumes in its different stages, and which it either retains or discards in the repetition of the circulation process, were not considered. These forms are now the first objects of our study. In order to conceive of these forms in their purest state, we must first of all abstract from all factors which have nothing to do directly with the discarding or adopting of any of these forms. It is therefore taken for granted at this point that the commodities are sold at their value and that this takes place under the same conditions throughout. Abstraction is likewise made of any changes of value which mig
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