ABSTRACT
Marx's critical analyses of two further dimensions of the ‘motion’ of the capitalist economic system, as they were worked out in the ‘Theories of Surplus Value’ manuscripts, are considered in this chapter. The first is the circulation component of expanded reproduction. As noted in the previous chapter, capital accumulation was considered by Marx to be the most essential driving force determining the nature and pace of capitalist ‘motion’. So far, this process has only been considered in its production context. Such analysis enabled Marx to reveal certain effects of the logical contradictions inherent in expanding the production process under the ‘rules’ of capitalism. Two particular effects were argued by Marx, both of which had their origin in the rising organic composition of capital that he believed would necessarily accompany accumulation: first, the tendency of the Value rate of profits to fall; and secondly, the relative decrease in the rate at which labour power was purchased by capitalists, with its implications for growing unemployment. As Marx well knew, the logic of capital accumulation as it involved production in isolation could provide only a partial analysis of ‘motion’. He had long recognised that the mode of production comprised production and circulation in an essential unity. 1 An extension of the analysis to include circulation would do two things. It would emphasise that the falling Value rate of profits exposed by the production analysis could only be considered a notional consequence until the realisation process of the commodities whose Values embodied the profits was made explicit in the analysis. If anything, it had been implicitly assumed by Marx in this first stage of ‘motion’ that the circulation process worked without impediment. Thus, the other thing that now had to be made clear was that the circulation process of capitalism was unlikely to conform to the stringent input-output conditions evident from the reproduction schema and required for unimpeded circulation. The circulation process, then, involved a set of its own contradictions that would affect the behaviour of the capitalist system as well as compounding those contradictions already exposed in the expanding production operations.
