ABSTRACT
The firm and the rentier Capitalism is the money game based par excellence on exchange. Its main strategy is the accumulation of money on the basis of exchange circuits for which rij·rjik…rmi>1, adapting the terminology of p. 55. At the most elementary level, such accumulation does not necessarily have any monetary basis, as the cases cited on p. 59 make clear. Its essential starting point is a measurable quantity of a given commodity, representing a capital asset, which at the end of a circuit of successive exchanges is converted into a greater quantity of the same commodity. The surplus which then arises, divided by the time it takes to complete the circuit, is the measure of the return on the original capital. The capitalist, pure and simple, being concerned only with exchange, is dependent on others to produce the commodities he deals in. If the ‘firm’ is defined as the institutional basis of capitalism, then it is the ‘household’ upon which the capitalist depends to keep him in business. The essential distinction between the two is that the exchange circuits of the household are never completed, so that the household never realizes a capital surplus. It does not follow that the firm is more prosperous than the average household with which it deals: the question is one of economic organization, concerned with the creation and distribution of wealth.
