But the direct result of M---C< L MP is the interruption of the circulation of the capital-value advanced in the form of money.
By the transformation of money-capital into productive capital the capital-value has acquired a bodily form in which it cannot continue to circulate but must enter into consumption, viz., into productive consumption. The use of labour-power, labour, can be materialised only in the labour-process.
The capitalist cannot resell the laborer as a commodity because he is not his chattel slave and the capitalist has not bought anything except the right to use his labour-power for a certain time. On the other hand the capitalist cannot use this labour-power in any other way than by utilising means of production to create commodities with its help. The result of the first stage is therefore entrance into the second, the productive stage of capital.
This movement is represented by M---C< L MP ... P, in which the dots indicate that the circulation of capital is interrupted, while its circular movement continues, since it passes from the sphere of circulation of commodities into that of production. The first stage, the transformation of money-capital into productive capital, is therefore merely the harbinger and introductory phase of the second stage, the functioning of productive capital.
M---C< L MP presupposes that the individual performing this act not only has at his disposal values in any use-form, but also that he has them in the form of money, that he is the owner of money. But as the act consists precisely in giving away money, the individual can remain the owner of money only in so far as the act of giving away implies a return of money. But money can return to him only through the sale of commodities. Hence the above act assumes him to be a producer of commodities.
M---L. The wage-laborer lives only by the sale of his labour-power.
Its preservation -- his preservation -- requires daily consumption. Hence payment for it must be continuously repeated at rather short intervals in order that he may be able to repeat acts L---M---C or C---M---C, repeat the purchases needed for his self-preservation. For this reason the capitalist must always meet the wage-laborer in the capacity of a money-capitalist, and his capital as money-capital. On the other hand if the wage-labourers, the mass of direct producers, are to perform the act L---M---C, they must constantly be faced with the necessary means of subsistence in purchasable form, i.e., in the form of commodities. This state of affairs necessitates a high degree of development of the circulation of products in the form of commodities, hence also of the volume of commodities produced. When production by means of wage-labour becomes universal, commodity production is bound to be the general form of production. This mode of production, once it is assumed to be general, carries in its wake an ever increasing division of social labour, that is to say an ever growing differentiation of the articles which are produced in the form of commodities by a definite capitalist, ever greater division of complementary processes of production into independent processes. M---MP therefore develops to the same extent as M---L does, that is to say the production of means of production is divorced to that extent from the production of commodities whose means of production they are. And the latter then stand opposed to every producer of commodities which he does not produce but buys for his particular process of production. They come from branches of production which, operated independently, are entirely divorced from his own, enter into his own branch as commodities, and must therefore be bought. The material conditions of commodity production face him more and more as products of other commodity producers, as commodities.
And to the same extent the capitalist must assume the role of money-capitalist, in other words there is an increase in the scale on which his capital must assume the functions of money-capital.
On the other hand, the same conditions which give rise to the basic condition of capitalist production, the existence of a class of wage-workers, facilitate the transition of all commodity production to capitalist commodity production. As capitalist production develops, it has a disintegrating, resolvent effect on all older forms of production, which, designed mostly to meet the direct needs of the producer, transform only the excess produced into commodities. Capitalist production makes the sale of products the main interest, 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. But, secondly, 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. Capitalist production first makes the production of commodities general and then, by degrees, transforms all commodity production into capitalist commodity production. [3]
