Whether or not m, the surplus-value turned into money, is immediately added to the capital-value in process and is thus enabled to enter the circuit together with capital M now having the magnitude M', depends on circumstances which are independent of the mere existence of m. If m is to serve as money-capital in a second independent business, to be run side by side with the first, it is evident that it cannot be used for this purpose unless it is of the minimum size required for it. And if it is intended to be used for the expansion of the original business, the relations between the material factors of P and their value-relations likewise demand a minimum magnitude for m. All the means of production employed in this business have not only a qualitative but also a definite quantitative relation to one another, are proportionate in quantity. These material relations as well as the pertinent value-relations of the factors entering into the productive capital determine the minimum magnitude m must possess to be capable of transformation into additional means of production and labour-power, or only into the former, as an accretion to the productive capital. Thus the owner of a spinning-mill cannot increase the number of his spindles without at the same time purchasing a corresponding number of carders and roving frames, apart from the increased expenditure for cotton and wages which such an expansion of his business demands. To carry this out the surplus-value must therefore have reached a considerable figure (generally calculated to be £1 per newly installed spindle). If m does not reach this minimum size the circuit of capital must be repeated until the sum of m successively produced by it can function together with M, hence M'---C'< L MP .
Even mere changes of detail, for instance in the spinning machinery, introduced to make it more productive, require greater expenditures for spinning material, more roving machinery, etc. In the meantime m is accumulated, and its accumulation is not its own function but the result of repeated P ... P. Its own function consists in persisting in the money state until it receives sufficient increment from the repeated surplus-value-creating circuits, i.e., from outside, to possess the minimum magnitude necessary for its active function, the magnitude in which alone it can really enter as money-capital -- in the case at hand as the accumulated part of the functioning of money-capital M -- into the functioning of M. But in the interim it is accumulated and exists only in the shape of a hoard in process of formation, of growth.
Hence the accumulation of money, hoarding, appears here as a process by which real accumulation, the extension of the scale on which industrial capital operates, is temporarily accompanied. Temporarily, for so long as the hoard remains in the condition of a hoard, it does not function as capital, does not take part in the process of creating surplus-value, remains a sum of money which grows only because money, come by without its doing anything, is thrown in the same coffer.
The form of a hoard is simply the form of money not in circulation, of money whose circulation has been interrupted and which is therefore fixed in its money-form. As for the process of hoarding, it is common to all commodity production and figures as an end in itself only in the undeveloped, pre-capitalist forms of this production. In the present case, however, the hoard appears as a form of money-capital and the formation of a hoard as a process which temporarily accompanies the accumulation of capital because and so far as the money here figures as latent money-capital ;because the formation of a hoard, the state of being a hoard, in which the surplus-value existing in money-form finds itself, is a functionally determined preparatory stage gone through outside of the circuit described by the capital and required for the transformation of the surplus-value into really functioning capital. By its definition it is therefore latent money-capital. Hence the size it must acquire before it can take part in the process is determined in each case by the value constitution of the productive capital. But so long as it remains in the condition of a hoard it does not yet perform the functions of money-capital but is still idle money-capital; not money-capital whose function has been interrupted, as was the case before, but money-capital not yet capable of performing it.
