The total circuit presents itself for each functional form of capital as its own specific circuit, and indeed each of these circuits conditions the continuity of the overall process; the circular course of one functional form determines that of the others. It is a necessary condition for the total-production-process [Gesamtproduktionsprozeß], in other words for the social capital, that this is at the same time a reproduction-process, and therefore the circuit of each of its moments. Different fractions of the capital successively pass through the different stages and functional forms. Each functional form thus passes through its circuit simultaneously with the others, though it is always a different part of the capital that presents itself in it. A part of the capital exists as commodity capital that is being transformed into money, but this is an ever-changing part, and is constantly being reproduced; another part exists as money capital that is being transformed into productive capital; a third part as productive capital being transformed into commodity capital. The constant presence of all three forms is mediated by the circuit of the total capital through precisely these three phases.
As a whole, then, the capital is simultaneously present, and spatially coexistent, in its various phases. But each part is constantly passing from one phase or functional form into another, and thus functions in all of them in turn. The forms are therefore fluid forms, and their simultaneity is mediated by their succession. Each form both follows and precedes the others, so that the return of one part of the capital to one form is determined by the return of another part to another form. Each part continuously describes its own course, but it is always another part of capital that finds itself in this form, and these particular circuits simply constitute simultaneous and successive moments of the overall process.
It is only in the unity of the three circuits that the continuity of the total-process is realised...total social capital always possesses this continuity, and its process always contains the unity of the three circuits. 15
<sup>12</sup> Of interest here is the manner in which, from the standpoint of total social capital, ‘production’ (the circuit of productive capital) simply represents the capacity of the living organism to preserve/maintain itself, not the sense in which this being reproduces itself as more than itself– as ‘giving birth’ to more than what it already is (this is the function of the circuit of money capital). To put this a different way, whereas the production-process in the first volume of Capital obviously corresponds to the production of surplus-value, this is, from the standpoint of the second volume of Capital, expressed by the circuit of money capital, not the circuit of productive capital. As Marx expresses it, ‘the general form of the movement P…P’ is the form of reproduction, and does not indicate, as does M…M’, that valorisation is the purpose of the process.’ Marx, Capital 2, 172.
<sup>13</sup> Tombazos, Time in Marx, 140.
<sup>14</sup> Ibid. 144.
<sup>15</sup> Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Zweiter Band: Der Zirkulationsprozeß des Capitals [1885], herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels (hereafter Kapital 2), in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 24 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1963), 108 (Capital 2, 184). Consider also Marx, Capital 2, 180: ‘if we take all three forms together, then all the premises of the process appear as its result, as premises produced by the process itself. Each moment appears as a point of departure, of transit, and of return.
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