THE METAMORPHOSES OF CAPITAL AND THEIR CIRCUITSTHE COSTS OF CIRCULATION I. GENUINE COSTS OF CIRCULATION 1. The Time of Purchase and SaleThe transformations of the forms of capital from commodities into money and from money into commodities are at the same time transactions of the capitalist, acts of purchase and sale. The time in which these transformations of forms take place constitutes subjectively, from the standpoint of the capitalist, the time of purchase and sale; it is the time during which he performs the functions of a seller and buyer in the market. Just as the time of circulation of capital is a necessary segment of its time of reproduction, so the time in which the capitalist buys and sells and scours the market is a necessary part of the time in which he functions as a capitalist, i.e., as personified capital. It is a part of his business hours.
[Since we have assumed that commodities are bought and sold at their values, these acts constitute merely the conversion of a certain value from one form into another, from the commodity-form into the money-form or from the money-form into the commodity-form -- a change in the state of being. If commodities are sold at their values, then the magnitudes of value in the hands of the buyer and seller remain unchanged. Only the form of existence of value is changed. If the commodities are not sold at their values, then the sum of the converted values remains unchanged;the plus on one side is a minus on the other.
The metamorphoses C---M and M---C are transactions between buyers and sellers; they require time to conclude bargains, the more so as the struggle goes on in which each seeks to get the best of the other, and it is businessmen who face one another here; and when Greek meets Greek then comes the tug of war." [A paraphrase of words from the 17th century tragedy The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great by Nathaniel Lee. -- Ed .] To effect a change in the state of being costs of time and labour-power, not for the purpose of creating value, however, but in order to accomplish the conversion of value from one form into another.
The mutual attempt to appropriate an extra slice of this value on this occasion changes nothing. This labour, increased by the evil designs on either side, creates no value, any more than the work performed in a judicial proceeding increases the value of the subject matter of the suit. Matters stand with this labour -- which is a necessary element in the capitalist process of production as a whole, including circulation or included by it -- as they stand, say, with the work of combustion of some substance used for the generation of heat. This work of combustion does not generate any heat, although it is a necessary element in the process of combustion.
In order, e.g., to consume coal as fuel, I must combine it with oxygen, and for this purpose must transform it from the solid into the gaseous state (for in the carbonic acid gas, the result of the combustion, coal is in the gaseous state); consequently, I must bring about a physical change in the form of its existence or in its state of being. The separation of carbon molecules, which are united into a solid mass, and the splitting up of these molecules into their separate atoms must precede the new combination, and this requires a certain expenditure of energy which thus is not transformed into heat but taken from it. Therefore, if the owners of the commodities are not capitalists but independent direct producers, the time employed in buying and selling is a diminution of their labour-time, and for this reason such transactions used to be deferred (in ancient and medieval times)to holidays.
Of course the dimensions assumed by the conversion of commodities in the hands of the capitalists cannot transform this labour -- which does not create any value -- into labour productive of value. Nor can the miracle of this transubstantiation be accomplished by a transposition, i.e., by the industrial capitalist making this "work of combustion" the exclusive business of third persons, who are paid by them, instead of performing it themselves. This third persons will of course not tender their labour-power to the capitalist out of sheer love for them. It is a matter of indifference to the rent collector of a real-estate owner or the messenger of a bank that their labour does not add one iota or tittle to the value of either the rent or the gold pieces carried to another bank by the bagful. [10]
To the capitalist who has others working for him, buying and selling becomes a primary function. Since he appropriates the product of many on a large social scale, he must sell it on the same scale and then reconvert it from money into elements of production. Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant's capital give rise to an illusion. But without going into this at length here this much is plain from the start: If by a division of labour a function, unproductive in itself although a necessary element of reproduction, is transformed from an incidental occupation many into an exclusive occupation of a few, into their special business, the nature of this function itself is not changed. One merchant (here considered a mere agent attending to the change of form of commodities, a mere buyer and seller) may by his operations shorten the time of purchase and sale for many producers. In such case he should be regarded as a machine which reduces useless expenditure of energy or helps to set production time free. [11]