He even explores what hidden methods there may be of ‘saving’ on the variable capital, such as the truck system, frauds, etc., only to comment finally: ‘This is the same operation as under (1), only disguised and carried out by a detour. Therefore it must likewise be rejected as an explanation of the present problem.’[128]
All efforts to make the variable capital yield a new source of money for the purpose of accumulation are thus unrewarded: ‘In short, we cannot accomplish anything with 376 IIv for the solution of this question.’[128]
Marx next turns to the cash reserves which the capitalists in Department II keep for the circulation of their own consumption and investigates whether none of this money can be diverted to the purposes of capitalisation. Yet this, he allows, is ‘still more impossible’.
‘Here the capitalists of the same department are standing face to face, heavily buying and selling their articles of consumption. The money required for these transactions serves only as a medium of circulation and must flow back to the interested parties in the normal course of things, to the extent that they have advanced it to the circulation, in order to pass again and again over the same course.’[129]
The next attempt to follow belongs, as was to have been expected, to the category of those ‘subterfuges’ which Marx ruthlessly refutes: the attempt to explain that money-capital can be formed in the hands of one capitalist group in Department II by defrauding the other capitalists within the same department—viz. in the process of the mutual selling of consumer goods. No time need be wasted on this little effort.
Then comes a more sober proposition: ‘Or, a certain portion of IIs, represented by necessities of life, might be directly converted into new variable capital of Department II.’[130]
It is not quite clear how this can help us over the hurdle, help to get accumulation going. For one thing, the formation of additional variable capital in Department II is not much use if we have no additional constant capital for this department, being in fact engaged on the task of finding it. For another thing, our present concern is to see if we can find in Department II a source of money for the purchase of additional means of production from I, and Department II’s problem how to place its own additional product in some way or other in the process of production is beside the point. Further, is the implication that the respective consumer goods should be used ‘direct’, i.e. without the mediation of money, in the production of Department II, so that the corresponding amount of money can be diverted from variable capital to the purpose of accumulation? If so, we could not accept the solution. Under normal conditions of capitalist production, the remuneration of the workers by consumer goods direct is precluded, one of the corner-stones of capitalist economy being the money-form of the variable capital, the independent transaction between the worker as buyer of commodities and producer of consumer goods. Marx himself stresses this point in another context:
‘We know that the actual variable capital consists of labour-power, and therefore the additional must consist of the same thing. It is not the capitalist of I who among other things buys from II a supply of necessities of life for his labourers, or accumulates them for this purpose, as the slave holder had to do. It is the labourers themselves who trade with II.’[131]
And that goes for the capitalists of Department II just as much as for those of Department I, thus disposing of Marx’s last effort.
Marx ends up by referring us to the last part of Capital, volume ii, chapter 21, the ‘Concluding Remarks sub iv’, as Engels has called them. Here we find the curt explanation: