‘About this time Marx seems to have realised that he would never be able to complete the second and third volume in a manner satisfactory to himself, unless a complete revolution in his health took place. Manuscripts V-VIII show traces of hard struggles against depressing physical conditions far too frequently to be ignored. The most difficult part of the first section had been worked over in Manuscript V. The remainder of the first, and the entire second section, with the exception of Chapter 17, presented no great theoretical difficulties. But the third section, dealing with the reproduction and circulation of social capital, seemed to be very much in need of revision. Manuscript II, it must be pointed out, had first treated of this reproduction without regard to the circulation which is instrumental in effecting it, and then taken up the same question with regard to circulation. It was the intention of Marx to eliminate this section and to reconstruct it in such a way that it would conform to his wider grasp of the subject. This gave rise to Manuscript VIII, containing only 70 pages in quarto. A comparison with Section III, as printed after deducting the paragraphs inserted out of Manuscript II, shows the amount of matter compressed by Marx into this space.
‘Manuscript VIII is likewise merely a preliminary presentation of the subject, and its main object was to ascertain and develop the new points of view not set forth in Manuscript II, while those points were ignored about which there was nothing new to say. An essential part of Chapter 17, Section II, which is more or less relevant to Section III, was at the same time drawn into this discussion and expanded. The logical sequence was frequently interrupted, the treatment of the subject was incomplete in various places, and especially the conclusion was very fragmentary. But Marx expressed as nearly as possible what he intended to say on the subject.
‘This is the material for Volume II, out of which I was supposed “to make something”, as Marx said to his daughter Eleanor shortly before his death.’[145]
We cannot but admire this ‘something’ which Engels managed to ‘make’ from material of such a kind. As far as our present problem is concerned, however, this detailed report makes it clear that no more than the first two of the three sections that make up volume ii were anything like ready for print in the manuscripts Marx left: the section ‘On the Circulation of Money and Commodity Capital’ and on ‘The Causes of Circulation and the Turnover of Capital’. The third section which treats of the reproduction of total capital is merely a collection of fragments which Marx himself considered to be ‘very much in need of revision.’ Yet it is the last part of this section, i.e. chapter 21, ‘On Accumulation and Enlarged Reproduction’, which is of primary importance in the present context, and of the whole book this is the most incomplete. It comprises thirty-five pages of print in all and breaks off right in the middle of the analysis.
Besides this extraneous circumstance, we would suggest another point of great influence. Marx’s investigation of the social reproductive process starts off, as we have seen, from the analysis of Adam Smith which came to grief, among other reasons, because of the erroneous doctrine that the price of all commodities is composed of v + s. Polemics against this dogma dominated Marx’s entire analysis of the reproductive process. He devoted all his attention to proving that the total capital of society must serve, not only for consumption to the full amount of the various sources of revenue, but also for renewal of the constant capital. And inasmuch as the purest theoretical form for this line of reasoning is given, not by enlarged reproduction, but by simple reproduction, Marx tends to consider reproduction mainly from a point of view that is the very opposite of accumulation, from the assumption that the entire surplus value is consumed by the capitalists. How greatly these polemics influenced his analysis is proved by his returning time and again in the course of his work to the attack on Adam Smith from the most various angles. So already in volume i, the following pages are devoted to it: vol. i, sect. 7, chap. 24, (2), pp. 588-602, and in vol. ii, pp. 417-56, p. 473, pp. 504-8, and pp. 554 f.
Marx again takes up the question of total reproduction in volume iii but from the start becomes once more involved with the problem set by Smith to which he devotes the whole of his 49th chapter and most of chapter 50 (pp. 968-92 and 992-1022). Finally, in Theorien ueber den Mehrwert, we again find detailed polemics against Smith’s dogma: pp. 164-253 in vol. i, and pp. 92, 95, 126, 233, and 262 in vol. ii, part 2. Marx repeatedly stressed and emphasised the fact that he considered replacement of the constant capital from the aggregate social product the most difficult and important problem of reproduction.[146] The other problem, that of accumulation, i.e. realisation of the surplus value for the purpose of capitalisation, was thus pushed into the background, so that in the end Marx hardly touched upon it.
This problem being of such paramount importance for capitalist economy, it is not surprising that bourgeois economists have dealt with it again and again. Attempts to grapple with this vital question for capitalist economy, with the question whether capital accumulation is possible in practice, come up time and again in the history of economic theory. To these historical attempts, before and after Marx, at solving this problem we shall now turn.