Circulation of Capital
Description
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"What the young Marx discusses as “universal intercourse” is in his later works, such as Grundrisse and Capital, developed in more abstract terms through the concept of “circulation”. This is a term that has a double meaning, in a way that is both confusing and felicitous (Kjøsen 2019).
The first of these meanings — call it “circulation 1” — designates a specific moment or segment of the process by which capital incessantly transforms from money to commodities to more money, and more commodities. It is, Marx says, only in the process of production, where human labour transforms raw materials into commodities, that “surplus value” is created. However, for this surplus value to be realized as profit, commodities must exit production and go to market, where they can be exchanged for money. “Circulation 1” refers to this phase in the overall circuit of capital. As surplus value is only generated in production, circulation1 cannot add to the value of a commodity. But it can increase the speed and efficiency with which commodities are exchanged for money, realizing their value. Increasing the velocity of circulation decreases the time in which a given quantity of capital “turns over” from commodities to money and back again, thereby increasing its profitability. In this sense, then, circulation1 defines a crucial, but delimited part of the cycle of capital, one which gives rise to its own vast, historically evolving apparatus of transportation, warehousing, logistics, shops, marketing, advertising, financing and all the communicative flows these entail (see Kjøsen 2019).
There is, however, a second meaning of “circulation” in some passages of Marx’s work. In this usage, the term “circulation 2” refers to movement through the entire circuit of capital. It encompasses all the transformations of value through money, the purchase of labour and machinery for production, the making and marketing of commodities, back to more money. “Circulation 2” therefore includes and subsumes production and circulation1 — from which, in recent Marxist scholarship, monetary operations of credit, debt and speculation are sometimes split off as a distinct third category of “financialization”. “Circulation 2” thus comprises all of capital’s continuous motion between production, circulation1 and financialization."
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Discussion
Acceleration as the Rotational Velocity of Capital’s Globalized Circulation
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"It points to a historical process by which capital as a whole becomes increasingly circulatory. Production, marketing and financialization become increasingly tightly integrated; ever larger ratios of waged labour are devoted to logistical, marketing and financial (i.e. “circulation1”) rather than production activities; the “annihilation of space by time” (Marx 1973, 539), the mission of the circulation1, is intensified by production operations at the scale of the world market and the whole ensemble is increasingly governed by the logics of velocity.
The oscillating semantics of circulation this point to the accelerationist tendencies of capital. Acceleration, in both its left and right variants, is often thought as a rocket-like ascension of technological powers, blasting towards some fatal or utopian destination. That ascending, dynamic is, however, propelled by, and in turn propels, the rotational velocity of capital’s globalized circulation. The technological medium, both product and cause, of this circulatory intensification is provided through the successive revolutionizing of industrial processes by capital, of which the latest is the so-called third or fourth industrial revolution of mobile communication, high speed 5G networks, artificial intelligences, and advanced automation (see Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012 and 2014; Kjøsen 2016). This is the process for which Big Tech (and, increasingly, its Chinese capitalist competitors) are capitalism’s vanguard, and circulation is the concept that we will use as to connect the ascendancy of platform capitalism with the rise of populist electoral parties, a global pandemic, and worldwide riot. The thread of circulation links platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots."