In the case of factories for instance buyer and seller are frequently different persons. In the production of commodities, circulation is as necessary as production itself, so that circulation agents are just as much needed as production agents. The process of reproduction includes both functions of capital, therefore it includes the necessity of having representatives of these functions, either in the person of the capitalist himself or of wage-labourers, his agents. But this furnishes no ground for confusing the agents of circulation with those of production, any more than it furnishes ground for confusing the functions of commodity-capital and money-capital with those of productive capital. The agents of circulation must be paid by the agents of production. But the capitalists, who sell to and buy from one another, create neither values nor products by these acts, this state of affairs is not changed if they are enabled or compelled by the volume of their business to shift this function on to others. In some businesses the buyers and sellers get paid in the form of percentages on the profits.
All talk about their being paid by the consumer does not help matters.
The consumers can pay only in so far as they, as agents of production, produce an equivalent in commodities for themselves or appropriate it from production agents either on the basis of some legal title (as their co-partners, etc.) or by personal services.
There is a difference between C---M and M---C which has nothing to do with the difference in forms of commodities and money but arises from the capitalist character of production. Intrinsically both C---M and M---C are mere conversions of given values from one form into another.
But C'---M' is at the same time a realisation of the surplus-value contained in C'. M---C however is not. Hence selling is more important than buying.
Under normal conditions M---C is an act necessary for the self-expansion of the value expressed in M, but it is not a realisation of surplus-value;it is the introduction to its production, not an afterword.
The form in which a commodity exists, its existence as a use-value, sets definite limits to the circulation of commodity capital C'---M'. Use-values are perishable by nature. Hence if they are not productively or individually consumed within a certain time, depending on what they are intended for, in other words, if they are not sold within a certain period, they spoil and lose with their use-value the property of being vehicles of exchange-value.
The capital-value contained in them, hence also the surplus-value accrued in it, gets lost. The use-values do not remain the carriers of perennial self-expanding capital-value unless they are constantly renewed and reproduced, are replaced by new use-values of the same or of some other order. The sale of the use-values in the form of commodities, hence their entry into productive or individual consumption effected through this sale is however the ever recurring condition of their reproduction. They must change their old use-form within a definite time in order to continue their existence in a new form. Exchange-value maintains itself only by means of this constant renewal of its body. The use-values of various commodities spoil sooner or later; the interval between their production and consumption may therefore be comparatively long or short; hence they can persist without spoiling in the circulation phase C---M for a shorter or longer term in the form of commodity-capital, can endure a shorter or a longer time of circulation as commodities. The limit of the circulation time of a commodity-capital imposed by the spoiling of the body of the commodity is the absolute limit of this part of the time of circulation, or of the time of circulation of commodity-capital as such. The more perishable a commodity and the sooner after its production it must therefore be consumed and hence sold, the more restricted is its capacity for removal from its place of production, the narrower therefore is the spatial sphere of its circulation, the more localised are the markets where it can be sold. For this reason the more perishable a commodity is and the greater the absolute restriction of its time of circulation as commodity on account of its physical properties, the less is it suited to be an object of capitalist production. Such a commodity can come within its grasp only in thickly populated districts or to the extent that improved transportation eliminate distance. But the concentration of the production of any article in the hands of a few and in a populous district may create a relatively large market even for such articles as are the products of large breweries, dairies, etc.
NOTES
[8] Beginning of Manuscript IV. -- F.E.
[9] Time of production is here used in the active sense: The time of production of the means of production does not mean in this case the time required for their production, but the time during which they take part in the process of production of a certain commodity.
-- F.E.