Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 16
The Circuits as a System of Syllogisms
The second volume, which Engels published from Marx’s papers in 1885, is the methodologically densest part of the work and the least read. There Marx develops three circuits of capital: that of money capital, that of productive capital, and that of commodity capital. These are not three kinds of capital but three views of the same process, depending on which phase occupies the middle position.
The form corresponds to that of the syllogism in Hegel’s Logic of the Concept — and it must be said at once what this observation accomplishes and what it does not. That an analysis can be cast into syllogistic figures says nothing about whether it is correct. The figure is a form of presentation, not a means of cognition: the work lies in distinguishing the three circuits at all and in determining what is mediated in each — and this work Marx performed on the subject matter, not on the form. Anyone who proceeded the other way around, trying to derive the articulation from the figure, would have nothing in hand: the same reproduction could be broken down into other triads as well, and all of them would be formally correct. A syllogism has three figures, in each of which a different one of the three terms occupies the middle position; only all three together fully determine the connection. In Marx, circulation occupies the middle in the first circuit, production in the second, sale in the third. Only all three together display the reproduction of the whole.
Marx himself states what follows from this: “If we take all three forms together, then all the premises of the process appear as its result, as a premise produced by the process itself. Each moment appears as a point of departure, a point of transit, and a point of return” (MEW 24, 105). The sentence is Hegelian down to its choice of words. The premises prove to have been posited; the process returns to itself after having run through its moments.
What this shows carries weight beyond the question of method. Capitalism functions as a system of mutual presuppositions: the reproduction of any one capital presupposes that of all the others; circulation is not an external exchange of finished commodities but a necessary moment of social reproduction; and a disturbance at one point propagates through the whole. Crisis is thereby determined not as an accident but as an expression of the system’s inner constitution.
For practical purposes, one feature of this analysis is especially important: it is formal. It concerns the structure of the system, not the question of where surplus value comes from. It is thus independent of the disputes over the value theory of the first volume — and remains valid even where those disputes remain unresolved.