An Error Common to ‘The Transformation of Money into Capital’ and ‘The Primitive Calculation’: Pre-Capitalist Societies Do and Do Not Produce Surplus

Abstract

Part II, Book I of Capital, entitled ‘The transformation of money into capital’, consists of Chapters 4 to 6, ending in the presentation of a question on our title subject. Its answer is given by Marx himself in Chapter 7, ‘The labour-process and the process of producing surplus value’, Part III. This is improper. Chapter 7 should have been included in Part II.1 Chapters 4 and 5 tell us that an indispensable prerequisite for the transformation of money into capital is the appearance of labour-power as a commodity and that the pre-capitalist simple commodity-producers’ society does not produce surplus value. The historical explanation corresponding to this theoretical description, the transformation of money into capital, is given in Chapters 26 to 32, in Part VIII, The So-Called Primitive Accumulation’. In Chapter 26 Marx points out that the fundamental precondition for the transformation of money and commodities into capital is the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ which is ‘nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’,2 in other words the process of production of labour-power as a commodity.