In volume one, he says, basically, “in volume one I deal with this, in volume two I deal with that, and in volume three I deal with something else.” It’s clear that in Marx’s mind, he had an idea of the totality of the circulation of capital. They’re important because this is what Marx says. That’s what I try to teach, so that people understand the relationships between the three volumes of Capital and don’t get lost entirely in any one volume or parts of them. And the third deals with distribution - how much goes to the landlord, how much goes to the financier, how much goes to the merchant, before it is all turned around and sent back into the circulation process. The second deals with circulation and what we call “realization” - the way the commodity is converted back into money. And the three volumes of Capital deal with different aspects of that process. Then the profit is redistributed in various ways, in the form of rents and interest, and then it circulates back into that money, which starts the production cycle again. That new commodity is sold for money, plus a profit. Capitalists start the day with a certain amount of money, take the money into the marketplace and buy some commodities like means of production and labor power, and put them to work in a labor process that produces a new commodity. Marx is very much into detail, and it’s sometimes hard to get a sense of exactly what the whole conception of Capital is about.
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