None of the producers who see demand for their output decline, as part of this process, see a part of their capital released. If demand for any of these commodities declines, because the unemployed workers no longer have wages to spend, the effect is to reduce the market price of these commodities, as the supply exceeds that demand. The lower price means that the realised profit falls and maybe the capital consumed in the production cannot be reproduced. In itself that reduces the revenue – profit – of the capitalist, in that sphere, and if the capital cannot be reproduced, and production is cut back, it will mean workers are laid off, and their revenue – wages – also fall.
Marx emphasises again the point made in Capital II, that what confronts the workers, in particular, here, the discharged workers, in the shape of the commodities being sold, is not capital. Workers do not exchange their commodity – labour-power – for capital. The variable-capital, whether it is in the form of commodities paid directly to the workers as wages in kind, or more commonly in the form of a money wage, equivalent to the value of these commodities, is only capital for the capitalist. What the worker receives is not capital, but only commodities, or their money equivalent. What the worker sells is not capital, but only a commodity. That commodity – labour-power – only becomes capital in the hands of the capitalist, so that in the process their money-capital is metamorphosed into productive- capital.
“What confronted the workers as capital, was a part of the commodity now being produced with machinery; this part came to them in the form of money and was exchanged by them for other commodities (means of subsistence), which did not face them as capital, but confronted their money as commodities. This is therefore an entirely different relationship. The farmer and any other producer whose commodity they bought with their wages, did not confront them as capitalist and did not employ them as workers.
They have only ceased to be buyers for him, which may possibly—if not counterbalanced by other circumstances—bring about a temporary depreciation in his capital, but does not set free any capital for the discharged workers. The capital that employed them “is still in being”, but no longer in a form in which it resolves into wages, or only indirectly and to a smaller extent.
Otherwise anyone who through some bad luck ceased to have money, would inevitably set free sufficient capital for his own employment.” (p 564)
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