The capital that exists in the form of commodity-capital, or as money-capital is not a different capital than that which exists in the form of productive-capital. It is all the same industrial capital, which exists in these different forms simultaneously.
“the whole of all these parts, exists simultaneously in its various phases and functions and thus describes all three circuits at the same time.”
The output of one industrial capital, which takes the form of its commodity-capital, may become the input of another industrial capital. The fact that it may pass through the hands of a merchant capital, before doing so, does not change this fact. The merchant capital merely takes on the function that the commercial workers of the producers would otherwise have undertaken in selling and buying. If the whole social capital is considered as one large enterprise, then the inputs of the second producer are no different to the components of production that pass from one stage of production in the factory to another, as part of a continuous flow of production.
“But it can be such a unity only if all the different parts of capital can go through the successive stages of the circuit, can pass from one phase, from one functional form to another, so that the industrial capital, being the whole of all these parts, exists simultaneously in its various phases and functions and thus describes all three circuits at the same time. The succession [das Nacheinander] of these parts is here governed by their co-existence [das Nebeneinander], that is to say, by the division of capital. In a ramified factory system the product is constantly in the various stages of its process of formation and constantly passes from one phase of production to another.”
(ibid)
The process of capital, and of social reproduction is characterised by this simultaneity. It is that which gives it its continuity as a dialectical process of change, rather than as a syllogistic series of discrete events that simply follow one after another.
“A large part of what appears as constant capital—instruments and materials of labour—in one sphere of production, is simultaneously the product of another, parallel sphere of production. For example, yarn which forms part of the constant capital of the weaver, is the product of the spinner, and may still have been in the process of becoming yarn on the previous day. When we use the term simultaneous here, we mean produced during the same year. The same commodities in different phases pass through various spheres of production in the course of the same year.”
(Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17)
“The same commodities which are thus consumed as constant capital in the course of the year are also, in the same way continuously being produced during the same year.”
(ibid)
“A machine is wearing out in sphere A. It is simultaneously being produced in sphere B. The constant capital that is consumed during a year in those spheres of production which produce the means of subsistence, is simultaneously being produced in other spheres of production, so that during the course of the year or by the end of the year it is renewed in kind. Both of them, the means of subsistence as well as this part of the constant capital, are the products of new labour employed during the year.”
(ibid)
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