Charles
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Capital Vol. III Part V. Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital Chapter 21. Interest-Bearing Capita
Last paragraph of Chapter 21:
"The acts of circulation, M — C and C — M', in which a certain amount of value functions as money or commodities, are but intermediate processes, mere phases of the total movement. As capital, it performs the entire movement M — M'. It is advanced as money or a sum of values in one form or another, and returns as a sum of values. The lender of money does not expend it in purchasing commodities, or, if this sum of values is in commodity-form, does not sell it for money. He advances it as capital, as M — M', as a value, which returns to its point of departure after a certain term. He lends instead of buying or selling. This lending, therefore, is the appropriate form of alienating value as capital, instead of alienating it as money or commodities. It does not follow, however, that lending cannot also take the form of transactions which have nothing to do with the capitalist process of reproduction."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch21.htm
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Didn't Doug in one of his posts point out that in actuality there is no difference between speculative and productive investment. My grandfather in 1939 took 300 crates of strawberries to market, in which he had "invested/speculated" quite a bit. Then he brought them home and fed them to the hogs, because the highest price offered had been less than the cost of the packaging. Ford invested/speculated quite a bit on the Edsel; not much return.
As Doug pointed out in one of his earliest posts on this thread, the whole dispute is generated by those whose moral sensibilities are roughed up by "speculation" and who think "production" is good. That is, the distinction is precisely a moral not an economic distinction, and moral distinctions are grounded in a false epistemology -- that is they assume that moral statements can be grounded and they can't.
Carroil
^^^^^^ CB: Doesn't Marx make a non-moralistic distinction between M-C-M1 and M-M1 ? The latter is fictitious capital accumulation , I believe. Is fictitious capital speculative investment ?