All this amounts to an exposition along these lines: under conditions of developing and growing accumulation, capitalist reproduction dumps ever larger masses of commodity values on the market. To put this commodity mass of a continually increasing value into circulation requires an ever larger amount of money. This increasing amount of money must be found somehow or other. All this is, no doubt, plausible and correct as far as it goes, but our problem is not solved, it is merely wished away. One thing or the other! Either we regard the aggregate social product in a capitalist economy simply as a mass, a conglomeration of commodities of a certain value, seeing under conditions of accumulation, a mere increase in this undifferentiated mass of commodities and in the bulk of its value. Then all we need say is that a corresponding quantity of money is required for circulating this bulk of value, that with an increasing bulk of value the quantity of money must also increase, unless this growth of value is offset by acceleration of, and economy in, the traffic. And the final question, where does all money originally come from, could then be answered on Marx's recipe: from the gold mines. This, of course, is one way of looking at things, that of simple commodity circulation. But in that case there is no need to drag in concepts such as constant and variable capital, or surplus value, which have no place in simple commodity circulation, belonging essentially to the circulation of capitals and to social reproduction; nor is there need to inquire for sources of money for the realisation of the social surplus value under conditions of first simple, and then enlarged, reproduction. Under the aspect of simple commodity circulation puzzles of this kind are without meaning or content. But once these questions have been raised, once the course has been set for an investigation into the circulation of capitals and social reproduction, there can be no appealing to the sphere of simple commodity circulation, where there is no such problem at all, and consequently no solution to it. There can be no looking for the answer there, and then saying triumphantly that the problem has long been solved and in fact never really existed.