Besides this extraneous circumstance, we would suggest another point of great influence. Marx's investigation of the social reproductive process starts off, as we have seen, from the analysis of Adam Smith which came to grief, among other reasons, because of the erroneous doctrine that the price of all commodities is composed of _v + s_. Polemics against this dogma dominated Marx's entire analysis of the reproductive process. He devoted all his attention to proving that the total capital of society must serve, not only for consumption to the full amount of the various sources of revenue, but also for renewal of the constant capital. And inasmuch as the purest theoretical form for this line of reasoning is given, not by enlarged reproduction, but by simple reproduction, Marx tends to consider reproduction mainly from a point of view that is the very opposite of accumulation, from the assumption that the entire surplus value is consumed by the capitalists. How greatly these polemics influenced his analysis is proved by his returning time and again in the course of his work to the attack on Adam Smith from the most various angles. So already in volume i, the following pages are devoted to it: vol. i, sect. 7, chap. 24, (2), pp. 588-602, and in vol. ii, pp. 417-56, p. 473, pp. 504-8, and pp. 554 f. Marx again takes up the question of total reproduction in volume iii but from the start becomes once more involved with the problem set by Smith to which he devotes the whole of his 49th chapter and most of chapter 50 (pp. 968-92 and 992-1022). Finally, in _Theorien ueber den Mehrwert_, we again find detailed polemics against Smith's dogma: pp. 164-253 in vol. i, and pp. 92, 95, 126, 233, and 262 in vol. ii, part 2. Marx repeatedly stressed and emphasised the fact that he considered replacement of the constant capital from the aggregate social product the most difficult and important problem of reproduction.[146] The other problem, that of accumulation, i.e. realisation of the surplus value for the purpose of capitalisation, was thus pushed into the background, so that in the end Marx hardly touched upon it. This problem being of such paramount importance for capitalist economy, it is not surprising that bourgeois economists have dealt with it again and again. Attempts to grapple with this vital question for capitalist economy, with the question whether capital accumulation is possible in practice, come up time and again in the history of economic theory. To these historical attempts, before and after Marx, at solving this problem we shall now turn. FOOTNOTES: [133] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 572. [134] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 380-1. [135] Ibid., p. 381. [136] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 381-3. [137] Ibid., p. 383. [138] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 384-5. [139] Ibid., p. 385. [140] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 387. [141] Ibid., p. 397. [142] Ibid., p. 397. [143] Ibid., pp. 397-8. [144] _Capital_, vol. ii, p. 401. [145] _Capital_, vol. ii, pp. 8 ff.