La Partita Imaginaria

” Money in its immediate form, as it belongs to a historic stage of production preceding capital, thus appears to capital as a cost of circulation, and the efforts of capital hence tend in the direction of transforming it into a form adequate for its own ends; hence attempting to make it into a representative of one moment of circulation which does not itself cost labour, and has itself no value. Capital hence tends in the direction of suspending money in its inherited, immediate reality, and transforming it into something merely posited and at the same time suspended by capital, into something purely ideal. It cannot be said, therefore, as does Storch, that money as such is a means of speeding up the circulation of capital; it must rather be said to the contrary that capital attempts to transform money into a merely ideal moment of its circulation, and first to raise it into the adequate form corresponding to it. Suspension of money in its immediate form appears as a demand made by money circulation once it has become a moment of the circulation of capital; because in its immediate, presupposed form it is a barrier to the circulation of capital. The tendency of capital is circulation without circulation time.”

Karl Marx, The Grundrisse