A note by Engels stands here. It says that the three fragments that follow were found at different places in the manuscript for Part Six.
Capital–profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land–ground-rent, labour–wages. That is the trinity form, and it holds inside itself all the mysteries of the social production process.
Further, as was shown earlier, interest appears as capital's own proper, characteristic product, while profit of enterprise appears, by contrast, as a wage independent of capital. Because of this, the trinity form reduces more closely to this:
Capital–interest, land–ground-rent, labour–wages. Here profit has been happily got rid of — profit, the form of surplus-value that specifically characterizes the capitalist mode of production.
If we look more closely at this economic three-in-one, we find:
First: the alleged sources of the wealth available each year belong to wholly disparate spheres, with not the least analogy between them. They stand to each other roughly as notary's fees, beetroot and music do.
Capital, land, labour! But capital is not a thing. It is a definite social relation of production, belonging to a definite historical form of society. It presents itself in a thing, and it gives that thing a specific social character. Capital is not the material and produced means of production added together. Capital is those means of production turned into capital — in themselves as little capital as gold or silver in itself is money. They are the means of production monopolized by one part of society, the products and conditions of activity of living labour-power, made independent over against that labour-power and personified in capital through this opposition.
It is not only the workers' products that turn into independent powers — products ruling over their producers and buying them. The social powers of this labour, too, and a future ... [here the manuscript has an illegible word] form of it, confront the workers as properties of their product; the MEW editors read the phrase as 'the social powers and the connected form'. So here we have a definite social form — at first sight a very mysterious one — of one factor in a historically made social production process.
And now, beside that, land — inorganic nature as such, a raw, jumbled mass, in all its primeval wildness. Value is labour. So surplus-value cannot be earth. The soil's absolute fertility does nothing but let a given quantity of labour yield a given product, and how much product it yields is conditioned by the soil's natural fertility. Differences in the soil's fertility make the same amounts of labour and capital — the same value — express themselves in different quantities of farm products, so that these products have different individual values. The levelling of these individual values into market values brings it about, in Ricardo's words, that 'the advantages of fertile over inferior soil ... are transferred from the cultivator or consumer to the landlord' (Principles, p. 62).
And finally, third in the league: a mere spectre — 'the' labour. It is nothing but an abstraction, and taken by itself it does not exist at all. Or, if we take the … — here the manuscript has an illegible word, which the MEW editors read as 'what is meant' — it is human productive activity in general, the activity through which people mediate their interchange of matter with nature. And this activity is stripped not only of every social form and every definite character: even in its bare existence in nature, independent of society, it is lifted out of all societies, and as an expression and a confirmation of life it is common to the human being who is not social at all yet, together with the one who is social in some way or other.
Capital – interest; landed property, private property in the earth, and the modern kind at that, the kind that matches the capitalist mode of production – rent; wage-labour – wages. In this form, then, a connection between the sources of revenue is supposed to hold. Wage-labour and landed property are historically specific social forms, just as capital is: one a form of labour, the other a form of the monopolized earth, and both correspond to capital and belong to the same economic formation of society.
The first thing that stands out in this formula is this. Capital is a form of an element of production that belongs to a particular mode of production, to a particular historical shape of the social production process — an element of production mixed together with a particular social form and presented in it. And beside that, without any further ado, two other things are ranked: the earth on one side, labour on the other. Those two are elements of the real labour process; in this material shape they are common to every mode of production, they are the material elements of any production process, and they have nothing to do with its social form.
Secondly. In the formula capital – interest, earth – ground-rent, labour – wages, capital, earth and labour appear as the sources of interest (instead of profit), of ground-rent and of wages, and these revenues appear as their products, their fruits: the sources the basis, the revenues the consequence; the sources the cause, the revenues the effect. And each separate source is related to its product as something it throws off and produces.
But all three incomes — interest (instead of profit), rent, wages — are parts of the value of the product; so they are parts of value in general, or, put in money, certain parts of money, parts of price.
The formula capital – interest is indeed the most conceptless formula of capital, but it is a formula of it. Still: how is the earth supposed to create a value, that is, a socially determined quantum of labour — and on top of that the particular value-part of its own products that forms rent? The earth is at work, for instance, as an agent of production in the making of a use-value, a material product, wheat. But it has nothing to do with producing the value of the wheat. In so far as value is expressed in wheat, the wheat counts only as a certain quantum of objectified social labour, entirely indifferent to the particular material in which that labour is expressed, and to the particular use-value of that material.
None of this is contradicted by the fact that (1) other things being equal, whether wheat is cheap or dear depends on the productivity of the earth. How productive agricultural labour is depends on natural conditions, and depending on that productivity the same quantum of labour is expressed in many products or few, in many or few use-values. How big the quantum of labour is that is expressed in one bushel depends on how many bushels the same quantum of labour supplies. So the quantities of product in which the value is expressed do depend here on the productivity of the earth; but this value is given, independently of that distribution. Value is expressed in use-value, and a use-value is a condition of value-creation; but it is folly to set up an opposition, with a use-value, the earth, on one side and a value on the other — and a particular value-part at that. Then a second point is announced — '2.' — and there, as Engels notes, the manuscript breaks off.
In fact, vulgar economics does nothing but interpret in doctrinaire fashion, systematize and defend the notions of the agents caught up in bourgeois relations of production. So we should not be surprised that precisely in the estranged form of appearance of economic relations, where those relations are absurd on their face and complete contradictions — and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance and the essence of things coincided immediately — precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, and these relations appear all the more self-evident to it the more their inner connection is hidden from view, while the ordinary way of thinking is familiar with them. So it has not the slightest suspicion that the trinity it starts from — land-rent, capital-interest, labour-wages or price of labour — consists of three compositions that are impossible on their face. First we have land as a use-value, which has no value, and rent as exchange-value: a social relation, grasped as a thing, is put into a proportion with nature — two incommensurable magnitudes that are supposed to have a relation to each other. Then capital-interest. If capital is grasped as a certain sum of value, independently represented in money, then it is nonsense on its face that a value should be more value than it is worth. Precisely in the form capital-interest all mediation drops away, and capital is reduced to its most general formula, which for that very reason is also inexplicable in itself and absurd. That is exactly why the vulgar economist prefers the formula capital-interest — with the occult quality of a value that is unequal to itself — to the formula capital-profit, because in capital-profit one already comes nearer to the real capital-relation. Then again, in the uneasy feeling that 4 is not 5 and that 100 Taler therefore cannot possibly be 110 Taler, he flees from capital as value to the material substance of capital, to its use-value as a production condition of labour — machinery, raw material, and so on. So, in place of that first relation, the incomprehensible one where 4 = 5, he once again succeeds in producing a wholly incommensurable one: a use-value, a thing, on one side, set against a specific social relation of production, surplus-value, on the other — just as with landed property. As soon as he arrives at this incommensurable, everything becomes clear to the vulgar economist, and he no longer feels the need to think further. For he has precisely arrived at the 'rationale' of the bourgeois outlook. Finally, labour-wages, the price of labour: as shown in Book I, this is an expression that on its face contradicts the concept of value, and equally the concept of price, which is itself generally only a specific expression of value; and 'price of labour' is just as irrational as a yellow logarithm. But here the vulgar economist is all the more satisfied, since he has now arrived at the bourgeois's profound insight that he pays money for labour, and since the very contradiction between the formula and the concept of value relieves him of the obligation to understand the latter.
We have seen that the capitalist production process is one historically specific form of the social production process in general. That general process produces the material conditions of human life. And it also goes on within specific historical and economic relations of production, and in doing so produces and reproduces those relations themselves — and with them the bearers of this process, their material conditions of existence, and their relations with one another, that is, the particular economic form of their society. For the whole of these relations — how the bearers of this production stand to nature and to each other, the relations in which they produce — that whole, looked at by its economic structure, is precisely society. Like all its predecessors, the capitalist production process goes on under definite material conditions; but these are at the same time the bearers of definite social relations that people enter into as they reproduce their life. Those conditions, like those relations, are on the one hand presuppositions of the capitalist production process and on the other its results and creations: it produces and reproduces them. We have also seen that capital — and the capitalist is only personified capital, acting in the production process merely as capital's bearer — so capital pumps out of the direct producers, the workers, a definite quantity of surplus labour in the social production process that corresponds to it. Capital receives that surplus labour without an equivalent, and the surplus labour by its very essence always remains forced labour, however much it may appear as the outcome of a free contractual agreement. This surplus labour presents itself in a surplus-value, and this surplus-value exists in a surplus product. Surplus labour as such — work beyond the measure of the given needs — must always remain. In the capitalist system, as in the slave system and others, it has only an antagonistic form, and it is filled out by the sheer idleness of one part of society. A definite quantity of surplus labour is required for insurance against accidents and for the necessary progressive expansion of the reproduction process, in keeping with the development of needs and the progress of population — what, from the capitalist standpoint, is called accumulation. It is one of capital's civilizing sides that it extorts this surplus labour in a manner and under conditions more favourable to the development of the productive forces and of the social relations, and to the creation of the elements for a higher new formation than were the earlier forms of slavery, serfdom and so on. So it brings about, on the one hand, a stage at which compulsion, and the monopolization of social development (including its material and intellectual advantages) by one part of society at the expense of another, fall away; on the other hand, it creates the material means and the seed of relations that, in a higher form of society, allow this surplus labour to be combined with a greater restriction of the time devoted to material labour in general. For surplus labour can, according to how far the productive power of labour has developed, be great with a small total working day and relatively small with a large one. If necessary labour-time is 3 and surplus labour is 3, the total working day is 6 and the rate of surplus labour 100 per cent. If necessary labour is 9 and surplus labour 3, the total working day is 12 and the rate of surplus labour only 33 1/3 per cent. And it then depends on the productivity of labour how much use-value is produced in a definite time, and so also in a definite surplus labour-time. The real wealth of society and the possibility of steadily expanding its reproduction process therefore depend not on the length of surplus labour but on how productive it is and on the more or less plentiful conditions of production in which it takes place. The realm of freedom truly begins only where work determined by need and external expediency comes to an end; so by the nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production proper. Civilized man, like the savage, has to struggle with nature to meet his needs and to keep his life going and reproduce it — and he has to do so in every form of society and under every possible mode of production. As he develops, this realm of natural necessity grows, because his needs grow; but at the same time the productive forces that satisfy them grow as well. Freedom within this sphere can only consist in this: that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their metabolism with nature rationally and bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by a blind power, and carry it out with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human powers as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom — which, however, can flourish only on that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is the basic condition.
In capitalist society, this surplus-value, or this surplus product, is divided among the capitalists as dividends, in proportion to each one's share of the social capital — if we set aside the accidental fluctuations of distribution and look at the law that regulates it, the limits that set its normal range.
In this form, surplus-value appears as the average profit that falls to capital. That average profit then splits into profit of enterprise and interest, and under those two categories it can fall to different sorts of capitalist.
But capital's appropriation and distribution of surplus-value or surplus product has a barrier in landed property. Just as the functioning capitalist pumps surplus labour out of the worker, and with it, in the form of profit, surplus-value and surplus product, so the landowner pumps a part of this surplus-value or surplus product back out of the capitalist, in the form of rent, in line with the laws developed earlier.
If we speak here of profit as the share of surplus-value that falls to capital, we mean average profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), which is already limited by the deduction of rent from total profit — and total profit is identical in mass with total surplus-value. The deduction of rent is assumed.
Capital-profit (profit of enterprise plus interest) and ground-rent are thus nothing but particular parts of one surplus-value. They are categories in which this surplus-value is distinguished according to whether it falls to capital or to landed property — labels that change nothing in what it is. Added together, they make up the sum of society's surplus-value.
Capital pumps the surplus labour represented in surplus-value and surplus product directly out of the workers. So in this sense it can be regarded as the producer of surplus-value.
Landed property has nothing to do with the real production process. Its role comes down to carrying a part of the produced surplus-value out of capital's pocket into its own. But the landowner does play a role in the capitalist production process — not only through the pressure he puts on capital, and not merely because large landed property is a precondition and condition of capitalist production, since it is a precondition of the worker's expropriation from the conditions of labour, but specifically because he appears as the personification of one of the most essential conditions of production.
Finally the worker gets, as the owner and seller of his personal labour-power, a part of the product under the name of wages. In that part is represented the portion of his labour we call necessary labour — that is, the labour needed to keep this labour-power going and to reproduce it, whether the conditions of that upkeep and reproduction are poorer or richer, more favourable or less.
However disparate these relations may otherwise appear, they all have one thing in common: capital throws off profit to the capitalist, year in, year out; land throws off ground-rent to the landowner; and labour-power — under normal conditions, and as long as it remains a usable labour-power — throws off wages to the worker.
These three portions of the total value produced each year, and the matching portions of the total product, can be consumed by their owners every year without the source they come from running dry — we leave accumulation aside here for now. They appear as fruits of a perennial tree for yearly consumption, or rather of three trees. They make up the yearly income of three classes — the capitalist, the landowner and the worker. And it is the functioning capitalist who distributes them, as the one who directly pumps out the surplus labour and puts labour in general to use.
To the capitalist his capital, to the landowner his land, and to the worker his labour-power — or rather his labour itself, since he really sells labour-power only as it is exercised, and the price of labour-power, as shown earlier, necessarily presents itself on the basis of the capitalist mode of production as the price of labour — these appear as three different sources of their own particular revenues: profit, ground-rent and wages.
And they really are so, in this sense: capital is for the capitalist a never-ending pumping machine for surplus labour; land is for the landowner a never-ending magnet that draws off a part of the surplus-value pumped out by capital; and labour is the constantly renewed condition and the constantly renewed means by which the worker acquires a part of the value he himself created, and so a part of the social product measured by that part of value — the necessary means of subsistence — under the heading of wages.
They are sources of revenue in a second sense as well: capital fixes one part of the value, and so of the product, of the year's labour in the form of profit; landed property fixes another part in the form of rent; and wage-labour fixes a third part in the form of wages — and it is precisely this transformation that turns those parts into the revenues of the capitalist, the landowner and the worker. But they do not create the substance itself that turns into these different categories. Distribution, rather, assumes that substance is already there: the total value of the annual product, which is nothing but social labour in objectified form.
To the agents of production, though — the people who carry the different functions in the production process — the matter does not present itself in this form. It presents itself in an inverted form. Why that happens we shall develop further as the investigation goes on. Capital, landed property and labour appear to those agents as three separate, independent sources, from which, as such, three different components of the value produced each year — and therefore of the product in which that value exists — spring: sources, then, from which spring not only the different forms this value takes as revenues falling to particular factors of the social production process, but this value itself, and with it the substance of these forms of revenue.
Engels notes that a folio of the manuscript is missing here.
... Differential rent is tied to the relative fertility of the land — that is, to properties that arise from the land as such. But in so far as it rests, first, on the different individual values of the products of different kinds of land, that is only the determination just mentioned. In so far as it rests, second, on the regulating general market value, which is distinct from those individual values, it is a social law carried through by competition, and it has nothing to do with the land or with the varying degrees of its fertility.
It could seem that at least in "labour-wages" a rational relation was expressed. But that is no more the case than with "land-ground-rent". In so far as labour is value-forming and is represented in the value of commodities, it has nothing to do with the distribution of that value among different categories. In so far as it has the specifically social character of wage-labour, it is not value-forming. It was shown earlier, in general, that wages, or the price of labour, are only an irrational expression for the value or price of labour-power; and the particular social conditions under which this labour-power is sold have nothing to do with labour as a general agent of production. Labour also objectifies itself in that value component of the commodity which, as wages, forms the price of labour-power; it creates this part just as it creates the other parts of the product; but it objectifies itself in this part no more and no differently than in the parts that form rent or profit. And in general, when we fix on labour as value-forming, we are not considering it in its concrete shape as a condition of production, but in a social determinacy that is different from that of wage-labour.
Even the expression "capital-profit" is incorrect here. If capital is taken in the only relation in which it produces surplus-value — its relation to the worker, in which it extorts surplus labour through the compulsion it exercises over labour-power, that is, over the wage-labourer — then this surplus-value includes rent as well as profit (profit of enterprise plus interest): in short, the whole undivided surplus-value. Here, by contrast, as a source of revenue, capital is related only to the part that falls to the capitalist. It is not the surplus-value it extracts overall, but only the part it extracts for the capitalist. All connection falls away still more once the formula turns into "capital-interest".
If we first looked at the disparity among the three sources, now, secondly: by contrast, their products, the revenues that come off them, all belong to one sphere, the sphere of value. That disparity does even out — and the relation here is not merely one between magnitudes that cannot be measured against each other; it is a relation between wholly unequal, mutually unrelated and incomparable things. It evens out because capital, like the earth and labour, is in fact taken only by its material substance, simply as produced means of production, with abstraction made both from capital as a relation to the worker and from capital as value.
Thirdly. In this sense, then, the formula — capital, interest (profit); earth, rent; labour, wages — offers an incongruity that is uniform and symmetrical.
In fact it is not that wage-labour appears as one socially determined form of labour. All labour appears as wage-labour by nature — that is how it presents itself to those caught up in the capitalist relations of production. And given that, the particular social forms that the objective conditions of labour take on over against wage-labour — the produced means of production and the earth — (just as they in turn presuppose wage-labour) coincide straight away with the material existence of those conditions of labour, with the shape they have in the actual labour process in general, apart from any social form fixed by history, indeed apart from any social form of that process at all.
The conditions of labour are alienated from labour and set up over against it as something standing on its own, and in that way transformed: the produced means of production become capital, and the earth becomes monopolized earth, becomes landed property. This shape, belonging to one particular period of history, therefore coincides with the existence and the function that produced means of production and earth have in the production process in general. So, on this footing, those means of production are capital in and for themselves, by nature, and capital is nothing but a mere ‘economic name’ for them; and so the earth, in and for itself, by nature, is the earth monopolized by a certain number of landowners.
Just as the products become an independent power over against the producers in capital and in the capitalist — who in fact is nothing but personified capital — so the land is personified in the landowner: the land too stands up on its hind legs and, as an independent power, demands its share of the product produced with its help. So it is not the land that receives the part of the product belonging to it, to replace and increase its productivity; instead the landowner receives a share of that product, to sell off and squander.
It is clear that capital presupposes labour as wage-labour. But it is just as clear that if we start from labour as wage-labour, so that labour in general and wage-labour seem self-evidently to be the same thing, then capital and the monopolized earth must also appear as the natural form of the conditions of labour, over against labour in general. Being capital now appears as the natural form of the means of labour, and therefore as a purely material character, one that springs from their function in the labour process in general. So capital and produced means of production become identical expressions. Land and land monopolized by private property become identical expressions too. And the means of labour as such, capital by nature, therefore become the source of profit, just as the earth as such becomes the source of rent.
Labour as such, in its simple character as purposeful productive activity, relates to the means of production not in their social form but in their material substance, as the material and the means of labour. These differ from one another only materially, as use-values: the earth as unproduced means of labour, the others as produced ones. If labour and wage-labour thus coincide, then the particular social form in which the conditions of labour now confront labour also coincides with their material existence. The means of labour as such are then capital, and the earth as such is landed property. The formal standing-on-its-own of these conditions of labour over against labour — the particular form that standing-on-its-own takes over against wage-labour — is then a property inseparable from them as things, as material conditions of production: a character that necessarily belongs to them as elements of production, grown into them from within. Their social character in the capitalist production process, fixed by a particular historical epoch, is a material character innate to them as elements of the production process, natural to them and, so to speak, eternal. The share the earth takes in the production process in general — as the original field of employment of labour, the realm of natural forces, the given arsenal of all objects of labour — and the other share taken by the produced means of production (instruments, raw materials, etc.), must then seem to express themselves in the shares that fall to them as capital and landed property, that is, to their social representatives, in the form of profit (interest) and rent — just as the share his labour takes in the production process falls to the worker in wages. So rent, profit and wages seem to grow out of the part that the earth, the produced means of production and labour each play in the simple labour process — even in so far as we view that process as one going on merely between man and nature, leaving every historical determinacy aside. The same thing comes back in another form when it is said: the product in which the wage-worker’s labour presents itself to him as his proceeds, his revenue, is only the wage — the part of value (and therefore of the social product measured by that value) that represents his wage. If wage-labour coincides with labour in general, then the wage coincides with the product of labour, and the part of value that the wage represents coincides with the value created by labour in general. But then the other parts of value, profit and rent, confront the wage just as independently, and must spring from sources of their own, sources specifically different from labour and independent of it. They must spring from the co-operating elements of production to whose owners they fall: profit from the means of production — capital's material elements — and rent from the earth, or nature, which the landowner represents. That is Roscher’s account.
So landed property, capital and wage-labour turn from sources of revenue — revenue sources in the sense that capital draws to the capitalist a part of the surplus-value he extracts from labour, in the form of profit; that the monopoly of the earth draws another part to the landowner, in the form of rent; and that labour assigns to the worker the last part of value still available, in the form of wages; sources by which one part of value is converted into the form of profit, a second into the form of rent, a third into the form of wages — into real sources: sources from which these parts of value themselves spring, together with the corresponding parts of the product in which they exist or against which they can be exchanged, and from which, as their last source, the value of the product itself springs.
Even in the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production — and even of commodity production, in the commodity and in money — we have already shown the mystifying character. It turns the social relations, the ones the material elements of wealth serve as bearers of in production, into properties of those things themselves. That is the commodity. And it does this more plainly still with the relation of production itself, turning it into a thing. That is money.
All forms of society take part in this inversion, as far as they get to commodity production and money circulation. But in the capitalist mode of production, and with capital — which is its ruling category, its determining relation of production — this bewitched and inverted world develops much further.
If we look at capital at first in the immediate production process, as a pumper-out of surplus labour, the relation is still very simple. The real connection presses itself on the capitalists themselves, the bearers of this process, and is still present in their consciousness — the fierce fight over the working day's limits proves it strikingly. But even within this unmediated sphere, the sphere of the immediate process between labour and capital, it does not stay at that simplicity. With the development of relative surplus-value in the properly specifically capitalist mode of production — and with it the development of the social productive forces of labour — these productive forces and the social interconnections of labour appear in the immediate labour process as shifted out of labour and into capital. Capital thereby already becomes a very mystical being: all the social productive forces of labour appear as powers that belong to capital and not to labour as such, powers springing from capital's own womb.
Then the circulation process comes in between. Every part of capital, agricultural capital included, falls under its change of matter and change of form — and falls under it in the same measure as the specifically capitalist mode of production develops. This is a sphere in which the relations of the original production of value drop completely into the background. Already in the immediate production process the capitalist is working at the same time as commodity producer, as manager of commodity production. So this production process by no means presents itself to him simply as the production of surplus-value. And whatever the surplus-value may be that capital has pumped out in the immediate production process and put into commodities, the value and surplus-value contained in those commodities must first be realized in the circulation process. And both the return of the values advanced in production and especially the surplus-value contained in the commodities seem not merely to be realized in circulation but to spring out of it. Two circumstances in particular fix this appearance: first, profit on alienation, which depends on cheating, cunning, expertise, skill and a thousand market conjunctures; second, the fact that here a second determining element comes in beside labour-time, namely circulation time. Admittedly circulation time functions only as a negative limit on the formation of value and surplus-value, but it has the appearance of being just as positive a ground as labour itself, and of bringing in a determination that arises from the nature of capital and is independent of labour.
In Book II, naturally, we had to set out this sphere of circulation only with regard to the determinations of form it produces — to show how the shape of capital develops further within it. In reality, though, this sphere is the sphere of competition, which is ruled by accident when you take each individual case. The inner law that asserts itself in these accidents and governs them becomes visible only once these accidents are gathered together in large masses, so it stays invisible and incomprehensible to the individual agents of production themselves. And further: the real production process, as the unity of the immediate production process and the circulation process, produces new configurations. In these, the vein of the inner connection gets lost more and more, the relations of production become independent of one another, and the components of value ossify into independent forms, each set against the others.
The change of surplus-value into profit is, as we saw, determined by the circulation process just as much as by the production process. Once surplus-value takes the form of profit, it is no longer measured against the part of the capital laid out in labour, the part it comes from; it is measured against the whole capital. And the profit rate follows laws of its own, which allow it to change while the rate of surplus-value stays the same, and even require that change. All of this hides what surplus-value really is, and with it the real motor of capital, more and more. Still more is this done by the change of profit into average profit and of values into prices of production, into the averages that regulate market prices. A complicated social process comes in between: the equalization of capitals. It cuts the relative average prices of commodities loose from their values, and it cuts the average profits of the different spheres of production (quite apart from the individual capital investments inside any one sphere) loose from the real exploitation of labour by the particular capitals. And here it does not merely seem so: the average price of commodities really is different from their value, that is, from the labour realized in them, and the average profit of a particular capital really is different from the surplus-value that this capital extracted from the workers it employed. The value of commodities now shows up directly only in the influence that labour's changing productive power has on the fall and rise of prices of production — on their movement, not on their ultimate limits. Profit now appears as determined only in a secondary way by the direct exploitation of labour — namely in so far as that exploitation lets the capitalist realize, at governing market prices that seem to exist independently of it, a profit that departs from the average. Normal average profits themselves seem to belong to capital as such, independent of exploitation; abnormal exploitation, or even average exploitation under exceptionally favourable conditions, seems to determine only the departures from average profit, and not average profit itself. The splitting of profit into profit of enterprise and interest completes the way the form of surplus-value comes to stand on its own, the ossification of its form against its substance, its essence — not to mention the intervention of commercial profit and money-dealing profit, which rest on circulation and seem to spring entirely from it and not from the production process itself. One part of profit, as against the other, comes loose entirely from the capital relation as such and presents itself as springing not from the function of exploiting wage-labour but from the capitalist's own wage-labour. Interest, by contrast, then seems to spring from capital as its own independent source, independent alike of the worker's wage-labour and of the capitalist's own labour. If capital first appeared on the surface of circulation as the capital fetish, value creating value, it now presents itself again in the shape of interest-bearing capital, in its most estranged and most peculiar form. That is also why the form 'capital–interest', as the third term beside 'earth–rent' and 'labour–wages', is far more consistent than 'capital–profit': in profit a memory of where it came from still remains, while in interest that memory is not merely wiped out but fixed in a form set against that origin.
Finally, beside capital — which figures here as a source of surplus-value in its own right — landed property now steps in, as a limit to average profit and as transferring part of the surplus-value to a class that neither works itself nor directly exploits workers, and that also cannot console itself, the way interest-bearing capital can, with morally edifying grounds of comfort, such as the risk and the sacrifice involved in lending capital. Because here one part of surplus-value seems bound directly not to social relations but to a natural element, the earth, the estrangement and ossification of the different parts of surplus-value against one another is complete: the inner connection is definitively torn apart and its source completely buried — precisely because the relations of production tied to the different material elements of the production process have come to stand independently over against one another.
Capital–profit — or better still, capital–interest — land–ground-rent, labour–wages: in this economic trinity, taken as the connection between the parts of value and of wealth in general and their sources, the mystification of the capitalist mode of production is complete: social relations turn into things, and the material relations of production grow together, immediately, with their historical and social determinacy. This is the bewitched, inverted, upside-down world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre go about their haunting as social characters and at the same time immediately as mere things. The great merit of classical economics is that it dissolved this false appearance and deception — this setting loose of the different social elements of wealth against one another and their hardening into separate things, this turning of things into persons and of relations of production into things, this religion of everyday life. It did this by reducing interest to a part of profit and rent to the excess over average profit, so that both coincide in surplus-value; by showing the circulation process as a mere change of forms; and finally, in the immediate production process, by reducing the value and surplus-value of commodities to labour. Yet even the best of its spokesmen stay more or less caught in the world of appearance that their criticism dissolved — from the bourgeois standpoint nothing else is possible — and so they all fall more or less into inconsistencies, half-truths and unresolved contradictions. On the other hand it is just as natural that the actual agents of production feel entirely at home in these estranged and irrational forms, capital–interest, land–rent, labour–wages, for these are precisely the configurations of appearance they move in and deal with every day. It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economics — which is nothing but a didactic, more or less doctrinaire translation of the everyday notions of these actual agents of production, brought into a certain sensible order — finds precisely in this trinity, where the whole inner connection is wiped out, the natural and beyond-all-doubt basis of its shallow self-importance. At the same time this formula matches the interest of the ruling classes, since it proclaims the natural necessity and eternal justification of their sources of income and raises that to a dogma.
In setting out how the relations of production turn into things and set themselves up independently over against the agents of production, we do not go into how these connections — through the world market and its conjunctures, the movement of market prices, the periods of credit, the cycles of industry and trade, the alternation of prosperity and crisis — appear to those agents as overwhelming natural laws that rule them without their will, and assert themselves against them as blind necessity. We do not, because the real movement of competition lies outside our plan: all we have to present is the inner organization of the capitalist mode of production, so to speak in its ideal average.
In earlier forms of society this economic mystification enters only principally, where money and interest-bearing capital are concerned. By the nature of the case it is excluded — first, where production for use-value, for people's immediate own needs, predominates; second, where, as in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, slavery or serfdom forms the broad basis of social production. There the domination of the conditions of production over the producers is hidden by the relations of domination and servitude, and those relations appear as the direct mainsprings of the production process, and are visible. In the original communities, where a natural communism prevails, and even in the ancient city communities, it is the community itself, with its conditions, that presents itself as the basis of production, and its reproduction as production's final purpose. Even in the medieval guild system, neither capital nor labour appears unbound; their relations are determined by the system of corporations, by the relationships bound up with it, and by the matching notions of professional duty, mastery, etc. Only in the capitalist mode of production …
The manuscript breaks off here, mid-sentence.
A note by Engels stands here. It says that the three fragments that follow were found at different places in the manuscript for Part Six.
Capital–profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land–ground-rent, labour–wages. That is the trinity form, and it holds inside itself all the mysteries of the social production process.
Further, as was shown earlier, interest appears as capital's own proper, characteristic product, while profit of enterprise appears, by contrast, as a wage independent of capital. Because of this, the trinity form reduces more closely to this:
Capital–interest, land–ground-rent, labour–wages. Here profit has been happily got rid of — profit, the form of surplus-value that specifically characterizes the capitalist mode of production.
If we look more closely at this economic three-in-one, we find:
First: the alleged sources of the wealth available each year belong to wholly disparate spheres, with not the least analogy between them. They stand to each other roughly as notary's fees, beetroot and music do.
Capital, land, labour! But capital is not a thing. It is a definite social relation of production, belonging to a definite historical form of society. It presents itself in a thing, and it gives that thing a specific social character. Capital is not the material and produced means of production added together. Capital is those means of production turned into capital — in themselves as little capital as gold or silver in itself is money. They are the means of production monopolized by one part of society, the products and conditions of activity of living labour-power, made independent over against that labour-power and personified in capital through this opposition.
It is not only the workers' products that turn into independent powers — products ruling over their producers and buying them. The social powers of this labour, too, and a future ... [here the manuscript has an illegible word] form of it, confront the workers as properties of their product; the MEW editors read the phrase as 'the social powers and the connected form'. So here we have a definite social form — at first sight a very mysterious one — of one factor in a historically made social production process.
And now, beside that, land — inorganic nature as such, a raw, jumbled mass, in all its primeval wildness. Value is labour. So surplus-value cannot be earth. The soil's absolute fertility does nothing but let a given quantity of labour yield a given product, and how much product it yields is conditioned by the soil's natural fertility. Differences in the soil's fertility make the same amounts of labour and capital — the same value — express themselves in different quantities of farm products, so that these products have different individual values. The levelling of these individual values into market values brings it about, in Ricardo's words, that 'the advantages of fertile over inferior soil ... are transferred from the cultivator or consumer to the landlord' (Principles, p. 62).
And finally, third in the league: a mere spectre — 'the' labour. It is nothing but an abstraction, and taken by itself it does not exist at all. Or, if we take the … — here the manuscript has an illegible word, which the MEW editors read as 'what is meant' — it is human productive activity in general, the activity through which people mediate their interchange of matter with nature. And this activity is stripped not only of every social form and every definite character: even in its bare existence in nature, independent of society, it is lifted out of all societies, and as an expression and a confirmation of life it is common to the human being who is not social at all yet, together with the one who is social in some way or other.
Capital – interest; landed property, private property in the earth, and the modern kind at that, the kind that matches the capitalist mode of production – rent; wage-labour – wages. In this form, then, a connection between the sources of revenue is supposed to hold. Wage-labour and landed property are historically specific social forms, just as capital is: one a form of labour, the other a form of the monopolized earth, and both correspond to capital and belong to the same economic formation of society.
The first thing that stands out in this formula is this. Capital is a form of an element of production that belongs to a particular mode of production, to a particular historical shape of the social production process — an element of production mixed together with a particular social form and presented in it. And beside that, without any further ado, two other things are ranked: the earth on one side, labour on the other. Those two are elements of the real labour process; in this material shape they are common to every mode of production, they are the material elements of any production process, and they have nothing to do with its social form.
Secondly. In the formula capital – interest, earth – ground-rent, labour – wages, capital, earth and labour appear as the sources of interest (instead of profit), of ground-rent and of wages, and these revenues appear as their products, their fruits: the sources the basis, the revenues the consequence; the sources the cause, the revenues the effect. And each separate source is related to its product as something it throws off and produces.
But all three incomes — interest (instead of profit), rent, wages — are parts of the value of the product; so they are parts of value in general, or, put in money, certain parts of money, parts of price.
The formula capital – interest is indeed the most conceptless formula of capital, but it is a formula of it. Still: how is the earth supposed to create a value, that is, a socially determined quantum of labour — and on top of that the particular value-part of its own products that forms rent? The earth is at work, for instance, as an agent of production in the making of a use-value, a material product, wheat. But it has nothing to do with producing the value of the wheat. In so far as value is expressed in wheat, the wheat counts only as a certain quantum of objectified social labour, entirely indifferent to the particular material in which that labour is expressed, and to the particular use-value of that material.
None of this is contradicted by the fact that (1) other things being equal, whether wheat is cheap or dear depends on the productivity of the earth. How productive agricultural labour is depends on natural conditions, and depending on that productivity the same quantum of labour is expressed in many products or few, in many or few use-values. How big the quantum of labour is that is expressed in one bushel depends on how many bushels the same quantum of labour supplies. So the quantities of product in which the value is expressed do depend here on the productivity of the earth; but this value is given, independently of that distribution. Value is expressed in use-value, and a use-value is a condition of value-creation; but it is folly to set up an opposition, with a use-value, the earth, on one side and a value on the other — and a particular value-part at that. Then a second point is announced — '2.' — and there, as Engels notes, the manuscript breaks off.
In fact, vulgar economics does nothing but interpret in doctrinaire fashion, systematize and defend the notions of the agents caught up in bourgeois relations of production. So we should not be surprised that precisely in the estranged form of appearance of economic relations, where those relations are absurd on their face and complete contradictions — and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance and the essence of things coincided immediately — precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, and these relations appear all the more self-evident to it the more their inner connection is hidden from view, while the ordinary way of thinking is familiar with them. So it has not the slightest suspicion that the trinity it starts from — land-rent, capital-interest, labour-wages or price of labour — consists of three compositions that are impossible on their face. First we have land as a use-value, which has no value, and rent as exchange-value: a social relation, grasped as a thing, is put into a proportion with nature — two incommensurable magnitudes that are supposed to have a relation to each other. Then capital-interest. If capital is grasped as a certain sum of value, independently represented in money, then it is nonsense on its face that a value should be more value than it is worth. Precisely in the form capital-interest all mediation drops away, and capital is reduced to its most general formula, which for that very reason is also inexplicable in itself and absurd. That is exactly why the vulgar economist prefers the formula capital-interest — with the occult quality of a value that is unequal to itself — to the formula capital-profit, because in capital-profit one already comes nearer to the real capital-relation. Then again, in the uneasy feeling that 4 is not 5 and that 100 Taler therefore cannot possibly be 110 Taler, he flees from capital as value to the material substance of capital, to its use-value as a production condition of labour — machinery, raw material, and so on. So, in place of that first relation, the incomprehensible one where 4 = 5, he once again succeeds in producing a wholly incommensurable one: a use-value, a thing, on one side, set against a specific social relation of production, surplus-value, on the other — just as with landed property. As soon as he arrives at this incommensurable, everything becomes clear to the vulgar economist, and he no longer feels the need to think further. For he has precisely arrived at the 'rationale' of the bourgeois outlook. Finally, labour-wages, the price of labour: as shown in Book I, this is an expression that on its face contradicts the concept of value, and equally the concept of price, which is itself generally only a specific expression of value; and 'price of labour' is just as irrational as a yellow logarithm. But here the vulgar economist is all the more satisfied, since he has now arrived at the bourgeois's profound insight that he pays money for labour, and since the very contradiction between the formula and the concept of value relieves him of the obligation to understand the latter.
We have seen that the capitalist production process is one historically specific form of the social production process in general. That general process produces the material conditions of human life. And it also goes on within specific historical and economic relations of production, and in doing so produces and reproduces those relations themselves — and with them the bearers of this process, their material conditions of existence, and their relations with one another, that is, the particular economic form of their society. For the whole of these relations — how the bearers of this production stand to nature and to each other, the relations in which they produce — that whole, looked at by its economic structure, is precisely society. Like all its predecessors, the capitalist production process goes on under definite material conditions; but these are at the same time the bearers of definite social relations that people enter into as they reproduce their life. Those conditions, like those relations, are on the one hand presuppositions of the capitalist production process and on the other its results and creations: it produces and reproduces them. We have also seen that capital — and the capitalist is only personified capital, acting in the production process merely as capital's bearer — so capital pumps out of the direct producers, the workers, a definite quantity of surplus labour in the social production process that corresponds to it. Capital receives that surplus labour without an equivalent, and the surplus labour by its very essence always remains forced labour, however much it may appear as the outcome of a free contractual agreement. This surplus labour presents itself in a surplus-value, and this surplus-value exists in a surplus product. Surplus labour as such — work beyond the measure of the given needs — must always remain. In the capitalist system, as in the slave system and others, it has only an antagonistic form, and it is filled out by the sheer idleness of one part of society. A definite quantity of surplus labour is required for insurance against accidents and for the necessary progressive expansion of the reproduction process, in keeping with the development of needs and the progress of population — what, from the capitalist standpoint, is called accumulation. It is one of capital's civilizing sides that it extorts this surplus labour in a manner and under conditions more favourable to the development of the productive forces and of the social relations, and to the creation of the elements for a higher new formation than were the earlier forms of slavery, serfdom and so on. So it brings about, on the one hand, a stage at which compulsion, and the monopolization of social development (including its material and intellectual advantages) by one part of society at the expense of another, fall away; on the other hand, it creates the material means and the seed of relations that, in a higher form of society, allow this surplus labour to be combined with a greater restriction of the time devoted to material labour in general. For surplus labour can, according to how far the productive power of labour has developed, be great with a small total working day and relatively small with a large one. If necessary labour-time is 3 and surplus labour is 3, the total working day is 6 and the rate of surplus labour 100 per cent. If necessary labour is 9 and surplus labour 3, the total working day is 12 and the rate of surplus labour only 33 1/3 per cent. And it then depends on the productivity of labour how much use-value is produced in a definite time, and so also in a definite surplus labour-time. The real wealth of society and the possibility of steadily expanding its reproduction process therefore depend not on the length of surplus labour but on how productive it is and on the more or less plentiful conditions of production in which it takes place. The realm of freedom truly begins only where work determined by need and external expediency comes to an end; so by the nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production proper. Civilized man, like the savage, has to struggle with nature to meet his needs and to keep his life going and reproduce it — and he has to do so in every form of society and under every possible mode of production. As he develops, this realm of natural necessity grows, because his needs grow; but at the same time the productive forces that satisfy them grow as well. Freedom within this sphere can only consist in this: that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their metabolism with nature rationally and bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by a blind power, and carry it out with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human powers as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom — which, however, can flourish only on that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is the basic condition.
In capitalist society, this surplus-value, or this surplus product, is divided among the capitalists as dividends, in proportion to each one's share of the social capital — if we set aside the accidental fluctuations of distribution and look at the law that regulates it, the limits that set its normal range.
In this form, surplus-value appears as the average profit that falls to capital. That average profit then splits into profit of enterprise and interest, and under those two categories it can fall to different sorts of capitalist.
But capital's appropriation and distribution of surplus-value or surplus product has a barrier in landed property. Just as the functioning capitalist pumps surplus labour out of the worker, and with it, in the form of profit, surplus-value and surplus product, so the landowner pumps a part of this surplus-value or surplus product back out of the capitalist, in the form of rent, in line with the laws developed earlier.
If we speak here of profit as the share of surplus-value that falls to capital, we mean average profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), which is already limited by the deduction of rent from total profit — and total profit is identical in mass with total surplus-value. The deduction of rent is assumed.
Capital-profit (profit of enterprise plus interest) and ground-rent are thus nothing but particular parts of one surplus-value. They are categories in which this surplus-value is distinguished according to whether it falls to capital or to landed property — labels that change nothing in what it is. Added together, they make up the sum of society's surplus-value.
Capital pumps the surplus labour represented in surplus-value and surplus product directly out of the workers. So in this sense it can be regarded as the producer of surplus-value.
Landed property has nothing to do with the real production process. Its role comes down to carrying a part of the produced surplus-value out of capital's pocket into its own. But the landowner does play a role in the capitalist production process — not only through the pressure he puts on capital, and not merely because large landed property is a precondition and condition of capitalist production, since it is a precondition of the worker's expropriation from the conditions of labour, but specifically because he appears as the personification of one of the most essential conditions of production.
Finally the worker gets, as the owner and seller of his personal labour-power, a part of the product under the name of wages. In that part is represented the portion of his labour we call necessary labour — that is, the labour needed to keep this labour-power going and to reproduce it, whether the conditions of that upkeep and reproduction are poorer or richer, more favourable or less.
However disparate these relations may otherwise appear, they all have one thing in common: capital throws off profit to the capitalist, year in, year out; land throws off ground-rent to the landowner; and labour-power — under normal conditions, and as long as it remains a usable labour-power — throws off wages to the worker.
These three portions of the total value produced each year, and the matching portions of the total product, can be consumed by their owners every year without the source they come from running dry — we leave accumulation aside here for now. They appear as fruits of a perennial tree for yearly consumption, or rather of three trees. They make up the yearly income of three classes — the capitalist, the landowner and the worker. And it is the functioning capitalist who distributes them, as the one who directly pumps out the surplus labour and puts labour in general to use.
To the capitalist his capital, to the landowner his land, and to the worker his labour-power — or rather his labour itself, since he really sells labour-power only as it is exercised, and the price of labour-power, as shown earlier, necessarily presents itself on the basis of the capitalist mode of production as the price of labour — these appear as three different sources of their own particular revenues: profit, ground-rent and wages.
And they really are so, in this sense: capital is for the capitalist a never-ending pumping machine for surplus labour; land is for the landowner a never-ending magnet that draws off a part of the surplus-value pumped out by capital; and labour is the constantly renewed condition and the constantly renewed means by which the worker acquires a part of the value he himself created, and so a part of the social product measured by that part of value — the necessary means of subsistence — under the heading of wages.
They are sources of revenue in a second sense as well: capital fixes one part of the value, and so of the product, of the year's labour in the form of profit; landed property fixes another part in the form of rent; and wage-labour fixes a third part in the form of wages — and it is precisely this transformation that turns those parts into the revenues of the capitalist, the landowner and the worker. But they do not create the substance itself that turns into these different categories. Distribution, rather, assumes that substance is already there: the total value of the annual product, which is nothing but social labour in objectified form.
To the agents of production, though — the people who carry the different functions in the production process — the matter does not present itself in this form. It presents itself in an inverted form. Why that happens we shall develop further as the investigation goes on. Capital, landed property and labour appear to those agents as three separate, independent sources, from which, as such, three different components of the value produced each year — and therefore of the product in which that value exists — spring: sources, then, from which spring not only the different forms this value takes as revenues falling to particular factors of the social production process, but this value itself, and with it the substance of these forms of revenue.
Engels notes that a folio of the manuscript is missing here.
... Differential rent is tied to the relative fertility of the land — that is, to properties that arise from the land as such. But in so far as it rests, first, on the different individual values of the products of different kinds of land, that is only the determination just mentioned. In so far as it rests, second, on the regulating general market value, which is distinct from those individual values, it is a social law carried through by competition, and it has nothing to do with the land or with the varying degrees of its fertility.
It could seem that at least in "labour-wages" a rational relation was expressed. But that is no more the case than with "land-ground-rent". In so far as labour is value-forming and is represented in the value of commodities, it has nothing to do with the distribution of that value among different categories. In so far as it has the specifically social character of wage-labour, it is not value-forming. It was shown earlier, in general, that wages, or the price of labour, are only an irrational expression for the value or price of labour-power; and the particular social conditions under which this labour-power is sold have nothing to do with labour as a general agent of production. Labour also objectifies itself in that value component of the commodity which, as wages, forms the price of labour-power; it creates this part just as it creates the other parts of the product; but it objectifies itself in this part no more and no differently than in the parts that form rent or profit. And in general, when we fix on labour as value-forming, we are not considering it in its concrete shape as a condition of production, but in a social determinacy that is different from that of wage-labour.
Even the expression "capital-profit" is incorrect here. If capital is taken in the only relation in which it produces surplus-value — its relation to the worker, in which it extorts surplus labour through the compulsion it exercises over labour-power, that is, over the wage-labourer — then this surplus-value includes rent as well as profit (profit of enterprise plus interest): in short, the whole undivided surplus-value. Here, by contrast, as a source of revenue, capital is related only to the part that falls to the capitalist. It is not the surplus-value it extracts overall, but only the part it extracts for the capitalist. All connection falls away still more once the formula turns into "capital-interest".
If we first looked at the disparity among the three sources, now, secondly: by contrast, their products, the revenues that come off them, all belong to one sphere, the sphere of value. That disparity does even out — and the relation here is not merely one between magnitudes that cannot be measured against each other; it is a relation between wholly unequal, mutually unrelated and incomparable things. It evens out because capital, like the earth and labour, is in fact taken only by its material substance, simply as produced means of production, with abstraction made both from capital as a relation to the worker and from capital as value.
Thirdly. In this sense, then, the formula — capital, interest (profit); earth, rent; labour, wages — offers an incongruity that is uniform and symmetrical.
In fact it is not that wage-labour appears as one socially determined form of labour. All labour appears as wage-labour by nature — that is how it presents itself to those caught up in the capitalist relations of production. And given that, the particular social forms that the objective conditions of labour take on over against wage-labour — the produced means of production and the earth — (just as they in turn presuppose wage-labour) coincide straight away with the material existence of those conditions of labour, with the shape they have in the actual labour process in general, apart from any social form fixed by history, indeed apart from any social form of that process at all.
The conditions of labour are alienated from labour and set up over against it as something standing on its own, and in that way transformed: the produced means of production become capital, and the earth becomes monopolized earth, becomes landed property. This shape, belonging to one particular period of history, therefore coincides with the existence and the function that produced means of production and earth have in the production process in general. So, on this footing, those means of production are capital in and for themselves, by nature, and capital is nothing but a mere ‘economic name’ for them; and so the earth, in and for itself, by nature, is the earth monopolized by a certain number of landowners.
Just as the products become an independent power over against the producers in capital and in the capitalist — who in fact is nothing but personified capital — so the land is personified in the landowner: the land too stands up on its hind legs and, as an independent power, demands its share of the product produced with its help. So it is not the land that receives the part of the product belonging to it, to replace and increase its productivity; instead the landowner receives a share of that product, to sell off and squander.
It is clear that capital presupposes labour as wage-labour. But it is just as clear that if we start from labour as wage-labour, so that labour in general and wage-labour seem self-evidently to be the same thing, then capital and the monopolized earth must also appear as the natural form of the conditions of labour, over against labour in general. Being capital now appears as the natural form of the means of labour, and therefore as a purely material character, one that springs from their function in the labour process in general. So capital and produced means of production become identical expressions. Land and land monopolized by private property become identical expressions too. And the means of labour as such, capital by nature, therefore become the source of profit, just as the earth as such becomes the source of rent.
Labour as such, in its simple character as purposeful productive activity, relates to the means of production not in their social form but in their material substance, as the material and the means of labour. These differ from one another only materially, as use-values: the earth as unproduced means of labour, the others as produced ones. If labour and wage-labour thus coincide, then the particular social form in which the conditions of labour now confront labour also coincides with their material existence. The means of labour as such are then capital, and the earth as such is landed property. The formal standing-on-its-own of these conditions of labour over against labour — the particular form that standing-on-its-own takes over against wage-labour — is then a property inseparable from them as things, as material conditions of production: a character that necessarily belongs to them as elements of production, grown into them from within. Their social character in the capitalist production process, fixed by a particular historical epoch, is a material character innate to them as elements of the production process, natural to them and, so to speak, eternal. The share the earth takes in the production process in general — as the original field of employment of labour, the realm of natural forces, the given arsenal of all objects of labour — and the other share taken by the produced means of production (instruments, raw materials, etc.), must then seem to express themselves in the shares that fall to them as capital and landed property, that is, to their social representatives, in the form of profit (interest) and rent — just as the share his labour takes in the production process falls to the worker in wages. So rent, profit and wages seem to grow out of the part that the earth, the produced means of production and labour each play in the simple labour process — even in so far as we view that process as one going on merely between man and nature, leaving every historical determinacy aside. The same thing comes back in another form when it is said: the product in which the wage-worker’s labour presents itself to him as his proceeds, his revenue, is only the wage — the part of value (and therefore of the social product measured by that value) that represents his wage. If wage-labour coincides with labour in general, then the wage coincides with the product of labour, and the part of value that the wage represents coincides with the value created by labour in general. But then the other parts of value, profit and rent, confront the wage just as independently, and must spring from sources of their own, sources specifically different from labour and independent of it. They must spring from the co-operating elements of production to whose owners they fall: profit from the means of production — capital's material elements — and rent from the earth, or nature, which the landowner represents. That is Roscher’s account.
So landed property, capital and wage-labour turn from sources of revenue — revenue sources in the sense that capital draws to the capitalist a part of the surplus-value he extracts from labour, in the form of profit; that the monopoly of the earth draws another part to the landowner, in the form of rent; and that labour assigns to the worker the last part of value still available, in the form of wages; sources by which one part of value is converted into the form of profit, a second into the form of rent, a third into the form of wages — into real sources: sources from which these parts of value themselves spring, together with the corresponding parts of the product in which they exist or against which they can be exchanged, and from which, as their last source, the value of the product itself springs.
Even in the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production — and even of commodity production, in the commodity and in money — we have already shown the mystifying character. It turns the social relations, the ones the material elements of wealth serve as bearers of in production, into properties of those things themselves. That is the commodity. And it does this more plainly still with the relation of production itself, turning it into a thing. That is money.
All forms of society take part in this inversion, as far as they get to commodity production and money circulation. But in the capitalist mode of production, and with capital — which is its ruling category, its determining relation of production — this bewitched and inverted world develops much further.
If we look at capital at first in the immediate production process, as a pumper-out of surplus labour, the relation is still very simple. The real connection presses itself on the capitalists themselves, the bearers of this process, and is still present in their consciousness — the fierce fight over the working day's limits proves it strikingly. But even within this unmediated sphere, the sphere of the immediate process between labour and capital, it does not stay at that simplicity. With the development of relative surplus-value in the properly specifically capitalist mode of production — and with it the development of the social productive forces of labour — these productive forces and the social interconnections of labour appear in the immediate labour process as shifted out of labour and into capital. Capital thereby already becomes a very mystical being: all the social productive forces of labour appear as powers that belong to capital and not to labour as such, powers springing from capital's own womb.
Then the circulation process comes in between. Every part of capital, agricultural capital included, falls under its change of matter and change of form — and falls under it in the same measure as the specifically capitalist mode of production develops. This is a sphere in which the relations of the original production of value drop completely into the background. Already in the immediate production process the capitalist is working at the same time as commodity producer, as manager of commodity production. So this production process by no means presents itself to him simply as the production of surplus-value. And whatever the surplus-value may be that capital has pumped out in the immediate production process and put into commodities, the value and surplus-value contained in those commodities must first be realized in the circulation process. And both the return of the values advanced in production and especially the surplus-value contained in the commodities seem not merely to be realized in circulation but to spring out of it. Two circumstances in particular fix this appearance: first, profit on alienation, which depends on cheating, cunning, expertise, skill and a thousand market conjunctures; second, the fact that here a second determining element comes in beside labour-time, namely circulation time. Admittedly circulation time functions only as a negative limit on the formation of value and surplus-value, but it has the appearance of being just as positive a ground as labour itself, and of bringing in a determination that arises from the nature of capital and is independent of labour.
In Book II, naturally, we had to set out this sphere of circulation only with regard to the determinations of form it produces — to show how the shape of capital develops further within it. In reality, though, this sphere is the sphere of competition, which is ruled by accident when you take each individual case. The inner law that asserts itself in these accidents and governs them becomes visible only once these accidents are gathered together in large masses, so it stays invisible and incomprehensible to the individual agents of production themselves. And further: the real production process, as the unity of the immediate production process and the circulation process, produces new configurations. In these, the vein of the inner connection gets lost more and more, the relations of production become independent of one another, and the components of value ossify into independent forms, each set against the others.
The change of surplus-value into profit is, as we saw, determined by the circulation process just as much as by the production process. Once surplus-value takes the form of profit, it is no longer measured against the part of the capital laid out in labour, the part it comes from; it is measured against the whole capital. And the profit rate follows laws of its own, which allow it to change while the rate of surplus-value stays the same, and even require that change. All of this hides what surplus-value really is, and with it the real motor of capital, more and more. Still more is this done by the change of profit into average profit and of values into prices of production, into the averages that regulate market prices. A complicated social process comes in between: the equalization of capitals. It cuts the relative average prices of commodities loose from their values, and it cuts the average profits of the different spheres of production (quite apart from the individual capital investments inside any one sphere) loose from the real exploitation of labour by the particular capitals. And here it does not merely seem so: the average price of commodities really is different from their value, that is, from the labour realized in them, and the average profit of a particular capital really is different from the surplus-value that this capital extracted from the workers it employed. The value of commodities now shows up directly only in the influence that labour's changing productive power has on the fall and rise of prices of production — on their movement, not on their ultimate limits. Profit now appears as determined only in a secondary way by the direct exploitation of labour — namely in so far as that exploitation lets the capitalist realize, at governing market prices that seem to exist independently of it, a profit that departs from the average. Normal average profits themselves seem to belong to capital as such, independent of exploitation; abnormal exploitation, or even average exploitation under exceptionally favourable conditions, seems to determine only the departures from average profit, and not average profit itself. The splitting of profit into profit of enterprise and interest completes the way the form of surplus-value comes to stand on its own, the ossification of its form against its substance, its essence — not to mention the intervention of commercial profit and money-dealing profit, which rest on circulation and seem to spring entirely from it and not from the production process itself. One part of profit, as against the other, comes loose entirely from the capital relation as such and presents itself as springing not from the function of exploiting wage-labour but from the capitalist's own wage-labour. Interest, by contrast, then seems to spring from capital as its own independent source, independent alike of the worker's wage-labour and of the capitalist's own labour. If capital first appeared on the surface of circulation as the capital fetish, value creating value, it now presents itself again in the shape of interest-bearing capital, in its most estranged and most peculiar form. That is also why the form 'capital–interest', as the third term beside 'earth–rent' and 'labour–wages', is far more consistent than 'capital–profit': in profit a memory of where it came from still remains, while in interest that memory is not merely wiped out but fixed in a form set against that origin.
Finally, beside capital — which figures here as a source of surplus-value in its own right — landed property now steps in, as a limit to average profit and as transferring part of the surplus-value to a class that neither works itself nor directly exploits workers, and that also cannot console itself, the way interest-bearing capital can, with morally edifying grounds of comfort, such as the risk and the sacrifice involved in lending capital. Because here one part of surplus-value seems bound directly not to social relations but to a natural element, the earth, the estrangement and ossification of the different parts of surplus-value against one another is complete: the inner connection is definitively torn apart and its source completely buried — precisely because the relations of production tied to the different material elements of the production process have come to stand independently over against one another.
Capital–profit — or better still, capital–interest — land–ground-rent, labour–wages: in this economic trinity, taken as the connection between the parts of value and of wealth in general and their sources, the mystification of the capitalist mode of production is complete: social relations turn into things, and the material relations of production grow together, immediately, with their historical and social determinacy. This is the bewitched, inverted, upside-down world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre go about their haunting as social characters and at the same time immediately as mere things. The great merit of classical economics is that it dissolved this false appearance and deception — this setting loose of the different social elements of wealth against one another and their hardening into separate things, this turning of things into persons and of relations of production into things, this religion of everyday life. It did this by reducing interest to a part of profit and rent to the excess over average profit, so that both coincide in surplus-value; by showing the circulation process as a mere change of forms; and finally, in the immediate production process, by reducing the value and surplus-value of commodities to labour. Yet even the best of its spokesmen stay more or less caught in the world of appearance that their criticism dissolved — from the bourgeois standpoint nothing else is possible — and so they all fall more or less into inconsistencies, half-truths and unresolved contradictions. On the other hand it is just as natural that the actual agents of production feel entirely at home in these estranged and irrational forms, capital–interest, land–rent, labour–wages, for these are precisely the configurations of appearance they move in and deal with every day. It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economics — which is nothing but a didactic, more or less doctrinaire translation of the everyday notions of these actual agents of production, brought into a certain sensible order — finds precisely in this trinity, where the whole inner connection is wiped out, the natural and beyond-all-doubt basis of its shallow self-importance. At the same time this formula matches the interest of the ruling classes, since it proclaims the natural necessity and eternal justification of their sources of income and raises that to a dogma.
In setting out how the relations of production turn into things and set themselves up independently over against the agents of production, we do not go into how these connections — through the world market and its conjunctures, the movement of market prices, the periods of credit, the cycles of industry and trade, the alternation of prosperity and crisis — appear to those agents as overwhelming natural laws that rule them without their will, and assert themselves against them as blind necessity. We do not, because the real movement of competition lies outside our plan: all we have to present is the inner organization of the capitalist mode of production, so to speak in its ideal average.
In earlier forms of society this economic mystification enters only principally, where money and interest-bearing capital are concerned. By the nature of the case it is excluded — first, where production for use-value, for people's immediate own needs, predominates; second, where, as in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, slavery or serfdom forms the broad basis of social production. There the domination of the conditions of production over the producers is hidden by the relations of domination and servitude, and those relations appear as the direct mainsprings of the production process, and are visible. In the original communities, where a natural communism prevails, and even in the ancient city communities, it is the community itself, with its conditions, that presents itself as the basis of production, and its reproduction as production's final purpose. Even in the medieval guild system, neither capital nor labour appears unbound; their relations are determined by the system of corporations, by the relationships bound up with it, and by the matching notions of professional duty, mastery, etc. Only in the capitalist mode of production …
The manuscript breaks off here, mid-sentence.