The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use value, or his personal consumption. The product in which the capitalist is really interested is not the palpable product itself, but the excess value of the product over the value of the capital consumed by it.
The capitalist's profit is derived from the fact that he has something to sell for which he has paid nothing.
One is conscious that capital generates this new value by its movement in the processes of production and circulation. But the way which this occurs is cloaked in mystery and appears to originate from hidden qualities inherent in capital itself.
The rate of profit, therefore, depends on two main factors - the rate of surplus-value and the value-composition of capital.
The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller the idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.
The chief means of reducing the time of production is higher labour productivity, which is commonly called industrial progress.
The chief means of reducing the time of circulation is improved communications.
The amount of variable capital invested in his business is something the capitalist himself does not know in most cases.
Indeed, it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and maintained in the epoch of history immediately preceding the conscious reorganisation of society.
Excretions of consumption are the natural waste matter discharged by the human body, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc. Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture. So far as their utilisation is concerned, there is an enormous waste of them in the capitalist economy. In London, for instance, they find no better use for the excretion of four million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.
Universal labour is all scientific labour, all discovery and all invention.
It follows furthermore that foreign trade influences the rate of profit, regardless of its influence on wages through the cheapening of the necessities of life.
Violent price fluctuations therefore cause interruptions, great collisions, even catastrophes, in the process of reproduction.
Taking equal amounts of capital, the rates of profit differ because, owing to the different masses of living labour set in motion, the masses of surplus-value, and thus of profit, differ, although the rates of surplus value are the same.
So far as profits are concerned, the various capitalists are just so many stockholders in a stock company in which the shares of profit are uniformly divided per 100, so that profits differ in the case of the individual individual capitalists only on accordance with the amount of capital invested by each in the aggregate enterprise, i.e., according to his investment in social production as a whole, according to the number of his shares.
Disguised as profit, surplus value actually denies its origin, losses its character, and becomes unrecognisable.
The transformation of values into prices of production serves to obscure the basis for determining value itself.
To what extent this profit is due to the aggregate exploitation of labour on the par of the total social capital, i.e., by all his capitalist colleagues-this interrelation is a complete mystery to the individual capitalist; all the more so, since no bourgeois theorists, the political economists, have so far revealed it.
The real difficulty in formulating the general definition of supply and demand is that it seems to take on the appearance of a tautology.
In reality, supply and demand never coincide, or, if they do, it is by mere accident, hence scientifically 0, and to be regarded as not having occurred.
Three individuals are enough for the complete metamorphosis of a commodity, and therefore for the process of sale and purchase taken as a whole.
Here, then, we have a mathematically precise proof why capitalists form a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis the whole working class, while there is little love lost between them in competition among themselves.
A general increase of wages, all else remaining the same, is tantamount to a reduction in the rate of surplus value.
As the process of production and accumulation advances therefore, the mass of available and appropriated surplus-labour, and hence the absolute mass of profit appropriated by the social capital must grow.
Crude as these ideas are, they arise necessarily out of the inverted aspect which the immanent laws of capitalist production represent in competition.
In commercial practice, the turnover is generally calculated inaccurately.
The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive, but because it becomes more productive.
The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.
Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms.
No capitalist ever voluntarily introduces a new method of production, no matter how much more productive it may be, and how much it may increase the rate of surplus-value, so long as it reduces the rate of profit.
It does not take more time to deal with large figures than with small ones.
The conceptions of the merchant, stockbroker, and banker, are necessarily quite distorted.
Small profits and quick returns appear to the shopkeeper to be the principal which he follows out of sheer principle.
It is in the circulation process that money develops into capital.
Slavery on the basis of capitalist production is unjust; likewise fraud in the quality of commodities.
Capital exists as capital in actual movement, not in the process of circulation, but only in the process of production, in the process by which labour power is exploited.
If all capital were in the hands of the industrial capitalists there would be no such thing as interest and rate of interest.
The labour of exploiting is just as much labour as exploited labour.
Stock companies in general - developed with the credit system - have an increasing tendency to separate this work of management as a function from the ownership of capital, be it self owned or borrowed.
Capital is now a thing, but as a thing it is capital. Money is now pregnant.
A bank-note is nothing but a draft upon a banker, payable at any time to the bearer, and given by the banker in place of private drafts.
All great fluctuations of interest, great either in their duration or in the extent of the fluctuation, may be distinctly traced to alterations in the value of capital.
The idiocy of the present-day bourgeois world cannot be better described than by the respect, which the "logic" of the millionaire-the dunghill aristocrat-inspired in all England.
credit accelerates the velocity of the metamorphoses of commodities and thereby the velocity of money circulation.
It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction - crises - and thereby the elements of the old mode of production.
The maximum of credit is here identical with the fullest employment of industrial capital, that is, the utmost exertion of its reproductive power without regard to the limits of consumption.
Business is always thoroughly sound and the campaign is in full swing, until suddenly the debacle takes place.
Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis. But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis.
It is after all much better that the corn producers and speculators lose a portion of their profit for the good of their own country than their capital for the good of England.
The rural depositor fancies that he deposits only with his banker, and fancies furthermore that when his banker lends to others, it is done to private persons whom he knows. He has not the slightest suspicion that his banker places his deposit at the disposal of some London bill broker, over whose operations neither of them have the slightest control.
the banker, who receives the money as a loan from one group of the reproductive capitalists, lends it to another group of reproductive capitalists, so that the banker appears in the role of supreme benefactor; and at the same time, the control over this capital falls completely into the hands of the banker in his capacity as middleman.
Furthermore, in regard to Asia, all capitalist nations are usually simultaneously - directly or indirectly - its debtors.
Low money-prices for commodities and a low interest rate do not necessarily go together. Otherwise, the interest rate would be lowest in the poorest countries, where money-prices for produce are lowest, and highest in the richest countries, where money-prices for agricultural products are highest.
Most of the banks in Australia, the West Indies, and Canada, have been founded with English capital, and the dividends are payable in England.
...the tool becomes a machine.
Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.
The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.
By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.
Without the ban on interest churches and cloisters would never have become so affluent.
But a waterfall cannot be created by capital out of itself.
The landlord is always ready to draw a rent,i.e., to receive something for nothing. But capital requires certain conditions to fulfil his wish.
From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.
Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations.
the profit made in selling depends on cheating, deceit, inside knowledge, skill and a thousand favorable market opportunities;
The conversion of surplus-value into profit, as we have seen, is determined as much by the process of circulation as by the process of production.
It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.
Nevertheless even the best spokesman of classical economy remain more or less in the grip of the world of illusion which their criticism had dissolved,as cannot be otherwise from a bourgeois standpoint, and thus they all fall more or less into inconsistencies, half-truths and unsolved contradictions.
It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economy, which is no more than a didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of everyday conceptions of the actual agents of production, and which arranges them in a certain rational order, should see precisely in this trinity, which is devoid of all inner connection, the natural and indubitable lofty basis for its shallow pompousness.
But what is money? Money is not a thing, but a definite form of value, hence, value is again presupposed.
[Here the manuscript breaks off.]