Whatever may be the disparity of these conditions in other respects, they all have this in common: Capital yields year after year a profit to the capitalist, land a gTound-rent to the landlord, and labor-power, under normal conditions and so long as it remains a useful labor-power, a wage to the laborer. These three parts of the total value produced annually, and the corresponding parts of the annually created total product, may be annually consumed by their respective owners, without draining the source of their reproduction (leaving aside for the present any consideration of accumulation). They are like the annually consumable fruits of a perennial tree, or rather of three trees. They form the annual revenue of three classes, the capitalist, the landlord and the laborer. They are revenues distributed at large by the active capitalist in his capacity as the direct exploiter of surplus labor and employer of labor in general. In this way the capital appears to the capitalist, the land to the landlord, and the labor-power or rather the labor itself, to the laborer (since he sells laborpower only to the extent that it is actively employed, and since the price of his labor-power, as previously shown, necessarily appears as the price of his labor under the capital- The Trinitarian Formula. 957 ist system) as three different sources of their respective revenues, of profit, ground-rent and wages. They are so in fact in the sense that capital is for the capitalist a perennial pumping machine of surplus labor, the land for the landlord a perennial magnet attracting a portion of the surplusvalue pumped out by capital, and finally, labor the continually self-renewing condition and the ever self-renewing means of acquiring a portion of the value created by the laborer and with it a part of the social product measured by this portion of value, the necessities of life, under the title of wages. They are so, furthermore, in the sense that capital fixes a portion of the value, and thus of the product, of annual labor in the form of profit, the private land fixes another portion in the form of rent, and wage labor fixes a third portion in the form of wages, and converts them by this transformation into revenues of the capitalist, the landlord, and the laborer, without, however, creating the substance itself, which is transformed into these different categories.
Their distribution rather presupposes the existence of this substance, namely the total value of the annual product, which is nothing but materialized social labor. But this is not the form, in which the matter appears to the human agents in production, to the human bearers of the various functions in tlie process of production. It rather appears to them reversed. We shall point out in the further course of our analysis, why this happens. Capital, ground-rent and labor appear to those human agents in production as three different, independent sources, from which arise three different constituents of the annually produced value, and of the product, in which it exists. They fancy that not merely the different forms of this value as revenues falling to the share of particular agents in the social process of production, but this value itself arises from these sources, and with it the substance of these forms of revenue.
[Here one folio sheet of the manuscript is missing.]
Differential rent is bound up with the relative fertility of the soil, in other words, with qualities, which arise from the soil as such. But in the first place, to the 958 Capitalist Production. II extent that it rests upon the different individual values of the products of different kinds of soil, it is determined only in the manner just mentioned; in the second place, to the extent that it rests upon the regulating general market value, which differs from the individual value, it is a social law carried through by means of competition, and this law has nothing to do either with the soil or with the different degrees of its fertility.
It might seem that a rational relation was expressed at least in the term " Labor — ■ Wages of Labor," But this is no more the case than it is in the term " Land — Ground-Rent." To the extent that labor creates value, and materializes itself in the value of commodities, it has nothing to do with the distribution of this value among the different categories. And so far as it has the specifically social character of wage labor, it does not create any value. We have already shown that wages of labor, or price of labor, is but an irrational expression for the value, or price, of laborpower; and the definite social conditions, under which this labor-power is sold, have nothing to do with labor as a general agent in production. Labor is also materialized in that portion of the value of a commodity, which forms the price of labor-power in the shape of wages; it creates this portion just as it does the other portions of the product; but it does not materialize itself in this portion to any other extent, or in any other way, than it does in the portions representing rent or profit. Besides, if we regard labor as a faculty creating value, we do not look upon its concrete form as a means of production, but upon its social relation, which differs from that of wage labor.
Even the term " Capital — Profit " is not correct here. If capital is viewed in the only relation, in which it produces surplus-value, namely in its relation to the laborer, in which it extorts surplus labor by compulsion exerted upon the wage laborer and his labor-power, then this surplus-value comprises not merely profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), but also rent, in short, the entire undivided surplus-value. Here, on the other hand, as a source of revenue, it is considered only The Trinitarian Formula. 959 in relation with that portion, which falls into the hands of the capitalist. This is not the surplus-value which it extracts, all together, but only that portion, which it extracts for the capitalist. Still more is all connection lost, as soon as the formula is transformed into '' Capital — Interest."
JSTow, having first considered the disparity of the above three sources, we must note, in the second place, that their products, their offspring, the revenues, all belong to the same sphere, namely that of value. However, this relation, not only between incommensurable magnitudes, but also between wholly unlike, mutually unrelated, and incomparable things, is accounted for by the fact that capital, like land and labor, is indeed taken only in its meaning as a material substance, that is, simply as a produced means of production, and in so doing both its relation to the laborer and its value are ignored.
In the third place, if understood in this way, the formula Capital — Interest (Profit), Land — Eent, Labor — Wages of Labor, presents a uniform and symmetrical inconsistency. In fact, when wage labor does not appear as a socially determined form of labor^ but rather all labor is considered naturally as wage labor (because it appears in this light to people who are biased by capitalist conditions of production), then the particular, specific, social forms observed by the material requirements of labor (the produced means of production and the land) towards wage labor (which is in its turn a prerequisite of those conditions), easily coincide with the material existence of these requirements of labor, or with the form possessed by them generally in the actual labor process, divested of all historically determined social forms, or even of any social form. The changed form of the requirements of labor, divested of labor and facing it as an independent element, which is assumed by the produced means of production when they become capital, and by the land when it becomes monopolized land, private property, this form belonging to a definite period of history then coincides with the existence and the function of the produced means of production and of the earth, in the general process of pro- 960 Capitalist Production.
diiction. Those means of production are then capital in themselves, by nature; capital is merely an " economic name " for those means of production; and in the same way land is then naturally the earth monoj)olized by a certain number of landlords. Just as the products become an independent power opposed to the producer when they become capital and capitalists (for capitalists are but the personification of capital), so the land becomes personified in the landlord and likewise rises on its feet to demand, as an independent power, its share of the product created by its assistance.
Thus it is not the land, which receives its due portion of its product for the reproduction and improvement of its productivity, but the landlord, who takes a share of this product and sells or wastes it. It is evident that capital is conditioned upon labor in tlie capacity of wage labor. But it is likewise evident that if wage labor is taken as a point of departure for labor, so that the identity of any labor with wage labor appears to be a matter of course, then capital and monopolized land must also appear as the natural form of the material requirements of production as distinguished from labor. It then appears natural for the material prerequisites of labor to be capital, and this looks like their general character necessarily arising from their function in the labor process. Capital and produced means of production thus become identical terms. In like manner land and land monopolized by private owners become identical terms. In this way the requirements of production in their assumed natural capacity of capital are considered as the source of profit, and so does the land assume the guise of the source of rent.
Labor as such, in its simple capacity as a useful productive activity, refers to the means of production, not as concerns their form due to social conditions, but rather as concerns their material substance, their capacity as material and means of labor. And they are distinguished merely as usevalues, the land as an unproduced, the others as produced means of production. If, then, labor is identical with wage labor, so is the particular social form assumed by the requirements of labor in their opposition to labor identical witli The Trinitarian Formula. 961 their material existence. The requirements of labor are then natural capital, and the land is natural private property. The formal separation of these requirements of labor from labor, the peculiar form of their independence as compared to labor, thus becomes a necessary attribute, an inherent character, inseparable from the material conditions of production.
The social character given to them in the process of capitalist production by a definite epoch of history becomes a natural character belonging to them, as it were, from time immemorial, as elements in the process of production. So it is that the respective part played by the earth as the original field of activity of labor, as the realm of natural forces, as the pre-existing armory of all objects of labor, and the other respective part played by the produced means of production (instruments, raw materials, etc.) in tlie general process of production, must seem to be expressed in the respective shares claimed by them as capital and private land, in other words, which are pocketed by their social representatives in the form of profit (interest) and rent, just as the laborer seems to receive in his wages that share which is due to his labor in the process of production. Rent, profit and wages thus seem to grow out of the role played by the land, the produced means of production, and the labor in the simple labor process, even when we look upon this labor process as one passing merely between man and nature, without regard to any historical determination.
It is merely the same thing in another form, when it is argued that the product, in which the labor of the wage laborer materializes itself for himself, as his income, his revenue, is just his wages, is just that portion of value (and of the social product measured by this value), which represents his wages. If wage labor is identical with any labor, then so is the wage and the product of labor, and so is the portion of value representing wages and the value created by any labor. But in this way the other portions of value, profit and rent, also become independent and separated from wages, and must seem to arise from sources of their own, which differ from that of wages and are independent of it.
962 Capitalist Production.
They must seem to arise out of the participating elements of production, by the owners of which they are claimed, so that profit seems to come from the means of production, the material elements of ca]3ital, and rent from the earth, or nature, represented by the landlord (Roscher).
Private land, capital and wage labor are thus transformed into actual sources of revenue. It is thought that rent, profit and wages and the respective portions of the product representing these parts of value, in which they exist and for w^hich they may be exchanged, arise from these sources directly, and that the value of the product itself arises in the last analysis from them.^'*^ They are not considered as sources of revenue in the sense that capital assigns to the capitalist, in the form of profit, a portion of the surplus-value extracted by him from labor, that monopoly in land attracts for the landlord another portion in the form of rent, and that labor gives to the laborer the remaining portion of value in the form of w^ages. They are not conceived as sources, by which one portion of value is transformed into profit, another into rent, a third into wages.
In the case of the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production, and even of the production of commodities, in the case of commodities and money, we have already pointed out the mystifying character, which transforms the social conditions that use the material elements of wealth as bearers of production into qualities of these things themselves (commodities) and still more pronouncedly transfonns the interrelations of production themselves into a thing (money). All forms of society, to the extent that they reach the stage in which commodities are produced and money circulated, take part in this perversion. But under the capitalist mode of production and in the case of capital, which forms its ruling category, its determining relationship in production, this enchanted and perverted w^orld develops still more. If we consider capital in the actual process of production, as a i« Wages, profit, and rent are the three original sources of all revenue, as welJ as of all exchangeable value (A. Smith). — In this way the causes of mate ii production are at the same time the sources of the existing primitive revenues.
The Trinitarian Fonnitla. 963 means of extracting surplus-vahie, tlien tliis relationship is still very simple. The actual connection impresses itself upon the bearers of this process, the capitalists, and they are conscious of it. The violent struggle about the limits of the Avorking day shows this clearly. But even within this undisguised sphere, the sphere of the direct process between labor and capital, matters do not rest in this simplicity. With the development of relative surplus-value in the typical, specifically capitalist mode of production, by which the social powers of production of labor are developed, these powers of production and the soeial interrelations of labor in the actual labor process seem transferred from labor to capital. This endows capital with a very mystic nature, since all of labor's social powers of production appear to be due to capital, not to labor as such, and seem to sprout from the womb of capital itself. Then the process of circulation intervenes, with its changes of substance and fomi, to which all parts of the capital, even of agricultural capital, must submit to the extent that the specifically capitalist mode of production develops. This is a sphere, in which the conditions under which value is originally produced are pushed completely into the background. Even in the direct process of production the capitalist acts at the same time in the capacity of a producer of commodities, of a manager in tiie production of commodities.
Hence this process of production appears to him by no means as a simple process by which surplus-value is produced. But whatever may be the sui*]ilus-value extorted by capital in the actual process of production and offered in the shape of commodities, the value and surplus-value contained in the commodities must first be realized in the process of circulation. And both the restitution of the values advanced in production and, particularly, the surplus-value contained in the commodities do not seem to be merely realized in the circulation, but actually to rise from it. This appearance of things is strengthened by two circumstances. Tn the first place, it is strengthened by the profit made through cheating, cunning, inside knowledge, ability and a thousand market constellations in the selling of commodities. Tn the second place, it 964 Capitalist Production.
is enhanced by the circumstance tliat a second determining element, the time of circulation, is here added to the labor time. It is true that the time of circulation asserts itself as a negativ^e barrier against the formation of value and surplus-value, but it has the appearance of being quite as positive a cause as labor itself and of carrying into the problem a detemiining element independent of labor and due to the nature of capital itself.
In Volume II we had of course, to present merely the forms created and determined by this sphere of circulation, to demonstrate the further development of the form of capital, which takes place in it. But in reality this sphere is the sphere of competition, which, considered in each individual case, is dominated by accident. In other words, the internal law, which enforces itself in these accidents and regulates them, does not become visible until large numbers of these accidents are grouped together. It remains invisible and unintelligible to the individual agents in production. Furthermore: The actual process of production, considered as the unison of the strict process of production and the process of circulation, gives rise to new formations, in which the vein of the internal connections is lost, the conditions of production become separate identities, and the component parts of value become ossified into forms independent of one another.
We have seen that the conversion of surplus-value into profit is determined as much by the process of circulation as it is by the process of production. The surplus-value, in the form of profit, is no longer referred back to that portion of capital, which is invested in labor and from which it arises, but to the total capital. The rate of profit is regulated by laws of its own, which admit, or even require, a change in it while the rate of surplus-value remains unaltered. All this obscures more and more the true nature of surplus-value and thus the actual running gear of capital. Still more is this done by the transformation of profit into average profit and of the values into prices of production, into the regulating averages of the market prices. Here a The Trinitarian Formula. 965 complicated social process iuterveiies, the process by which the capitals are equalized, and which separates the relative average prices of the commodities from their values, as it separates also the average profits of the various spheres of production (quite aside from the individual investments of capital in each particular sphere of production) from the actual exploitation of labor by the different capitals. iSTo longer does the average price of the commodities merely seem to differ from their value, but it actually does differ, it actually is not the same as the labor realised in them, and the average profit of some particular capital differs from the surplus-value, which this capital has extracted from the laborers employed by it. The value of the commodities appears no longer directly down to their very last boundaries, but remains visible only in the influence of the fluctuating productivity of labor upon the rise and fall of the prices of production. The profit seems to be detemiined only incidentally by the direct exploitation of labor, namely to the. extent that this exploitation permits the capitalist to realize a profit differing from the average profit at the regulating market prices, which appear to be independent of such exploitation. The normal average profits themselves seem immanent in capital and independent of exploitation.
The abnormal exploitation, or even the average exploitation under exceptionally favorable conditions, seems to determine only the dvviations from the average profit, not this profit itself. The division of profit into profit of enterprise and interest (not to mention the intervention of commercial profit and financial profit founded upon the circulation and seemingly arising wholly from it and not at all from the process of production itself) completes the selfdependence of the form of surplus-value, the ossification of its form as compared to its substance. One portion of the profit, as compared to the other, separates itself wholly from the relationship of capital as such and pretends to be an offspring, not of the process by which wage labor is exploited, but of the wage labor of the capitalist himself. On the other hand, interest then seems to be independent both of the wage 966 Capitalist Production.
labor of the laborer and of that of tlie capitalist, and to arise from no other source but capital itself. Capital, appearing originally, on the surface of circulation, as a capitalist fetish, as a self-expanding value, now assumes in the form of interest-bearing capital, its most estranged and peculiar shape. For this reason the formula " Capital — Interest," as the third link in ''Land — Kent" and "Labor — Wages of Labor," appears much more consistent than " Capital — Profit," since in " Profit " there still remains a recollection of its origin, which is not only extinguished in " Interest," but also placed in opposition to this origin and fixed in this antagonistic form.
Capital, as an independent source of surplus-value, is finally joined by private land, which acts as a barrier against average profit and transfers a portion of the surplus-value to a class that neither does any work of its own, nor directly exploits labor, nor can find moral consolation, like interestbearing capital, in devotional subterfuges such as the alleged risk and sacrifice of lending money to others. Since a part of tlie surplus-value seems here bound up directly, not with a social relation, but with a natural element, the land, the form of the mutual estrangement and ossification of the various parts of surplus-value is completed, their internal connection completely disrupted, and its source entirely buried, because the relations of production have been made selfdependent in spite of the fact that they are bound up with the different material elements of the process of production.
In Capital — Profit, or better Capital — Interest, Land — Pent, Labor — Wages of Labor, in this economic trinity expressing professedly the connection of value and of wealth in general with their sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the transformation of social conditions into things, the indiscriminate amalgamation of the material conditions of production with their historical and social forms. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Mister Capital and Mistress Land carry on their goblin tricks as social characters and at the same time as mere things. It is the great merit of classic The Trinitarian Formula. 967 economy to have dissolved this false appearance and illusion, this self-isolation and ossification of the different social elements of wealth by themselves, this personification of things and conversion of conditions of production into entities, this religion of everyday life. It did so by reducing interest to a jjortion of profit, and rent to the surplus above the average 23rofit, so that both of them meet in surplus-value. It represented the process of circulation as a mere metamorphosis of forms, and finally reduced value and surplus-value of commodities to labor in the actual process of production. Nevertheless even the best spokesmen of classic economy remained more or less the prisoners of the world of illusion which they had dissolved critically, and this could not well be otherwise from a bourgeois point of view. Consequently all of them fall more or less into inconsistencies, half-way statements, and unsolved contradictions. On the other hand, it is equally natural that the actual agents of production felt completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of Capital — Interest, Land — Eent, Labor — Wages of Labor, for these are the forms of the illusion, in which they move about and in which they find their daily occupation. It is also quite natural that vulgar economy, which is nothing but a didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of the ordinary conceptions of the agents of production and which arranges them in a certain intelligent order, should see in this trinity, which is devoid of all internal connection, the natural and indubitiable basis of its shallow assumption of importance. This formula corresponds at the same time to the interests of the ruling classes, by proclaiming the natural necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue and raising them to the position of a dogma.
In our description of the way, in Avhich the conditions of production are converted into entities and into independent things as compared to the agents of production, we do not enter into a discussion of the manner, in which the interrelations of the Avorld market, its constellations, the movements of market prices, the periods of credit, the cycles of industry and commerce, the changes from prosperity to crises, appear 968 Capitalist Production.
to these agents as overwhelming natural laws that rule them irresistibly and enforce their rule over them as blind necessities. We do not enter into such a discussion, because the actual movements of competition belong outside of our plan, and because we have to present only the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production, as it were, in its ideal average.
In preceding forms of society this economic mystification arises principally in the case of money and of interest-bearing capital. In the nature of the case it is out of the question where, in the first place, production is mainly for use, for the satisfaction of immediate wants, and where, in the second place, slavery or serfdom form the broad foundation of social production, as they did in antiquity and during the Middle Ages. The rule of the conditions of production over the producers in those systems is concealed by the relation between masters and servants, which appear and are visible as the direct motive powers of the process of production. In the primitive societies, in which natural communism prevails, and even in the ancient urban communes, it is this community itself which appears as the basis of production, and its reproduction appears as its ultimate purpose. Even in the medieval guild system neither capital nor labor appear untrammeled. Their relations are rather defined by the corporate rules, by the conditions connected with them, and by the conceptions of professional duties, mastership, etc., which accompany them. Only when the capitalist mode of production...CHAPTER XLIX.
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE PROCESS OF PRO- DUCTION.
For the purposes of the following analysis Ave may leave out of consideration the distinction between the price of produc- Analysis of Production. 969 tion and the value, since this distinction falls altogether to the gronnd, when, as is the case here, the value of the total annual product of labor is under discussion, in other words, the value of the product of the total social capital.
Profit (profit of enterprise plus interest) and rent are nothing but peculiar forms assumed by particular parts of the surplus-value of commodities. The magnitude of the surplus-value is tlie limit of the sum of parts, into which it may be divided. The average profit plus the rent are, therefore, equal to the surplus-value. It is possible that a part of the surplus labor contained in the commodities, and thus of the surplus-value, does not take part directly in the equalization tending toward an average rate of profit, so that a part of the value of commodities is not expressed at all in their price.