Years Since Karl

Scan page 11

Revolutionaries in Khabarovsk in the Far East support the Russian Revolution - carrying pictures of Marx.

And over the rest of the year we'll be carrying a series of articles on Marx's writings and their background; on their relevance today; Frederick Marx's ment of capital, Marx starts from the simple, notoriously obvious fact that the capitalists turn their capital to account by exchange: they buy commodities for their money and afterwards sell them for more money than they cost them. For example, a capitalist buys cotton for 1,000 talers and then sells it for 1,100, thus : "earning" 100 talers. This excess of 100 talers over the original capital Marx calls surplus value. Where does this surplus value come from? According to the economists' assumption, only equal values are exchanged, and in the sphere of abstract theory this is correct.

Hence, the purchase of cotton and its subsequent sale can just as little yield surplus value as the exchange of a silver taler for thirty silver groschen and the re-exchange of the small coins for a silver taler, a process by which one becomes neither richer nor poorer.

But surplus value can just as little arise from sellers selling commodities above their value, or buyers buying them below their value, because each one is in turn buyer and seller and this would, therefore, again balance.

No more can it arise from buyers and sellers reciprocally overreaching each other, for this would create no new or surplus value, but would only distribute the existing capital differently between the capitalists. In spite of the fact that the capitalist buys the commodities at their value and sells them at their value, he gets more value out than he put in. How does this happen?

Under present social conditions the capitalist finds on the commodity market a commodity which has the peculiar property