rocess by which money is transformed into
capital and discovers that the form in which money circulates as
capital is the inversion of the form in which it circulates as the
universal equivalent. The individual owner of commodities sells to
buy, he sells what he does not need, and buys with the money thus
obtained what he does need. The budding capitalist buys on the
contrary what he does not want himself, he buys to sell, and to sell
for a higher money value than he put into the business, he makes a
money profit, and this profit Marx calls surplus value.

What is the origin of this surplus value? Either the buyer buys goods
below their value or the seller sells them above their value. In both
cases gain and loss would balance one another, since every buyer is
also a seller. It can also not arise from extortion, for extortion
might enrich one at the expense of the other but it could not increase
the total sum of money neither could it increase the amount of
commodities in circulation. "The entire capitalist class of a country
cannot overreach itself."

Now, we find that the totality of the capitalist class in every
country grows richer before our very eyes, by the process of selling
dearer than it bought, by appropriating surplus value. So we are just
at the beginning of the discussion. Where does this surplus value come
from? This question has to be answered on purely economic grounds to
the exclusion of all cheating, and all invasion of force. How is it
possible to keep selling dearer than one buys under the assumption
that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?

The solution of this problem is the crowning glory of the work of
Marx. He sheds clear daylight in economic places where the earlier
socialists no less than the bourgeois economists have groped in utter
darkness. From his work dates the origin of scientific socialism.

The solution is as follows. The power of increase in money which is
transformed into capital cannot proceed from the money neither does it
depend upon trade, since the money only realizes the price of the
commodities and this price is, since we hold that only equal values
are exchanged, no different from its value. On the same grounds the
power of increase cannot come from the exchange of commodities. The
change therefore depends upon the commodities which are exchanged, but
not upon their value, since they are bought and sold at their value.
It arises from their consumption-va