HKB
exposed the present capitalistic methods of production and the methods of appropriation resting upon them and unveiled the secret upon which the whole arrangement of the society of to-day depends.
There is a necessary presupposition to this origin and birth of capital. "For the transformation of money into capital the money owner must first find free laborers in the market, free in the double sense that as a free person the laborer can use his labor power as a commodity, that he has no other wares to sell, that he is unemployed and that he is free of everything necessary to the realisation of his labor power." But this condition of a possessor of money or commodities on the one hand, and, on the other, of the possessor of nothing, except his own labor force, is no natural condition of affairs nor is it common to all periods of history; "it is clearly the result of a historical development, the product of a whole series of older forms of social production." And this free laborer first strikes our notice as a historical phenomenon at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century as a result of the dissolution of feudal society. Thereupon with the creation of the world trade and the world market which dates from the same period the foundation was laid for the mass of moveable wealth to become more and more transformed into capital and for the capitalistic system, directed more and more to the production of surplus value, to become the dominant system.
VIII. Capital and Surplus Value (Conclusion).
(Duehring having said that the term surplus value merely signifies in ordinary language, rent, profit and interest, Engels still further explains)
We have already seen that Marx does not say that the surplus product of the industrial capitalist, of which he is the first owner, is always exchanged for its value, as Herr Duehring points out. Marx plainly says that trade profit only constitutes a portion of the surplus value and under the foregoing conditions this is only possible if the factory proprietor sells his product under value to the trader and thus parts with a portion of the booty. Marx' contention rationally put is How is surplus value transformed into its subordinate forms, profit, interest, trade-profits, ground rents etc.? and this question Marx undertakes to answer in the third volume of Capital. But since Herr Duehring cannot wait long enough for the second volume to appear he has in the meantime to take a close look at the first volume. He thereupon reads that the immanent laws of capitalistic production, the course of the development of capitalism, realise themselves as the necessary laws of competition and thus are brought to the consciousness of the individual capitalists as dominant motives. That therefore a scientific analysis of competition is only possible when the real nature of capital is grasped, just as the apparent movement of heavenly bodies can only be understood by apprehending their real movement, and not merely those movements which are perceptible to the senses. So Marx shows how a certain law, the law of value, appears under given conditions in the competitive system and makes evident its impelling force. Herr Duehring might have understood that competition plays an important role in the distribution of surplus values, and, after sufficient thought, might have grasped at least the outlines of the transformation of surplus value into its subordinate forms from the examples given in the first volume.