Capital begins where the circulation of commodities ends. Marx says its modern history starts in the 16th century with a world market, and that new capital still turns up as money, as it did in the hands of the merchant and the usurer. What marks money as capital is not the money but the way it moves. The ordinary sale is C-M-C: a farmer sells a quarter of corn for £3 and spends the £3 on clothes. The money is spent and done with, and the aim is something to use. Capital runs the other way, M-C-M: buy in order to sell. A merchant who pays £100 for 2,000 lbs of cotton and sells it for £110 has swapped money for money. At first that looks absurd. The miser could keep his £100 and run no risk.
The two circuits share the same two acts and the same three parties, but nearly everything else is reversed. In the first, the same coin changes hands twice and the deal ends when the coin is spent. In the second, the commodity changes hands twice, and the money is not spent but advanced, let go with what Marx calls the sly intention of getting it back. If it does not flow back, the operation fails. The ordinary sale ends in consumption, so use-value is its aim. The buyer who sells again begins and ends with money, so its only aim is exchange-value. With both ends the same, only the amount can differ. The round trip makes sense only as M-C-M', where M' is the original sum plus an increment. Marx calls that increment surplus-value.
That increment is what turns money into capital, and it explains why the movement never stops. Once the £110 is in hand, it is only money, no different in kind from the £100, so it must be thrown back in to grow again. Taken out and hoarded, it would sit there till doomsday and earn not a farthing. The person who carries this movement is the capitalist, money in person with a will. For him use-values are never the real aim, and no single profit is enough. Marx sets him beside the miser. Both chase wealth without limit, but the miser is a capitalist gone mad, while the capitalist is a rational miser who keeps his money in circulation.
Marx then lets value itself take the stage. In M-C-M' it passes from money to commodity and back, growing as it goes, as though it had the occult power to add value to itself and lay golden eggs. It needs one form in which it can always be recognised, and that form is money. He likens the £100 and the £10 to father and son, distinct for a moment and then one again as £110. The Mercantilists described capital as money that begets money, M-M'. Merchant's capital shows the formula plainly, but industrial capital follows the same path, and interest-bearing capital shows only the result, money worth more money. Marx leaves the general formula standing, and the extra £10 it promises still has no source.
Coming Up in Chapter 5
Marx now puts the capitalist's trick under suspicion. Buying from A and selling to B looks like profit to the middleman, but A and B would call it Hokus Pokus and trade directly. He then tests a plain swap of wine for corn, each worth fifty, and asks whether anyone can gain value from it.
