surplus value. Through a thousand runnels, this surplus value flows into the pockets of the master class. Part goes to the capitalist himself, in the form of entrepreneur’s profit; part goes to the landowner; in the form of taxes, part enters the coffers of the capitalist State; other portions accrue to merchants, traders, and shopkeepers, are spent upon churches and in brothels, support actors, artists, bourgeois scribblers, and so on. Upon surplus value live all the parasites who are bred by the capitalist system.
Part of the surplus value is, however, used over again by the capitalists. They add it to their capital, and the capital grows. They extend their enterprises. They engage more workers. They instal better machinery. The increased number of workers produces for them a still greater quantity of surplus value. The capitalist enterprises grow ever larger. Thus at each revolution of time, capital moves forward, heaping up surplus value. Squeezing surplus value out of the working class, exploiting the workers, capital continually increases in size.
11. Capital.
We now see clearly what capital is. Before all else, it is a definite value: it may be in the form of money; it may be in the form of machinery, raw materials, or factory buildings; it may be in the form of finished commodities. But it is value of such a kind as serves for the production of new value, for the production of surplus value. CAPITAL IS VALUE WHICH PRODUCES SURPLUS VALUE. CAPITALIST PRODUCTION IS THE PRODUCTION OF SURPLUS VALUE.
In capitalist society, machinery and factory buildings take the form of capital. But do machinery and buildings always take the form of capital? Certainly not. If the whole of society were a cooperative commonwealth producing everything for itself, then neither machinery nor raw materials would be capital, seeing that they would not be means for the creation of