Key Arguments

• The laws of exchange are observed in every single act taken in isolation
• Originally, property rights were based on the producer's own labor
• Under capitalism, the same rights allow the appropriation of unpaid labor on an increasing scale
• This revolution in appropriation occurs while maintaining the original property rights of commodity production

Source Quotes

To say that the intervention of wage-labour adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own immanent laws, undergoes a further development into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation. We have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital, whatever its original source, is transformed into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value.

However long a series of periodic reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity. As long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange - taken in isolation – the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionized without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production. The same rights remain in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate the unpaid labour of others over and over again.

As long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange - taken in isolation – the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionized without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production. The same rights remain in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate the unpaid labour of others over and over again. This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the worker himself, of labour-power as a commodity.

Key Concepts

• property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation
• mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionized without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production
• The same rights remain in force both at the outset
• social wealth becomes to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate the unpaid labour of others

Context

Marx explaining the central dialectical shift where the rules of fair exchange turn into a system of exploitation without breaking any laws