for his capital to the banker; the trader may have paid rent, interest, or for help; there may have been a lot of time and labor spent in transporting it from place to place until it finally reached its place of ultimate destination, the consumer—and all of this had to be paid for.
All these persons who participated in the production or circulation of our factory product, and all those with whom they must "divvy up," must share in our factory product, that is to say, in the price which the ultimate consumer paid for it. Let us see how it is done.
We must, of course, as already pointed out above, assume that each gets what is due him, under our present system, as they are all presumed to be honest, the cases of one getting advantage of the other are exceptional, and they are all free agents working without compulsion. The workingman is "free" to work or not to work, so is the manufacturer and merchant to hire, buy and sell. The capitalist system needs for its proper development, and we therefore assume, absolute freedom, personal and commercial. How, then, is the share of each determined, when is it produced and when paid over?
It must always be remembered that none of those interested in the production, circulation and distribution of the factory product, have any interest whatever in its existence, or desire for its possession. None of them gets any share of it physically. Their distributive share comes out of the purchase price paid for it by its ultimate consumer, who takes it out of the "market," converts it from a commodity into an ordinary good possessing only its natural qualities of a use-value. In other words, each of their distributive shares comes of the exchange-value of the commodity which is turned into the universal medium of exchange—money—by its sale to the ultimate consumer.
This exchange-value first manifests itself when the manufacturer has the commodity ready for sale and places it on the market for which it was produced. The manufacturer produced it not for its use-value,—he never had any per-
