used as a means of future production. It also presupposes that the "saved" portions of the surplus-value produced in the past are not in the hands of the laborers who offer for sale their labor-power. The possessors of these "saved" portions of past surplus-values, the capitalists, use these "savings," capital, in the production of further surplus-value, by the aid of the labor power which they purchase for part of it, in order to take it all to themselves. It is not, however, the capitalist personally who acquires the surplus-value. Capital, congealed and concentrated surplus-profit, produced by labor power, is just as impersonal, just as abstract, as its parent, labor power. It is capital as such, irrespective of the capitalist who owns it, that gobbles up all the surplus-value. The capitalist personally may sometimes by his ingenuity cause his capital to produce some extra surplus-value which other, less ingenious, capitalists could not do. In that event it goes to him personally as an extra profit. The ordinary, regular profits, however, of capitalist production and trade go to the credit of the capital employed, not the capitalist personally.
In order to produce a certain commodity and realize its -value, that is bring it to the ultimate consumer and obtain from him its price, a certain amount of capital must necessarily be employed for a certain length of time. The amount of capital necessary to be employed therein at the different stages of the processes of production and circulation, and the length of time for which it will have to be employed at each stage will vary, of course, with the state of development of the means of production and exchange, including the means of transportation and communication and other facilities for the circulation of commodities. But under given conditions of production and circulation the amounts of, and lengths of time for which, capital is necessarily employed in order to produce a commodity and bring it to the consumer remain the same.
We have already seen before that while all the surplus-value contained in a commodity is produced in the process
