In so far as the surplus-value, of which the additional capital,
 No. 1, consists, is the result of the purchase of labour-power with part
 of the 547original capital, a purchase that conformed to the laws
 of the exchange of commodities, and that, from a legal standpoint, presupposes
 nothing beyond the free disposal, on the part of the labourer, of his own
 capacities, and on the part of the owner of money or commodities, of the
 values that belong to him; in so far as the additional capital, No. 2,
 &c., is the mere result of No. 1, and, therefore, a consequence of
 the above conditions; in so far as each single transaction invariably conforms
 to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labour-power,
 the labourer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far
 as all this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of
 private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation
 of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed
 into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation
 with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there
 is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the
 capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of
 the product of others’ labour appropriated without an equivalent; and,
 secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer,
 but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting
 between capitalist and labourer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to
 the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of
 the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever repeated purchase and
 sale of labour-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this
 — the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion
 of the previously materialised labour of others, and exchanges it for a
 greater quantity of living labour. At first the rights of property seemed
 to us to be based on a man’s own labour. At least, some such assumption
 was necessary since only commodity-owners with equal rights confronted
 each other, and the sole means by which a man could become possessed of
 the commodities of others, was by alienating his own commodities; and these
 could be replaced by labour alone. Now, however, property turns out to
 be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid
 labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility, on the part
 of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property
 from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently
 originated in their identity. [6]