For the productive capitalist who works on borrowed capital, the gross
 profit falls into two parts — the interest, which he is to pay the
 lender, and the surplus over and above the interest, which makes up his own
 share of the profit. If the general rate of profit is given, this latter
 portion is determined by the rate of interest; and if the rate of interest is
 given, then by the general rate of profit. And furthermore: however the gross
 profit, the actual value of the total profit, may diverge in each individual
 case from the average profit, the portion belonging to the functioning
 capitalist is determined by the interest, since this is fixed by the general
 rate of interest (leaving aside any special legal stipulations) and assumed to
 be given beforehand, before the process of production begins, hence before its
 result, the gross profit, is achieved. We have seen that the actual specific
 product of capital is surplus-value, or, more precisely, profit. But for the
 capitalist working on borrowed capital it is not profit, but profit minus
 interest, that portion of profit which remains to him after paying interest.
 This portion of the profit, therefore, necessarily appears to him to be the
 product of a capital as long as it is operative; and this it is, as far as he
 is concerned, because he represents capital only as functioning capital. He is
 its personification as long as it functions, and it functions as long as it is
 profitably invested in industry or commerce and such operations are undertaken
 with it through its employer as are prescribed by the branch of industry
 concerned. As distinct from interest, which he has to pay to the lender out of
 the gross profit, the portion of profit which falls to his share necessarily
 assumes the form of industrial or commercial profit, or, to use a German term
 embracing both, the form of Unternehmergewinn (profit of enterprise).
 If the gross profit equals the average profit, the size of the profit of
 enterprise is determined exclusively by the rate of interest. If the gross
 profit deviates from the average profit, its difference from the average profit
 (after interest is deducted from both) is determined by all the circumstances
 which cause a temporary deviation, be it of the rate of profit in any
 particular sphere from the general rate of profit, or the profit of some
 individual capitalist in a certain sphere from the average profit of this
 sphere. We have seen however that the rate of profit within the production
 process itself does not depend on surplus-value alone, but also on many other
 circumstances, such as purchase prices of means of production, methods more
 productive than the average, on savings of constant capital, etc. And aside
 from the price of production, it depends on special circumstances, and in every
 single business transaction on the greater or lesser shrewdness and industry of
 the capitalist, whether, and to what extent, he buys or sells above or below
 the price of production and thus appropriates a greater or smaller portion of
 the total surplus-value in the process of circulation. In any case, the
 quantitative division of the gross profit turns here into a qualitative one,
 and all the more so because the quantitative division itself depends on
 what is to be divided, the manner in which the active
 capitalist manages his capital, and what gross profit it yields to him as a
 functioning capital, i.e., in consequence of his functions as an
 active capitalist. The functioning capitalist is here assumed as a non-owner of
 capital. Ownership of the capital is represented in relation to him by the
 money-capitalist, the lender. The interest he pays to the latter thus appears
 as that portion of gross profit which is due to the ownership of capital as
 such. As distinct from this, that portion of profit which falls to the active
 capitalist appears now as profit of enterprise, deriving solely from the
 operations, or functions, which he performs with the capital in the process of
 reproduction, hence particularly those functions which he performs as
 entrepreneur in industry or commerce. In relation to him interest appears
 therefore as the mere fruit of owning capital, of capital as such abstracted
 from the reproduction process of capital, inasmuch as it does not "work,"; does
 not function; while profit of enterprise appears to him as the exclusive fruit
 of the functions which he performs with the capital, as the fruit of the
 movement and performance of capital, of a performance which appears to him as
 his own activity, as opposed to the inactivity, the non-participation of the
 money-capitalist in the production process. This qualitative distinction
 between the two portions of gross profit that interest is the fruit of capital
 as such, of the ownership of capital irrespective of the production process,
 and that profit of enterprise is the fruit of performing capital, of capital
 functioning in the production process, and hence of the active role played by
 the employer of the capital in the reproduction process — this
 qualitative distinction is by no means merely a subjective notion of the
 money-capitalist, on the one hand, and the industrial capitalist, on the other.
 It rests upon an objective fact, for interest flows to the money-capitalist, to
 the lender, who is the mere owner of capital, hence represents only ownership
 of capital before the production process and outside of it; while the profit of
 enterprise flows to the functioning capitalist alone, who is non-owner of the
 capital.