Let us take some individual capitalist who is starting in business, a farmer for instance. During the first year, he advances a money-capital of, say, £5,000, paying £4,000 for means of production, and £1,000 for labour-power. Let the rate of surplus-value be 100%, the amount of surplus-value appropriated by him £1,000. The above £5,000 comprise all the money he advances as money-capital. But the man must also live, and he does not take in any money until the end of the year. Take it that his consumption amounts to £1,000. These he must have in his possession. He may say that he has to advance himself these £1,000 during the first year. But this advance, which here has only a subjective meaning, denotes nothing else but that he must pay for his individual consumption during the first year out of his own pocket instead of defraying it out of the gratuitous production of his labourers. He does not advance this money as capital. He spends it, pays it out for an equivalent in means of subsistence which he consumes. This value has been spent by him in money, thrown into circulation and withdrawn from it in the form of commodity-values. These commodity-values he has consumed. He has thus ceased to bear any relation to their value. The money with which he paid for this value exists now as an element of the circulating money. But he has withdrawn the value of this money from circulation in the form of products; and this value is now destroyed together with the products in which it existed. It’s all gone. But at the end of the year he throws commodities worth £6,000 into circulation and sells them. By this means he recovers: 1) his advanced money-capital of £5,000; 2) the realised surplus-value of £1,000. He has advanced as capital, has thrown into circulation, £5,000, and he withdraws from it £6,000 — £5,000 of which cover his capital, and £1,000 his surplus-value. The last £1,000 are turned into money with the money which he himself has thrown into circulation, which he did not advance, but spent as a consumer, not as a capitalist. They now return to him as the money-form of the surplus-value produced by him. And henceforth this operation is repeated every year. But beginning with the second year, the £1,000 which he spends are constantly the converted form, the money-form, of the surplus-value produced by him. He spends them annually and they return to him annually.