But that is not all. This inversion has no existence for two out
 of the three persons who transact business together. As capitalist, I buy
 commodities from A and sell them again to B, but as a simple owner of commodities,
 I sell them to B and then purchase fresh ones from A. A and B see no difference
 between the two sets of transactions. They are merely buyers or sellers.
 And I on each occasion meet them as a mere owner of either money or commodities,
 as a buyer or a seller, and, what is more, in both sets of transactions,
 I am opposed to A only as a buyer and to B only as a seller, to the one
 only as money, to the other only as commodities, and to neither of them
 as capital or a capitalist, or as representative of anything that is more
 than money or commodities, or that can produce any effect beyond what money
 and commodities can. For me the purchase from A and the sale to B are part
 of a series. But the connexion between the two acts exists for me alone.
 A does not trouble himself about my transaction with B, nor does B about
 my business with A. And if I offered to explain to them the meritorious
 nature of my action in inverting the order of succession, they would probably
 point out to me that I was mistaken as to that order of succession, and
 that the whole transaction, instead of beginning with a purchase and ending
 with a sale, began, on the contrary, with a sale and was 155concluded
 with a purchase. In truth, my first act, the purchase, was from the standpoint
 of A, a sale, and my second act, the sale, was from the standpoint of B,
 a purchase. Not content with that, A and B would declare that the whole
 series was superfluous and nothing but Hokus Pokus; that for the future
 A would buy direct from B, and B sell direct to A. Thus the whole transaction
 would be reduced to a single act forming an isolated, non-complemented
 phase in the ordinary circulation of commodities, a mere sale from A’s
 point of view, and from B’s, a mere purchase. The inversion, therefore,
 of the order of succession, does not take us outside the sphere of the
 simple circulation of commodities, and we must rather look, whether there
 is in this simple circulation anything permitting an expansion of the value
 that enters into circulation, and, consequently, a creation of surplus-value.