lls his product under value to the trader
and thus parts with a portion of the booty. Marx' contention
rationally put is How is surplus value transformed into its
subordinate forms, profit, interest, trade-profits, ground rents etc.?
and this question Marx undertakes to answer in the third volume of
Capital. But since Herr Duehring cannot wait long enough for the
second volume to appear he has in the meantime to take a close look at
the first volume. He thereupon reads that the immanent laws of
capitalistic production, the course of the development of capitalism,
realise themselves as the necessary laws of competition and thus are
brought to the consciousness of the individual capitalists as dominant
motives. That therefore a scientific analysis of competition is only
possible when the real nature of capital is grasped, just as the
apparent movement of heavenly bodies can only be understood by
apprehending their real movement, and not merely those movements which
are perceptible to the senses. So Marx shows how a certain law, the
law of value, appears under given conditions in the competitive system
and makes evident its impelling force. Herr Duehring might have
understood that competition plays an important role in the
distribution of surplus values, and, after sufficient thought, might
have grasped at least the outlines of the transformation of surplus
value into its subordinate forms from the examples given in the first
volume.

Herr Duehring finds competition to be the stumbling block in the way
of his comprehension. He cannot understand how competing
entrepreneurs can manage to sell the entire product of labor including
the surplus product for so much more than the natural cost of
production. Here again that "force" of his which, in his estimation,
is the very evil thing, comes into play. According to Marx, the
surplus product does not have any cost of production, it is the part
of the product which costs the capitalist nothing. If the
entrepreneurs were to sell the surplus product at its real cost of
production they would have to give it away. Is it not a fact that the
competing entrepreneurs really sell the product of labor every day at
its natural cost of production? According to Herr Duehring the cost of
production consists "in the expenditure of labor or force and
therefore in the last analysis must be measured by cost of
maintenance," and therefore, in present day society, is to be
estimated at the cost of