Part Seven — The Revenues and their Sources Chapters 48–52. The trinity formula and the completed fetishism of capitalist production, the critique of the surface, distribution, and classes.

The final Part is the culmination of the entire work. Having followed surplus-value out to its distributed forms — profit, interest, rent — Marx now assembles the finished surface of capitalist society and shows it to be a completed system of mystification. Each class draws a revenue that appears to spring from a source of its own: the capitalist's profit and interest from capital, the landowner's rent from land, the worker's wages from labour. This is the trinity formula, and it presents the three forms of revenue as though capital, land, and labour were three independent, co-ordinate sources of value — obliterating the truth established across three volumes, that all three revenues are portions of the single surplus-value produced by living labour and merely distributed among the classes. Chapter 48 dissects the trinity formula as the consummation of the fetishism that began with the commodity; Chapters 49 and 50 return to the analysis of the production process behind the distributed revenues and to the illusions competition breeds; Chapter 51 states the relation between the distribution relations and the production relations that determine them; Chapter 52, the famous fragment on classes, breaks off after two pages at the threshold of the question with which the whole work would have closed. The brief carries the load-bearing formulations of the trinity formula and the "religion of everyday life," and reconstructs the rest at the level of its essential movement, noting where the manuscript is unfinished.

The trinity formula — capital yielding profit/interest, land yielding rent, labour yielding wages — is the fully developed fetishism of capitalist production, the point at which the social relation of exploitation is most completely dissolved into the appearance of three natural, co-ordinate sources of revenue.

The chapter opens by naming its object whole, and by reducing the formula at once to its purest form.

Capital–profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land–ground-rent, labour–wages, this trinity form holds in itself all the mysteries of the social production process.

Since it is interest that appears as the specific and characteristic product of capital, as we have already seen, with profit of enterprise appearing in contrast as a wage independent of capital, this first trinity form can be reduced to a second: capital–interest, land–ground-rent, labour–wages, where profit, the form of surplus-value specifically characteristic to the capitalist mode of production, is fortunately set aside.

Marx, Capital III, page 953.

The incommensurability of the three "sources" is announced immediately.

If we now look more closely at this economic three-in-one, we find, firstly, that the ostensible sources of the wealth annually available belong to completely disparate spheres and have not the slightest analogy with one another. Their mutual relationship is like that of lawyer’s fees, beetroot and music.

Marx, Capital III, page 953.

Capital-profit (or better still capital-interest), land–ground-rent, labour-wages, this economic trinity as the connection between the components of value and wealth in general and its sources, completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity.

Marx, Capital III, page 968.

The dismantling proceeds term by term, and capital comes first.

Capital, land, labour! But capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is the means of production as transformed into capital, these being no more capital in themselves than gold or silver are money. It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society, the products and conditions of activity of labour-power, which are rendered autonomous vis-à-vis this living labour-power and are personified in capital through this antithesis.

Marx, Capital III, page 953.

Labour, the third term, fares no better as an independent "source".

Lastly, as the third in the league, a mere spectre – labour, which is nothing but an abstraction and taken by itself cannot exist at all, or, if we take what is actually meant here, the entire productive activity of man, through which his metabolic interchange with nature is mediated.

Marx, Capital III, page 954.

Marx dismantles it term by term. Land is a natural thing and can yield no value; "capital" is not a thing but a social relation, and cannot beget interest of itself; and labour is not a source of wages but the source of the whole new value, of which wages are only the part returned to the worker. The formula sets three incommensurable things side by side — a natural agent (land), a social relation misrepresented as a thing (capital), and human activity (labour) — as if they were three parallel sources, and in doing so it makes the historically specific capitalist form appear as an eternal, natural order of things. This is the passage in which Marx names the completed fetish-world.

the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things.

Marx, Capital III, page 969.

Vulgar economics, Marx argues, does no more than systematize and celebrate this surface — it is the theoretical expression of the trinity formula, taking the appearances of competition and distribution as ultimate data and asking no further. Against it, he names the standpoint of the whole critique: the task of science is precisely to reduce the fetishized surface to the value relations beneath it.

It is the great merit of classical economics to have dissolved this false appearance and deception … this religion of everyday life, by reducing interest to a part of profit and rent to the surplus above the average profit, so that they both coincide in surplus-value.

Marx, Capital III, page 969. The ellipsis drops the intervening clause on the autonomization of the value components.

Earlier in the chapter, the standpoint of the critique is grounded in a single methodological aphorism — the sentence on which the whole essence/appearance architecture of the volume turns.

Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that precisely in the estranged form of appearance of economic relations that involves these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions – and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence – that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, these relationships appearing all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner connections remain hidden, even though they are comprehensible to the popular mind.

Marx, Capital III, page 956.

And the religion-of-everyday-life passage continues directly into the account of why the trinity feels self-evident — to the agents themselves, to vulgar economics, and to the interest of the ruling classes.

It is also quite natural, on the other hand, that the actual agents of production themselves feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of capital-interest, land-rent, labour-wages, for these are precisely the configurations of appearance in which they move, and with which they are daily involved. It is equally natural, therefore, that vulgar economics, which is nothing more than a didactic and more or less doctrinaire translation of the everyday notions of the actual agents of production, giving them a certain comprehensible arrangement, finds the natural basis of its fatuous self-importance established beyond all doubt precisely in this trinity, in which the entire inner connection is obliterated. This formula also corresponds to the self-interest of the dominant classes, since it preaches the natural necessity and perpetual justification of their sources of income and erects this into a dogma.

Marx, Capital III, page 969.