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.

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 953.

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 960.

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 960. The ellipsis drops the intervening clause on the autonomization of the value components.

Chapter 49 returns behind the distributed revenues to the analysis of the total product and confronts, once more, the error Marx has pursued since Volume II Part Three: the Smithian dogma that the whole value of the annual product resolves into revenues (wages + profit + rent), leaving no component to replace the constant capital consumed. Marx shows again that the value of the total product is c + v + s, that only the newly added labour produces v + s (the fund of revenues), and that the constant capital c must be reproduced in kind and does not dissolve into anyone's income. The revenues are drawn from the new value alone; the illusion that they exhaust the product is the trinity formula's economic counterpart. Chapter 50 anatomizes the "illusion created by competition": because prices of production, wages, and rents present themselves on the surface as independently given magnitudes whose sum makes up the price, it appears that value is composed by adding up the three revenues, rather than that the revenues are shares distributed out of a value already determined by labour-time. Marx reverses the apparent order: value is not the sum of the revenues; the revenues are portions into which a prior value is divided. Competition, seeing only the surface, inverts cause and effect, and vulgar economics erects that inversion into doctrine.

Chapter 51 states the relation the whole volume has been driving toward: the relations of distribution are not independent of, but determined by and identical in substance with, the relations of production. The way the product is divided — into wages for the worker, profit and interest for the capitalist, rent for the landowner — is not a separate matter that could be arranged otherwise while production stayed the same. The distribution forms are the reverse side of the production relations: wage-labour, capital, and landed property are at once the agents of a specific mode of producing and the titles to specific shares of its product. This is Marx's answer to the reformist and Ricardian-socialist idea that the capitalist mode of production could be kept while its distribution was made just — that one could socialize the shares without touching the production relation. The distribution relations, Marx insists, have the same historically transitory character as the production relations they express; to change the one is to change the other. The chapter thus draws the political conclusion latent in the whole analysis: the critique of distribution is not a demand for fairer shares but a critique of the production relation that generates the shares.

The work ends on a fragment. Chapter 52, "Classes," opens by naming the three great classes of modern capitalist society — wage-labourers, capitalists, and landowners — defined by their respective sources of revenue: labour-power yielding wages, capital yielding profit, land yielding ground-rent. This is the trinity formula read as a class structure: the three revenues are the three classes' shares, and the classes are constituted by their relation to the conditions of production. Marx then poses the question the whole analysis has earned — what makes these income-groups into classes, given that within each, incomes and situations shade into one another, and that the division of labour would seem to multiply classes without end — and, at the very moment of posing it, the manuscript breaks off. Engels's note records that the text ends here.

The abrupt ending is fitting and much remarked. The three volumes have traced the capitalist mode of production from the single commodity to the completed surface of classes and revenues, showing at each level how the social relation of exploitation is transformed and disguised into the apparently natural forms of everyday economic life. That the work stops at the threshold of "classes" — the point at which the economic analysis would have passed over into the theory of the class struggle and the political conclusion — leaves the transition to be made by the reader, armed now with the critique of the categories through which capitalist society represents itself to itself. The brief records the fragment as it stands and marks it as the unfinished terminus of the whole.