The strong defeat the weak, and it becomes possible for a social elite and its army to gain control over the surplus-labour and surplus product of the working population; they can live off the labour of others.
According to Marx, capital had its origin in the commercial activity of buying in order to sell and rents of various types, with the aim of gaining an income (a surplus value) from this trade.
But, initially, this does not involve any capitalist mode of production; rather, merchant traders, state functionaries, religious authorities and rentiers are intermediaries between non-capitalist producers.
During a lengthy historical process, the old ways of extracting surplus labour are gradually replaced by commercial forms of exploitation and private industrial enterprises.
It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.
This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc.
For the most part, Marx assumed equal exchange in Das Kapital, i.e. that supply and demand would balance; his argument was that even if, ideally speaking, no unequal exchange occurred in trade, and market equality existed, exploitation could nevertheless occur within capitalist relations of production, since the value of the product produced by labour power exceeded the value of labour power itself.
In the real world, Marxian economists like Samir Amin argue, unequal exchange occurs all the time, implying transfers of value from one place to another, through the trading process.
"[5] Some basic modern criticisms of Marx's theory can be found in the works by Pearson, Dalton, Boss, Hodgson and Harris (see references).
The analytical Marxist John Roemer challenges what he calls the "fundamental Marxian theorem" (after Michio Morishima) that the existence of surplus labour is the necessary and sufficient condition for profits.
[citation needed] Five reasons were that: All that Marx really argued was that surplus labour was a necessary feature of the capitalist mode of production as a general social condition.
However, they predict that in the long run of history, the operation of the law of value will tend to equalize the conditions of production and sales in different parts of the world.