 So money is here, as you can see, is a medium of exchange. Marx then talks about another medium of exchange. Okay, he develops this, you can see the usefulness of money here, that it is an exchange value. The next one is, once he's introduced money, he talks about MCM prime. So here is something a little bit different. A person starts with a quantum of money, what is it? It starts with a command over abstract labor, because that's what money is. It's exchange value, the source of exchange value is abstract labor. So a person has a quantum of money, which is, in Marxian terms, has a command over abstract labor. Gets rid of it, gets a commodity in one way or the other, then sells the commodity for more than the amount of money that one started with. So in other words, the assumption here is by Marx that M prime is greater than M. So let's do this, let's put it all together. You start with a quantum of value, abstract labor. You end up with a greater quantum of abstract labor. Notice the poles here are the same. Okay, this is different than CMC. Here we have the same kind of use value to begin with. The use value of money is its exchange value. We've ended up with more exchange value than we started. So a person has, in some way, which we're going to examine in a moment, that's some way, but a person has been able to expand his or her value. There's been a self-expansion of value, a self-expansion of money. Marx calls this self-expansion of value capital, and that's the title of his book. So capital refers to an individual who's successfully expanded his or her value by engaging an MCM prime. A capitalist personifies this self-expansion of value. So a successful capitalist has expanded his or her value. And you can now have a measure of this. That is M prime minus M over M. When you start at M, when you end up M prime minus M, that's an index of how successful is the capitalist in expanding his or her money. Or in the numerator, M prime minus M, we can call that the change in money. If you start with 100, you ended up with $110. This would be 10, 110 minus 10 over M, where you started, $100. So this is the rate of change, literally, of a capitalist in expanding his or her value. And when that's going up, the capitalist is being successful. So I can jump, because we're going to come to it very soon. In the expansion phases of capitalism, this thing is increasing. In the contracting phases of capitalism, this will be decreasing. Now, Marx talks about different kinds of capitalists, which is the last thing I want to talk about in talking about money. There are three different kinds of capitalists that he discusses in this MCM prime. They're all engaged in MCM prime, but they differ. They're different adjectives. Let's take the first. There's some called the finance capitalists. These are individuals who do something interesting. They take a quantum of money, they give it to other people, and they get back a bigger quantity. So they're a little bit different here. They're not really buying anything to sell or producing anything to sell. What they're doing is taking a quantum of money and lending it to someone else. So they've expanded their capital. There's no question about that. If they're successful at this, this has expanded. So they've been able to expand their capital, but they're not engaged in any production of anything, as I said, or buying to resell something. So this is just an M to M prime without this middle step here. But I want to leave it on the blackboard because it encompasses these others that I want to talk about. So this is finance capital, M to M prime. Then we have merchant capital. Here, indeed, these people, they buy a commodity at a wholesale price, and they sell that commodity at a retail price, a wholesale price, retail higher than the wholesale, and they also expand their money in a different way. They're merchant capitalists buying low, selling high, buying at wholesale, selling at retail prices. The third one is where Marx is going to spend most of his time, calls it industrial capitalists. What do these people do? These people also expand their M in a different way. The industrial capitalists, I don't know if I can sneak this in here, they have a quantum of money. They go out and they buy labor power, remember, and they buy means of production, other inputs. They combine them together in production, and then they sell that for M prime. So industrial capitalists take their money, buy labor power, means of production, and industrially produce something, the commodity, which they then sell for M prime. Merchant capitalists don't do that. Merchant capitalists buy low, sell high, finance capitalists give money and get back more money in interest, repayment of the debt in interest than they started with. In all cases, if they're successful, there's a general expansion of capital. So the title of the book, capital, refers to these, in general, these different kinds of capitalists, but you have to remember that the capitalists refer to different ways of expanding their capital. So in terms of what I told you before, the working class is a problematic concept in Marxian theory because it combines together productive and unproductive labor. The capitalist class is also a problematic concept in Marxian theory because it conflates different kinds of capitalists. There are the productive capitalists, they're productive of surplus. There are the unproductive capitalists in which there's no surplus value. In the activities that they engage in. And indeed, as we're going to see, there could be conflicts within that capitalist, so-called capitalist class, between finance capitalists and productive capitalists and merchant capitalists and productive capitalists, industrial capitalists. It's very trivial and I will stop. One of the biggest capitalist entities in the entire world is Walmart, the merchant capitalists. Well, Walmart buys commodities from industrial capitalists. So Walmart buys soaps and foods and computers from industrial capitalists. The industrial capitalists sells the product to Walmart at a wholesale price and then Walmart in turn turns around and sells that commodity to you and I at a retail price. What Walmart is interested in is very much lowering its wholesale price. But that's the selling price of the industrial capitalists. So as Walmart squeezes the industrial capitalists for paying it a lower price, then the industrial capitalists has a cost, which is they sell their commodities to Walmart at this, if you want, this bargain for and forced lower price by Walmart, because they're so powerful, and that squeezes the surplus value of the industrial capitalists. And as Walmart continually lowers its retail price, because that's his TV ads, it puts ever more pressure on the industrial capitalists for a lower wholesale price so that Walmart can maintain its merchant margin, profit margin. So there's a conflict here between the industrial capitalists and the merchant capitalists. So when you just say capitalists, we've got to remember that there are different kinds of capitalists deploying their capital in different ways and making money, that is, delta M over M, in these dramatically different ways. That's today's lecture.