Capital, then, as Marx understands it, may be said to be independent wealth employed or its own increase, and in "societies in which the capitalistic method of production prevails" all wealth bears distinctively this character. In more primitive days, wealth was a store of means of life produced and preserved for the supply of the producer's future wants, but now it "appears as a huge collection of wares," made for other people's wants, made for sale in the market, made for its own increase. What Marx wants to discover is how all this independent wealth has come to accumulate in hands that do not produce it, and in particular from whence comes the increase expected from its use, because it is this increase that enables it to accumulate. What he endeavours to show is that this increase of value cannot take place anywhere except in the process of production, that in that process it cannot come from the dead materials, but only from the living creative power of labour that works upon them, and that it is accordingly virtually stolen from the labourers who made it by the superior economic force of the owners of the dead materials, without which indeed it could not be made, but whose service is entitled to a much more limited reward. No increase of value, he contends, can occur in the process of exchange, for an exchange is a mere transposition of things of equal value. In one sense both parties in the transaction are gainers, for each gets a thing he wants for a thing he does not want. The usefulness of the two commodities is thus increased by the exchange, but their value is not. An exchange simply means that each party gives to the other equal value for equal value, and even if it were possible for one of them to make a gain in value to-day--to get a more valuable thing for a less valuable thing--still, as all the world is buyer and seller in turn, they would lose to-morrow as buyers what they gained to-day as sellers, and the old level of value would be restored. No increase whatever would be effected. There is indeed a class of people whom he describes as always buying and never selling--the unproducing class who live on their money, and who, he says, receive by legal titles or by force wealth made by producers without giving anything in exchange for it. And it may be supposed that perhaps value is created by selling things to this class of persons, or by selling things to them above their true value, but that is not so; you would have brought no new value into the world by such a transaction, and even if you got more for your goods than their worth, you would only be cheating back from these rich people part of the money that they had previously received for nothing. Another supposition remains. Perhaps new value is created in the process of exchange when one dealer takes advantage of another--when Peter, say, contrives to induce Paul to take £40 worth of wine for £50 worth of iron.