could hardly expect a warm welcome from either. And on such feeble premises the star turn of the performance is to take place: the exchange between workers and entrepreneurs. The fundamental transaction of exchange in capitalist production, the exchange between workers and capitalists, is transformed by v. Kirchmann from an exchange between living labour and capital into an exchange of products. Not the first act, that of exchanging labour power for variable capital, but the second, the realisation of the wage received from the variable capital is put at the centre of the whole machinery, the entire commodity exchange of capitalist society being in turn reduced to this realisation of the labour-wage. And the crowning glory is that this exchange between workers and entrepreneurs, the king-pin of all economic life, dissolves into nothing on a closer scrutiny--it does not take place at all. For as soon as all workers have received their natural wages in the form of half their product, an exchange will be possible only among the workers themselves; every worker will only keep one-third of his wage consisting exclusively of either clothing, food or furniture, as the case may be, and realise the remainder to equal parts in the two other product-groups. The entrepreneurs no longer come into this at all; the three of them are left high and dry with their surplus value: half the clothing, furniture and food that has been produced by the society; and they have no idea what to do with the stuff. In this calamity of v. Kirchmann's creation, even the most generous distribution of the product would be of no use. On the contrary, if larger quantities of the social product were allotted to the workers, they would have even less to do with the entrepreneurs in this transaction: all that would happen is that the exchange of the workers among themselves would increase in volume. The surplus product which the entrepreneurs have on their hands would then contract, it is true, though not indeed because the exchange of the surplus product would be facilitated, but merely because there would be less surplus value altogether. Now as before, an exchange of the social product between workers and entrepreneurs is out of the question. One must confess that the puerile and absurd economics here crammed into comparatively little space exceed the bounds even of what might be put up with from a Prussian Public Prosecutor--such having been v. Kirchmann's profession, though he must be credited with having incurred disciplinary censure on two occasions. Nevertheless, after these unpromising preliminaries, v. Kirchmann goes right to the root of the matter. He admits that his assuming the surplus product in a concrete use-form is the reason why the surplus value cannot be usefully employed. As a remedy he now allows the entrepreneurs to devote half of the social labour appropriated as surplus value to the production not of common goods but of luxuries.