Commercial capital (n.) is absolutely nothing more than the producer's commodity capital on its way to becoming money — an incidental chore turned into a separate species of capitalist.
Commercial capital (n.) reverses ordinary circulation: there the same money changes hands twice so goods can change shape; here the same commodity changes hands twice so the money can come home.
Commercial capital (n.) creates neither value nor surplus-value, yet raises the rate of profit by shortening the time capital spends idle in circulation.
Commercial capital (n.) changes its function and designation more easily than any other species of capital — which is why it must earn exactly the average profit.
Commercial capital (n.) earns a profit that looks like a mark-up on value, but that is a mere semblance — the merchant's share is carved out of surplus-value already produced in industry.
Commercial capital (n.) comes last in the logic of Capital but first in history: it was the merchant who first fixed prices more or less by values.
Commercial capital (n.) originally determined industrial profit, and only when the producer becomes his own merchant does its profit shrink to a mere share of the total surplus-value.
Commercial capital (n.) gets no surplus-value from its employee's labour, yet his unpaid labour creates the employer's ability to appropriate surplus-value, which for that capital comes to the same thing.
Commercial capital (n.) sets labour to work as a consequence of value, not its cause: there must be plenty of goods before there is much weighing, measuring, packing and shipping to do.
Commercial capital (n.) always withdraws more money from circulation than it puts in — that is what makes its turnover a turnover of capital.
Commercial capital (n.) is inwardly dependent and outwardly autonomous — a combination that drives it past production's limits until a crisis forcibly re-establishes the inner connection.
Commercial capital (n.) is the source of every superficial and distorted view of the economy: from its vantage, circulation seems to set prices on its own.
Commercial capital (n.) was capital par excellence in every earlier epoch; under capitalism it is demoted to the mere agent of productive capital.
Commercial capital (n.) develops independently in inverse proportion to the general economic development of society.
Commercial capital (n.) begins as a go-between, moving between extremes it does not rule and conditions it did not create.
Commercial capital (n.) earns, among undeveloped communities, a profit that not only appears as defrauding and cheating but largely is just that.
Commercial capital (n.) wherever it dominates is a system of plunder, bound up with piracy, slave-taking and the subjugation of colonies from Carthage to the Dutch.