In so far as each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labor-power, the laborer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far as all of this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor-power is itself but a portion of the product of other’s labor appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and laborer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever-repeated purchase and sale of labor-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this – the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialized labor of others, and exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labor. At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man’s own labor. [...] Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its products, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the laborer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.412-413