Investors only put money down on the expectation that they will receive a larger sum in return. Profit is what drives the capitalist system. Any standard textbook will tell you that profit is total revenue minus total cost. But that is a description not an explanation. In previous class societies, like feudalism, it’s easy to see that the lord got richer because peasants had to hand over to him a portion of the fruits of the ir labor. But under capitalism, the source of surplus wealth, unpaid labor, is disguised under the rules of apparent “free exchange” that govern the market place. This talk will get beyond the bland complacency of mainstream economics and get to the root—using as its foundation the first volume of Marx’s Capital—of where capitalist profits really come from.