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either a direct or indirect real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is
without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it.
Price, like relative value in general, expresses the value of a commodity (e.g., a ton of iron), by
stating that a given quantity of the equivalent (e.g., an ounce of gold), is directly exchangeable for
iron. But it by no means states the converse, that iron is directly exchangeable for gold. In order,
therefore, that a commodity may in practice act effectively as exchange-value, it must quit its
bodily shape, must transform itself from mere imaginary into real gold, although to the
commodity such transubstantiation may be more difficult than to the Hegelian “concept,” the
transition from “necessity” to “freedom,” or to a lobster the casting of his shell, or to Saint
Jerome the putting off of the old Adam.
15
Though a commodity may, side by side with its actual
form (iron, for instance), take in our imagination
the form of gold, yet it cannot at one and the
same time actually be both iron and gold. To fix its price, it suffices to equate it to gold in
imagination. But to enable it to render to its owner the service of a universal equivalent, it must
be actually replaced by gold. If the owner of the iron were to go to the owner of some other
commodity offered for exchange, and were to refer him to the price of the iron as proof that it was
already money, he would get the same answer as St. Peter gave in heaven to Dante, when the
latter recited the creed –
“Assad bene e trascorsa
D’esta moneta gia la lega e’l peso,
Ma dimmi se tu l’hai nella tua borsa.”
A price therefore implies both that a commodity is exchangeable for money, and also that it must
be so exchanged. On the other hand, gold serves as an ideal measure of value, only because it has
already, in the process of exchange, established itself as the money-commodity. Under the ideal
measure of values there lurks the hard cash.
Section 2: The Medium of Circulation
A. The Metamorphosis of Commodities
We saw in a former chapter that the exchange of commodities implies contradictory and mutually
exclusive conditions. The differentiation of commodities into commodities and money does not
sweep away these inconsistencies, but develops a modus vivendi, a form in which they can exist
side by side. This is generally the way in which real contradictions are reconciled. For instance, it
is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same
time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this
contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it.
In so far as exchange is a process, by which commodities are transferred from hands in which
they are non-use-values, to hands in which they become use-values, it is a social circulation of
matter. The product of one form of useful labour replaces that of another. When once a
commodity has found a resting-place, where it can serve as a use-value, it falls out of the sphere
of exchange into that of consumption. But the former sphere alone interests us at present. We
have, therefore, now to consider exchange from a formal point of view; to investigate the change
of form or metamorphosis of commodities which effectuates the social circulation of matter.
The comprehension of this change of form is, as a rule, very imperfect. The cause of this
imperfection is, apart from indistinct notions of value itself, that every change of form in a
commodity results from the exchange of two commodities, an ordinary one and the money-
commodity. If we keep in view the material fact alone that a commodity has been exchanged for
gold, we overlook the very thing that we ought to observe – namely, what has happened to the
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form of the commodity. We overlook the facts that gold, when a mere commodity, is not money,
and that when other commodities express their prices in gold, this gold is but the money-form of
those commodities themselves.
Commodities, first of all, enter into the process of exchange just as they are. The process then
differentiates them into commodities and money, and thus produces an external opposition
corresponding to the internal opposition inherent in them, as being at once use-values and values.
Commodities as use-values now stand opposed to money as exchange-value. On the other hand,
both opposing sides are commodities, unities of use-value and value. But this unity of differences
manifests itself at two opposite poles, and at each pole in an opposite way. Being poles they are
as necessarily opposite as they are connected. On the one side of the equation we have an
ordinary commodity, which is in reality a use-value. Its value is expressed only ideally in its
price, by which it is equated to its opponent, the gold, as to the real embodiment of its value. On
the other hand, the gold, in its metallic reality, ranks as the embodiment of value, as money. Gold,
as gold, is exchange-value itself. As to its use-value, that has only an ideal existence, represented
by the series of expressions of relative value in which it stands face to face with all other
commodities, the sum of whose uses makes up the sum of the various uses of gold. These
antagonistic forms of commodities are the real forms in which the process of their exchange
moves and takes place.
Let us now accompany the owner of some commodity – say, our old friend the weaver of linen –
to the scene of action, the market. His 20 yards of linen has a definite price, £2. He exchanges it
for the £2, and then, like a man of the good old stamp that he is, he parts with the £2 for a family
Bible of the same price. The linen, which in his eyes is a mere commodity, a depository of value,
he alienates in exchange for gold, which is the linen’s value-form, and this form he again parts
with for another commodity, the Bible, which is destined to enter his house as an object of utility
and of edification to its inmates. The exchange becomes an accomplished fact by two
metamorphoses of opposite yet supplementary character – the conversion of the commodity into
money, and the re-conversion of the money into a commodity.
16
The two phases of this
metamorphosis are both of them distinct transactions of the weaver – selling, or the exchange of
the commodity for money; buying, or the exchange of the money for a commodity; and, the unity
of the two acts, selling in order to buy.
The result of the whole transaction, as regards the weaver, is this, that instead of being in
possession of the linen, he now has the Bible; instead of his original commodity, he now
possesses another of the same value but of different utility. In like manner he procures his other
means of subsistence and means of production. From his point of view, the whole process
effectuates nothing more than the exchange of the product of his labour for the product of some
one else’s, nothing more than an exchange of products.
The exchange of commodities is therefore accompanied by the following changes in their form.
Commodity – Money – Commodity.
C–––––– M ––––––C.
The result of the whole process is, so far as concerns the objects themselves, C – C, the exchange
of one commodity for another, the circulation of materialised social labour. When this result is
attained, the process is at an end.
C – M. First metamorphosis, or sale
The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity, into the body of the gold, is, as I have
elsewhere called it, the salto mortale of the commodity. If it falls short, then, although the
commodity itself is not harmed, its owner decidedly is. The social division of labour causes his