Das Kapital

EXCHANGE

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Two
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Two: Exchange
It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and
make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse
to their guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are things, and
therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting
in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of
them. In order that these objects may enter into
relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves
in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects,
and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity
of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by
mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the
rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses
itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal
system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of
the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation
that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.

The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and,
therefore. as owners of, commodities. In the course of our investigation
we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic
stage are but the personifications of the economic relations that exist
between them.
What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact,
that it looks upon every other commodity as but the form of appearance
of its own value. A born leveller and a cynic, it is always ready to exchange
not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the same
more repulsive than Maritornes herself. The owner makes up for this lack
in the commodity of a sense of the concrete, by his own five and more senses.
His commodity possesses for himself no immediate use-value. Otherwise,
he would not bring it to the market. It has use-value for others; but for
himself its only direct use-value is that of being a depository of exchange-value,
and, consequently, a means of exchange. Therefore,
he makes up his mind to part with it for commodities whose value in use
is of service to him. All commodities are non-use-values for their owners,
and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change
hands. But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and
the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realises
them as values. Hence commodities must be realised as values before they
can be realised as use-values.
On the other hand, they must show that they are use-values before
they can be realised as values. For the labour spent upon them counts effectively,
only in so far as it is spent in a form that is useful for others. Whether
that labour is useful for others, and its product consequently capable
of satisfying the wants of others, can be proved only by the act of exchange.
Every owner of a commodity wishes to part with it in exchange
only for those commodities whose use-value satisfies some want of his.
Looked at in this way, exchange is for him simply a private transaction.
On the other hand, he desires to realise the value of his commodity, to
convert it into any other suitable commodity of equal value, irrespective
of whether his own commodity has or has not any use-value for the owner
of the other. From this point of view, exchange is for him a social transaction
of a general character. But one and the same set of transactions cannot
be simultaneously for all owners of commodities both exclusively private
and exclusively social and general.
Let us look at the matter a little closer. To the owner of a commodity,
every other commodity is, in regard to his own, a particular equivalent,
and consequently his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all
the others. But since this applies to every owner, there is, in fact, no
commodity acting as universal equivalent, and the relative value of commodities
possesses no general form under which they can be equated as values and
have the magnitude of their values compared. So far, therefore, they do
not confront each other as commodities, but only as products or use-values.
In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust: “Im Anfang
war die Tat.” [“In the beginning was the deed.” – Goethe, Faust.]
They therefore acted and transacted before they thought.
Instinctively they conform to the laws imposed by the nature of commodities.
They cannot bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore
as commodities, except by comparing them with some one other commodity
as the universal equivalent. That we saw from the analysis of a commodity.
But a particular commodity cannot become the universal equivalent except
by a social act. The social action therefore of all other commodities,
sets apart the particular commodity in which they all represent their values.
Thereby the bodily form of this commodity becomes the form of the socially
recognised universal equivalent. To be the universal equivalent, becomes,
by this social process, the specific function of the commodity thus excluded
by the rest. Thus it becomes –
money. “Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem
et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere,
nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.” [“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.” Revelations, 17:13; “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelations, 13:17.]
(Apocalypse.)
Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges,
whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another
and thus by practice converted into commodities. The historical progress
and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities,
between use-value and value. The necessity for giving an external expression
to this contrast for the purposes of commercial intercourse, urges on the
establishment of an independent form of value, and finds no rest until
it is once for all satisfied by the differentiation of commodities into
commodities and money. At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products
into commodities is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one
special commodity into money.
The direct barter of products attains the elementary form of the
relative expression of value in one respect, but not in another. That form
is x Commodity A = y Commodity B. The form of direct barter is x use-value
A = y use-value B. The articles A and B in this case
are not as yet commodities, but become so only by the act of barter. The
first step made by an object of utility towards acquiring exchange-value
is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it
forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate
wants. Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable
by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary
for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners
of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals.
But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive
society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form
of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca
State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries
of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities,
or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become
commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction,
become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are
exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable
is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need
for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant
repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time,
therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced
with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes
firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of
consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value
becomes distinguished from its exchange-value. On the other hand, the quantitative
proportion in which the articles are exchangeable, becomes dependent on
their production itself. Custom stamps them as values with definite magnitudes.
In the direct barter of products, each commodity is directly a
means of exchange to its owner, and to all other persons an equivalent,
but that only in so far as it has use-value for them. At this stage, therefore,
the articles exchanged do not acquire a value-form independent of their
own use-value, or of the individual needs of the exchangers. The necessity
for a value-form grows with the increasing number and variety of the commodities
exchanged. The problem and the means of solution arise simultaneously.
Commodity-owners never equate their own commodities to those of others,
and exchange them on a large scale, without different kinds of commodities
belonging to different owners being exchangeable for, and equated as values
to, one and the same special article. Such last-mentioned article, by becoming
the equivalent of various other commodities, acquires at once, though within
narrow limits, the character of a general social equivalent. This character
comes and goes with the momentary social acts that called it into life.
In turns and transiently it attaches itself first to this and then to that
commodity. But with the development of exchange it fixes itself firmly
and exclusively to particular sorts of commodities, and becomes crystallised
by assuming the money-form. The particular kind of commodity to which it
sticks is at first a matter of accident. Nevertheless there are two circumstances
whose influence is decisive. The money-form attaches itself either to the
most important articles of exchange from outside, and these in fact are
primitive and natural forms in which the exchange-value of home products
finds expression; or else it attaches itself to the object of utility that
forms, like cattle, the chief portion of indigenous alienable wealth. Nomad
races are the first to develop the money-form, because all their worldly
goods consist of moveable objects and are therefore directly alienable;
and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact
with foreign communities, solicits the exchange of products. Man has often
made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material
of money, but has never used land for that purpose. Such an idea could
only spring up in a bourgeois society already well developed. It dates
from the last third of the 17th century, and the first attempt to put it
in practice on a national scale was made a century afterwards, during the
French bourgeois revolution.
In proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value
of commodities more and more expands into an embodiment of human labour
in the abstract, in the same proportion the character of money attaches
itself to commodities that are by Nature fitted to perform the social function
of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals.
The truth of the proposition that, “although gold and silver are
not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver,”
is shown by the fitness of the physical properties of these metals for
the functions of money. Up to this point, however,
we are acquainted only with one function of money, namely, to serve as
the form of manifestation of the value of commodities, or as the material
in which the magnitudes of their values are socially expressed. An adequate
form of manifestation of value, a fit embodiment of abstract, undifferentiated,
and therefore equal human labour, that material alone can be whose every
sample exhibits the same uniform qualities. On the other hand, since the
difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the
money commodity must be susceptible of merely quantitative differences,
must therefore be divisible at will, and equally capable of being reunited.
Gold and silver possess these properties by Nature.
The use-value of the money-commodity becomes two-fold. In addition
to its special use-value as a commodity (gold, for instance, serving to
stop teeth, to form the raw material of articles of luxury, &c.), it
acquires a formal use-value, originating in its specific social function.
Since all commodities are merely particular equivalents of money,
the latter being their universal equivalent, they, with regard to the latter
as the universal commodity, play the parts of particular commodities.
We have seen that the money-form is but the reflex, thrown upon
one single commodity, of the value relations between all the rest. That
money is a commodity is therefore a new discovery
only for those who, when they analyse it, start from its fully developed
shape. The act of exchange gives to the commodity converted into money,
not its value, but its specific value-form. By confounding these two distinct
things some writers have been led to hold that the value of gold and silver
is imaginary. The fact that money can, in certain
functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other
mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol. Nevertheless under this
error lurked a presentiment that the money-form of an object is not an
inseparable part of that object, but is simply the form under which certain
social relations manifest themselves. In this sense every commodity is
a symbol, since, in so far as it is value, it is only the material envelope
of the human labour spent upon it. But if it be
declared that the social characters assumed by objects, or the material
forms assumed by the social qualities of labour under the régime
of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same breath
also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned
by the so-called universal consent of mankind. This suited the mode of
explanation in favour during the 18th century. Unable to account for the
origin of the puzzling forms assumed by social relations between man and
man, people sought to denude them of their strange appearance by ascribing
to them a conventional origin.
It has already been remarked above that the equivalent form of
a commodity does not imply the determination of the magnitude of its value.
Therefore, although we may be aware that gold is money, and consequently
directly exchangeable for all other commodities, yet that fact by no means
tells how much 10 lbs., for instance, of gold is worth. Money, like every
other commodity, cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively
in other commodities. This value is determined by the labour-time required
for its production, and is expressed by the quantity of any other commodity
that costs the same amount of labour-time. Such
quantitative determination of its relative value takes place at the source
of its production by means of barter. When it steps into circulation as
money, its value is already given. In the last decades of the 17th century
it had already been shown that money is a commodity, but this step marks
only the infancy of the analysis. The difficulty lies, not in comprehending
that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why, and by what means
a commodity becomes money.
We have already seen, from the most elementary expression of value,
x commodity A = y commodity B, that the object in which the magnitude of
the value of another object is represented, appears to have the equivalent
form independently of this relation, as a social property given to it by
Nature. We followed up this false appearance to its final establishment,
which is complete so soon as the universal equivalent form becomes identified
with the bodily form of a particular commodity, and thus crystallised into
the money-form. What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money,
in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it,
but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their
values in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process
vanish in the result and leave no trace behind. Commodities find their
own value already completely represented, without any initiative on their
part, in another commodity existing in company with them. These objects,
gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are
forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of
money. In the form of society now under consideration, the behaviour of
men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations
to each other in production assume a material character independent of
their control and conscious individual action. These facts manifest themselves
at first by products as a general rule taking the form of commodities.
We have seen how the progressive development of a society of commodity-producers
stamps one privileged commodity with the character of money. Hence the
riddle presented by money is but the riddle presented by commodities; only
it now strikes us in its most glaring form.
Footnotes
1. In the 12th century, so renowned for its
piety, they included amongst commodities some very delicate things. Thus
a French poet of the period enumerates amongst the goods to be found in
the market of Landit, not only clothing, shoes, leather, agricultural implements,
&c., but also “femmes folles de leur corps.”
2. Proudhon begins by taking his ideal
of Justice, of “justice éternelle,” from the juridical relations
that correspond to the production of commodities: thereby, it may be noted,
he proves, to the consolation of all good citizens, that the production
of commodities is a form of production as everlasting as justice. Then
he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities,
and the actual legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this
ideal. What opinion should we have of a chemist, who, instead of studying
the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and decomposition
of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to
regulate the composition and decomposition of matter by means of the “eternal
ideas,” of “naturalité” and “affinité”? Do we really know
any more about “usury,” when we say it contradicts “justice éternelle,”
équité éternelle,” “mutualité éternelle,”
and other vérités éternelles” than the fathers of the
church did when they said it was incompatible with “grâce éternelle,”
“foi éternelle,” and “la volonté éternelle de Dieu”?
3. “For two-fold is the use of every
object.... The one is peculiar to the object as such, the other is not,
as a sandal which may be worn, and is also exchangeable. Both are uses
of the sandal, for even he who exchanges the sandal for the money or food
he is in want of, makes use of the sandal as a sandal. But not in its natural
way. For it has not been made for the sake of being exchanged.” (Aristoteles,
“De Rep.” l. i. c. 9.)
4. From this we may form an estimate
of the shrewdness of the petit-bourgeois socialism, which, while perpetuating
the production of commodities, aims at abolishing the “antagonism” between
money and commodities, and consequently, since money exists only by virtue
of this antagonism, at abolishing money itself. We might just as well try
to retain Catholicism without the Pope. For more on this point see my work,
“Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekon.,” p. 61, sq.
5. So long as, instead of two distinct
use-values being exchanged, a chaotic mass of articles are offered as the
equivalent of a single article, which is often the case with savages, even
the direct barter of products is in its first infancy.
6. Karl Marx, l.c., p. 135. “I metalli
... naturalmente moneta.” [“The metals ... are by their nature money.”] (Galiani, “Della moneta” in Custodi’s Collection:
Parte Moderna t. iii.)
7. For further details on this subject
see in my work cited above, the chapter on “The precious metals.”
8. “Il danaro è la merce universale"(Verri,
l.c., p. 16).
9. “Silver and gold themselves (which
we may call by the general name of bullion) are ... commodities ... rising
and falling in ... value ... Bullion, then, may be reckoned to be of higher
value where the smaller weight will purchase the greater quantity of the
product or manufacture of the countrey,” &c. (“A Discourse of the General
Notions of Money, Trade, and Exchanges, as They Stand in Relation each
to other.” By a Merchant. Lond., 1695, p. 7.) “Silver and gold, coined
or uncoined, though they are used for a measure of all other things, are
no less a commodity than wine, oil, tobacco, cloth, or stuffs.” (“A Discourse
concerning Trade, and that in particular of the East Indies,” &c. London,
1689, p. 2.) “The stock and riches of the kingdom cannot properly be confined
to money, nor ought gold and silver to be excluded from being merchandise.”
("The East-India Trade a Most Profitable Trade.” London, 1677, p. 4.)
10. “L’oro e l’argento hanno valore
come metalli anteriore all’esser moneta.” [“Gold and silver have value as metals before they are money”] (Galiani, l.c.) Locke says,
“The universal consent of mankind gave to silver, on account of its qualities
which made it suitable for money, an imaginary value.” Law, on the other
hand. “How could different nations give an imaginary value to any single
thing... or how could this imaginary value have maintained itself?” But
the following shows how little he himself understood about the matter:
“Silver was exchanged in proportion to the value in use it possessed, consequently
in proportion to its real value. By its adoption as money it received an
additional value (une valeur additionnelle).” (Jean Law: “Considérations
sur le numéraire et le commerce” in E. Daire’s Edit. of “Economistes
Financiers du XVIII siècle,” p. 470.)
11. “L’Argent en (des denrées) est le signe.” [“Money is their (the commodities’) symbol”] (V. de Forbonnais: “Eléments du Commerce, Nouv. Edit. Leyde, 1766,” t. II., p. 143.) “Comme signe il est attiré par les denrées.” [“As a symbol it is attracted by the commodities”] (l.c., p. 155.) “L’argent est un signe d’une chose et la représente.” [“Money is a symbol of a thing and represents it”] (Montesquieu: “Esprit des Lois,” (Oeuvres, Lond. 1767, t. II, p. 2.) “L’argent n’est pas simple signe, car il est lui-même richesse, il ne représente pas les valeurs, il les équivaut.” [“Money is not a mere symbol, for it is itself wealth; it does not represent the values, it is their equivalents”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 910.) “The notion of value contemplates the valuable article as a mere symbol - the article counts not for what it is, but for what it is worth.” (Hegel, l.c., p. 100.) Lawyers started long before economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely imaginary. This they did in the sycophantic service of the crowned heads, supporting the right of the latter to debase the coinage, during the whole of the middle ages, by the traditions of the Roman Empire and the conceptions of money to be found in the Pandects. “Qu’aucun puisse ni doive faire doute,” [“Let no one call into question,”] says an apt scholar of theirs, Philip of Valois, in a decree of 1346, “que à nous et à notre majesté royale n’appartiennent seulement ... le mestier, le fait, l’état, la provision et toute l’ordonnance des monnaies, de donner tel cours, et pour tel prix comme il nous plait et bon nous semble.” [“that the trade, the composition, the supply and the power of issuing ordinances on the currency ... belongs exclusively to us and to our royal majesty, to fix such a rate and at such price as it shall please us and seem good to us”] It was a maxim of the Roman Law that the value of money was fixed by decree of the emperor. It was expressly forbidden to treat money as a commodity. “Pecunias vero nulli emere fas erit, nam in usu publico constitutas oportet non esse mercem.” [“However, it shall not be lawful to anyone to buy money, for, as it was created for public use, it is not permissible for it to be a commodity”] Some good work on this question has been done by G. F. Pagnini: “Saggio sopra il giusto pregio delle cose, 1751”; Custodi “Parte Moderna,” t. II. In the second part of his work Pagnini directs his polemics especially against the lawyers.
12. “If a man can bring to London an
ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he can
produce a bushel of Corn, then the one is the natural price of the other;
now, if by reason of new or more easier mines a man can procure two ounces
of silver as easily as he formerly did one, the corn will be as cheap at
ten shillings the bushel as it was before at five shillings, caeteris paribus.”
William Petty. “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions.” Lond., 1667, p.
32.
13. The learned Professor Roscher, after
first informing us that “the false definitions of money may be divided
into two main groups: those which make it more, and those which make it
less, than a commodity,” gives us a long and very mixed catalogue of works
on the nature of money, from which it appears that he has not the remotest
idea of the real history of the theory; and then he moralises thus: “For
the rest, it is not to be denied that most of the later economists do not
bear sufficiently in mind the peculiarities that distinguish money from
other commodities” (it is then, after all, either more or less than a commodity!)...
“So far, the semi-mercantilist reaction of Ganilh is not altogether without
foundation.” (Wilhelm Roscher: “Die Grundlagen der Nationaloekonomie,”
3rd Edn. 1858, pp. 207-210.) More! less! not sufficiently! so far! not
altogether! What clearness and precision of ideas and language! And such
eclectic professorial twaddle is modestly baptised by Mr. Roscher, “the
anatomico-physiological method” of Political Economy! One discovery however,
he must have credit for, namely, that money is “a pleasant commodity.”
Transcribed by Bert Shultz
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
Next: Chapter Three: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
Capital Volume One- Index