THE MODERN LIBRARY of the World's Best Books
»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»» »»»»»»»»>»»»j
CAPITAL A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
The publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of the modern library, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of boohj will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price.
CAPITAL
A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»
BY
KARL MARX
THE PROCESS OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION
TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD GERMAN EDITION BY SAMUEL MOORE AND EDWARD AVELING
EDITED BY
FREDERICK ENGELS
REVISED AND AMPLIFIED ACCORDING TO THE
FOURTH GERMAN EDITION
BY ERNEST UNTERMANN
»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>^3>3>»5>»»3.»»»»»»»»»»»;
BENNETT A. CERF • DONALD S. KLOPFER
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY »»»»>»»»»»»»»»>»»»»»?'>»»»»»,»»»3'»>3>»»»»»;
►»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>*>>>>>*>>>>>>>:'
Manufactured in the United States of America
Bound for THE MODERN LIBRARY by H. W olfi
01 . 1Y\3L
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Editor's Note to the First American Edition, . • . . ?
Author's Prefaces — I. To the First Edition, 11
II. To the Second Edition 16
Editor's Preface — To the First English Translation .27
Editor's Preface — To the Fourth German Edition » ..... 32
PART I.
COMMODITIES and money.
Chapter I. — Commodities, 41
Section 1. — The two Factors of a Commodity; Use Value and Value (the
Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value), 41
Section 2. — The Twofold Character of the Labour embodied in Commodities, 48
Section 3. — The Form of Value, or Exchange Value 54
A. Elementary or Accidental Form o ' Value 56
1. The two Poles of the Expression of Value: Relative Form and
Equivalent Form, 56
The Relative Form of Value 57
(a.) The Nature and Import of this Form, 57
(&.) Quantitative Determination of Relative Value 61
3. The Equivalent Form of Value, 64
4. The Elementary Form of Value considered as a Whole, ... 69
B. Total or Expanded Form of Value 72
1. The Expanded Relative Form of Value 72
2. The Particular Equivalent Form, 73
3. Defects of the Total or Expanded Form of Value, 74
C. The General Form of Value 75
1. The altered Character of the Form of Value 75
2. The interdependent Development of the Relative Form of Value,
and of the Equivalent Form,. 78
3. Transition from the General Form to the Money Form 79
D. The Money Form 80
Section 4.— The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof, 81
Chapter II.— Exchange 96
Chapter 111. — Money, or the Circulation of Commodities 106
Section 1.— The Measure of Value 106
Section 3.— The Medium of Circulation 116
a. The Metamorphosis of Commodities 116
b. The Currency of Money 128
e. Coin, and Symbols of Value, „ 140
Sectioa 3.— Money 146
a. Hoarding 146
b. Means of Payment, 151
C. Universal Money, 159
PART II.
the transformation of money into capital.
Chapter IV.— The General Formula for Capital 1/52
Chapter V.— Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital, ifs
Chapter VI. — The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power „ 186
3
j. Contents.
PART III.
THE PRODUCTION OF ABSOLUTE SURPLUS-VALUE.
PAG8
Chapter VII. — The Labour Process and the Process of producing Surplus- Value 197
Section 1. — The Labour Process or the Production of Use- Value 197
Section 2. — The Production of Surplus- Value 207
Chapter VIII. — Constant Capital and Variable Capital 221
Chapter IX. — The Rate of Surplus- Value 235
Section 1. — The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power, 235
Section 2. — The Representation of the Components of the Value of the Pro- duct by corresponding proportional Parts of the Product itself, . . . 244
Section 3. — Senior's " Last Hour," 248
Section 4. — Surplus-Produce, 254
Chapter X. — The Working-Day 255
Section 1. — The Limits of the Working-Day, 255
Section 2. — The Greed for Surplus-Labour. Manufacturer and Boyard, . . 259 Section 3. — Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation, 268
Section 4.— Day and Night Work. The Relay System, 283
Section 5. — The Struggle for a Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Laws for the Extension of the Working-Day from the Middle of the 14th to the
End of the 17th Century 290
Section 6. — The Struggle for a Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Limitation
by Law of the Working- Time. The English Factory Acts, 1833 to 1864, 304 Section 7. — The Struggle for a Normal Working-Day. Re-action of the Eng- lish Factory Acts on Other Countries, 326
Chapter XI. — Rate and Mass of Surplus- Value, 331
PART IV.
PRODUCTION OF RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE.
CHAPTER XII. — The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value 342
Chapter XIII. — Co-Operation 353
Chapter XIV. — Division of Labour and Manufacture 368
Section 1. — Twofold Origin of Manufacture 368
Section 2. — The Detail Labourer and his Implements 372
Section 3. — The two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture: Heterogeneous
Manufacture, Serial Manufacture, 375
Section 4. — Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of Labour in
Society, 385
Section 5. — The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture, 395
Chapter XV. — Machinery and Modern Industry, , 405
Section 1. — The Development of Machinery 405
Section 2. — The Value transferred by Machinery to the Product 422
Section 3.— The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman, .... 430
a. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The
Employment of Women and Children 431
b. Prolongation of the Working-Day, 440
C. Intensification of Labour, 447
Section 4. — The Factory, 457
Section 5. — The Strife between Workman and Machinery, 466
Section 6. — The Theory of Compensation as regards JJap Workpeople displaced
by Machinery, . . • 478
Section 7. — Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the "factory ^iysteir*.
Crises of the Cotton Trade, ***
Contents. 5
PAGE
Section 8. — Revolution effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic
Industry by Modern Industry, 502
a. Overthrow of Co-Operation based on Handicraft and on Divi-
sion of Labour, 502
b. Re-action of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domes-
tic Industries, 504
c. Modern Manufacture, 506
d. Modern Domestic Industry, 509
e. Passage of Modern Manufacture and Domestic Industry into
Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening of this Revo- lution by the Application of the Factory Acts to those In- dustries, 514
Section 9. — The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same.
Their general Extension in England, 526
Section 10. — Modern Industry and Agriculture 553
PART V.
THE PRODUCTION OF ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE.
Chapter XVI. — Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value, 557
Chapter XVII. — Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in
Surplus- Value, 568
I. Length of the Working Day and Intensity of Labour constant. Pro-
ductiveness of Labour variable, 569
II. Working Day constant. Productiveness of Labour constant. Intensity
of Labor variable, 574
III. Productiveness and Intensity of Labour constant. Length of the Work- ing Day variable, 576
IV. Simultaneous Variations in the Duration, Productiveness and In- tensity of Labour, 578
(1.) Diminishing Productiveness of Labour with a simultaneous Length- ening of the Working Day, 578
(2.) Increasing Intensity and Productiveness of Labour with simul- taneous Shortening of the Working Day, 580
Chapter XVIII. — Various Formlae for the Rate of Surplus-Value, .... 582
PART VI.
WAGES.
Chapter XIX. — The Transformation of the Value (and respectively the Price)
of Labour-Power into Wages 586
Chapter XX. — Time-wages, 594
Chapter XXI. — Piece-Wages, 602
Chapter XXII. — National Differences of Wages, 611
PART VII.
THE accumulation of capital.
Chapter XXIII. — Simple Reproduction, 619
Chapter XXIV. — Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital, 634
Section 1. — Capitalist Production on a progressively increasing Scale. Transi- tion of the Laws of Property that characterise Production of Com- modities into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation, 634
Section 2. — Erroneous Conception, by Political Economy, of Reproduction on
a progressively increasing Scale, 644
6 Contents.
Section 3. — Separation of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue. The Ab- stinence Theory, 648
Section 4. — Circumstances that, independently of the proportional Division of Surplus- Value into Capital and Revenue, determine the Amount of Ac- cumulation. Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power. Productivity of Labour. Growing Difference in Amount between Capital employed and Capital consumed. Magnitude of Capital advanced, 656
Section 5. — The so-called Labour Fund, 667
Chapter XXV. — The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, 671
Section 1. — The increased Demand for Labour-Power that accompanies Accumu- lation, the Composition of Capital remaining the same, 671
Section 2. — Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that ac- companies it, 681
Section 3. — Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus-Population, or Indus- trial Reserve Army 689
Section 4. — Different Forms of the Relative Surplus-Population. The General
Law of Capitalistic Accumulation, 703
Section 5. — Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, . . 711
a. England from 1846 to 1866 711
b. The badly paid Strata of the British Industrial Class, . . . 718
c. The Nomad Population, 728
d. Effect of Crises on the best paid Part of the Working Class, . 733
e. The British Agricultural Proletariat, 739
/. Ireland, 767
PART VIII.
THE SO-CALLED PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION.
Chapter XXVI. — The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, 784
Chapter XXVII. — Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land, 788 Chapter XXVIII. — Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated from the End
of the 15th Century. Forcing down of Wages by Acts of Parliament, . 805
Chapter XXIX. — Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer 814
Chapter XXX. — Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Crea- tion of the Home Market for Industrial Capital, 817
Chapter XXXI. — Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist 828
Chapter XXXII. — Historical Tendency of Capitalistic Accumulation, . . . 834
Chapter XXaIII. — The Modern Theory of Colonization 838
Works and Authors quoted in " Capital," . 850
Index . . . .. * ... . . 866
EDITOR'S NOTE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION.
The original plan of Marx, as outlined in his preface to the first German edition of Capital, in 1867, was to divide his work into three volumes. Volume I was to contain Book I, The Process of 'Capitalist Production. Volume II was scheduled to comprise both Book II, The Process of Capi- talist Circulation, and Book III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. The work was to close with volume III, containing Book IV, A History of Theories of Surplus- Value.
When Marx proceeded to elaborate his work for publica- tion, he had the essential portions of all three volumes, with a few exceptions, worked out in their main analyses and con- clusions, but in a very loose and unfinished form. Owing to ill health, he completed only volume I. He died on March 14, 1883, just when a third German edition of this volume was being prepared for the printer.
Frederick Engels, the intimate friend and co-operator of Marx, stepped into the place of his dead comrade and pro- ceeded to complete the work. In the course of the elabora- tion of volume II it was found that it would be wholly taken up with Book II, The Process of Capitalist Circulation. Its first German edition did not appear until May, 1885, almost 18 years after the first volume.
The publication of the third volume was delayed still longer. When the second German edition of volume II ap- peared, in July, 1893, Engels was still working on volume
7
8 American Editor's Note.
III. It was not until October, 1894, that the first German edition of volume III was published, in two separate parts, containing the subject matter of what had been originally planned as Book III of volume II, and treating of The Capi- talist Process of Production as a whole.
The reasons for the delay in the publication of volumes II and III, and the difficulties encountered in solving the problem of elaborating the copious notes of Marx into a fin- ished and connected presentation of his theories, have been fully explained by Engels in his various prefaces to these two volumes. His great modesty led him to belittle his own share in this fundamental work. As a matter of fact, a large portion of the contents of Capital is as much a creation of Engels as though he had written it independently of Marx.
Engels intended to issue the contents of the manuscripts for Book IV, originally planned as volume III, in the form of a fourth volume of Capital. But on the 6th of August, 1895, less than one year after the publication of volume III, he followed his co-worker into the grave, still leaving this work incompleted.
However, some years previous to his demise, and in antici- pation of such an eventuality, he had appointed Karl Kautsky, the editor of Die Neue Zeit, the scientific organ of the German Socialist Party, as his successor and familiarized him per- sonally with the subject matter intended for" volume IV of this work. The material proved to be so voluminous, that Kautsky, instead of making a fourth volume of Capital out of it, abandoned the original plan and issued his elaboration as a separate work in three volumes under the title Theories of Surplus-value.
The first English translation of the first volume of Capital was edited by Engels and published in 1886. Marx had in the meantime made some changes in the text of the second
American Editor's Note. 9
German edition and of the French translation, both of which appeared in 1873, and he had intended to superintend per- sonally the edition of an English version. But the state of his health interfered with this plan. Engels utilised his notes and the text of the Trench edition of 1873 in the prep- aration of a third German edition, and this served as a basis for the first edition of the English translation.
Owing to the fact that the title page of this English trans- lation (published by Swan Sonnenschein & 'Co.) did not dis- tinctly specify that this was but volume I, it has often been mistaken for the complete work, in spite of the fact that the prefaces of Marx and Engels clearly pointed to the actual condition of the matter.
In 1890, four years after the publication of the first Eng- lish edition, Engels edited the proofs for a fourth German edition of volume I and enlarged it still more after a re- peated comparison with the French edition and with manu- script notes of Marx. But the Swan Sonnenschein edition did not adopt this new version in its subsequent English issues.
This first American edition will be the first complete Eng- lish edition of the entire Marxian theories of Capitalist Pro- duction. It will contain all three volumes of Capital in full. The present volume, I, deals with The Process of Capitalist Production in the strict meaning of the term " production." Volume II will treat of The Process of Capitalist Circulation in the strict meaning of the term " circulation." Volume III will contain the final analysis of The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, that is of Production and Circulation in their mutual interrelations.
The Theories of Surplus-Value, Kautsky's elaboration of the posthumous notes of Marx and Engels, will in due time be published in an English translation as a separate work.
IO American Editor's Note.
This first American edition of volume I is based on the revised fourth German edition. The text of the English version of the Swan Sonnenschein edition has been compared page for page with this improved German edition, and about ten pages of new text hitherto not rendered in English are thus presented to American readers. All the footnotes have likewise been revised and brought up to date.
For all further information concerning the technical par- ticulars of this work I refer the reader to the prefaces of Marx and Engels.
Ernest Untekmann.
Orlando, Ha., July 18, 1906.
AUTHOR'S PREFACES.
I. TO THE FIRST EDITION.
THE work, the first volume of which I now submit to the public, forms the continuation of my "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) published in 1859. The long pause be- tween the first part and the continuation is due to an illness of many years' duration that again and again interrupted my work.
The substance of that earlier work is summarised in the first three chapters of this volume. This is done not merely for the sake of connection and completeness. The presentation of the subject-matter is improved. As far as circumstances in any way permit, many points only hinted at in the earlier book are here worked out more fully, whilst, conversely, points worked out fully there are only touched upon in this volume. The sections on the history of the theories of value and <f money are now, of course, left out altogether. The reader of the earlier work will find, however, in the notes to the first chapter additional sources of reference relative to the history of those theories.
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that con- tains the analysis of commodities, will, the efore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concern: more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value,
12 Author's Prefaces.
I have, as much as it was possible, popularised.1 The value- form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why \ Because the body, as an or- ganic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labor — or the value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the super- ficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutise. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are ot the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
With the exception of the section on value-form, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. J pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn some- thing new and therefore to think for himself.
The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experi- ments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phe-
iThis is the more necessary, as even the section of Ferdinand Lassalle'* work against Schulze-Delitzsch, in which he professes to give "the intel- lectual quintessence" of my explanations on these subjects, contains im- portant mistakes. If Ferdinand Lassalle has borrowed almost literally from my writings, and without any acknowledgment, all the general theoretic il propositions in his economic works, e.g., those on the his- torical character of capital, on the connection between the conditions of production an '. the mode of production, &c, &c, even to the terminology created by me, this may perhaps be due to purposes of propaganda. I am here, of course, not speaking of his detailed working out and applica- tion of these propositions, with which I have nothing to do.
Author's Prefaces. 13
nomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of pro- duction and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If, however, the Ger- man reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the Eng- lish industrial and agricultural laborers, or in optimist fash- ion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, "De te fabvla narratur! "
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a ques- tion of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less de- veloped, the image of its own future.
But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that develop- ment. Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of anti- quated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mart saisit Te vif !
The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled. But they raise the veil just enough
14 Author's Prefaces.
to let us eaten a glimpse of the Medusa head behind it. We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed period- ically commissions of enquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it was possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical re- porters on public health, her commissioners of enquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food. Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters. Le us not deceive ourselves on this. As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-class, so in the 19th century, the American civil war sounded it for the European working-class. In Eng- land the progress of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must re-act on the continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, accord- ing to the degree of development of the working-class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most impor- tant interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working-class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement — and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society — it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the
Author's Prefaces. I£J
successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.
To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of par- ticular class-relations and class-interests. My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose crea- ture he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific enquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malig- nant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private in- terest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on -JL of its income. Now-a-days atheism itself is culpa levis, as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Never- thuless, there is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the blut'book published within the last few weeks : " Correspond- ence with Her Majesty's Missions Abroad, regarding Indus- trial Questions and Trades' Unions." The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European continent, a radical change "in the existing relations between capital and labor is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations ol
1 6 Author's Prefaces.
capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that to-morrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling- classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.
The second volume of this work will treat of the process of the circulation of capital1 (Book II.), and of the varied forms assumed by capital in the course of its development (Book III.) j the third and last volume (Book IV.), the history of the theory.
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine:
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti."
KARL MARX.
London, July 25, 1867.
IT. TO THE SECOND EDITION.
To the present moment Political Economy, in Germany, is a foreign science. Gustav von Giilich in his "Historical de- scription of Commerce, Industry," &c.,2 especially in the two first volumes published in 1830, has examined at length the historical circumstances that prevented, in Germany, the de- velopment of the capitalist mode of production, and conse- quently the development, in that country, of modern bourgeois society. Thus the soil whence Political Economy springs was
1On p. 618 the author explains what he comprises under this head. 2 Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels, der Gewerhe und des Acker- baus, &c., von Gustav von Giilich. 5 vols., Jena, 1830-45.
Author's Prefaces. 17
wanting. This "science" had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article; its German professors remained schoolboys. The theoretical expression of a foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas, interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore misinterpreted. The feeling of scientific impotence, a feeling dot wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness of having to touch a subject in reality foreign to them, was but imperfectly concealed, either under a parade of literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, borrowed from the so-called "Kameral" sciences, a medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeless candidate for the German bureaucracy has to pass.
Since 1848 capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany, and at the present time it is in the full bloom of speculation rnd swindling. But fate is still unpropitious to our professional economists. At the time when they were able to deal with Political Economy in a straightforward fashion, modern economic conditions did not actually exist in Germany. And as soon as these conditions did come into existence, they did so under circumstances that no longer al- lowed of their being really and impartially investigated within the bounds of the bourgeois horizon. In so far as Political Economy remains within that horizon, in so far, i.e., as the capitalist, regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production, instead of as a passing historical phase of its evolution, Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.
Let us take England. Its political economy belongs to thr period in which the class-struggle was as yet undeveloped Its last great, representative, Bicardo, in the end, consciously makes the antagonism of class-interests, of wages and profits,
1 8 Authors Prefaces.
of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of nature. But by this start the science of bourgeois economy had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass. Already in the life- time of Ricardo, and in opposition to him, it was met by criti- cism, in the person of Sismondi.1
The succeeding period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England for scientific activity in the domain of Political Economy. It was the time as well of the vulgarising and extending of Ricardo' s theory, as of the contest of that theory with the old school. Splendid tournaments were held. What was done then, is little known to the Continent generally, be- cause the polemic is for the most part scattered through articles in reviews, occasional literature and pamphlets. The un- prejudiced character of this polemic — although the theory of Ricardo already serves, in exceptional cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeois economy — is explained by the circum- stances of the time. On the one hand, modern industry itself was only just emerging from the age of childhood, as is shown by the fact that with the crisis of 1825 it for the first time opens the periodic cycle of its modern life. On the other hand, the class-struggle between capital and labor is forced into the background, politically by the discord between the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses, led by the bourgeoisie on the other; economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and aristocratic landed property — a quarrel that in France was concealed by the opposition between small and large landed property, and that in England broke out openly after the Corn Laws. The literature of Political Economy in England at this time calls to mind the stormy rV>rward movement in France after Dr. Quesnay's death, but i See my work "Critique, &c," p. 70.
Author's Prefaces. 19
only as a Saint Martin's summer reminds us of spring. With the year 1830 came the decisive crisis.
In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bour- geois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, polit- ically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested enquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. Still, even the obtrusive pamphlets with which the Anti-Corn Law League, led by the manufacturers Cobden and Bright, deluged the world, haye. a historic interest, if no scientific one, on account of their polemic against the landed aristocracy. But since then the Free Trade legislation, inaugurated by Sir Robert Peel, has deprived vulgar economy of this its last sting.
The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and syco- phants of the ruling-classes, tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism, of which John Stuart Mill is the best representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the great Russian scholar and critic, 1ST. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in his "Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill."
In Germany, therefore, the capitalist mode of production came to a head, after its antagonistic character had already, in France and England, shown itself in a fierce strife of
20 'Author's Prefaces.
classes. And mean-while, moreover, the German proletariat had attained a much more clear class-consciousness than the German bourgeoisie. Thus, at the very moment when a bour- geois science of political economy seemed at last possible in Germany, it had in reality again become impossible.
Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups. The one set, prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most adequate representative of the apologetic of vulgar economy; the other, proud of the professorial dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile irrecon- cilables. Just as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so also in the time of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys, imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawk- ers in the service of the great foreign wholesale concern.
The peculiar historic development of German society there- fore forbids, in that country, all original work in bourgeois economy; but not the criticism of that economy. So far a3 such criticism represents a class, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes — the proletariat.
The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bour- geoisie tried at first to kill "Das Kapital" by silence, as they had managed to do with my earlier writings. As soon as they found that these tactics no longer fitted in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence of criticising my book, prescriptions "for the tranquillisation of the bourgeois mind." But they found in the workers' press — see, e.g., Joseph Dietz- gen's articles in the "Volksstaat" — antagonists stronger than themselves, to whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply.1
I'The mealy-mouthed babblers of German vulgar economy fell foul of
Author's Prefaces. 21
An excellent Eussian translation of "Das Kapital" appeared in the spring of 1872. The edition of 3000 copies is already nearly exhausted. As early as 1871, A. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Kiev, in his work "David Kicardo's Theory of Value and of Capital," referred to my theory of value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals a necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Eicardo. That which astonishes the Western European in the reading of this excellent work, is the author's consistent and firm grasp of the purely theoretical position.
That the method employed in "Das Kapital" has been little understood, is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.
Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on
the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the
other hand — imagine ! — confine myself to the mere critical
analysis of actual facts, instead of writing recipes (Comtist
ones ?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to the
reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it : "In so
far as it deals with actual theory, the method of Marx is the
deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose
failings and virtues are common to the best theoretic econ-
the style of my book. No one can feel the literary shortcomings in "Das Kapital" more strongly than I myself. Yet I will for the benefit and the enjoyment of these gentlemen and their public quote in this connec- tion one English and one Russian notice. The "Saturday Review," al- ways hostile to my views, said in its notice of the first edition: "The presentation of the subject invests the driest economic questions with a certain peculiar charm." The "St. Petersburg Journal" ( Sankt-Peter- burgskie Viedomosti), in its issue of April 20, 1872, says: "The presen- tation of the subject, with the exception of one or two exceptionally spe- cial parts, is distinguished by its comprehensibility by the general reader, its clearness, and in spite of the scientific intricacy of the subject, by an unusual liveliness. In this respect the author in no way resembles . . . the majority of German scholars who . „ . write their books in a language so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinary mortals are clacked by it."
22 Author's Prefaces.
omists." M. Block — "Les theoriciens du socialisme en Alle- magne, Extrait du Journal des Economistes, Juillet et Aout 1872" — makes the discovery that my method is analytic and says : "Par cet ouvrage M. Marx se classe parmi les esprits analytiques les plus eminents." German reviews, of course, shriek out at "Hegelian sophistics." The European Messenger of St. Petersburg, in an article dealing exclusively with the method of "Das Kapital" (May number, 1872, pp. 427-436), finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, German-dialectical. It says: "At first sight, if the judgment is based on the external form of the presentation of the subject, Marx is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., the bad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realis- tic than all his fore-runners in the work of economic criticism. He can in no sense be called an idealist." I cannot answer the writer better than by aid of a few extracts from his own criticism, which may interest some of my readers to whom the Russian original is inaccessible.
After a quotation from the preface to my "Critique of Political Economy," Berlin, 1859, pp. 11-13, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on: "The one thing which is of moment to Marx is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned ; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connection within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connections into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing; to show, by rigid scien-
Author's Prefaces. 23
tific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or un- conscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. . . . If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different mo- menta of an evolution ; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolu- tion present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given
124 Author's Prefaces.
stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. Ln a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. . . . With the varying degree of levelopment of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, develop- ment, and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has."
Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method ?
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the ma- terial in detail, to analyse its different forms of development,
Author's Prefaces. 25
to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegel- ian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea," he even transforms into an inde- pendent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of "Das Kapital," it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre E7rtyovoiVv'ho now talk large in cultured Germany, to treal Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a "dead dog." I there- fore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Ger- many, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify thf existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal
26 Author's Prefaces.
and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire pro- fessors, because it includes in its comprehension and af- firmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every his- torically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence ; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the uni- versal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage ; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.
KAE.L MAEX.
London, January 24, 1873.
EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
rpiHE publication of an English version of "Das Kapital" ■*■ needs no apology. On the contrary, an explanation might be expected why this English version has been delayed until now, seeing that for some years past the theories advo- cated in this book have been constantly referred to, attacked and defended, interpreted and mis-interpreted, in the period- ical press and the current literature of both England and America.
When, soon after the author's death in 1883, it became evident that an English edition of the work was really re- quired, Mr. Samuel Moore, for many years a friend of Marx and of the present writer, and than whom, perhaps, no one is more conversant with the book itself, consented to undertake the translation which the literary executors of Marx were anxious to lay before the public. It was understood that I should compare the MS. with the original work, and suggest such alterations as I might deem advisable. When, by and by, it was found that Mr. Moore's professional occupations prevented him from finishing the translation as quickly as we all desired, we gladly accepted Dr. Aveling's offer to undertake a portion of the work; at the same time Mrs. Aveling, Marx's youngest daughter, offered to check the quotations and to restore the original text of the numerous passages taken from English authors and Bluebooks and trans- lated by Marx into German. This has been done throughout, with but a few unavoidable exceptions.
27
28 Editors Preface.
The following portions of the book have been translated by Dr. Aveling: (1) Chapters X. (The Working Day), and XI. (Rate and Mass of Surplus- Value) ; (2) Part VI. (Wages, comprising Chapters XIX. to XXII.) ; (3) from Chapter XXIV, Section 4 (Circumstances that &c.) to the end of the book, comprising the latter part of Chapter XXIV., Chapter XXV.2 and the whole of Part VIII. (Chapters XXVI. to XXXIII.) ; (4) the two Author's prefaces. All the rest of the book has been done by Mr. Moore. While, thus, each of the translators is responsible for his share of the work only, I bear a joint responsibility for the whole.
The third German edition, which has been made the basis of our work throughout^ was prepared by me, in 1883, with the assistance of notes left by the author, indicating the passages of the second edition to be replaced by designated passages, from the French text published in 1873.1 The alter- ations thus effected in the text of the second edition generally coincided with changes prescribed by Marx in a set of MS. instructions for an English translation that was planned, about ten years ago, in America, but abandoned chiefly for want of a fit and proper translator. This MS. was placed at our disposal by our old friend Mr. F. A. Sorge of Hoboken N.J". It designates some further interpolations from the French edition ; but, being so many years older than the final instructions for the third edition, I did not consider myself at liberty to make use of it otherwise than sparingly, and chiefly in cases where it helped us over difficulties. In the same way, the French text has been referred to in most of the difficult passages, as an indicator of what the author him- self was prepared to sacrifice wherever something of the full
i "Le Capital," par Karl Marx. Traduction de M. J. Eoy, entiere- ment revisee par l'auteur. Paris. Lachatre." This translation, especially in the latter part of the book, contains considerable alterations in and additions to the text of the second German edition.
Editor's Preface. 29
import of the original had to be sacrificed in the rendering. There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader : the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary political economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science. This is best shown by chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically changed about once in twenty years, and where you will hardly find a single organic com- pound that has not gone through a whole series of different names. Political Economy has generally been content to take, just as they were, the terms of commercial and industrial life, and to operate with them, entirely failing to see that by so doing, it confined itself within the narrow circle of ideas ex- pressed by those terms. Thus, though perfectly aware that both profits and rent are but sub-divisions, fragments of that unpaid part of the product which the laborer has to supply to his employer (its first appropriator, though not its ultimate exclusive owner), yet even classical Political Economy never went beyond the received notions of profits and rent never ex- amined this unpaid part of the product (called by Marx sur- plus-product) in its integrity as a whole, and therefore never arrived at a clear comprehension, either of it origin and nature, or of the laws that regulate the subsequent distribution of its value. Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in ihe term o_ manu- facture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated betwea. two great and essentially different periods of economic 1 istory : the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labor, and the period of modern industry based 0 machinery. It is, however, self-evident that - theory which. views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind, must make use of terms
go Editor's Preface.
different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final.
A word respecting the author's method of quoting may not be out of place. In the majority of cases, the quotations serve, in the usual way, as documentary evidence in support of assertions made in the text. But in many instances, passages from economic writers are quoted in order to indicate when, where, and by whom a certain proposition was for the first time clearly enunciated. This is done in cases where the proposition quoted is of importance as being a more or less adequate expression of the conditions of social production and exchange prevalent at the time, and quite irrespective of Marx's recognition, or otherwise, of its general validity. These quotations, therefore, supplement the text by a running commentary taken from the history of the science.
Our translation comprises the first book of the work only. But this first book is in a great measure a whole in itself, and has for twenty years ranked as an independent work. The second book, edited in German by me, in 1885, is de- cidedly incomplete without the third, which cannot be pub- lished before the end of 1887. When Book III. has been brought out in the original German, it will then be soon enough to think about preparing an English edition of both.
"Das Kapital" is often called, on the Continent, "the Bible of the working class." That the conclusions arrived at in this work are df \ more and more becoming the fundamental principles of the great working clnss movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain ; that every- where the working class more and more recognises, in these conclusions, the most adequate expression of its condition and of its aspirations, nobody acquainted with that movement will deny. And in England, too, the theories of Marx, even at this
Editor's Preface. 31
moment, exercise a powerful influence upon the socialist move- ment which is spreading in the ranks of "cultured" people no less than in those of the working class. But that is not all. The time is rapidly approaching when a thorough ex- amination of England's economic position will impose itself as an irresistible national necessity. The working of the in- dustrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to ' dead stop. Free trade has exhausted its re- sources; even Manchester doubts this its quondam economic gospel.1 Foreign industry, rapidly developing, stares Eng- lish production in the face everywhere, not only in protected, but also in neutral markets, and even on this side of the Channel. While the productive power increases in a geomet- ric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over- production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course ; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed-for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air. Meanwhile, each succeeding winter brings up afresh the great question, "what to do with the unemployed ;" but while the number of the unemployed keeps swelling from year to year, there is nobody to answer that question; and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed, losing patience, will take their own fate into
1 At the quarterly meeting of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, held this afternoon, a warm discussion took place on the subject of Free Trade. A resolution was moved to the effect that "having waited in vain 40 years for other nations to follow the Free Trade example of England, this Chamber thinks the time has now arrived to reconsider that posi- tion." The resolution was rejected by a majority of one only, the figures being 21 for, and 22 against. — Evening Standard, Nov. 1, 1886.
^2 Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition.
their own hands. Surely, at such a moment, the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a life-long study of the economic history and condition of Eng- land, and whom that study led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a "pro- slavery rebellion," to this peaceful and legal revolution.
FREDERICK ENGELS.
November 5, 1886.
EDITOR'S PREFACE. TO THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION.
The fourth edition of this work required of me a revision, which should give to the text and foot notes their final form, so far as possible. The following brief hints will indicate the way in which I performed this task.
After referring once more to the French edition and to the manuscript notes of Marx, I transferred a few additional pass- ages from the French to the German text.1
I have also placed the long foot note concerning the wine workers, on pages 461-67, into the text, just as had already been done in the French and English editions. Other small changes are merely of a technical nature.
Furthermore I added a few explanatory notes, especially in places where changed historical conditions seemed to require it. All these additional notes are placed between brackets and marked with my initials.2
i These were inserted by me in the English text of the Swan Sonnen- schein edition, and will be found on pages 539, 640-644, 687-689, and 892 of this American edition. — E. U.
2 These were ten new notes, which I inserted in the respective places of the Swan Sonnenschein edition. — E. U.
Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition. 33
A complete revision of the numerous quotations had become necessary, because the English edition had been published in the mean time. Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, had un- dertaken the tedious task of comparing, for this edition, all the quotations with the original works, so that the quotations from English authors, which are the overwhelming majority, are not retranslated from the German, but taken from the original texts. I had to consult the English edition for this fourth German edition. In so doing I found many small inaccuracies. There were references to wrong pages, due either to mistakes in copying, or to accumulated typographical errors of three editions. There were quotation marks, or periods indicating omissions, in wrong places, such as would easily occur in making copious quotations from notes. Now and then I came across a somewhat inappropriate choice of terms made in translating. Some passages were. taken from Marx's old manuscripts written in Paris, 1843-45, when he did not yet understand English and read the works of English economists in French translations. This twofold translation carried with it a slight change of expression, for instance in the case of Steuart, Ure, and others. Now I used the English text. Such and similar little inaccuracies and inadvertences were corrected. And if this fourth edition is now compared with former editions, it will be found that this whole tedious process of verification did not change in the least any essential statement of this work. There is but one single quotation which could not be located, namely that from Richard Jones, in section 3 of chapter XXIV. Marx probably made a mis- take in the title of the book. All other quotations retain their corroborative power, or even increase it in their present exact form.
In this connection I must revert to an old story.
I have heard of only one case, in which the genuineness of
34 Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition.
a quotation by Marx was questioned. Since this case was continued beyond Marx's death, I cannot well afford to ignore it.
The Berlin Concordia, the organ of the German Manufac-> turer's Association, published on March 7, 1872, an anony- mous article, entitled : "How Marx Quotes." In it the writer asserted with a superabundant display of moral indignation and unparliamentarian expressions that the quotation from Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863, (cited in the Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen's Asso- ciation, 1864, and republished in Capital, volume I, chapter XXV, section 5 a) was a falsification. It was denied that the statement: "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power . . . entirely confined to classes of property," was contained in the stenographical report of Hansard, which was as good as an official report. "This statement is not found anywhere in Gladstone's speech. It says just the reverse. Marx has formally and materially lied in adding thai sen- tence."
Marx, who received this issue of the Concordia in May of the same year, replied to the anonymous writer in the Volks- staat of June 1. As he did not remember the particular newspaper from which he had clipped this report, he con- tented himself with pointing out that the same quotation was contained in two English papers. Then he quoted the report of the Times, according to which Gladstone had said : "That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The aug- mentation I have described and which is founded, I think,
Editors Preface to the Fourth German Edition 35
upon accurate terms, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property."
In other words, Gladstone says here that he would be sorry if things were that way, but they are. This intoxicating aug- mentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. And so far as the quasi official Hansard is con- cerned, Marx continues : "In the subsequent manipulation of his speech for publication Mr. Gladstone was wise enough to eliminate a passage, which was so compromising in the mouth of an English Lord of the Exchequer as that one. By the way, this is an established custom in English parliament, and not by any means a discovery made by Lasker to cheat Bebel."
The anonymous writer then became still madder. Pushing aside his second-hand sources in his reply in the Concordia, July 4, he modestly hints, that it is the "custom" to quote parliamentarian speeches from the official reports; that the report of the Times (which contained the added lie) "was materially identical" with that of Hansard (which did not contain it) ; that the report of the Times even said "just the reverse of what that notorious passage of the Inaugural Ad- dress implied." Of course, our anonymous friend keeps still about the fact that the report of the Times does not only con- tain "just the reverse," but also "that notorious passage" ! JSTevertheless he feels that he has been nailed down, and that only a new trick can save him. Hence he decorates his article, full of "insolent mendacity," until it bristles with pretty epithets, such as "bad faith," "dishonesty," "mendacious as- sertion," "that lying quotation," "insolent mendacity," "a completely spurious quotation," "this falsification," "simply infamous," etc., and he finds himself compelled to shift the discussion to another ground, promising "to explain in a sec- ond article, what interpretation we [the "veracious" anony- mous] place upon the meaning of Gladstone's words." As
36 Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition.
though his individual opinion had anything to do with the matter ! This second article is published in the Concordia of July 11.
Marx replied once more in the Volksstaat of August 7, quoting also the reports of this passage in the Morning Star and Morning Advertiser of April 17, 1863. Both of them agree in quoting Gladstone to the effect that he would look with apprehension, etc., upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were confined to classes in easy cir- cumstances. But this augmentation was entirely confined to glasses possessed of property. Both of these papers also con- tain the "added lie" word for word. Marx furthermore showed, by comparing these three independent, yet identical reports of newspapers, all of them containing the actually spoken words of Gladstone, with Hansard's report, that Glad- stone, in keeping with the "established custom," had "sub- sequently eliminated" this sentence, as Marx had said. And Marx closes with the statement, that he has no time for further controversy with the anonymous writer. It seems that this worthy had gotten all he wanted, for Marx received no more issues of the Concordia.
Thus the matter seemed to be settled. It is true, people who were in touch with the university at Cambridge once or twice dropped hints as to mysterious rumors about some un- speakable literary crime, which Marx was supposed to have committed in Capital. But nothing definite could be ascer- tained in spite of all inquiries. Suddenly, on November 29, 1883, eight months after the death of Marx, a letter appeared in the Times, dated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and signed by Sedley Taylor, in which this mannikin, a dabbler in the tamest of cooperative enterprises, at last took occasion to give us some light, not only on the gossip of Cambridge, but also on the anonymous of the Concordia.
Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition. $7
"What seems very queer," says the mannikin of Trinity College, "is that it remained for professor Brentano (then in Breslau, now in Strasburg) ... to lay bare the bad faith, which had apparently dictated that quotation from Gladstone's speech in the Inaugural Address. Mr. Karl Marx, who . . . tried to justify his quotation, had the temerity, in the deadly shifts to which Brentano' s masterly attacks quickly reduced him, to claim that Mr. Gladstone tampered with the report of his speech in the Times of April 17, 1863, before it was published in Hansard, in order to eliminate a passage which was, indeed, compromising for the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Brentano demonstrated by a detailed comparison of the texts, that the reports of the Times and of Hansard agreed to the absolute exclusion of the meaning, impugned to Gladstone's words by a craftily isolated quotation, Marx retreated under the excuse of having no time."
This, then, was the kernel of the walnut ! And such was the glorious reflex of Brentano's anonymous campaign, in the Concordia, in the cooperative imagination of Cambridge ! Thus he lay, and thus he handled his blade in his "masterly attack," this Saint George of the German Manufacturers' As- sociation, while the fiery dragon Marx quickly expired under his feet "in deadly shifts !"
However, this Ariostian description of the struggle serves only to cover up the shifts of our Saint George. There is no longer any mention of "added lies," of "falsification," but merely of "a craftily isolated quotation." The whole question had been shifted, and Saint George and his Cambridge Knight knew very well the reason.
Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly magazine To-Day, February, 1884, because the Times refused to print her state- ments. She reduced the discussion to the only point, which was in question, namely: Was that sentence a lie added by
38 Editor s Preface to the Fourth German Edition.
Marx, or not ? Whereupon Mr. Sedley Taylor retorted : "The question whether a certain sentence had occurred in Mr. Glad- stone's speech or not" was, in his opinion, "of a very inferior importance" in the controversy between Marx and Brentano, "compared with the question, whether the quotation had been made with the intention of reproducing the meaning of Mr. Gladstone or distorting it." And then he admits that the report of the Times "contains indeed a contradiction in words" ; but, interpreting the context correctly, that is, in a liberal Gladstonian sense, it is evident what Mr. Gladstone intended to say. {To-Day, March, 1884.) The comic thing about this retort is that our mannikin of Cambridge now in- sists on not quoting this speech from Hansard, as is the "custom" according to the anonymous Mr. Brentano, but from the report of the Times, which the same Brentano had desig- nated as "necessarily bungling." Of course, Hansard does not contain that fatal sentence !
It was easy for Eleanor Marx to dissolve this argumentation into thin air in the • same number of To-Day. Either Mr. Taylor had read the controversy of 1872. In that case he had now "lied," not only "adding," but also "subtracting." Or, he had not read it. Then it was his business to keep hi3 mouth shut. At any rate, it was evident that he did not dare for a moment to maintain the charge of his friend Brentano to the effect that Marx had "added a lie." On the contrary, it was now claimed, that Marx, instead of adding a lie, had suppressed an important sentence. But this same sentence is quoted on page 5 of the Inaugural Address, a few lines before the alleged "added lie." And as for the "contradiction" in Gladstone's speech, isn't it precisely Marx who speaks in another foot note of that chapter in Capital of the "continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches of 1863 and 1864" ? Of course, he does not undertake xo reconcile
Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition. 39
them by liberal hot air, like Sedley Taylor. And the final summing up in Eleanor Marx's reply is this: "On the con- trary, Marx has neither suppressed anything essential nor added any lies. He rather has restored and rescued from oblivion a certain sentence of a Gladstonian speech, which had undoubtedly been pronounced, but which somehow found its way out of Hansard."
This was enough for Mr. Sedley Taylor. The result of this whole professorial gossip during ten years and in two great countries was that no one dared henceforth to question Marx's literary conscientiousness. In the future Mr. Sedley Taylor will probably have as little confidence in the literary fighting bulletins of Mr. Brentano, as Mr. Brentano in thf papal infallibility of Hansard.
FEEDERICK ENGELS.
London, June 25, 1890.
(Translated by Ernest Untermann.,)
BOOK I.
CAPITALIST PRODUCTION.
PART I. COMMODITIES AND MONEY.
CHAPTER I.
COMMODITIES.
SECTION 1. THE TWO FACTOKS OF A COMMODITY: USE-VALUE
AND VALUE (THE SUBSTANCE OF VALUE AND THE MAGNITUDE OF VALUE).
THE wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as " an immense accumulation of commodities," * its unit being a single com- modity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no differ-
1 Karl Marx " A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," 1859, London, p. 19.
41
42 Capitalist Production.
ence.1 Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.
Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various use of things is the work of history.2 So also is the establishment of socially- recognised standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.
The utility of a thing makes it a use-value.3 But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use- value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities.4 Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also con-
1 " Desire implhs want; it :» the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body. . . . The create-: number (of things) have their value from supply- ing the wants of the mind." Nicolas Barbon: "A Discourse on coining the new money lighter, in answer to Mr. Locke's Considerations," &c. London, 1696. p. 2, 3.
8 "Things have an intrinsick virtue" (this is Barbon's special term for value in use) "which in all places I .ve the same virtue; as the loadstone to attract iron" (1. c., p. 6). The property v/hich the magnet possesses of attracting iron, became of use only after by means of that property the polarity of the magnet had been discovered.
8 "The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life." (John Locke, "Some considerations on the consequences of the lowering of interest, 1691," in Works Edit. London, 1777, Vol. II., p. 28.) In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find "worth" in the sense of value in use, and "value" in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.
* in Dourgeois societies tne economical hctio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopa;dic knowledge of commodities.
Commodities. 43
stitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.
Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,1 a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange vrlue appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and conse- quently an intrinsic value, i. e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.2 Let us consider the matter a little more closely.
A given commodity, e. g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. — in short, for other com- modities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c., each represent the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c, must as exchange values be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal ; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.
Let us take two commodities, e. g., corn and iron. The pro- portions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those prc~ portions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron : e. g., 1 quarter corn=x cwt. iron. What does this equa- tion tell us? It tells us that in two different things — in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quan- tities something common to both. The two things must there-
1 "La valeur consiste dans le rapport d'echange qui se trouve entre telle chose et telle autre, entre telle mesure d'une production, et telle mesure d'une autre." (Le Trosne: De 1' Interet Social. Physiocrates, Ed. Daire. Paris, 1845. P. 889.)
2 "Nothing can have an intrinsick value." (N. Barbon, 1. c, p. 6) ; or as But- ler says —
" The value of a thing Is just as much at it will bring."
44 Capitalist Production.
fore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.
A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the tri- angle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base into the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of com- modities must be capable of being expressed in terms of some- thing common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.
This common "something" cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use-values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act character- ised by a total abstraction from use-value. Then .ne use- value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says, "one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value .... An hundred pounds' worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds' worth of silver or gold." * As use- values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and con- sequently do not contain an atom of use-value.
If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of com- modities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value ; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material, thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be re4 garded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason,
1 N. Barbon, 1. c. p. 53 and 7.
Commodities. 45
the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour^ Along with the useful qualities of the products them- selves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour ; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour-power ex- pended withoi > regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labor is em- bodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are — Values.
We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independ- ent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in zhich the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. Tor the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.
A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only be- cause human labour in the abstract has been embodied or ma- terialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured ? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour- time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.
Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of
46 Capitalist Production.
value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uni- form labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour-power of society, and takes effect as such ; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The intro- duction of power looms into England probably reduced by one half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before ; but for all that, the pro- duct of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour's social labour, and consequently fell to one- half its former value.
We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially neces- sary, or the labour- time socially necessary for its production.1 Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be con- sidered as an average sample of its class.2 Commodities, there- fore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. "As values, all com- modities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time." 3
1 The value of them (the necessaries of life), when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required, and commonly taken in producing them." (Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in general, and particularly in the Publick Funds, &c, Lond., p. 36.) This re- markable anonymous work, written in the last century, bears no date. It is clear, however, from internal evidence, that it appeared in the reign of George II. about 1730 or 1740.
2 " Toutes les productions d'un meme genre ne forment proprement qu'une masse, dont le prix se determine en general et sans egard aux circonstances particulieres." (Le Trosne, 1. c. p. 893.) * K. Marx, 1. c. p. 24.
Commodities. 47
The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour-time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of pro- duction, and by physical conditions. For example, the same amount of labour in favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth's surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an aver- age, a great deal of labour-time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small compass. Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years' average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks. In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour-time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value ; and vise versa, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour-time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, there- fore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it.
A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can
48 Capitalist Production.
be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values. Lastly, nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.
SECTION 2. THE TWOFOLD CHABACTER OF THE LABOUR EM- BODIED IN COMMODITIES.
At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things — use-value and exchange-value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same two-fold nature ; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this two- fold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns, we must go more into detail.
Let us take two commodities such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the former be double the value of the latter, so that, if 10 yards of linen=W, the coatp=2W.
The coat is a use-value that satisfies a particular want. Its existence is the result of a special sort of productive activity, the nature of which is determined by its aim, mode of opera- tion, subject, means, and result. The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use-value, we call useful labour. In this connexion we consider only its useful effect.
As the coat and the linen are two qualitatively different use- values, so also are the two forms of labour that produce them, tailoring and weaving. Were these two objects not quali- tatively different, not produced respectively by labour of different quality, they could not stand to each other in the
Commodities. 49
relation of commodities. Coats are not exchanged for coats, one use-value is not exchanged for another of the same kind.
To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of useful labour, classified according tc the order, genus, species, and variety to which they belong in the social division of labour. This division of labour is a neces- sary condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow conversely, that the production of commodities is a necessary condition for the division of labour. In the primitive Indian community there is social division of labour, without production of commodities. Or, to take an example nearer home, in every factory the labour is divided according to a system, but this division is not brought about by the operatives mutually exchanging their individual products. Only such products can become commodities with regard to each other, as result from different kinds of labour, each kind being carried on independently and for the account of private individuals.
To resume, then : In the use-value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i. e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim. Use-values cannot confront each other as commodities, unless the useful labour embodied in them is qualitatively different in each of them. In a community, the produce of which in general takes the form of commodities, i. e., in a community of commodity pro- ducers, this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour that are carried on independently by individual pro- ducers, each on their own account, develops into a complex system, a social division of labour.
Anyhow, whether the coat be worn by the tailor or by his customer, in either case it operates as a use-value. ISTor is the relation between the coat and the labour that produced it altered by the circumstance that tailoring may have become a special trade, an independent branch of the social division of labour. Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. But coats and linen, like every other element of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of nature, must invariably owe their existence to a
50 Capitalist Production.
special productive activity, exercised with a definite aim, an activity that appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants. So far therefore as labour is a creator of use-value, is useful labour, it is a necessary con- dition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race ; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life.
The use-values, coat, linen, &c, i. e., the bodies of commodi- ties, are combinations of two elements — matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.1 Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use-values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.
Let us now pass from the commodity considered as a use* value to the value of commodities.
By our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the linen. But this is a mere quantitative difference, which for the present does not concern us. We bear in mind, however, that if the value of the coat is double that of 10 yds. of linen, 20 yds. of linen must have the same value as one coat. So far as they are values, the coat and the linen are things of a like substance, objective expressions of essentially identical labour. But tailoring and weaving are, qualitatively, different kinds of labour. There are, however, states of society in which one and
1 Tutti i fenomeni dell' universo, sieno essi prodotti della mano, dell' uomo, ovvero delle universal! leggi della fisica, non ci danno idea di attuale creazione, ma unicamente di una modificazione della materia. Accostare e separare sono gli unici elementi che l'ingegno umano ritrova analizzando l'idea della riproduzione: e tanto e riproduzione di valore (value in use, although Verri in this passage of his contro- versy with the Physiocrats is not himself quite certain of the kind of value he is speaking of) e di ricchezze se la terra l'aria e l'acqua ne' campi si trasmutino in grano, come se colla mano dell' uomo il glutine di un insetto si trasmuti in velluto ovvero alcuni pezzetti di metallo si organizzino a formare una ripetizione." — Pietro Verri. "Meditazioni stilla Economia Politica" [first printed in 1773] in Custodi's edition of the Italian Economists, Parte Moderna, t. xv. p. 22.
Commodities. 51
the same man does tailoring and weaving alternately, in which case these two forms of labour are mere modifications of the labour of the same individual, and not special and fixed func- tions of different persons; just as the coat which our tailor makes one day, and the trousers which he makes another day, imply only a variation in the labour of one and the same indi- vidual. Moreover, we see at a glance that, in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labour is, in accordance with the varying demand, at one time supplied in the form of tailor- ing, at another in the form of weaving. This change may possibly not take place without friction, but take place it must. Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the ex- penditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour-power. Of course, this labour-power, which remains the same under all its modi- fications, must have attained a certain pitch of development before it can be expended in a multiplicity of modes. But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general. And just as in society, a general or a banker plays a great part, but mere man, on the other hand, a very shabby part,1 so here with mere human labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour- power, i.e., of the labour-power which, on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual. Simple average labour, it is true, varies in character in different countries and at different times, but in a particular society it is given. Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most skilled labour, but its value, by equating it to the product of simple unskilled labour, represents a
*Comp. Hegel, Philosophic des Rechts. Berlin, 1840, p. 250 § 190.
52 Capitalist Production.
definite quantity of the latter labour alone.1 The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom. For simplicity's sake we shall henceforth account every kind of labour to be unskilled, simple labour ; by this we do no more than save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction.
Just as, therefore, in viewing the coat and linen as values, we abstract from their different use-values, so it is with the labour represented by those values : we disregard the difference between its useful forms, weaving and tailoring. As the use- values, coat and linen, are combinations of special productive activities with cloth and yarn, while the values, coat and linen, are, on the other hand, mere homogeneous congelations of indifferentiated labour, so the labour embodied in these latter values does not count by virtue of its productive relation to cloth and yarn, but only as being expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving are necessary factors in the creation of the use-values, coat and linen, precisely because these two kinds of labour are of different qualities ; but only in so far as abstraction is made from their special qualities, only in so far as both possess the same quality of being human labour, do tailoring and weaving form the substance of the values of the same articles.
Coats and linen, however, are not merely values, but values of definite magnitude, and according to our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the ten yards of linen. Whence this difference in their values ? It is owing to the fact that the linen contains only half as much labour as the coat, and consequently, that in the production of the latter, labour- power must have been expended during twice the time neces-- sary for the production of the former.
While, therefore, with reference to use-value, the labour con- tained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with refer-
1 The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a given labour time, but of the value of the com- modity in which that labour time is materialised. Wages is a category that, as yetf has no existence at the present stage of our investigation.
Commodities. 53
ence to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and What, in the latter of How much ? How long a time ? Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents only the quantity of labour embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain proportions, must be equal in value.
If the productive power of all the different sorts of useful labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, the sum of the values of the coat produced increases with their number. If one coat represents x days' labour, two coats represent 2x days' labour, and so on. But assume that the duration of the labour necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled or halved. In the first case, one coat is worth as much as two coats were before ; in the second case, two coats are only worth as much as one was before, although in both cases one coat renders the same service as before, and the useful labour embodied in it remains of the same quality. But the quantity of labour spent on its production has altered.
An increase in the quantity of use-values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quan- tity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic move- ment has its origin in the two-fold character of labour. Productive power has reference, of course, only to labour of some useful concrete form ; the efficacy of any special produc- tive activity during a given time being dependent on its productiveness. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labour represented by value. Since productive power is an attribute of the concrete useful forms of labour, of course it can no longer have any bearing on that labour, so soon as we make abstraction from those concrete useful forms. However then productive power may vary, the same labour, exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value. But it will yield, during equal
54 Capitalist Production.
periods of time, different quantities of values in use ; more, if the productive power rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use-values produced by that labour, will diminish the total value of this increased quantity of use-values, provided such change shorten the total labour-time necessary for their production ; and vice versd.
On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour-power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expendi- ture of human labour-power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use-values. 1
SECTION" 3. THE FORM OF VALUE OR EXCHANGE VALUE.
Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities,
1 In order to prove that labour alone is that all-sufficient and real measure, by which at all times the value of all commodities can be estimated and com- pared, Adam Smith says, " Equal quantities of labour must at all times and in all places have the same value for the labourer. In his normal state of health, strength and activity, and with the average degree of skill that he may possess, he must always give up the same portion of his rest, his freedom, and his happiness.3' (Wealth of Nations, b. I. ch. v.) On the one hand, Adam Smith here (but not everywhere) confuses the determination of value by means of the quantity of labour expended in the production of commodities, with the determination of the values of commodities by means of the value of labour, and seeks in consequence to prove that equal quantities of labour have always the same value. On thq other hand, he has a presentiment, that labour, so far as it manifests itself in the value of commodities, counts only as expenditure of labour power, but he treats this expenditure as the mere sacrifice of rest, freedom, and happiness, not as the same time the normal activity of living beings. But then, he has the mod. em wage-labourer in his eye. Much more aptly, the anonymous predecessor ol Adam Smith, quoted above in Note 1, p. 6, says, " one man has employed him- self a week in providing this necessary of life . . . and he that gives him some other in exchange, cannot make a better estimate of what is a proper equivalent, than by computing what cost him just as much labour and time; which in effect is no more than exchanging one man's labour in one thing for a time certain, for another man's labour in another thing for the same time." (1. c. p. 39.) [The English language has the advantage of possessing different words for the two aspects of labour here considered. The labour which creates Use-Value, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour; that which creates Value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distingiushed fronj Work. — Ed.]
Commodities. 55
only because they are something twofold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities., or have the form of com- modities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form.
The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don't know "where to have it." The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse ma- teriality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will. Yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expres- sions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., hu- man labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to com- modity. In fact we started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us.
Every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use- values. I mean their money form. Here, however, a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been at- tempted by bourgeois economy, the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value im- plied in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money form. By doing this we shall, at the same time, solve the riddle presented by money.
The simplest value relation is evidently that of one com- modity to some one other commodity of a different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities sup- plies us with the simplest expression of the value of a single commodity.
56 Capitalist Production.
A. Elementary or Accidental Form of Value. x commodity A=y commodity B, or x commodity A is worth y commodity B.
20 yards of linen=l coat, or
20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat.
1. The two poles of the expression of value : Relative form and Equivalent form.
The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.
Here two different kinds of commodities (in our example the linen and the coat), evidently play two different parts. The linen expresses its value in the coat ; the coat serves as the material in which that value is expressed. The former plays an active, the latter a passive, part. The value of the linen is represented as relative value, or appears in relative form. The coat officiates as equivalent, or appears in equivalent form.
The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimate- ly connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value ; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes — i.e., poles of the same ex- pression. They are allotted respectively to the two different commodities brought into relation by that expression. It is not possible to express the value of linen in linen. 20 yards of linen =20 yards of linen is no expression of value. On the contrary, such an equation merely says that 20 yards of linen are nothing else than 20 yards of linen, a definite quantity of the use-value linen. The value of the linen can therefore be expressed only relatively — i.e., in some other commodity. The relative form of the value of the linen pre-supposes, therefore, the presence of some other commodity — here the coat — under the form of an equivalent. On the other hand, the commodity that figures as the equivalent cannot at the same time assume the relative form. That second commodity is not the one whose value is expressed. Its function is merely to serve as
Commodities. 57
the material in which the value of the first commodity is ex- pressed.
No doubt, the expression 20 yards of linen=l coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat, implies the opposite relation : 1 coat=20 yards of linen, or 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen. But, in that case, I must reverse the equation, in order to ex- press the value of the coat relatively ; and, so soon as I do that the linen becomes the equivalent instead of the coat. A single commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously assume, in the same expression of value, both forms. The very polarity of these forms makes them mutually exclusive.
Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends entirely upon its acci- dental position in the expression of value — that is, upon whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.
2. The Relative form of value. (a.) The nature and import of this form.
In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the value relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts of commodities that are considered equal to each other. It is apt to be forgotten that the magnitudes of different things can be compared quantitatively, only when those magnitudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the same denomination, and therefore commensurable.1
Whether 20 yards of linen=l coat or=20 coats or=x
1 The few economists, amongst whom is S. Bailey, who have occupied themselves with the analysis of the form of value, have been unable to arrive at any result, first, because they confuse the form of value with value itself; and second, be- cause, under the coarse influence of the practical bourgeois, they exclusively give their attention to the quantitative aspect of the question. "The command of quan- ity . . . constitutes value." ("Money and its Vicissitudes." London, 1837, p. 11. By S. Bailey.
58 Capitalist Production.
coats — that is, whether a given quantity of linen is worth few or many coats, every such statement implies that the linen and coats, as magnitudes of value, are expressions of the same unit, things of the same kind. Linen=coat is the basis of the equation.
But the two commodities whose identity of quality is thus assumed, do not play the same part. It is only the value of the linen that is expressed. And how ? By its reference to the coat as its equivalent, as something that can be exchanged for it. In this relation the coat is the mode of existence of ^alue, is value embodied, for only as such is it the same as the linen. On the other hand, the linen's own value comes to the front, receives independent expression, for it is only as being value that it is comparable with the coat as a thing of equal value, or exchangeable with the coat To borrow an illustra- tion from chemistry, butyric acid is a different substance from propyl formate. Yet both are made up of the same chemical substances, carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O), and that, too, in like proportions — namely, C4H802. If now we equate butyric acid to propyl formate, then, in the first place, propyl formate would be, in this relation, merely a form oil existence of C4H802 ; and in the second place, we should be stating that butyric acid also consists of C4Ii802. Therefore, by thus equating the two substances, expression would be given to their chemical composition, while their different physical forms would be neglected.
If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value ; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to- another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other.
By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to that in the latter. Now, it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the
Commodities. 59
tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of com- modities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.1
There is, however, something else required beyond the ex- pression of the specific character of the labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour-power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities. The problem is already solved.
When occupying the position of equivalent in the equation of value, the coat ranks qualitatively as the equal of the linen, as something of the same kind, because it is value. In this posi- tion it is a thing in which we see nothing but value, or whose palpable bodily form represents value. Yet the coat itself, the body of the commodity, coat, is a mere use-value. A coat as such no more tells us it is value, than does the first piece of linen we take hold of. This shows that when placed in value
1 The celebrated Franklin, one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value, says: "Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is . . . most justly measured by labour." (The works of B. Franklin, &c, edited by Sparks, Boston, 1836, Vol. II., p. 267.) Franklin is unconscious that by estimating tho value of everything in labour, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labour exchanged, and thus reduces them all to equal human labour. But although ignorant of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of "the one labour," then of " the other labour," and finally of " labour," without further qualifica- tion, as the substance of the value of everything.
6o Capitalist Production.
relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than when out of that relation, just as many a man strutting about in a gorgeous uniform counts for more than when in mufti.
In the production of the coat, human labour-power, in the shape of tailoring, must have been actually expended. Human labour is therefore accumulated in it. In this aspect the coat is a depository of value, but though worn to a thread, it does not let this fact show through. And as equivalent of the linen in the value equation, it exists under this aspect alone, counts therefore as embodied value, as a body that is value. A, for instance, cannot be "your majesty" to B, unless at the same time majesty in B's eyes assumes the bodily form of A, and, what is more, with every new father of the people, changes its features, hair, and many other things besides.
Hence, in the value equation, in which the coat is the equiva- lent of the linen, the coat officiates as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is expressed by the bodily form of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other. As a use-value, the linen is something palpably dif- ferent from the coat ; as value, it is the same as the coat, and now has the appearance of a coat. Thus the linen acquires a value form different from its physical form. The fact that it is value, is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep's nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.
We see, then, all that our analysis of the value of commo- dities has already told us, is told us by the linen itself, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat. Only it betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that its own value is created by labour in its abstract character of human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it is worth as much as the linen, and therefore is value, consists of the same labour as the linen. In order to inform us that its sublime reality as value is not the same as its buck- ram body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and consequently that so far as the linen is value, it and the coat are as like as two peas. We may here remark, that the Ian-
Commodities. 61
guage of commodities has, besides Hebrew, many other more or less correct dialects. The German "werthsein," to be worth, for instance, expresses in a less striking manner than the Romance verbs "valere," "valer," "valoir," that the equating of commodity B to commodity A, is commodity A's own mode of expressing its value. Paris vaut bien une messe.
By means, therefore, of the value relation expressed in our equation, the bodily form of commodity B becomes the value form of commodity A, or the body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value of commodity A.1 By putting itself in re- lation with commodity B, as value in propria persona, as the matter of which human labour is made up, the commodity A converts the value in use, B, into the substance in which to express its, A's, own value. The value of A, thus expressed in the use-value of B, has taken the form of relative value.
(b.) Quantitative determination of Relative value.
Every commodity, whose value it is intended to express, is a useful object of given quantity, as 15 bushels of corn, or 100 lbs. of coffee. And a given quantity of any commodity con- tains a definite quantity of human labor. The value-form must therefore not only express value generally, but also value in definite quantity. Therefore, in the value relation of com- modity A to commodity B, of the linen to the coat, not only is the latter, as value in general, made the equal in quality of the linen, but a definite quantity of coat (1 coat) is made the equivalent of a definite quantity (20 yards) of linen.
The equation, 20 yards of linen=l coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, implies that the same quality of value- substance (congealed labour) is embodied in both; that the two commodities have each cost the same amount of labour or the same quantity of labour time. But the labour time necessary for the production of 20 yards of linen or 1 coat
1 In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom " I am I " is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing him- self with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in hia Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.
62 Capitalist Production.
varies with every change in the productiveness of weaving or tailoring. We have now to consider the influence of such changes on the quantitative aspect of the relative expression of value.
I. Let the value of the linen vary,1 that of the coat remain- ing constant. If, say in consequence of the exhaustion of flax- growing soil, the labour time necessary for the production of the linen he doubled, the value of the linen will also be doubled. Instead of the equation, 20 yards of linen=l coat, we should have 20 yards of linen=2 coats, since 1 coat would now con- tain only half the labour time embodied in 20 yards of linen. If, on the other hand, in consequence, say, of improved looms, this labour time be reduced by one half, the value of the linen would fall by one half. Consequently, we should have 20 yards of linen=-| coat. The relative value of commodity A, i.e., its value expressed in commodity B, rises and falls directly as the value of A, the value of B being supposed constant.
II. Let the value of the linen remain constant, while the value of the coat varies. If, under these circumstances, in consequence, for instance, of a poor crop of wool, the labour time necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled, we have instead of 20 yards of linen=l coat, 20 yards of lmen =4 coat. If, on the other hand, the value of the coat sinks by one half, then 20 yards of linen=2 coats. Hence, if the value of commodity A remain constant, its relative value ex- pressed in commodity B rises and falls inversely as the value of B.
If we compare the different cases in I. and II., we see that the same change of magnitude in relative value may arise from totally opposite causes. Thus, the equation, 20 yards of linen —1 coat, becomes 20 yards of linen=2 coats, either, because, the value of the linen has doubled, or because the value of the coat has fallen by one half; and it becomes 20 yards of linen ==4 coat, either, because the value of the linen has fallen by one half, or because the value of the coat has doubled.
III. Let the quantities of labour time respectively neces-
1 Value is here, as occasionally in the preceding pages, used in the sense of value determined as to quantity, or of magnitude of value.
Commodities. 63
sary for the production of the linen and the coat vary sim- ultaneously in the same direction and in the same proportion. In this case 20 yards of linen continue equal to 1 coat, however much their values may have altered. Their change of value is seen as soon as they are compared with a third commodity, whose value has remained constant. If the values of all com- modities rose or fell simultaneously, and in the same propor- tion, their relative values would remain unaltered. Their real change of value would appear from the diminished or increased quantity of commodities produced in a given time.
IV. The labour time respectively necessary for the produc- tion of the linen and the coat, and therefore the value of these commodities may simultaneously vary in the same direction, but at unequal rates, or in opposite directions, or in other ways. The effect of all these possible different variations, on the relative value of a commodity, may be deduced from the results of I., II., and III.
Thus real changes in the magnitude of value are neither unequivocally nor exhaustively reflected in their relative expression, that is, in the equation expressing the magnitude of relative value. The relative value of a commodity may vary, although its value remains constant. Its relative value may remain constant, although its value varies ; and finally, simultaneous variations in the magnitude of value and in that of its relative expression by no means necessarily correspond in amount.1
1 This incongruity between the magnitude of value and its relative expression has, with customary ingenuity, been exploited by vulgar economists. For example — "Once admit that A falls, because B, with which it is exchanged, rises, while no less labour is bestowed in the meantime on A, and your general principle of value falls to the ground. . . . If he [Ricardo] allowed that when A rises in value relatively to B, B falls in value relatively to A, he cut away the ground on which he rested his grand proposition, that the value of a commodity is ever de- termined by the labour embodied in it; for if a change in the cost of A alters not only its own value in relation to B, for which it is exchanged, but also the value of B relatively to that of A, though no change has taken place in the quantity of labour to produce B, then not only the doctrine falls to the ground which asserts that the quantity of labour bestowed on an article regulates its value, but also that which affirms the cost of an article to regulate its value." (J. Broadhurst: Political Economy, London, 1842, p. 11 and 14.
Mr. Broadhurst might just as well say: consider the fractions ig, £fl, jLfo, &c, khe number 10 remains unchanged, and yet its proportional magnitude, its magni-
64 Capitalist Production.
3. The Equivalent form of value.
We have seen that commodity A (the linen), by expressing its value in the use-value of a commodity differing in kind (the coat), at the same time impresses upon the latter a specific form of value, namely that of the equivalent. The commodity linen manifests its quality of having a value by the fact that the coat, without having assumed a value form different from its bodily form, is equated to the linen. The fact that the latter therefore has a value is expressed by saying that the coat is directly exchangeable "with it. Therefore, when we say that a commodity is in the equivalent form, we express the fact that it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.
When one commodity, such as a coal;, serves as the equivalent of another, such as linen, and coats consequently acquire the characteristic property of being directly exchangeable with linen, we are far from knowing in what proportion the two are exchangeable. The value of the linen being given in magni- tude, that proportion depends on the value of the coat. Whether the coat serves as the equivalent and the linen as relative value, or the linen as the equivalent and the coat as relative value, the magnitude of the coat's value is determined, independently of its value form, by the labour time necessary for its production. But whenever the coat assumes in the equation of value, the position of equivalent, its value acquires no quantitative expression ; on the contrary, the commodity coat now figures only as a definite quantity of some article.
For instance, 40 yards of linen are worth — what? 2 coats. Because the commodity coat here plays the part of equivalent, because the use-value coat, as opposed to the linen, figures as an embodiment of value, therefore a definite number of coats suffices to express the definite quantity of value in the linen. Two coats may therefore express the quantity of value of 40 yards of linen, but they can never express the quantity of their own value. A superficial observation of this fact, namely, that
tude relatively to the numbers 20, 50, 100, &c, continually diminishes. There- fore the great principle that the magnitude of a whole number, such as 10, is "regulated" by the number of times unity is contained in it, falls to the ground. — [The author explains in section 4 of this chapter, p. 93, note 1, what he under- stands by " Vulgar Economy." — Ed.]
Commodities. 65
in the equation of value, the equivalent figures exclusively as a simple quantity of some article, of some use-value, has misled Bailey, as also many others, both before and after him, into seeing, in the expression of value, merely a quantitative rela- tion. The truth being, that when a commodity acts as equiva- lent, no quantitative determination of its value is expressed.
The first peculiarity that strikes us, in considering the form of the equivalent, is this : use-value becomes the form of mani- festation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value.
The bodily form of the commodity becomes its value form. But, mark well, that this quid pro quo exists in the case of any commodity B, only when some other commodity A enters into a value relation with it; and then only within the limits of this relation. Since no commodity can stand in the relation of equivalent to itself, and thus turn its own bodily shape into the expression of its own value, every commodity is compelled to choose some other commodity for its equivalent, and to ac- cept the use-value, that is to say, the bodily shape of that other commodity as the form of its own value.
One of the measures that we apply to commodities as ma- terial substances, as use-values, will serve to illustrate this point. A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can neither see nor touch this weight. We then take various pieces of iron, whose weight has been determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the form of manifes- tation of weight, than is the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a weight-relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body representing nothing but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the measure of the weight of the sugar, and represents, in relation to the sugar-loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of weight. This part is played by the iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were they not both heavy, they could not enter into this relation, and the one could therefore not serve as the expression of the weight of the other. When we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight
66 Capitalist Production.
they are both, the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have the same weight. Just as the substance iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone.
Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expres- sion of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural pro- perty common to both bodies, namely their weight ; but the coat in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value.
Since the relative form of value of a commodity — the linen, for example — expresses the value of that commodity, as being something wholly different from its substance and properties, as being, for instance, coat-like, we see that this expression itself indicates that some social relation lies at the bottom of it. With the equivalent form it is just the contrary. The very essence of this form is that the material commodity itself — the coat — just as it is, expresses value, and is endowed with the form of value by Nature itself. Of course this holds good only so long as the value relation exists, in which the coat stands in the position of equivalent to the linen.1 Since, however, the properties of a thing are not the result of its relations to other things, but only manifest themselves in such relations, the coat seems to be endowed with its equivalent form, its property of being directly exchangeable, just as much by Nature as it is endowed with the property of being heavy, or the capacity to keep us warm. Hence the enigmatical character of the equiva- lent form which escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed, confronts him in the shape of money. He then seeks to explain away the mystical character of gold and silver, by substituting for them less dazzling commodities, and by reciting, with ever renewed satisfaction, the catalogue of all possible commodities which at one time or another have played the part of equivalent. He
1 Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex-categories, form. • very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they arc subjects because he is king.
Commodities. 67
has not the least suspicion that the most simple expression of value, such as 20 yds. of linen=l coat, already propounds the riddle of the equivalent form for our solution.
The body of the commodity that serves as the equivalent, figures as the materialization of human labour in the abstract and is at the same time the product of some specifically useful concrete labour. This concrete labour becomes, therefore, the medium for expressing abstract human labour. If on the one hand the coat ranks as nothing but the embodiment of abstract human labour, so, on the other hand, the tailoring which is actually embodied in it, counts as nothing but the form under which that abstract labour is realised. In the ex- pression of value of the linen, the utility of the tailoring con- sists, not in making clothes, but in making an object, which we at once recognise to be Value, and therefore to be a congelation of labour, but of labour indistinguishable from that realised in the value of the linen. In order to act as such a mirror of value, the labour of tailoring must reflect nothing besides its own abstract quality of being human labour generally.
In tailoring, as well as in weaving, human labour-power is expended. Both, therefore, possess the general property of being human labour, and may, therefore, in certain cases, such as in the production of value, have to be considered under this aspect alone. There is nothing mysterious in this. But in the expression of value there is a complete turn of the tables. For instance, how is the fact to be expressed that weaving creates the value of the linen, not by virtue of being weaving, as such, but by reason of its general property of being human labour ? Simply by opposing to weaving that other particular form of concrete labour (in this instance tailoring), which produces the equivalent of the product of weaving. Just as the coat in its bodily form became a direct expression of value, so now does tailoring, a concrete form of labour, appear as the direct and palpable embodiment of human labour generally.
Hence, the second peculiarity of the equivalent form is, that concrete labour becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself.
68 Capitalist Production.
But because this concrete labour, tailoring in our case, ranks as, and is directly indentified with, undifferentiated human labour, it also ranks as identical with any other sort of labor, and therefore with that embodied in linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, yet, at the same time, it ranks as labour directly social in its character. This is the reason why it results in a product directly exchangeable with other com- modities. We have then a third peculiarity of the Equivalent form, namely, that the labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form.
The two latter peculiarities of the Equivalent form will become more intelligible if we go back to the great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or nature, and amongst them also the form of value. I mean Aristotle.
In the first place, he clearly enunciates that the money form of commodities is only the further development of the simple form of value — i. ev of the expression of the value of one com- modity in some other commodity taken at random ; for he says 5 beds=l house (kXlvcu ttcvtc ami otKtas) is not to be
distinguished from 5 beds=so much money.
(i<\ivai, irevTC dvrl . . . octov at Treure /cA/vai)
He further sees that the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that the house should quali- tatively be made the equal of the bed, and that, without such an equalization, these two clearly different things could not be compared with each other as commensurable quantities. "Exchange," he says, "cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability" ( ovt tVoV^s (jy ova~r]<s <rvfxixcTpcas). Here, however, he comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. "It is, however, in reality, impossible' (jy f*.ev ovv aXrjOeia a.Svvarov') ^ that such unlike things can be commensurable" — i. e., qualita- tively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only "a make-shift for practical purposes."
Commodities. 69
Aristotle therefore, himself, tells us, what barred the way to his further analysis; it was the absence of any concept of value. What is that equal something, that common substance, which admits of the value of the beds being expressed by a house ? Such a thing, in truth, cannot exist, says Aristotle. And why not ? Compared with the beds, the house does re- present something equal to them, in so far as it represents what is really equal, both in the beds and the house. And that is — ■ human labour.
There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle's genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, "in truth," was at the bottom of this equality.
4. The Elementary form of value considered as a whole.
The elementary form of value of a commodity is contained in the equation, expressing its value relation to another com- modity of a different kind, or in its exchange relation to the same. The value of commodity A is qualitatively expressed by the fact that commodity B is directly exchangeable with it. Its value is quantitively expressed by the fact, that a definite quantity of B is exchangeable with a definite quantity of A. In other words, the value of a commodity obtains independent
jo Capitalist Production.
and definite expression, by taking the form of exchange value. When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said, in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use-value and an ex- change value, we were, accurately speaking, wrong. A com- modity is a use-value or object of utility, and a value. It manifests itself as this two-fold thing, that it is, as soon as its value assumes an independent form — viz., the form exchange value. It never assumes this form when isolated, but only when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind. When once we know this, such a mode of expression does no harm ; it simply serves as an abbreviation.
Our analysis has shown, that the form or expression of the value of a commodity originates in the nature of value, and not that value and its magnitude originate in the mode of their expression as exchange value. This, however, is the delusion as well of the mercantilists and their recent revivors, Ferrier, Ganilh,1 and others, as also of their antipodes, the modern bagmen of Free Trade, such as Bastiat. The mercan- tilists lay special stress on the qualitative aspect of the expression of value, and consequently on the equivalent form of commodities, which attains its full perfection in money. The modern hawkers of Free Trade, who must get rid of their article at any price, on the other hand, lay most stress on the quantitative aspect of the relative form of value. For them there consequently exists neither value, nor magnitude of value, anywhere except in its expression by means of the exchange relation of commodities, that is, in the daily list of prices current. MacLeod, who has taken upon himself to dress up the confused ideas of Lombard Street in the most learned finery, is a successful cross between the superstitious mercantilists, and the enlightened Free Trade bagmen.
A close scrutiny of the expression of the value of A in terms of B, contained in the equation expressing the value relation of A to B, has shown us that, within that relation, the bodily form
1 F. L. Ferrier, sous-inspecteur des douanes, "Du gouvernement considere dans ses rapports avec le commerce," Paris, 1805; and Charles Ganilh, "Des Systemes d'Economie politique," 2nd ed., Paris, 1821.
Commodities. yi
of A figures only as a use-value, the bodily form of B only as the form or aspect of value. The opposition or contrast existing internally in each commodity between use-value and value, is, therefore, made evident externally by two com- modities being placed in such relation to each other, that the commodity whose value it is sought to express, figures directly as a mere use-value, while the commodity in which that value is to be expressed, figures directly as mere exchange value. Hence the elementary form of value of a commodity is the elementary form in which the contrast contained in that commodity, between use-value and value, becomes apparent.
Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use- value ; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society's development that such product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value. It therefore follows that the elementary value-form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari passu with the development of the value-form.
We perceive, at first sight, the deficiencies of the elementary form of value : it is a mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the Price-form.
The expression of the value of commodity A in terms of any other commodity B, merely distinguishes the value from the use-value of A, and therefore places A merely in a relation of exchange with a single different commodity, B; but it is still far from expressing A's qualitative equality, and quantitative proportionality, to all commodities. To the elementary rela- tive value-form of a commodity, there corresponds the single equivalent form of one other commodity. Thus, in the rela- tive expression of value of the linen, the coat assumes the form of equivalent, or of being directly exchangeable, only in r&- lation to a single commodity, the linen*.
Nevertheless, the elementary form of value passes by an easy transition into a more complete form. It is true that by means
72 Capitalist Production.
of the elementary form, the value of a commodity A, becomes expressed in terms of one, and only one, other commodity. But that one may be a commodity of any kind, coat, iron, corn, or anything else. Therefore, according as A is placed in rela- tion with one or the other, we get for one and the same com- modity, different elementary expressions of value.1 The num- ber of such possible expressions is limited only by the number of the different kinds of commodities distinct from it. The isolated expression of A's value, is therefore convertible into a series, prolonged to any length, of the different elementary ex- pressions of that value.
B. Total or Expanded form of value.
z Com. A=u Com. B or=v Com. C or=w Com. D or=x Com.
E. or=&c.
(20 yards of linen=l coat or=10 lb tea or=40 lb coffee or=
1 quarter corn or =2 ounces gold or=i/2 ton iron or=&c.)
1. The Expanded Relative form of value.
The value of a single commodity, the linen, for example, is now expressed in terms of numberless other elements of the world of commodities. Every other commodity now becomes a mirror of the linen's value.2 It is thus, that for the first time
1 In Homer, for instance, the value of an article is expressed in a series of dif- ferent things. II. VII., 472-475.
2 For this reason, we can speak of the coat-value of the linen when its value is expressed in coats, or of its corn-value when expressed in corn, and so on.. Every such expression tells us, that what appears in the use-values, coat, corn, &c, is the value of the linen. " The value of any commodity denoting its relation in exchange, we may speak of it as . . . corn-value, cloth-value, according to the commodity with which it is compared; and hence there are a thousand different kinds of value, as many kinds of value as there are commodities in existence, and all are equally real and equally nominal." (A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Meas- ure and Causes of Value; chiefly in reference to the writings of Mr. Ricardo and his followers. By the author of " Essays on the Formation, &c, of Opu> ions." London, 1825, p. 39. ) S. Bailey, the author of this anonymous work, a work which in its day created much stir in England, fancied that, by thus pointing out the various relative expressions of one and the same value, he >^ proved the impossibility of any determination of the concept of value. How- ever narrow his own views may have been, yet, that he laid his finger on some serious defects in the Ricardian Theory, is proved by the animosity with which he was attacked by Ricardo's followers. See the Westminster Review for example.
Commodities. 73
this value shows itself in its true light as a congelation of un- differentiated human labour. For the labour that creates it, now stands expressly revealed, as labour that ranks equally with every other sort of human labour, no matter what its form, whether tailoring, ploughing, mining, &c. and no matter, therefore, whether it is realised in coats, corn, iron, or gold. The linen, by virtue of the form of its value, now stands in a social relation, no longer with only one other kind of com- modity, but with the whole world of commodities. As a commodity, it is a citizen of that world. At the same time, the interminable series of value equations implies, that as re- gards the value of a commodity, it is a matter of in- difference under what particular form, or kind, of use-value it appears.
In the first form, 20 yds. of linen=l coat, it might for ought that otherwise appears be pure accident, that these two com- modities are exchangeable in definite quantities. In the second form, on the contrary, we perceive at once the background that determines, and is essentially different from, this accidental appearance. The value of the linen remains unaltered in mag- nitude, whether expressed in coats, coffee, or iron, or in num- berless different commodities, the property of as many different owners. The accidental relation between two in- dividual commodity-owners disappears. It becomes plain, that it is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their value ; but, on the contrary, that it is the magnitude of their value which controls their exchange proportions.
2. The particular Equivalent form.
Each commodity, such as coat, tea, corn, iron, &c, figures in the expression of value of the linen, as an equivalent, and con- sequently as a thing that is value. The bodily form of each of these commodities figures now as a particular equivalent form, one out of many. In the same way the manifold con- crete useful kinds of labour, embodied in these different com-
74 Capitalist Production.
modifies, rank now as so many different forms of the realisa- tion, or manifestation, of undifferentiated human labour.
3. Defects of the Total or Expanded form of value.
In the first place, the relative expression of value is incom- plete because the series representing it is interminable. The chain of which each equation of value is a link, is liable at any moment to be lengthened by each new kind of commodity that comes into existence and furnishes the material for a fresh expression of value. In the second place, it is a many- coloured mosaic of disparate and independent expressions of value. And lastly, if, as must be the case, the relative value of each commodity in turn, becomes expressed in this ex- panded form, we get for each of them a relative value-form, different in every case, and consisting of an interminable series of expressions of value. The defects of the expanded relative-value form are reflected in the corresponding equiva- lent form. Since the bodily form of each single commodity is one particular equivalent form amongst numberless others, we have, on the whole, nothing but fragmentary equivalent forms, each excluding the others. In the same way, also, the special, concrete, useful kind of labour embodied in each particular equivalent, is presented only as a particular kind of labour, and therefore not as an exhaustive representative of human labour generally. The latter, indeed, gains adequate manifes- tation in the totality of its manifold, particular, concrete forms. But, in that case, its expression in an infinite series is ever" incomplete and deficient in unity.
The expanded relative value form is, however, nothing but the sum of the elementary relative expressions or equations of the first kind, such as
20 yards of linen=l coat
20 yards of linen =10 lbs. of tea, etc.
Each of these implies the corresponding inverted equation, 1 coat=20 yards of linen 10 lbs. of tea=20 yards of linen, etc.
In fact, when a person exchanges his linen for many other commodities, and thus expresses its value in a series of other
Commodities. 75
commodities, it necessarily follows, that the various owners of the latter exchange them for the linen, and consequently express the value of their various commodities in one and the same third commodity, the linen. If then, we reverse the series, 20 yards of linen=l coat or=10 lbs. of tea, etc., that is to say, if we give expression to the converse relation already implied in the series, we get,
C. The General form of value. 1 coat
=20 yards of linen
10 lbs. of tea 40 lbs. of coffee
1 quarter of corn
2 ounces of gold •^ a ton of iron x com. A., etc.
1. The altered character of tlie form of value.
All commodities now express their value ( 1 ) in an element- ary form, because in a single commodity ; ( 2 ) with unity, be- cause in one and the same commodity. This form of value is elementary and the same for all, therefore general.
The forms A and B were fit only to express the value of a commodity as something distinct from its use-value or material form.
The first form, A, furnishes such equations as the follow- ing : — 1 coat?=20 yards of linen, 10 lbs. of tea=4 ton of iron. The value of the coat is equated to linen, that of the tea to iron. But to be equated to linen, and again to iron, is to be as different as are linen and iron. This form, it is plain, occurs practically only in the first beginning, when the products of labour are converted into commodities by accidental and occasional exchanges.
The second form, B, distinguishes, in a more adequate man- ner than the first, the value of a commodity from its use-value ; for the value of the coat is there placed in contrast under all possible shapes with the bodily form of the coat ; it is equated
^6 Capitalist Production.
to linen, to iron, to tea, in short, to everything else, only not to itself, the coat. On the other hand, any general expression of value common to all is directly excluded ; for, in the equation of value of each commodity, all other commodities now appear only under the form of equivalents. The expanded form of value comes into actual existence for the first time so soon as a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities.
The third and lastly developed form expresses the values of the whole world of commodities in terms of a single commodity set apart for the purpose, namely, the linen, and thus represents to us their values by means of their equality with linen. The value of every commodity is now, by being equated to linen, not only differentiated from its own use-value, but from all other use-values generally, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities. By this form, commodities are, for the first time, effectively brought into relation with one another as values, or made to appear , as exchange values.
The two earlier forms either express the value of each com- modity in terms of a single commodity of a different kind, or in a series of many such commodities. In both cases, it is, so to say, the special business of each single commodity to find an expression for its value, and this it does without the help of the others. These others, with respect to the former, play the passive parts of equivalents. The general form of value C, results from the joint action of the whole world of commodities, and from that alone. A commodity can acquire a general ex- pression of its value only by all other commodities, simulta- neously with it, expressing their values in the same equivalent ; and every new commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that, since the existence of commodities as values is purely social, this social existence can be expressed by the totality of their social relations alone, and consequently that the form of their value must be a socially recognised form.
All commodities being equated to linen now appear not only
Commodities. 77
as qualitatively equal as values generally, but also as values whose magnitudes are capable of comparison. By expressing the magnitudes of their values in one and the same material, the linen, those magnitudes are also compared with each other. For instance, 10 lbs. of tea=20 yards of linen, and 40 lbs. of coffee=20 yards of linen. Therefore, 10 lbs. of tea =40 lbs. of coffee. In other words, there is contained in 1 lb. of coffee only one-fourth as much substance of value — labour — as is con- tained in 1 lb. of tea.
The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent — here the linen — into the universal equivalent. The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in common by the value of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all and every of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour. Weaving, which is the labour of certain private individuals producing a particular article, linen, acquires in consequence a social character, the character of equality with all other kinds of labour. The innumerable equations of which the general form of value is composed, equate in turn the labour embodied in the linen to that em- bodied in every other commodity, and they thus convert weaving into the general form of manifestation of undiffer- entiated human labour. In this manner the labour realised in the values of commodities is presented not only under its negative aspect, under which abstraction is made from every concrete form and useful property of actual work, but its own positive nature is made to reveal itself expressly. The general value-form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour power.
The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resume of the world of commodities. That form consequently makes it
78 Capitalist Production.
indisputably evident that in the world of commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific social character.
2. The interdependent development of the Relative form of value, and of the Equivalent form.
The degree of development of the relative form of value corresponds to that of the equivalent form. But we must bear in mind that the development of the latter is only the expres- sion and result of the development of the former.
The primary or isolated relative form of value of one commodity converts some other commodity into an isolated equivalent. The expanded form of relative value, which is the expression of the value of one commodity in terms of all other commodities, endows those other commodities with the character of particular equivalents differing in kind. And lastly, a particular kind of commodity acquires the character of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material in which they uniformly express their value.
The antagonism between the relative form of value and the equivalent form, the two poles of the value form, is developed concurrently with that form itself.
The first form; 20 yds. of linen =one coat, already contains this antagonism, without as yet fixing it. According as we read this equation forwards or backwards, the parts played by the linen and the coat are different. In the one case the relative value of the linen is expressed in the coat, in the other case the relative value of the coat is expressed in the linen. In this first form of value^ therefore, it is difficult to grasp the polar contrast.
Form B shows that only one single commodity at a time can completely expand its relative value, and that it acquires this expanded form only because, and in so far as, all other com- modities are, with respect to it, equivalents. Here we cannot reverse the equation, as we can the equation 20 yds. of linen=: 1 coat, without altering its general character, and converting it from the expanded form of value into the general form of value.
Commodities. 79
Finally, the form C gives to the world of commodities a general social relative form of value, because, and in so far as, thereby all commodities, with the exception of one, are excluded from the equivalent form. A single commodity, the linen, appears therefore to have acquired the character of direct ex- changeability with every other commodity because, and in so far as, this character is denied to every other commodity.1
The commodity that figures as universal equivalent, is, on the other hand, excluded from the relative value form. If the linen, or any other commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent. We should then have 20 yds. of linen=20 yds. of linen ; this tautology ex- presses neither value, nor magnitude of value. In order to express the relative value of the universal equivalent, we must rather reverse the form C. This equivalent has no relative form of value in common with other commodities, but its value is relatively expressed by a never ending series of other com- modities. Thus, the expanded form of relative value, or form B, now shows itself as the specific form of relative value for the equivalent commodity.
3. Transition from the General form of value to the Money form.
The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general. It can, therefore, be assumed by any commodity. On the
1 It is by no means self-evident that this character of direct and universal ex- changeability is, so to speak, a polar one, and as intimately connected with its opposite pole, the absence of direct exchangeability, as the positive pole of the magnet is with its negative counterpart. It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together. It is, of course, highly desirable in the eyes of the petit bourgeois, for whom the production of commodities is the ne plus ultra of human freedom and individual independence, that the inconveniences resulting from this character of commodities not being directly exchangeable, should be removed. Proudhon's socialism is a working out of this Philistine Utopia, a form of socialism which, as I have elsewhere shown, does not possess even the merit of originality. Long before his time, the task was attempted with much better success by Gray, Bray, and others. But, for all that, wisdom of this kind flourishes even now in certain circles under the name of " science." Never has any school played more tricks with the word science, than that of Proudhon, for
"wo Begriffe fehlen Da stellt zur rechten Zeit ein Wort sich ein."
80 Capitalist Production.
other hand, if a commodity be found to have assumed the universal equivalent form (form C), this is only because and in so far as it has been excluded from the rest of all other commodities as their equivalent, and that by their own act. And from the moment that this exclusion becomes finally restricted to one particular commodity, from that moment only, the general form of relative value of the world of commodities obtains real consistence and general social validity.
The particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is thus socially identified, now becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. It becomes the special social function of that commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent. Amongst the commodities which, in form B, figure as particular equivalents of the linen, and in form C, express in common their relative values in linen, this foremost place has been attained by one in particular — namely, gold. If, then, in form C we replace the linen by gold, we get,
D. The Money form,
20 yards of linen =
1 coat =
10 lb of tea =
40 lb of coffee —
1 qr. of corn =
H a ton of iron =
x commodity A =
In passing from form A to form B, and from the latter to
form C, the changes are fundamental. On the other hand,
there is no difference between forms C and D, except that, in
the latter, gold has assumed the equivalent form in the place
of linen. Gold is in form D, what linen was in form C — the
universal equivalent. The progress consists in this alone, that
the character of direct and universal exchangeability — in other
words, that the universal equivalent form — has now, by social
custom, become finally identified with the substance, gold.
2 ounces of gold.
Commodities. 81
Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity. Like all other commodities, it was also capable of serving as an equivalent, either as simple equivalent in isolated exchanges, or as particular equivalent by the side of others. Gradually it began to serve, within varying limits, as universal equivalent. So soon as it monopolises this posi- tion in the expression of value for the world of commodities, it becomes the money commodity, and then, and not till then, does form D become distinct from form C, and the general form of value become changed into the money form.
The elementary expression of the relative value of a single commodity, such as linen, in terms of the commodity, such as* gold, that plays the part of money, is the price form of that commodity. The price form of the linen is therefore 20 yards of linen=2 ounces of gold, or, if 2 ounces of gold when coined are £2, 20 yards of linen=£2.
The difficulty in forming a concept of the money form, con- sists in clearly comprehending the universal equivalent form, and as a necessary corollary, the general form of value, form C. The latter is deducible from form B, the expanded form of value, the essential component element of which, we saw, is form A, 20 yards of linen=l coat or x commodity A=y com- modity B. The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money form.
Section 4. — The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof.
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it; whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The
82 Capitalist Production.
form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than "table- turning" ever was.
The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism., and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quan- titative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour-time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence must necessarily be an object of inter- est to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.1 And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities ? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values ; the measure of the expenditure of labour- power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social
1 Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, and was called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad, &c. (See G. L. von Maurer Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark — , &c. Verfassung, Munchen, 1859, p. 129-59.)
Commodities. 83
character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social rela- tion between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped re- gions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which at- taches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are pro- duced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the fore- going analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individ-
84 Capitalist Production.
uals or groups of individuals who carry on their work inde- pendently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer's labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the in- dividual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest ap- pear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being ex- changed that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uni- form social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when ex- change has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their char- acter as values has therefore to be taken into account, before- hand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalization of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz., expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The two-fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when
Commodities. 85
reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are im- pressed upon that labour in everyday practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condi- tion, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the pro- ducts of labour, have one common quality, viz, that of having value.
Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into rela- tion with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary ; whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.1 Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social pro- ducts ; ^or to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific dis- covery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes
*When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons — >"La Ricchezza e una ragione tra due persone," — he ought to have added: a relation be- tween persons expressed as a relation between things. (Galiani: Delia Moneta, p. 221, V. III. of Custodi's collection of "Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia Politicia." Parte Moderna, Milano, 1803.)
86 Capitalist Production.
in the product the form of value — this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.
What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own ? in what proportions the pro- ducts are exchangeable ? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, fore- sight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which arc carried on in- dependently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitive proportions in which society re- quires them. And why ? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange-relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary for their pro- duction forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.1 The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent
1 " What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolu- tions? It is just nothing but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it." (Friedrich Engels: Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationa lokonomie," in the "Deutsch-franzosische Jahrbucher," edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris, 1844.
Commodities. 87
fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its dis- covery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentally from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.
Man's reflections on the forms of social life,and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of develop- ment ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities,and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Con- sequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ulimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of com- modities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
88 Capitalist Production.
Since Robinson Crusoe's experiences are a favorite theme with political economists,1 let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fish- ing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no ac- count, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than an- other, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their pro- duction ; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the rela- tions between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be in- telligible without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the deter- mination of value.
Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson's island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in dark- ness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find every-
1 Even Ricardo has his stories a la Robinson. "He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour-time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. 'The par- allelograms of Mr. Owen' appear to be the only form of society, besides the bour- geois form, with which he was acquainted." (Karl Marx: "Critique," &c.( p. 69-70.)
Commodities. 89
one dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, lay- men and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground- work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its prod- ucts to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natu- ral form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour-power. The iithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.
For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilized races.1 We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These differ- ent articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending,
1 "A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common property in its primitive form is specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove to have existed amongst Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous examples, ruins though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and especially of Indian forms of common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property, different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of Roman and Teutonic private property are deducible from different forms of Indian common property," (Karl Marx. "Critique," &c, p. 29, footnote.)
90 Capitalist Production.
spinning, weaving and making clotb.es, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which just as much as a society based on the production of commod- ities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour-time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon nat- ural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour-power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour-power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of in- dividual labour-power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.
Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a com- munity of free. individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community. All the charac- teristics of Robinson's labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Every- thing produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organization of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsis- tence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accord- ance with a definite social plan maintains the proper propor- tion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also
Commodities. 91
serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social re- lations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution.
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour — for such a soci- ety, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more espec- ially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c, is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the con- version of products into commodities, and therefore the con- version of men into producers of commodities, holds a subor- dinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish soci- ety. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and trans- parent. But they are founded either on the immature devel- opment of man individually, who has not yet severed the um- bilical cord that unites him with his fellow men in a primi- tive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjec- tion. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrow- ness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish,
92 Capitalist Production.
when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with re- gard to his fellowmen and to nature.
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is con- sciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground- work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.
Political economy has indeed analysed, however incom- pletely,1 value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product
1 The insufficiency of Ricardo's analysis of the magnitude of value, and his an- alysis is by far the best, will appear from the 3rd and 4th book of this work. As regards values in general, it is the weak point of the classical school of political economy that it nowhere, expressly and with full consciousness, distinguishes be- tween labour, as it appears in the value of a product and the same labour, as it ap- pears in the use-value of that product. Of course the distinction is practically made since this school treats labour, at one time under its quantitative aspect, at another under its qualitative aspect. But it has not the least idea, that when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour, is implied. For instance, Ricardo declares that he agrees with Destutt de Tracy in this proposition: "As it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the employment of those faculties, labour of some kind, is our only original treasure, and it is always from this employment that all those things are created, which we call riches. . . . It is certain, too, that all those things only represent the labour which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct values, they can only derive them from that (the value) of the labour from which they emanate." (Ricardo, The Principles of Pol. Econ. 3 Ed. Lond. 1S21, p. 334.) We would here only point out that Ricardo puts his own more profound interpretation upon the words of Destutt. What the latter really says is, that on the one hand all things which constitute wealth represent the labour that creates them, but that on the other hand, they acquire their "two different values" (use-value and exchange-value) from "the value of labour." He thus falls into the commonplace error of the vulgar econo- mists, who assume the value of one commodity (in this case labour) in order to deter- mine the values of the rest. But Ricardo reads him as if he had said, that labour (not the value of labour) is embodied both in use-value and exchange-value. Nevertheless, Ricardo himself pays so little attention to the two-fold character of the labour which has a two-fold embodiment, that he devotes the whole of his chapter on " Value and Riches, Their Distinctive Properties," to a laborious ex- amination of the trivialities of a J. B. Say. And at the finish he is quite astonished to find that Destutt on the one hand agrees with him as to labour being the source of value, and on the other hand with J. B. Say as to the notion of value.
Commodities. 93
and labour time by the magnitude of tHat value.1 These for- mulas, which bear stamped upon them in unmistakable let- ters, that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being con- trolled by him, such formulas appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bour- geoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.2
1 It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in dis- covering that form under which value becomes exchange-value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is en- tirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form, and of its further developments, money-form, capital-form, &c. We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and con- tradictory ideas of money, the perfected form of the general equivalent. This is seen in a striking manner when they treat of banking, where the common- place definitions of money will no longer hold water. This led to the rise of a restored mercantile system (Ganilh, &c), which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the unsubstantial ghost of that form. Once for all I may here state, that by classical political economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society, in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appear- ances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systema- tizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.
2 "The economists have a singular manner of proceeding. There are for them only two kinds of institutions, those of art and those of nature. Feudal institu- tions are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who also establish two kinds of religion. Every religion but their own is an invention of men, while their own religion is an emanation from God. . . . Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any." Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, A Reply to 'La Philosophic de la Misere' by Mr. Proudhon. 1847, p. 100. Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them ts seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear
94 Capitalist Production.
To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.
The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois pro- duction. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and charac- teristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary sys- tem ? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were nat-
that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bour- geois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour? — >I seize this opportunity of shortly answering an objection takeia by a German paper in America, to my work, "Critique of Political Economy, 1859." In the estimation of that paper, my view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in 9hort, tbat the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised, and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme. In the first place it strikes one as an odd thing for any one to suppose that these well-worn phrases about the middle ages and the ancient world are unknown to anyone else. This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight Errantry was compatible with all economical forms of society.
Commodities. 95
ural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of capital ? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society ?
But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity form. Could com- modities themselves speak, they would say : Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the econo- mist. "Value" — (i.e., exchange value) "is a property of things, riches" — (i.e., use-value) "of man. Value, in this sense, neces- sarily implies exchanges, riches do not." * "Riches" (use- value) "are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of com- modities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a dia- mond is valuable. . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable" as a pearl or diamond.2 So far no chemist has ever discovered ex- change value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economical discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs to them independently of their material pro- perties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstances that the use-value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the
1 Observations on certain verbal disputes in Pol. Econ., particularly relating to value and to demand and supply. Lond., 1821, p. 16.
2S. Bailey, 1. c., p. 165.
8 The author of " Observations " and S. Bailey accuse Ricardo of converting ex- change value from something relative into something absolute. The opposite is the fact. He has explained the apparent relation between objects, such as diamonds and pearls, in which relation they appear as exchange values, and disclosed the true relation hidden behind the appearances, namely, their relation to each other as mere expressions of human labour. If the followers of Ricardo answer Bailey somewhat rudely, and by no means convincingly, the reason is to be sought in this, that they were unable to find in Ricardo's own works any key to the hidden relations existing between value and its form, exchange value.
g6 Capitalist Production.
objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is real- ised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, "To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune ; but reading and writing comes by nature."
CHAPTER II.
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. Com- modities 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.1 In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as com- modities, 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, there- fore, mutually recognise in each other the right of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses it- self 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 economical relation between the two. It is this economical relation that determines the subject matter comprised in each such juridical act.2 The persons exist for
1 In the 12th century, so renowned for its piety, they included amongst com- modities some very delicate things. Thus a French poet of the period enumerates amongst the goods to be fund 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 eternelle," from th< 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.
Exchange. 97
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 economical 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 repul- sive 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.1 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
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 "naturalite" and "affinite?" Do we really know any more about "usury," when we say it contradicts "justice eternelle," "equite eternelle," "mutualite eternelle," and other "verites eternelles" than the fathers of the church did when they said it was incom- patible with "grace eternelle," "foi eternelle," and "la volonte eternelle de Dieu?"
1 " 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 ex- changeable. 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., 1. i. c. 9.)
G
98 Capitalist Production.
in a form that is useful for others. Whether that labour is use- ful 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 ex- change 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 de- sires 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 i9 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 ex- clusively 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 That." They therefore acted and transacted before they thought. Instinctively they conform to the laws imposed by the nature of commodities. They cannot bring their com- modities 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 par- ticular 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
Exchange. 99
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 bestise tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet charaeterem aut nomen bestise, aut numerum nominis ejus." (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 ex- changes 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 in- tercourse, 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.1
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.2 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 hap- pens 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
1 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, "Critique of Political Economy," p. 73, ff.
2 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.
100 Capitalist Production.
men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as inde- pendent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal indepen- dence has no existence in a primitive society based on pro- perty in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peru- vian 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 com- modities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse. The pro- portions 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 pur- poses of consumption, and its utility for the purposes of ex- change. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its ex- change 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 solu- tion 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 belong-
Exchange. 101
ing to different owners being exchangeable for, and equated as values to, one and the same special article. Such last-men- tioned 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 ex- change from outside, and these in fact are primitive and nat- ural 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 movable 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 prim- itive 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 embodi- ment 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
102 Capitalist Production.
silver," * is shown by the fitness of the physical properties of these metals for the functions of money.2 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, undiffer- entiated, 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 com- modity must be susceptible of merely quantitative differences, must therefore be divisible at will, and equally capable of being re-united. Gold and silver possess these properties by nature.
The use-value of the money commodity becomes twofold. 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, origina- ting 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.3
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 4 is therefore a new dis-
*Karl Marx, 1. c. p. 212. "I metalli. . . naturalmente moneta," (Galiani. "Delia moneta" in Custodi's Collection: Parte Moderna t. iii.).
2 For further details on this subject see in my work cited above, the chapter on " The precious metals."
8 "II danaro e la merce universale (Verri, 1. c, p. 16).
4 "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 greatest quantity of the product or manufacture of the countrey," &c. ("A Discourse of the General Notions of Money, Trade, and Exchange, as they stand in relations to each other." By a Merchant. Lond., 1G95, 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, oyl, tobacco, cloth, or stuffs." (" A Discourse concerning Trade, and that in particular of the East Indies," &c. London, 1C89, 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 merchandize." ("A
Exchange. 103
covery only for those who, when they analyse it, start from its fully developed shape. The act of exchange gives to the com- modity 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.1 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 them- selves. 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.2 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 regime 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
Treatise concerning the East India Trade being a most profitable Trade." Lon- don, 16S0, Reprint 1696, p. 4.)
1 "L'oro e l'argento hanno valore come metalli anteriore all' esser moneta." (Galiani, I.e.). 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: "Sil- ver 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 additionelle)" (Jean Law: "Considerations sur le numeraire et le commerce" in E. Daire's Edit, of "Economistes Financiers du XVIII. siecle.," p. 470).
2 L' Argent en (des denrees) est le signe." (V. de Forbonnais: "Elements du Commerce, Nouv. Edit. Leyde, 1776," t. II., p. 143.) "Comme signe il est attire par les denrees." (I.e., p. 155). " L'argent est un signe d'une chose et la represente." (Montesquieu: "Esprit des Lois," Oeuvres, Lond. 1767, t. II., p. 2.) "L'argent n'est pas simple signe, car il est lui-meme richesse; il ne represente pas les valeurs, il les equivaut." (Le Trosne, I.e., 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, I.e., 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," says an apt scholar of theirs, Philip of Valois, in a decree of 1316, " que a. nous et a notre majeste royale n' appartiennent seulement. . . le
104 Capitalist Production.
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, peo- ple 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 magni- tude 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.1 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 cen- tury 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 commo- dity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a com- modity becomes money.2
mestier, le fait, 1'etat, la provision et toute l'ordonnance des monnaies, de dormer tel cours, et pour tel prix comme il nous plait et bon nous semble." 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." 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.
1 " 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 easie 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 on Taxes and Contributions." Lond., 1662, p. 32.
2 The learned Professor Roscher, after first informing us that " the false defini- tions 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 ha9
Exchange. 105
We have already seen, from the most elementary expres- sion of value, x commodity A=y commodity B, that the object in which the magnitude of the value of another object is repre- sented, 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 com- modity, and thus crystallised into the money-form. What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money, in conse- quence 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 inter- mediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind. Commodities find their own value already com- pletely 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 inde- pendent of their control and conscious individual action. These facts manifest themselves at first by products as a gen- eral rule taking the form of commodities. We have seen how the progressive development of a society of commodity-pro- ducers stamps one privileged commodity with the character of money. Hence the riddle presented by money is but the riddle
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 com- modities" (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. 277-210) More! less! not sufficiently! so far! not altogether! What clearness and precision of ideas and language! And such eclectic professorial twaddle is mod' estly 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."
106 Capitalist Production.
presented by commodities ; only it now strikes us in its most glaring form.
CHAPTEE III.
MONEY, OR THE CIRCULATION OF COMMODITIES. SECTION 1. THE MEASURE OF VALUES.
Throughout this work, I assume, for the sake of simplicity, gold as the money-commodity.
The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to re- present their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excel- lence, become money.
It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special com- modity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be as- sumed by that measure of value which is immanent in com- modities, labour-time.1
The expression of the value of a commodity in gold — x
1 The question — Why does not money directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may represent, for instance, x hour's labour, is at bottom the same as the question why, given the production of commodities, must products take the form of commodities? This is evident, since their taking the form of commodities implies their differentiation into commodities and money. Or, why cannot pri- vate labour — labour for the account of private individuals — be treated as its oppo- site, immediate social labour? I have elsewhere examined thoroughly the Utopian idea of "labour-money" in a society founded on the production of commodities (1. c, p. 61, seq.)- On this point I will only say further, that Owen's " labour- money," for instance, is no more "money" than a ticket for the theatre. Owen presupposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely in- consistent with the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption. But it never enters into Owen's head to presuppose the production of commodities, and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary con- ditions of that production.
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 107
commodity A=y money-commodity — is its money-form or price. A single equation, such as 1 ton of iron=2 ounces of gold, now suffices to express the value of the iron in a socially valid manner. There is no longer any need for this equation to figure as a link in the chain of equations that express the values of all other commodities, because the equivalent com- modity, gold, now has the character of money. The general form of relative value has resumed its original shape of simple or isolated relative value. On the other hand, the expanded expression of relative value, the endless series of equations, has now become the form peculiar to the relative value of the money-commodity. The series itself, too, is now given, and has social recognition in the prices of actual commodities. We have only to read the quotations of a price-list backwards, to find the magnitude of the value of money expressed in all sorts of commodities. But money itself has no price. In order to put it on an equal footing with all other commodities in this respect, we should be obliged to equate it to itself as its own equivalent.
The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form ; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form. Although invisible, the value of iron, linen and corn has actual existence in these very articles : it is ideally made perceptible by their equality with gold, a relation that, so to say, exists only in their own heads. Their owner must, therefore, lend them his tongue, or hang a ticket on them, before their prices can be communicated to the outside world.1 Since the ex- pression of the value of commodities in gold is a merely ideal
1 Savages and half-civilised races use the tong differently. Captain Parry says of the inhabitants on the west coast of Baffin's Bay: "In this case (he refers to barter) they licked it (the thing represented to them) twice to their tongues, after which they seemed to consider the bargain satisfactorily concluded." In the same way, the Eastern Esquimaux licked the articles they received in exchange. If the tongue is thus used in the North as the organ of appropriation, no wonder that, in the South, the stomach serves as the organ of accumulated property, and that a Kaffir estimates the wealth of a man by the size of his belly. That the Kaffirs know what they are about is shown by the following: at the same time that the official British Health Report of 1864 disclosed the deficiency of fat-forming food among a large part of the working class, a certain Dr. Harvey (not, however, the celebrated discoverer of the circulation of the blood), made a good thing by adver- tising recipes for reducing the superfluous fat of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
lo8 Capitalist Production.
act, we may use for this purpose imaginary or ideal money. Every trader knows, that he is far from having turned his goods into money, when he has expressed their value in a price or in imaginary money, and that it does not require the least bit of real gold, to estimate in that metal millions of pounds' worth of goods. When, therefore, money serves as a measure of value, it is employed only as imaginary or ideal money. This circumstance has given rise to the wildest theories.1 But, although the money that performs the functions of a measure of value is only ideal money, price depends entirely upon the actual substance that is money. The value, or in other words, the quantity of human labour contained in a ton of iron, is expressed in imagination by such a quantity of the money- commodity as contains the same amount of labour as the iron. According, therefore, as the measure of value is gold, silver, or copper, the value of the ton of iron will be expressed by very different prices, or will be represented by very different quan- tities of those metals respectively.
If, therefore, two different commodities, such as gold and silver, are simultaneously measures of value, all commodities have two prices. — one a gold-price, the other a silver-price. These exist quietly side by side, so long as the ratio of the value of silver to that of gold remains unchanged, say, at 15 : 1. Every change in their ratio disturbs the ratio which exists between the gold-prices and the silver-prices of commodities, and thus proves, by facts, that a double standard of value is inconsistent with the functions of a standard.2
1See Karl Marx: "Critique, etc., chapter II. B., Theories of the Unit of Meas- ure of Money," p. 91, ff.
2 " Wherever gold and silver have by law been made to perform the function of money or of a measure of value side by side, it has always been tried, but in vain, to treat them as one and the same material. To assume that there is an invariable ratio between the quantities of gold and silver in which a given quantity of labour-time is incorporated, is to assume, in fact, that gold and silver are of one and the same material, and that a given mass of the less valuable metal, silver, is a constant fraction of a given mass of gold. From the reign of Edward III. to the time of George II., the history of money in England consists of one long series of perturbations caused by the clashing of the legally fixed ratio be- tween the values of gold and silver, with the fluctuations in their real values. At one time gold was too high, at another, silver. The metal that for the time being was estimated below its value, was withdrawn from circulation, melted and ex- ported. The ratio between the two metals was then again altered by law, but the new nominal ratio soon came into conflict again with the real one. In our own
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 109
Commodities with definite prices present themselves under the form: a commodity A=x gold; b commodity B=z gold; c commodity C=y gold, &c, where a, b, c, represent definite quantities of the commodities A, B2 C and x, z, y, definite quantities of gold. The values of these commodities are, therefore, changed in imagination into so many different quan- tities of gold. Hence, in spite of the confusing variety of the commodities themselves, their values become magnitudes of the same denomination, gold-magnitudes. They are now capable of being compared with each other and measured, and the want becomes technically felt of comparing them with some fixed quantity of gold as a unit measure. This unit, by subsequent division into aliquot parts, becomes itself the standard or scale. Before they become money, gold, silver, and copper already possess such standard measures in their standards of weight, so that, for example, a pound weight, while serving as the unit, is, on the one hand, divisible into ounces, and, on the other, may be combined to make up hundredweights.1 It is owing to this that, in all metallic currencies, the names given to the standards of money or of price were originally taken from the pre-existing names of the standards of weight.
As measure of value and as standard of price, money has two
times, the slight and transient fall in the value of gold compared with silver, which was a consequence of the Indo-Chinese demand for silver, produced on a far more extended scale in France the same phenomena, export of silver, and its ex- pulsion from circulation by gold. During the years 1855, 1856 and 1857, the excess in France of gold-imports over gold exports amounted to £41,580,000, while the excess of silver-exports over silver-imports was £14,704,000. In fact, in those countries in which both metals are legally measures of value, and therefore both legal tender, so that everyone has the option of paying in either metal, the metal that rises in value is at a premium, and, like every other commodity, measures its price in the over-estimated metal which alone serves in reality as the standard . of value. The result of all experience and history with regard to this question is simply that, where two commodities perform by law the functions of a measure of value, in practice one alone maintains that position." (Karl Marx, 1. c. pp. 90-91.) 1 The peculiar circumstance, that while the ounce of gold serves in England as the unit of the standard of money, the pound sterling does not form an aliquot part of it, has been explained as follows: "Our coinage was originally adapted to the employment of silver only, hence, an ounce of silver can always be divided into a certain adequate number of pieces of coin; but as gold was introduced at a later period into a coinage adapted only to silver, an ounce of gold cannot be coined into an aliquot number of pieces." Maclaren, "A Sketch of the History of the Currency." London, 1858, p. 16.
no Capitalist Production.
entirely distinct functions to perform. It is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human labour ; it is the standard of price inasmuch as it is a fixed weight of metal. As the measure of value it serves to convert the values of all the manifold commodities into prices, into imaginary quantities of gold ; as the standard of price it measures those quantities of gold. The measure of values measures commodities considered as values ; the standard of price measures, on the contrary, quantities of gold by a unit quantity of gold, not the value of one quantity of gold by the weight of another. In order to make gold a standard of price, a certain weight must be fixed upon as the unit. In this case, as in all cases of measuring quantities of the same denomina- tion, the establishment of an unvarying unit of measure is all- important. Hence, the less the unit is subject to variation, so much the better does the standard of price fulfill its office. But only in so far as it is itself a product of labour, and, therefore, potentially variable in value, can gold serve as a measure of value.1
It is, in the first place, quite clear that a change in the value of gold does not, in any way, affect its function as a standard of price. No matter how this value varies, the proportions between the values of different quantities of the metal remain constant. However great the fall in its value, 12 ounces of gold still have 12 times the value of 1 ounce; and in prices, the only thing considered is the relation between different quantities of gold. Since, on the other haud, no rise or fall in the value of an ounce of gold can alter its weight, no alteration can take place in the weight of its aliquot parts. Thus gold always renders the same service as an invariable standard of price, however much its value may vary.
In the second place, a change in the value of gold does not interfere with its functions as a measure of value. The change affects all commodities simultaneously, and, therefore, coeterip 'paribus, leaves their relative values inter se, unaltered,
1 With English writers the confusion between measure of value and standard of price (standard of value) is indescribable. Their functions, as well as tb<*ir names, are constantly interchanged.
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. in
although those values are now expressed in higher or lower gold-prices.
Just as when we estimate the value of any commodity by a definite quantity of the use-value of some other commodity, so in estimating the value of the former in gold, we assume nothing more than that the production of a given quantity of gold costs, at the given period, a given amount of labour. As regards the fluctuations of prices generally, they are subject to the laws of elementary relative value investigated in a former chapter.
A general rise in the prices of commodities can result only, either from a rise in their values — the value of money remain- ing constant — or from a fall in the value of money, the values of commodities remaining constant On the other hand, a general fall in prices can result only, either from a fall in the values of commodities — the value of money remaining con- stant— or from a rise in the value of money, the values of commodities remaining constant. It therefore by no means follows, that a rise in the value of money necessarily implies a proportional fall in the prices of commodities ; or that a fall in the value of money implies a proportional rise in prices. Such change of price holds good only in the case of com- modities whose value remains constant. With those, for ex- ample whose value rises, simultaneously with, and propor- tionally to, that of money, there is no alteration in price. And if their value rise either slower or faster than that of money, the fall or rise in their prices will be determined by the difference between the change in their value and that of money ; and so on.
Let us now go back to the consideration of the price-form.
By degrees there arises a discrepancy between the current money names of the various weights of the precious metal figuring as money, and the actual weights which those names originally represented. This discrepancy is the result of his- torical causes, among which the chief are: — (1) The im- portation of foreign money into an imperfectly developed community. This happened in Home in its early days, where gold and silver coins circulated at first as foreign commodities.
112 Capitalist Production.
The names of these foreign coins never coincide with those of the indigenous weights. (2) As wealth increases, the less precious metal is thrust out by the more precious from its place as a measure of value, copper by silver, silver by gold, however much this order of sequence may be in contradiction with poetical chronology.1 The word pound, for instance, was the money-name given to an actual pound weight of silver. When gold replaced silver as a measure of value, the same name was applied according to the ratio between the values of silver and gold, to perhaps l-15th of a pound of gold. The word pound, as a money-name, thus becomes differentiated from the same word as a weight-name.2 (3) The debasing of money carried on for centuries by kings and princes to such an extent that, of the original weights of the coins, nothing in fact remained but the names.
These historical causes convert the separation of the money- name from the weight-name into an established habit with the community.3 Since the standard of money is on the one hand purely conventional, and must on the other hand find general acceptance, it is in the end regulated by law. A given weight of one of the precious metals, an ounce of gold, for instance, becomes officially divided into aliquot parts, with legally be- stowed names, such as pound, dollar, &c. These aliquot parts, which henceforth serve as units of money, are then sub- divided into other aliquot parts with legal names, such as shilling, penny, &c.4 But, both before and after these divisions are made, a definite weight of metal is the standard of metallic money. The sole alteration consists in the sub- division and denomination.
1 Moreover, it has not general historical validity.
2 It is thus that the pound sterling in English denotes less than one-third of its original weight; the pound Scot, before the union, only l-36th; the French livre, l-74th; the Spanish maravedi, less than l-1000th; and the Portuguese rei a still smaller fraction.
3 "Le monete le quali oggi sono ideali sono le piu antiche d'ogni nazione, e tutte furono un tempo reali, e perche erano reali con esse si contava." (Galiani: Delia moneta, 1. c, p. 153.)
4 David Urquhart remarks in his "Familiar Words" on the monstrosity (!) that now-a-days a pound (sterling), which is the unit of the English standard of money, is equal to about a quarter of an ounce of gold. "This is falsify- ing a measure, not establishing a standard." He sees in this " false denomination " of the weight of gold, as in everything else, the falsifying hand of civilisation.
Money, vr the Circulation of Commodities. 113
The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of commodities are ideally changed, are therefore now expressed m the names of coins, or in the legally valid names of the sub- divisions of the gold standard. Hence, instead of saying : A quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of gold ; we say, it is worth £3 17s. l(Hd. In this way commodities express by their prices how much they are worth, and money serves as money of account whenever it is a question of fixing the value of an article in its money-form.1
The name of a thing is something distinct from the qualities of that thing. I know nothing of a man, by knowing that his name is Jacob. In the same way with regard to money, every trace of a value-relation disappears in the names pound, dollar, franc, ducat, &c. The confusion caused by attributing a hidden meaning to these cabalistic signs is all the greater, because these money-names express both the values of commodities, and, at the same time, aliquot parts of the weight of the metal that is the standard of money.2 On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary that value, in order that it may be distin- guished from the varied bodily forms of commodities, should assume this material and unmeaning, but, at the same time, purely social form.3
1When Anacharsis was asked for what purposes the Greeks used money, he re- plied, " For reckoning." (Athen. Deipn. 1. "iv. 49 v. 2. ed Schweighauser, 1802.)
2 " Owing to the fact that money, when serving as the standard of price, appears under the same reckoning names as do the prices of commodities, and that therefore the sum of £3 17s. 10 yid. may signify on the one hand an ounce weight of gold, and on the other, the value of a ton of iron, this reckoning name of money has been called its mint-price. Hence there sprang up the extraordinary notion, that the value of gold is estimated in its own material, and that, in contra-distinc- tion to all other commodities, its price is fixed by the State. It was erroneously thought that the giving of reckoning names to definite weights of gold, is the same thing as fixing the value of those weights." (Karl Marx. 1. c, p. 89.)
3 See "Theories of the Unit of Measure of Money" in "Critique of Political Economy," p. 91, ff. The fantastic notions about raising or lowering the mint- price of money by transferring to greater or smaller weights of gold or silver the names already legally appropriated to fixed weights of those metals; such no- tions, at least in those cases in which they aim, not at clumsy financial operations against creditors, both public and private, but at economical quack remedies have been so exhaustively treated by Wm. Petty in his " Quantulumcunque concerning' money: To the Lord Marquis of Halifax, 1682," that even his immediate followers, Sir Dudley North and John Locke, not to mention later ones, could only dilute him. " If the wealth of a nation," he remarks, " could be decupled by a proclama- tion, it were strange that such proclamations have not long since been made by our Governors." (1. c, p. 36.)
114 Capitalist Production.
Price is tihe money-name of the labour realised in a commo- dity. Hence the expression of the equivalence of a commodity with the sum of money constituting its price, is a tautology,1 just as in general the expression of the relative value of a commodity is a statement of the equivalence of two commod- ities. But although price, heing the exponent of the magni- tude of a commodity's value, is the exponent of its exchange- ratio with money; it does not follow that the exponent of this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of the commodity's value. Suppose two equal quantities of social- ly necessary labour to be respectively represented by 1 quarter of wheat and £2 (nearly -J oz. of gold), £2 is the expression in money of the magnitude of the value of the quarter of wheat, or is its price. If now circumstances allow of this price being raised to £3, or compel it to be reduced to £1, then although £1 and £3 may be too small or too great properly to express the magnitude of the wheat's value, nevertheless they are its prices, for they are, in the first place, the form under which its value appears, i.e., money; and in the second place, the ex- ponents of its exchange-ratio with money. If the conditions of production, in other words, if the productive power of labour remain constant, the same amount of social labour-time must, both before and after the change in price, be expended in the reproduction of a quarter of wheat. This circumstance de- pends, neither on the will of the wheat producer, nor on that; of the owners of other commodities.
Magnitude of value expresses a relation of social production, it expresses the connection that necessarily exists between a certain article and the portion of the total labour-time of society required to produce it. As soon as magnitude of value is con- verted into price, the above necessary relation takes the shape of a more or less accidental exchange-ratio between a single commodity and another, the money-commodity. But this ex- change-ratio may express either the real magnitude of that commodity's value, or the quantity of gold deviating from that value, for which, according to circumstances, it may be parted
1 " Ou bien, il faut consentir a dire qu'une valeur d'un million en argent vaut plus qu'une valeur egale en marchandises." (Le Trosne 1. c. p. 919), which amounts to saying, "qu'une valeur vaut plus qu'une valeur egale."
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 115
with. The possibility, therefore, of quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former from the latter, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is no defect, but, on the contrary, admirably adapts the price-form to a mode of production whose inherent laws impose themselves only as the mean of apparently lawless irregulari- ties that compensate one another.
The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency, so much so, that, although money is nothing but the value-form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value. Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c, are capable of being offered for sale by their hold- ers, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of com- modities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quan- tities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price- form may sometimes conceal 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 in- corporated 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 quan- tity of the equivalent {e.g., an ounce of gold), is directly ex- changeable for iron. But it by no means states the converse, that iron is directly exchangeable for gold. In order, there- fore, that a commodity may in practice act effectively as ex- change value, it must quit its bodily shape, must transform it- self from mere imaginary into real gold, although to the com- modity 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.1 Though a commod-
1 Jerome had to wrestle hard, not only in his youth with the bodil} flesh, as is shown by his fight in the desert with the handsome women of his imagination, but also in his old age with the spiritual flesh. " I thought," he says, " I was in the spirit before the Judge of the Universe." "Who art thou?" asked a voice. "I am
n6 Capitalist Production.
ity may, side by side with its actual form (iron, for in- stance), 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 —
" Assai bene § trascorsa D'esta moneta gia la lega e'l peso, Ma dimrni se tu 1'hai nella tua borsa."
A price therefore implies both that a commodity is exchange- able 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 commodi- ties 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
a Christian." "Thou liest," thundered back the great Judge, "thou art nought buf a Ciceronian."
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 117
hands in which they become use-values, it is a social circula- tion 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, there- fore, now to consider exchange from a formal point of view ; to investigate the change of form or metamorphosis of commodi- ties 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 indis- tinct 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 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 oppo- sition 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 exprea-
n8 Capitalist Production.
sions 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 com- modities 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 metamor- phoses of opposite yet supplementary character — the conversion of the commodity into money, and the re-conversion of the money into a commodity.1 The two phases of this metamor- phosis 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 pro- cess 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.
1<( £k S£ tow Trvpbs dvrafielfie<r0ai irdvra, <pn)<rlv,b 'HpajcXeiTos, Kal irvp
iar&VTWV, Sxrvep xpvcrov xpVIJ-aTa Kal\py\fi&T<i)v xpv<r6s." (F. Lassalle: Die Philosophic Herakleitos des Dunkeln. Berlin, 1845. Vol. I, p. 222.) Lassalle, in his note on this passage, p. 224, n. 3, erroneously makes gold a mere symbol of value.
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 119
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 encL
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 shfert, then, al- though the commodity itself is not harmed, its owner decidedly is. The social division of labour causes his labour to be as one- sided as his wants are many-sided. This is precisely the reason why the product of his labour serves him solely as exchange value. But it cannot acquire the properties of a socially recog- nised universal equivalent, except by being converted into money. That money, however, is in some one else's pocket. In order to entice the money out of that pocket, our friend's com- modity must, above all things, be a use-value to the owner of the money. For this, it is necessary that the labour expended upon it, be of a kind that is socially useful, of a kind that constitutes a branch of the social division of labour. But division of labour is a system of production which has grown up spontaneously and continues to grow behind the backs of the producers. The commodity to be exchanged may possibly be the product of some new kind of labour, that pretends to satisfy newly arisen requirements, or even to give rise itself to new requirements. A particular operation, though yesterday, perhaps, forming one out of the many operations conducted by one producer in creat- ing a given commodity, may to-day separate itself from this connection, may establish itself as an independent branch of labour and send its incomplete product to market as an inde- pendent commodity. The circumstances may or may not be ripe for such a separation. To-day the product satisfies a social want. To-morrow the article may, either altogether or partial- ly, be superseded by some other appropriate product. Moreover, although our weaver's labour may be a recognised branch of
120 Capitalist Produtt-icn.
the social division of labour, yet that fact is by no meand suffi- cient to guarantee the utility of his 20 yards, of lmen. If the community's want of linen, and such a want has a limit like every other want, should already be saturated by the products of rival weavers, our friend's product is superfluous, redundant, and consequently useless. Although people do not look a gift- horse in the mouth, our friend does not frequent the market for the purpose of making presents. But suppose his product turn out a real use-value, and thereby attracts money ? The question arises, how much will it attract ? No doubt the answer is al- ready anticipated in the price of the article, in the exponent of the magnitude of its value. We leave out of consideration here any accidental miscalculation of value by our friend, a mistake that is soon rectified in the market. We suppose him to have spent on his product only that amount of labour-time that is on an average socially necessary The price then, is merely the money-name of the quantity of social labour realised in his commodity. But without the leave, and behind the back, of our weaver, the old fashioned mode of weaving undergoes a change. The labour-time that yesterday was without doubt socially nec- essary to the production of a yard of linen, ceases to be so to- day, a fact which the owner of the money is only too eager to prove from the prices quoted by our friend's competitors. Un- luckily for him, weavers are not few and far between. Lastly, suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labour-time than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole, may have had superfluous labour-time spent upon thern. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labour of the community has been expended in the form of weaving. The ■effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour-time upon his particular product than is socially necessary. Here we may say, with the German proverb: caught together, hung together. All the linen in the market counts but as one article of commerce, of which each piece is only an aliquot part. And as a matter of fact, the value also of each single yard is but the materialised form of the same def-
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 12 1
inite and socially fixed quantity of homogeneous human labour.
We see then, commodities are in love with money, but "the course of true love never did run smooth." The quantitative division of labour is brought about in exactly the same spon- taneous and accidental manner as its qualitative division. The owners of commodities therefore find out, that the same divi- sion of labour that turns them into independent private pro- ducers, also frees the social process of production and the relations of the individual producers to each other within that process, from all dependence on the will of those producers, and that the seeming mutual independence of the individuals is supplemented by a system of general and mutual dependence through or by means of the products,
The division of labour converts the product of labour into a commodity, and thereby makes necessary its further conversion into money. At the same time it also makes the accomplish- ment of this trans-substantiation quite accidental. Here, how- ever, we are only concerned with the phenomenon in its integrity, and we therefore assume its progress to be normal. Moreover, if the conversion take place at all, that is, if the commodity be not absolutely unsaleable, its metamorphosis does take place although the price realised may be abnormally above or below the value.
The seller has his commodity replaced by gold, the buyer has his gold replaced by a commodity. The fact which here stares us in the face is, that a commodity and gold, 20 yards of linen and £2, have changed hands and places, in other words, that they have been exchanged. But for what is the com- modity exchanged ? For the shape assumed by its own value, for the universal equivalent. And for what is the gold exchanged ? Tor a particular form of its own use-value. Why does gold take the form of money face to face with the linen ? Because the linen's price of £2, its denomination in money, has already equated the linen to gold in its character of money. A commodity strips off its original commodity-form on being alienated, i.e., on the instant its use-value actually attracts the gold, that before existed only ideally in its price. The realisation of a commodity's price, or of its ideal value-
i22 Capitalist Production.
form, is therefore at the same time the realisation of the ideal use-value of money; the conversion of a commodity into money, is the simultaneous conversion of money into a com- modity. The apparently single process is in reality a double one. From the pole of the commodity owner it is a sale, from the opposite pole of the money owner, it is a purchase. In other words, a sale is a purchase, C — M is also M — C.1
Up to this point we have considered men in only one econom- ical capacity, that of owners of commodities, a capacity in which they appropriate the produce of the labour of others, by alienating that of their own labour. Hence, for one commodity owner to meet with another who has money, it is necessary, either, that the product of the labour of the latter person, the buyer, should be in itself money, should be gold, the material of which money consists, or that his product should already have changed its skin and have stripped off its original form of a useful object. In order that it may play the part of money, gold must of course enter the market at some point or other. This point is to be found at the source of production of the metal, at which place gold is bartered, as the immediate product of labour, for some other product of equal value. From that moment it always represents the realised price of some commodity.2 Apart from its exchange for other com- modities at the source of its production, gold, in whose-so-ever hands it may be, is the transformed shape of some commodity alienated by its owner ; it is the product of a sale or of the first metamorphosis C — M.3 Gold, as we saw, became ideal money, or a measure of values, in consequence of all commodities measuring their values by it, and thus contrasting it ideally with their natural shape as useful objects, and making it the shape of their value. It became real money, by the general alienation of commodities, by actually changing places with their natural forms as useful objects, and thus becoming in
1 " Toute vente est achat." (Dr. Quesnay: "Dialogues sur le Commerce et les Travaux des Artisans." Physiocrates ed. Daire I. Partie, Paris, 1846, p. 170), or as Quesnay in his "Maximes generales" puts it, "Vendre est acheter."
2 "Le prix d'une marchandise ne pouvant etre paye que par le prix d'une autre marchandise." (Mercier de la Riviere: "L'Ordre natural et essentiel des societe6 politiques." Physiocrates, ed. Daire II. Partie, p. 554.)
8 "Pour avoir cet argent, il faut avoir vendu," 1. c, p. 543.
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 123
reality tlie embodiment of their values. When they assume this money-shape, commodities strip off every trace of their natural use-value, and of the particular kind of labour to which they owe their creation, in order to transform themselves into the uniform, socially recognised incarnation of homogeneous hu- man labour. We cannot tell from the mere look of a piece of money, for what particular commodity it has been exchanged. Under their money-form all commodities look alike. Hence, money may be dirt, although dirt is not money. We will assume that the two gold pieces, in consideration of which our weaver has parted with his linen, are the metamorphosed shape of a quarter of wheat. The sale of the linen, C — M, is at the same time its purchase, M — C. But the sale is the first act of a process that ends with a transaction of an opposite nature, namely, the purchase of a Bible ; the purchase of the linen, on the other hand, ends a movement that began with a transac- tion of an opposite nature, namely, with the sale of the wheat, C — M (linen — money), which is the first phase of C — M — C (linen — money — Bible), is also M — C (money — linen), the last phase of another movement C — M — C (wheat — money — linen). The first metamorphosis of one commodity, its trans- formation from a commodity into money, is therefore also in- variably the second metamorphosis of some other commodity, the retransformation of the latter from money into a com- modity.1
M — C , or purchase. The second and concluding metamor- phosis of a commodity.
Because money is the metamorphosed shape of all other commodities, the result of their general alienation, for this reason it is alienable itself without restriction or condition. It reads all prices backwards, and thus, so to say, depicts itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which offer to it the material for the realisation of its own use-value. At the same time the prices, wooing glances cast at money by commodities,
1 As before remarked, the actual producer of gold or silver forms an exception. He exchanges his product directly for another commodity, without having first sold it.
124 Capitalist Production.
define the limits of its convertibility, by pointing to its quan- tity. Since every commodity, on becoming money, disappears as a commodity, it is impossible to tell from trie money itself, how it got into the hands of its possessor, or what article has been changed into it. !Non olet, from whatever source it may come. Representing on the one hand a sold commodity, it represents on the other hand a commodity to be bought.1
M — C, a purchase, is, at the same time, C — M, a sale ; the concluding metamorphosis of one commodity is the first meta- morphosis of another. With regard to our weaver, the life of his commodity ends with the Bible, into which he has recon- verted his £2. But suppose the seller of the Bible turns the £2 set free by the weaver into brandy. M — C, the concluding phase of C — M — C (linen, money, Bible), is also C — M, the first phase of C — M — C (Bible, money, brandy). The pro- ducer of a particular commodity has that one article alone to offer ; this he sells very often in large quantities, but his many and various wants compel him to split up the price realised, the sum of money set free, into numerous purchases. Hence a sale leads to many purchases of various articles. The concluding metamorphosis of a commodity thus constitutes an aggregation of first metamorphoses of various other commodities.
If we now consider the completed metamorphosis of a com- modity, as a whole, it appears in the first place, that it is made up of two opposite and complementary movements, C — M and M — C. These two antithetical transmutations of a commodity are brought about by two antithetical social acts on the part of the owner, and these acts in their turn stamp the character of the economical parts played by him. As the person who makes a sale, he is a seller; as the person who makes a pur- chase, he is a buyer. But just as, upon every such transmu- tation of a commodity, its two forms, commodity-form and money-form, exist simultaneously but at opposite poles, so every seller has a buyer opposed to him, and every buyer a seller. While one. particular commodity is going through its
1 " Si l'argent represente, dans nos mains, les choses que nous pouvons desirer d'acheter, il y represente aussi les choses que nous avons vendues pour cet argent." (Mercier de la Riviere 1. c.)
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 125
two transmutations in succession., from a commodity into money and from money into another commodity, the owner of the commodity changes in succession his part from that of seller to that of buyer. These characters of seller and buyer are therefore not permanent, but attach themselves in turns to the various persons engaged in the circulation of commodities.
The complete metamorphosis of a commodity, in its simplest form, implies four extremes, and three dramatis personse. First, a commodity comes face to face with money ; the latter is the form taken by the value of the former, and exists in all its hard reality, in the pocket of the buyer. A commodity- owner is thus brought into contact with a possessor of money. So soon, now, as the commodity has been changed into money, the money becomes its transient equivalent-form, the use-value of which equivalent-form is to be found in the bodies of other commodities. Money, the final term of the first transmutation, is at the same time the starting point for the second. The person who is a seller in the first transac- tion thus becomes a buyer in the second, in which a third commodity-owner appears on the scene as a seller.1
The two phases, each inverse to the other, that make up the metamorphosis of a commodity constitute together a circular movement, a circuit: commodity-form, stripping off of this form, and return to the commodity-form. No doubt, the com- modity appears here under two different aspects. At the start- ing point it is not a use-value to its owner; at the finishing point it is. So, too, the money appears in the first phase as a solid crystal of value, a crystal into which the commodity eagerly solidifies, and in the second, dissolves into the mere transient equivalent-form destined to be replaced by a use- value.
The two metamorphoses constituting the circuit are at the same time two inverse partial metamorphoses of two other commodities. One and the same commodity, the linen, opens the series of its own metamorphoses, and completes the meta- morphosis of another (the wheat). In the first phase or sale,
1 "II y a done . . . quatre termes et trois contractants, dont l'un intervient deux fois." (Le Trosne 1. c. p. 909.)
126 Capitalist Production.
the linen plays these two parts in its own person. But, then, changed into gold, it completes its own second and final meta- morphosis, and helps at the same time to accomplish the first metamorphosis of a third commodity. Hence the circuit made Dy one commodity in the course of its metamorphoses is inextri- cably mixed up with the circuits of other commodities. The total of all the different circuits constitutes the circulation of commodities.
The circulation of commodities differs from the direct ex- change of products (barter), not only in form, but in substance. Only consider the course of events. The weaver has, as a matter of fact, exchanged his linen for a Bible, his own com- modity for that of some one else. But this is true only so far as he himself is concerned. The seller of the Bible, who pre- fers something to warm his inside, no more thought of exchang- ing his Bible for linen than our weaver knew that wheat had been exchanged for his linen. B's commodity replaces that of A, but A and B do not mutually exchange those commodities. It may, of course, happen that A and B make simultaneous purchases, the one from the other ; but such exceptional trans- actions are by no means the necessary result of the general con- ditions of the circulation of commodities. We see here, on the one hand, how the exchange of commodities breaks through all local and personal bounds inseparable from direct barter, and develops the circulation of the products of social labor; and on the other hand, how it develops a whole network of so- cial relations spontaneous in their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors. It is only because the farmer has sold his wheat that the weaver is enabled to sell his linen, only because the weaver has sold his linen that our Hotspur is enabled to sell his Bible, and only because the latter has sold the water of everlasting life that the distiller is enabled to sell his eau-de-vie, and so on.
The process of circulation, therefore, does not, like direct barter of products, become extinguished upon the use values changing places and hands. The money does not vanish on dropping out of the circuit of the metamorphosis of a given commodity. It is constantly being precipitated into new
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 127
places in the arena of circulation vacated by other commodities. In the complete metamorphosis of the linen, for example, linen — money — Bible, the linen first falls out of circulation, and money steps into its place. Then the Bible falls out of circula- tion, and again money takes its place. When one commodity replaces another, the money commodity always sticks to the hands of some third person.1 Circulation sweats money from every pore.
Nothing can be more childish than the dogma, that because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities necessarily implies an equili- brium of sales and purchases. If this means that the number of actual sales is equal to the number of purchases, it is mere tautology. But its real purport is to prove that every seller brings his buyer to market with him. Nothing of the kind. The sale and the purchase constitute one identical act, an exchange between a commodity-owner and an owner of money, between two persons as opposed to each other as the two poles of a magnet. They form two distinct acts, of polar and oppo- site characters, when performed by one single person. Hence the identity of sale and purchase implies that the commodity is useless, if, on being thrown into the alchemistical retort of circulation, it does not come out again in the shape of money ; if, in other words, it cannot be sold by its owner, and there- fore be bought by the owner of the money That identity fur- ther implies that the exchange, if it does take place, constitutes a period of rest, an interval, long or short, in the life of the commodity. Since the first metamorphosis of a commodity is at once a sale and a purchase, it is also an independent process in itself. The purchaser has the commodity, the seller has the money, i.e., a commodity ready to go into circulation at any time. No one can sell unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has just sold. Circulation bursts through all restrictions as to time, place, and individuals, imposed by direct barter, and this it effects by splitting up, into the antithesis of a sale and a purchase, the
1 Self-evident as this may be, it is nevertheless for the most part unobserved by political economists, and especially by the " Freetrader Vulgaris."
128 Capitalist Production.
direct identity that in barter does exist between the alienation of one's own and the acquisition of some other man's product. To say that these two independent and antithetical acts have an intrinsic unity, are essentially one, is the same as to say that this intrinsic oneness expresses itself in an external, antithesis. If the interval in time between the two comple- mentary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity becomes too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase becomes too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing — a crisis. The antithesis, use-value and value ; the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularized concrete kind of labour has to pass for abstract human labour ; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things ; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent in com- modities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of a commod- ity. These modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crisis. The conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of a long series of rela- tions, that, from our present standpoint of simple circulation, have as yet no existence.1
b. The currency2 of money.
The change of form, C — M — C, by which the circulation of the material products of labour is brought about, requires that
1 See my observations on James Mill in "Critique, &c," p. 123—125. With regard to this subject, we may notice two methods characteristic of apologetic economy. The first is the identification of the circulation of commodities with the direct bar- ter of products, by simple abstraction from their points of difference; the second is, the attempt to explain away the contradictions of capitalist production, by reducing the relations between the persons engaged in that mode of production, to the simple relations arising out of the circulation of commodities. The production and circula- tion of commodities are, however, phenomena that occur to a greater or less extent in modes of production the most diverse. If we are acquain'ed with nothing but the abstract categories of circulation, which are common to all these modes of pro- duction, we cannot possibly know anything of the specific points of difference of those modes, nor pronounce any judgment upon them. In no science is such a big fuss made with commonplace truisms as in political economy. For instance, J. B. Say sets himself up as a judge of crises, because, forsooth, he knows that a com- modity is a product.
2 Translator's note. — This word is here used in its original signification of tb«
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 129
a given value in the shape of a commodity shall begin the pro- cess, and shall, also in the shape of a commodity, end it. The movement of the commodity is therefore a circuit. On the other hand, the form of this movement precludes a circuit from being made by the money. The result is not the return of the money, but its continued removal further and further away from its starting-point. So long as the seller sticks fast to his money, which is the transformed shape of his commodity, that commodity is still in the first phase of its metamorphosis, and has completed only half its course. But so soon as he com- pletes the process, so soon as he supplements his sale by a pur- chase, the money again leaves the hands of its possessor. It is true that if the weaver, after buying the Bible, sells more- linen, money comes back into his hands. But this return is not owing to the circulation of the first 20 yards of linen ; that cir- culation resulted in the money getting into the hands of the seller of the Bible. The return of money into the hands of the weaver is brought about only by the renewal or repetition of the process of circulation with a fresh commodity, which renewed process ends with the same result as its predecessor did. Hence the movement directly imparted to money by the circulation of commodities takes the form of a constant motion away from its starting point, of course from the hands of one commodity owner into those of another. This course consti- tutes its currency (cours de la monnaie).
The currency of money is the constant and monotonous re- petition of the same process. The commodity is always in the hands of the seller ; the money, as a means of purchase, always in the hands of the buyer. And money serves as a means of purchase by realising the price of the commodity. This reali- sation transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer, and removes the money from the hands of the buyer into those of the seller, where it again goes through the same process with another commodity That this one-sided character of the moneys motion arises out of the two-sided character of the commodity's motion, is. a circumstance that is veiled over.
course or track pursued by money as it changes from hand to hand, a course which essentially differs from circulation.
I
130 Capitalist Production.
The very nature of the circulation of commodities begets the op- posite appearance. The first metamorphosis of a commodity is visibly, not only the money's movement, but also that of the commodity itself; in the second metamorphosis, on the con- trary, the movement appears to us as the movement of the money alone. In the first phase of its circulation the com- modity changes place with the money. Thereupon the com- modity, under its aspect of a useful object, falls out of circulation into consumption.1 In its stead we have its value- shape — the money. It then goes through the second phase of its circulation, not under its own natural shape, but under the shape of money. The continuity of the movement is therefore kept up by the money alone, and the same movement that as regards the commodity consists of two processes of an anti- thetical character, is; when considered as the movement of the money, always one and the same process, a continued change of places with ever fresh commodities. Hence the result brought about by the circulation of commodities, namely, the replacing of one commodity by another, takes the appear- ance of having been effected not by means of the change of form of the commodities, but rather by the money acting as a medium of circulation, by an action that circulates commodi- ties, to all appearance motionless in themselves, and transfers them from hands in which they are non-use-values, to hands in which they are use-values; and that in a direction constantly opposed to the direction of the money. The latter is con- tinually withdrawing commodities from circulation and step- ping into their places, and in this way continually moving further and further from its starting-point. Hence, although the movement of the money is merely the expression of the circulation of commodities, yet the contrary appears to be the actual fact, and the circulation of commodities seems to be the result of the movement of the money.2
1 Even when the commodity is sold over and over again, a phenomenon that at present has no existence for us, it falls, when definitely sold for the last time, out of the sphere of circulation into that of consumption, where it serves either au means of subsistence or means of production.
2 " II (l'argent) n'a d'autre mouvement que celui qui lui est imprime par lcs pro> ductions." (Le Trosne I.e. p. 885.)
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 13B
Again, money functions as a means of circulation, only because in it the values of commodities have independent reality. Hence its movement, as the medium of circulation, is, in fact, merely the movement of commodities while changing their forms. This fact must therefore make itself plainly vis- ible in the currency of money. The twofold change of form in a commodity is reflected in the twice repeated change of place of the same piece of money during the complete metamorphosis of a commodity, and in its constantly repeated change of place, as metamorphosis follows metamorphosis, and each becomes interlaced with the others.
The linen, for instance, first of all exchanges its commodity- form for its money-form. The last term of its first metamor- phosis (C — M), or the money-form, is the first term of its final metamorphosis (M — C), of its re-conversion into a useful commodity, the Bible. But each of these changes of form is accomplished by an exchange between commodity and money, by their reciprocal displacement. The same pieces of coin, in the first act, changed places with the linen, in the second, with the Bible. They are displaced twice. The first metamorpho- sis puts them into the weaver's pocket, the second draws them out of it. The two inverse changes undergone by the same commodity are reflected in the displacement, twice repeated, but in opposite directions, of the same pieces of coin.
If, on the contrary, only one phase of the metamorphosis is gone through, if there are only sales or only purchases, then a given piece of money changes its place only once. Its second change corresponds to and expresses the second metamorphosis of the commodity, its re-conversion from money into another commodity intended for use. It is a matter of course, that all this is applicable to the simple circulation of commodities alone, the only form that we are now considering.
Every commodity, when it first steps into circulation, and undergoes its first change of form, does so only to fall out of circulation again and to be replaced by other commodities. Money, on the contrary, as the medium of circulation, keeps continually within the sphere of circulation, and moves about
132 Capitalist Production.
in it. The question therefore arises, how much money this sphere constantly absorbs ?
In a given country there take place every day at the same time, but in different localities, numerous one-sided metamor- phoses of commodities, or, in other words, numerous sales and numerous purchases. The commodities are equated before- hand in imagination, by their prices, to definite quantities of money. And since, in the form of circulation now under con- sideration, money and commodities always come bodily face to face, one at the positive pole of purchase, the other at the negative pole of sale, it is clear that the amount of the means of circulation required, is determined beforehand by the sum of the prices of all these commodities. As a matter of fact, the money in reality represents the quantity or sum of gold ideally expressed beforehand by the sum of the prices of the com- modities. The equality of these two sums is therefore self- evident. We know, however, that, the values of commodities remaining constant, their prices vary with the value of gold (the material of money), rising in proportion as it falls, and falling in proportion as it rises. Now if, in consequence of such a rise or fall in the value of gold, the sum of the prices of commodities fall or rise, the quantity of money in currency must fall or rise to the same extent. The change in the quantity of the circulating medium is, in this case, it is true, caused by money itself, yet not in virtue of its function as a medium of circulation, but of its function as a measure of value. First, the price of the commodities varies inversely as the value of the money, and then the quantity of the medium of circulation varies directly as the price of the commodities. Exactly the same thing would happen if, for instance, instead of the value of gold falling, gold were re- placed by silver as the measure of value, or if, instead of the value of silver rising, gold were to thrust silver out from being the measure of value. In the one case, more silver would be current than gold was before; in the other case, less gold would be current than silver was before. In each case the "value of the material of money, i.e., the value of the com- inodity that serves as the measure of value, would have under-
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 133
gone a change, and therefore, so, too, would the prices of com- modities which express their values in money, and so, too, would the quantity of money current whose function it is to realise those prices. We have already seen, that the sphere of circulation has an opening through which gold (or the material of money generally ) enters into it as a commodity with a given value. Hence, when money enters on its functions as a measure of value, when it expresses prices, its value is already determined. If now its value fall, this fact is first evidenced by a change in the prices of those commodities that are directly bartered for the precious metals at the sources of their production. The greater part of all other commodities-, especially in the imperfectly developed stages of civil society, will continue for a long time to be estimated by the former antiquated and illusory value of the measure of value. Nevertheless, one commodity infects another through their common value-relation, so that their prices, expressed in gold or in silver, gradually settle down into the proportions deter- mined by their comparative values, until finally the values of all commodities are estimated in terms of the new value of the metal that constitutes money. This process is accompanied by the continued increase in the quantity of the precious metals, an increase caused by their streaming in to replace the articles directly bartered for them at their sources of production. In proportion therefore as commodities in general acquire their true prices, in proportion as their values become estimated according to the fallen value of the precious metal, in the same proportion the quantity of that metal necessary for realis- ing those new prices is provided beforehand. A one-sided observation of the results that followed upon the discovery of fresh supplies of gold and silver, led some economists in the 17th, and particularly in the 18th century, to the false con- clusion, that the prices of commodities had gone up in conse- quence of the increased quantity of gold and silver serving as means of circulation. Henceforth we shall consider the value of gold to be given, as, in fact, it is momentarily whenever we estimate the price of a commodity.
On this supposition then, the quantity of the medium of
134 Capitalist Production.
circulation is determined by the sum of the prices that have to be realised. If now we further suppose the price of each com- modity to be given, the sum of the prices clearly depends on the mass of commodities in circulation. It requires but little racking of brains to comprehend that if one quarter of wheat cost £2, 100 quarters will cost £200, 200 quarters £400, and so on, that consequently the quantity of money that changes place with the wheat, when sold, must increase with the quan- tity of that wheat.
If the mass of commodities remain constant, the quantity of circulating money varies with the fluctuations in the prices of those commodities. It increases and diminishes because the sum of the prices increases or diminishes in consequence of the change of price. To produce this effect, it is by no means requisite that the prices of all commodities should rise or fall simultaneously. A rise or a fall in the prices of a number of leading articles, is sufficient in the one case to increase, in the other to diminish, the sum of the prices of all commodities, and, therefore, to put more or less money in circulation. Whether the change in the price correspond to an actual change of value in the commodities, or whether it be the result of mere fluctuations in market prices, the effect on the quan- tity of the medium of circulation remains the same.
Suppose the following articles to be sold or partially meta- morphosed simultaneously in different localities: say, one quarter of wheat, 20 yards of linen, one Bible, and 4 gallons of brandy. If the price of each article be £2, and the sum of the prices to be realised be consequently £8, it follows that £8 in money must go into circulation. If, on the other hand, these same articles are links in the following chain of metamor- phoses: 1 quarter of wheat — £2 — 20 yards of linen — £2 — 1 Bible — £2 — 4 gallons of brandy — £2, a chain that is already well-known to us, in that case the £2 cause the different com- modities to circulate one after the other, and after realizing their prices successively, and therefore the sum of those prices, £8, they come to rest at last in the pocket of the distiller. The £2 thus make four moves. This repeated change of place of the same pieces of money corresponds to the double change
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 1351
in form of the commodities, to their motion in opposite direc- tions through two stages of circulation, and to the interlacing of the metamorphoses of different commodities.1 These anti- thetic and complementary phases, of which the process of met- amorphosis consists, are gone through, not simultaneously, but successively. Time is therefore required for the completion of the series. Hence the velocity of the currency of money is measured by the number of moves made by a given piece of money in a given time. Suppose the circulation of the 4 ar- ticles takes a day. The sum of the prices to be realised in the day is £8, the number of moves of the two pieces of money is four, and the quantity of money circulating is £2. Hence, for a given interval of time during the process of circulation, we have the following relation : the quantity of money functioning as the circulating medium is equal to the sum of the prices of the commodities divided by the number of moves made by coins of the same denomination. This law holds generally.
The total circulation of commodities in a given country during a given period is made up on the one hand of numerous isolated and simultaneous partial metamorphoses, sales which are at the same time purchases, in» which each coin changes its place only once, or makes only one move; on the other hand, of numerous, distinct series of metamorphoses partly running side by side, and partly coalescing with each other, in each of which series each coin makes a number of moves, the number being greater or less according to circumstances. The total number of moves made by all the circulating coins of one denomination being given, we can arrive at the average num- ber of moves made by a single coin of that denomination, or at the average velocity of the currency of money. The quantity of money thrown into the circulation at the beginning of each, day is of course determined by the sum of the prices of all the commodities circulating simultaneously side by side. But once in circulation, coins are, so to say, made responsible for one another. If the one increase its velocity, the other either
1 " Ce sont les productions qui le (l'argent) mettent en mouvement et le font circuler . . . La celerite de son mouvement (sc. de l'argent) supplee a sa quantite. Lorsqu'il en est besoin, il ne fait que glisser d'une main dans l'autre sans s'arreter un instant." (Le Trosne 1. c. pp. 915, 916.)
136 Capitalist Production.
retards its own, or altogether falls out of circulation ; for the circulation can absorb only such a quantity of gold as when multiplied by the mean number of moves made by one single coin or element, is equal to the sum of the prices to be real- ised. Hence if the number of moves made by the separate pieces increase, the total number of those pieces in circulation diminishes. If the number of the moves diminish, the total number of pieces increases. Since the quantity of money cap- able of being absorbed by the circulation is given for a given mean velocity of currency, all that is necessary in order to ab- stract a given number of sovereigns from the circulation is to throw the same number of one-pound notes into it, a trick well known to all bankers.
Just as the currency of money, generally considered, is but a reflex of the circulation of commodities, or of the antithetical metamorphoses they undergo, so, too, the velocity of that cur- rency reflects the rapidity with which commodities change their forms, the continued interlacing of one series of meta- morphoses with- another, the hurried social interchange of matter, the rapid disappearance of commodities from the sphere of circulation, and the equally rapid substitution of fresh ones in their places. Hence, in the velocity of the cur- rency we have the fluent unity of the antithetical and com- plementary phases, the unity of the conversion of the useful aspect of commodities into their value-aspect, and their re-con- version from the latter aspect to the former, or the unity of the two processes of sale and purchase. On the other hand, the retardation of the currency reflects the separation of these two processes into isolated antithetical phases, reflects the stagna- tion in the change of form, and therefore, in the social inter- change of matter. The circulation itself, of course, gives no clue to the origin of this stagnation ; it merely puts in evidence the phenomenon itself. The general public, who, simultane- ously, with the retardation of the currency, see money appear and disappear less frequently at the periphery of circulation, naturally attribute this retardation to a quantitive deficiency in the circulating medium.1.
1 Money being . . . the common measure of buying and selling, every body who
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 137
The total quantity of money functioning during a given period as the circulating medium, is determined, on the one hand, by the sum of the prices of the circulating commodities, and on the other hand, by the rapidity with which the anti- thetical phases of the metamorphoses follow one another. On this rapidity depends what proportion of the sum of the prices can, on the average, be realised by each single coin. But the sum of the prices of the circulating commodities depends on the quantity, as well as on the prices, of the commodities. These three factors, however, state of prices, quantity of circu- lating commodities, and velocity of money-currency, are all variable. Hence, the sum of the prices to be realised, and consequently the quantity of the circulating medium depend- ing on that sum, will vary with the numerous variations of these three factors in combination. Of these variations we shall consider those alone that have been the most important in the history of prices.
While prices remain constant, the quantity of the circulat- ing medium may increase owing to the number of circulating commodities increasing, or to the velocity of currency decreasr ing, or to a combination of the two. On the other hand the
hath anything to sell, and cannot procure chapmen for it, is presently apt to think, that want of money in the kingdom, or country, is the cause why his goods do not go off; and so, want of money is the common cry; which is a great mistake. . . What do these people want, who cry out for money? . . . The farmer complains ... he thinks that were more money in the country, he should have a price for his goods. Then it seems money is not his want, but a price for his corn and cattel, which he would sell, but cannot. . . Why cannot he get a price? ... (1) Either there is too much corn and cattel in the country, so that most who come to market have need of selling, as he hath, and few of buying; or (2) There wants the usual vent abroad by transportation. . . ; or (3) The consumption fails, as when men, by reason of poverty, do not spend so much in their houses as formerly they did; wherefore it is not the increase of specific money, which would at all advance the farmer's goods, but the removal of any of these three causes, which do truly keep down the market. . . . The merchant and shopkeeper want money in the same manner, that is, they want a vent for the goods they deal in, by reason that the markets fail "... [A nation] " never thrives better, than when riches are tost from hand to hand." (Sir Dudley North: " Discourses upon Trade," Lond. 1691, pp. 11-15, passim.) Herrenschwand's fanciful notions amount merely to this, that the antagonism, which has its origin in the nature of commodities, and is repro- duced in their circulation, can be removed by increasing the circulating medium. But if, on the one hand, it is a popular delusion to ascribe stagnation in production and circulation to insufficiency of the circulating medium, it by no means follows, on the other hand, that an actual paucity of the medium in consequence, e.g., of bungling legislative interference with the regulation of currency, may not give rise to such stagnation.
238 Capitalist Production.
quantity of the circulating medium may decrease with a decreasing number of commodities, or with an increasing rapidity of their circulation.
With a general rise in the prices of commodities, the quan- tity of the circulating medium will remain constant, provided the number of commodities in* the circulation decrease propor- tionally to the increase in their prices, or provided the velocity of currency increase at the same rate as prices rise, the number of commodities in circulation remaining constant. The quan- tity of the circulating medium may decrease, owing to the num- ber of commodities decreasing more rapidly ; or to the veloc- ity of currency increasing more rapidly, than prices rise.
With a general fall in the prices of commodities, the quantity of the circulating medium will remain constant, provided the number of commodities increase proportionately to their fall in price, or provided the velocity of currency decrease in the same proportion. The quantity of the circulating medium will increase, provided the number of commodities increase quicker, or the rapidity of circulation decrease quicker, than the prices fall.
The variations of the different factors may mutually compen- sate each other, so that notwithstanding their continued in- stability, the sum of the prices to be realised and the quantity of money in circulation remains constant; consequently, we find, especially if we take long periods into consideration, that the deviations from the average level, of the quantity of money current in any country, are much smaller than we should at first sight expect, apart of course from excessive perturbations periodically arising from industrial and commercial crises, or, less frequently, from fluctuations in the value of money.
The law, that the quantity of the circulating medium is determined by the sum of the prices of the commodities circulating, and the average velocity of currency1 may also be
1 " There is a certain measure and proportion of money requisite to drive the trade of a nation, more or less than which would prejudice the same. Just as there is a certain proportion of farthings necessary in a small retail trade, to change sil- ver money, and to even such reckonings as cannot be adjusted with the smallest silver pieces. . . . Now, as the proportion of the number of farthings requisite in commerce is to be taken from the number of people, the frequency of their
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 139
stated as follows : given the sum of the values of commodities, and the average rapidity of their metamorphoses, the1 quantity of precious metal current as money depends on the value of that precious metal. The erroneous opinion that it is, on the contrary, prices that are determined by the quantity of the circulating medium, and that the latter depends on the quantity of the precious metals in a country ;* this opinion was based by those who first beheld it, on the absurd hypothesis that commodities are without a price, and money without a value, when they first enter into circulation, and that, once in the circulation, an aliquot part of the medley of commodities is exchanged for an aliquot part of the heap of precious metals.2
exchanges: as also, and principally, from the value of the smallest silver pieces of money; so in like manner, the proportion of money [gold and silver specie] requis- ite in our trade, is to be likewise taken from the frequency of commutations, and from the bigness of the payments." (William Petty. " A Treatise on Taxes and Contributions." Lond. 1662, p. 17.) The Theory of Hume was defended against the attacks of J. Steuart and others, by A. Young, in his '" Political Arithmetic," Lond. 1774, in which work there is a special chapter entitled " Prices depend on quantity of money," at p. 112, sqq. I have stated in "Critique, &c," p. 232: " He (Adam Smith) passes over without remark the question as to the quantity of coin in circulation, and treats money quite wrongly as a mere commodity." This statement applies only in so far as Adam Smith, ex officio, treats of money. Now and then, however, as in his criticism of the earlier systems of political economy, he takes the right view. " The quantity of coin in every country is regulated by the value of the commodities which are to be circulated by it. . . . The value of the goods annually bought and sold in any country requires a certain quantity of money to circulate and distribute them to their proper consumers, and can give employment to no more. The channel of circulation necessarily draws to itself a sum sufficient to fill it, and never admits any more." (" Wealth of Na- tions." Bk. IV., ch. I.) In like manner, ex officio, he opens his work with an apotheosis on the division of labour. Afterwards, in the last book which treats of the sources of public revenue, he occasionally repeats the denunciations of the division of labour made by his teacher, A. Ferguson.
1 "The prices of things will certainly rise in every nation, as the gold and silver increase amongst the people; and consequently, where the gold and silver de- crease in any nation, the prices of all things must fall proportionably to such decrease of money." (Jacob Vanderlint: "Money answers all Things." Lond. 1734, p. 5.) A careful comparison of this book with Hume's "Essays," proves to my mind without doubt that Hume was acquainted with and made use of Van- derlint's Svork, which is certainly an important one. The opinion that prices are determined by the quantity of the circulating medium, was also held by Barbon and other much earlier writers. " No inconvenience," says Vanderlint, " can arise by an unrestrained trade, but very great advantage; since, if the cash of the na- tion be decreased by it, which prohibitions are designed to prevent, those nations that get the cash will certainly find everything advance in price, as the cash in- creases amongst them. And . . . our manufactures, and everything else, will soon become so moderate as to turn the balance of trade in our favour, and thereby fetch the money back again." (1. c, pp. 43, 44.)
2 That the price of each single kind of commodity forms part of the sum of th«
140 Capitalist Production.
c. Coin and symbols of value.
That money takes the shape of coin, springs from its function as the circulating medium. The weight of gold represented in imagination by the prices or money-names of commodities, must confront those commodities, within the circulation, in the shape of coins or pieces of gold of a given denomination. Coining, like the establishment of a standard of prices, is the business of the State. The different national uniforms worn at home by gold and silver as coins, and doffed again in the market of the world, indicate the separation between the internal or national spheres of the circulation of commodities, and their universal sphere.
The only difference, therefore, between coin and bullion, is one of shape, and gold can at any time pass from one form to
prices of all the commodities in circulation, is a self-evident proposition. But how use-values, which are incommensurable with regard to each other, are to be ex- changed, en masse, for the total sum of gold and silver in a country, is quite incomprehensible. If we start from the notion that all commodities together form one single commodity, of which each is but an aliquot part, we get the following beautiful result: The total commodity = x cwt. of gold; commodity A = an aliquot part of the total commodity = the same aliquot part of x cwt. of gold. This is stated in all seriousness by Montesquieu: " Si Ton compare la masse de l'or et de l'argent qui est dans le monde avec la somme des marchandises qui y sont, il est certain que chaque denree ou marchandise, en particulier, pourra etre comparee a une certaine portion de le masse entiere. Supposons qu'il n'y ait qu'une seule denree ou marchandise dans le monde, ou qu'il n'y ait qu'une seule qui s'achete, et qu'elle se divise comme l'argent: Cette partie de cette marchandise repondra a une partie de la masse de l'argent; la moitie du total de l'une a la moitie du total de l'autre, &c. . . . l'etablissement du prix des choses depend toujours fondamentalement de la raison du total des choses au total des signes." (Montes- quieu 1. c. t III., pp. 122, 13.) As to the further development of this theory by Ricardo and his disciples, James Mill, Lord Overstone, and others, see "Critique of Political Economy," pp. 235, ff. John Stuart Mill, with his usual eclectic logic, understands how to hold at the same time the view of his father, James Mill, and the opposite view. On a comparison of the text of his compen- dium, "Principles of Pol. Econ.," with his preface to the first edition, in which preface he announces himself as the Adam Smith of his day — ■ we do not know whether to admire more the simplicity of the man, or that of the public, who took him, in good faith, for the Adam Smith he announced himself to be, although he bears about as much resemblance to Adam Smith as say General Williams, of Kars, to the Duke of Wellington. The original researches of Mr. J. S. Mill, which are neither extensive nor profound, in the domain of political economy, will be found mustered in rank and file in his little work, " Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy," which appeared in 1844. Locke asserts point blank the con- nexion between the absence of value in gold and silver, and the determination of their values by quantity alone, "Mankind having consented to put an imaginary value upon gold and silver . . . the intrinsik value, regarded in these metals, is nothing but the quantity." ("Some considerations," &c, 1691, Works Ed. 1777, vol. II., j>. IS.'*
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 141
tEe other.1 But no sooner does coin leave the mint, than it immediately finds itself on the high-road to the melting pot. During their currency, coins wear away, some more, others less. Name and substance, nominal weight and real weight, begin their process of separation. Coins of the same denom- ination become different in value, because they are different in weight. The weight of gold fixed upon as the standard of prices, deviates from the weight that serves as the circulating medium, and the latter thereby ceases any longer to be a real equivalent of the commodities whose prices it realises. The history of coinage during the middle ages and down into the 18th century, records the ever renewed confusion arising from this cause. The natural tendency of circulation to convert coins into a mere semblance of what, they profess to be, into a symbol of the weight of metal they are officially supposed to contain, is recognised by modern legislation, which fixes the loss of weight sufficient to demonetise a gold coin, or to make it no longer legal tender.
The fact that the currency of coins itself effects a separation between their nominal and their real weight, creating a dis- tinction between them as mere pieces of metal on the one hand, and as coins with a definite function on the other — this fact implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic coins by tokens of some other material, by symbols serving the same purposes as coins. The practical difficulties in the way of coining extremely minute quantities of gold or silver, and the circumstance that at first the less precious metal is used as a measure of value instead of the more precious, copper instead
1 It lies, of course, entirely beyond my purpose to take into consideration such details as the seigniorage on minting. I will, however, cite for the benefit of the romantic sycophant, Adam Midler, who admires the " generous liberality " with which the English Government coins gratuitously, the following opinion of Sir Dudley North : " Silver and gold, like other commodities, have their ebbings and Sowings. Upon the arrival of quantities from Spain . . . it is carried into the Tower, and coined. Not long after there will come a demand for bullion to be exported again. If there is none, but all happens to be in coin, what then? Melt it down again; there's no loss in it, for the coining costs the owner nothing. Thus the nation has been abused, and made to pay for the twisting of straw for asses to eat. If the merchant were made to pay the price of the coinage, he would not have sent his silver to the Tower without consideration; and coined money would always keep a value above uncoined silver." (North, I. c, p. 18.) North was himself one of the foremost merchants in the reign of Charles II.
142 Capitalist Production.
of silver, silver instead of gold, and that the less precious circulates as money until dethroned by the more precious — all these facts explain the parts historically played by silver and copper tokens as substitutes for gold coins. Silver and copper tokens take the place of gold in those regions of the circulation where coins pass from hand to hand most rapidly, and are sub- ject to the maximum amount of wear and tear. This occurs where sales and purchases on a very small scale are continually happening. In order to prevent these satellites from establish- ing themselves permanently in the place of gold, positive enactments determine the extent to which they must be com- pulsorily received as payment instead of gold. The particular tracks pursued by the different species of coin in currency, run naturally into each other. The tokens keep company with gold, to pay fractional parts of the smallest gold coin ; gold is, on the one hand, constantly pouring into retail circulation, and on the other hand is as constantly being thrown out again by being changed into tokens.1
The weight of metal in the silver and copper tokens is arbitrarily fixed by law. When in currency, they wear away even more rapidly than gold coins. Hence their functions are totally independent of their weight, and consequently of all value. The function of gold as coin becomes completely inde- pendent of the metallic value of that gold. Therefore things that are relatively without value, such as paper notes, can serve as coins in its place. This purely symbolic character is to a certain extent masked in metal tokens. In paper money it stands out plainly. In fact, ce n'est oue le premier pas qui coute.
We allude here only to inconvertible paper money issued by
1 If silver never exceed what is wanted for the smaller payments, it cannot be collected in sufficient quantities for the larger payments . . . the use ot gold in the main payments necessarily implies also its use in the retail trade: those who have gold coin offering them for small purchases, and receiving with the com- modity purchased a balance of silver in return; by which means the surplus of silver that would otherwise encumber the retail dealer, is drawn off and dis- persed into general circulation. But if there is as much silver as will transact the small payments independent of gold, the retail trader must then receive silver for small purchases; and it must of necessity accumulate in his hands." (David Buchanan. " Inquiry into the Taxation and Commercial Policy of Great Britain.'* Edinburgh, 1844, pp. 248, 249.)
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 143
the State and having compulsory circulation. It has its immediate origin in the metallic currency. Money based upon credit implies on the other hand conditions, which from our standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities, are as yet totally unknown to us. But we may affirm this much, that just as true paper money takes its rise in the function of money as the circulating medium, so money based upon credit takes root spontaneously in the function of money as the means of payment.1
The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their various denominations, say £1, £5, &c, are printed. In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold. Such a law exists; stated simply, it is as follows: the issue of paper money must not exceed in amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually circulate if not replaced by symbols. Now the quantity of gold which the circulation can absorb, constantly fluctuates about a given level. Still, the mass of the circulat- ing medium in a given country never sinks below a certain minimum easily ascertained by actual experience. The fact that this minimum mass continually undergoes changes in its constituent parts, or that the pieces of gold of which it consists are being constantly replaced by fresh ones, causes of course no change either in its amount or in the continuity of its circula-
1 The mandarin Wan-mao-in, the Chinese Chancellor of the Exchequer, took it into his head one day to lay before the Son of Heaven a proposal that secretly aimed at converting the assignats of the empire into convertible bank notes. The assignats Committee, in its report of April, 1854, gives him a severe snub- bing. Whether he also received the traditional drubbing with bamboos is not stated. The concluding part of the report is as follows: — "The Committee has carefully examined his proposal and finds that it is entirely in favour of the merchants, and that no advantage will result to the crown." (Arbeiten der Kaiserlich Russischen Gesandtschaft zu Peking fiber China. Aus dem Russischen von Dr. K. Abel und F. A. Mecklenburg. Erster Band. Berlin, 1858, pp. 47, 59.) In his evidence before the Committee of the House of Lords on the Bank Acts, a governor of the Bank of England says with regard to the abrasion of gold coins dur- ing currency: "Every year a fresh class of sovereigns becomes too light. The class which one year passes with full weight, loses enough by wear and tear to draw the scales next year against it." (House of Lords' Committee, 1848, n. 429.)
144 Capitalist Production.
tion. It can therefore be replaced by paper symbols. If, on the other hand, all the conduits of circulation were to-day filled with paper money to the full extent of their capacity for absorbing money, they might to-morrow be overflowing in consequence of a fluctuation in the circulation of commodities. There would no longer be any standard. If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount of gold coins of the like denomination that can actually be current, it would, apart from the danger of falling into general disrepute, re- present only that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the circulation of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented by paper. If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not of £ of an ounce, but of -J of an ounce of gold. The effect would be the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2.
Paper-money is a token representing gold or money. The relation between it and the values of commodities is this, that the latter are ideally expressed in the same quantities of gold that are symbolically represented by the paper. Only in so far as paper-money represents gold, which like all other com- modities has value, is it a symbol of value.1
Finally, some one may ask why gold is capable of being replaced by tokens that have no value ? But, as we have already seen, it is capable of being so replaced only in so far as it functions exclusively as coin, or as the circulating
1 The following passage from Fullarton shows the want of clearness on the part of even the best writers on money, in their comprehension of its various func- tions: " That, as far as concerns our domestic exchanges, all the monetary func- tions which are usually performed by gold and silver coins, may be performed as effectually by a circulation of inconvertible notes, having no value but that factitious and conventional value they derive from the law, is a fact which admits, I conceive, of no denial. Value of this description may be made to answer all the purposes of intrinsic value, and supersede even the necessity for a standard, pro- vided only the quantity of issues be kept under due limitation." (Fullarton: "Regulation of Currencies," London, p. 210.) Because the commodity that serves as money is capable of being replaced in circulation by mere symbols of value, therefore its functions as a measure of value and a standard of prices are declared to be superfluous.
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 145
medium, and as nothing else. Now, money has other functions besides this one, and the isolated function of serving as the mere circulating medium is not necessarily the only one attached to gold coin, although this is the case with those abraded coins that continue to circulate. Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it ac- tually circulates. But this is just the case with that minimum mass of gold, which is capable of being replaced by paper- money. That mass remains constantly within the sphere of circulation, continually functions as a circulating medium, and exists exclusively for that purpose. Its movement therefore represents nothing but the continued alternation of the inverse phases of the metamorphosis C — M — C, phases in which com- modities confront their value-forms, only to disappear again immediately. The independent existence of the exchange value of a commodity is here a transient apparition, by means of which the commodity is immediately replaced by another commodity. Hence, in this process which continually makes money pass from hand to hand, the mere symbolical existence of money suffices. Its functional existence absorbs, so to say, its material existence. Being a transient and objective reflex of the prices of commodities, it serves only as a symbol of itself, and is therefore capable of being replaced by a token.1 One thing is, however, requisite ; this token must have an objective social validity of its own, and this the paper symbol acquires by its forced currency. This compulsory action of the State can^take effect only within that inner sphere of circula- tion which is co-terminous with the territories of the com- munity, but it is also only within that sphere that money completely responds to its function of being the circulating medium, or becomes coin.
1 From the fact that gold and silver, so far as they are coins, or exclusively serve as the medium of circulation, become mere tokens of themselves, Nicholas Barbon deduces the right of Governments " to raise money," that is, to give to the weight of silver that is called a shilling the name of a greater weight, such as a crown; and so to pay creditors shillings, instead of crowns. " Money does wear and grow lighter by often telling over ... It is the denomination and cur- rency of the money that men regard in bargaining, and not the quantity of silver . . . 'Tis the public authority upon the metal that makes it money." (N. Barbon, L c, pp. 29, 30, 25.)
J
146 Capitalist Production.
SECTION 3. MONEY.
The commodity that functions as a measure of value, and, either in its own person or by a representative, as the medium of circulation, is money. Gold (or silver) is therefore money. It functions as money, on the one hand, when it has to be present in its own golden person. It is then the money-com- modity, neither merely ideal, as in its function of a measure of value, nor capable of being represented, as in its function of circulating medium. On the other hand, it also functions as money, when by virtue of its function, whether that function be performed in person or by representative, it congeals into the sole form of value, the only adequate form of existence of exchange-value, in opposition to use-value, represented by all other commodities.
a. Hoarding.
The continual movement in circuits of the two antithetical metamorphoses of commodities, or the never ceasing alternation of sale and purchase, is reflected in the restless currency of money, or in the function that money performs of a perpetuum mobile of circulation. But so soon as the series of metamor- phoses is interrupted, so soon as sales are not supplemented by subsequent purchases, money ceases to be mobilised ; it is trans- formed, as Boisguillebert says, from "meuble" into "im- meuble," from movable into immovable, from coin into money.
With the very earliest development of the circulation of commodities, there is also developed the necessity, and the passionate desire, to hold fast the product of the first metamor- phosis. This product is the transformed shape of the com- modity, or its gold-chrysalis.1 Commodities are thus sold not for the purpose of buying others, but in order to replace their commodity-form by their money-form. From being the mere means of effecting the circulation of commodities, this change of form becomes the end and aim. The changed form of the commodity is thus prevented from functioning as its uncondi-
1 "Une richesse en argent n'est que . . . richesse en productions, convertie? tn argent." (Mercier de la Riviere, 1. c.) "Une valeur en productions n't fait que changer de forme." (Id., p. 486.)
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 147
tionally alienable form^ or as its merely transient money-form. The money becomes petrified into a hoard, and the seller becomes a hoarder of money.
In the early stages of the circulation of commodities, it is the surplus use-values alone that are converted into money. Gold and silver thus become of themselves social expressions for superfluity of wealth. This naive form of hoarding be- comes perpetuated in those communities in which the tra- ditional mode of production is carried on for the supply of a fixed and limited circle of home wants. It is thus with the people of Asia, and particularly of the East Indies. Vander- lint, who fancies that the prices of commodities in a country are determined by the quantity of gold and silver to be found in it, asks himself why Indian commodities are so cheap. An- swer: Because the Hindoos bury their money. From 1602 to 1734, he remarks, they buried 150 millions of pounds sterling of silver, which originally came from America to Europe.1 In the 10 years from 1856 to 1866, England exported to India and China £120,000,000 in silver, which had been received in exchange for Australian gold. Most of the silver exported to China makes its way to India.
As the production of commodities further develops, every producer of commodities is compelled to make sure of the nexus rerum or the social pledge.2 His wants are constantly making themselves felt, and necessitate the continual purchase of other people's commodities, while the production and sale of his own goods require time, and depend upon circumstances. In order then to be able to buy without selling, he must have sold previously without buying. This operation, conducted on a general scale, appears to imply a contradiction. But the precious metals at the sources of their production are directly exchanged for other commodities. And here we have sales (by the owners of commodities) without purchases (by the owners of gold or silver.)3 And subsequent sales, by other
1 " 'Tis by this practice they keep all their goods and manufactures at such layo rates." (Vanderlint, 1. c, p. 96.)
2 Money ... is a pledge." (John Bellers: "Essays about the Poor, Manufac- turers, Trade, Plantations, and Immorality," Lond., 1699, p. 13.)
3 A purchase, in a " categorical " sense, implies that gold and silver are already the converted form of commodities, or the product of a sale.
148 Capitalist Production.
producers, unfollowed by purchases, merely bring about the distribution of the newly produced precious metals among all the owners of commodities. In this way, all along the line of exchange, hoards of gold and silver of varied extent are ac- cumulated. With the possibility of holding and storing up exchange value in the shape of a particular commodity, arises also the greed for gold. Along with the extension of circula- tion, increases the power of money, that absolutely social form of wealth ever ready for use. "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into Paradise." (Columbus in his letter from Jamaica, 1503.) Since gold does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold- crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctse extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy.1 Just as every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money, so money, on its side, like the radical leveller that it is, does away with all distinctions.2 But money itself is a commodity,
1 Henry III., most Christian king of France, robbed cloisters of their relics, and turned them into money. It is well known what part the despoiling of the Delphic Temple, by the Phocians, played in the history of Greece. Temples with the ancients served as the dwellings of the gods of commodities. They were " sacred banks." With the Phoenicians, a trading people par excellence, money was the transmuted shape of everything. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins, who, at the feast of the Goddess of Love, gave themselves up to Strangers, should offer to the goddess the piece of money they received. 2 "Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!
Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair;
Wrong right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
. . . What this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides;
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads;
This yellow slave Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs'd;
Make the hoar leprosy ador'd; place thieves,
And give them title, knee and approbation,
With senators on the bench; this is it,
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again:
..... Come damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind."
(Shakespeare: Timon of Athens.)
Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. 149
an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economical and moral order of things.1 Modem society, which soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,2 greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.
A commodity, in its capacity of a use-value, satisfies a particular want, and is a particular element of material wealth. But the value of a commodity measures the degree of its attraction for all other elements of material wealth, and there- fore measures the social wealth of its owner. To a barbarian owner of commodities, and even to a West-European peasant, value is the same as value-form, and therefore, to him the increase in his hoard of gold and silver is an increase in value. It is true that the value of money varies, at one time in con- sequence of a variation in its own value, at another, in consequence of a change in the value of commodities. But this, on the one hand, does not prevent 200 ounces of gold from still containing more value than 100 ounces, nor, on the other hand, does it hinder the actual metallic form of this article from continuing to be the universal equivalent form of all other commodities, and the immediate social incarnation of all human labour. The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. In its qualitative aspect, or formally considered, money has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal re- presentative of material wealth, because it is directly convert- ible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and therefore, as a
1 " Ovokv yap avSpdjirolcnv olov dpyvpos
Kaicbv vofiiS/xa e/3\ao-T€- tovto ko.1 v6\ei% Hopdel, t65' dvdpas i%avi<jT-t]<siv 86p.u>v. T65' iKOiddtricei Kal irapaX\&<r<r(t (ppivas Xprjaras irpbs aicrxpa avdpwwois t\ei» Kal iravTos epyov dvcrcr^fieiav eldivai.
(Sophocles, Antigone.) 3 '"EXir/f 01/0-775 rrjs 7rXeoi/e|tos di-dlety e« twp fivx&v Trjsyrjs avrbv rbv nXoiSrwra." (Athen. Deipnos.)
150 Capitalist Production.
means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy. This antag- onism between the quantitive limits of money and its qualita- tive boundlessness, continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like labour of accumulating. It is with him as it is with a conqueror who sees in every new country annexed, only a new boundary.
In order that gold may be held as money, and made to form a hoard, it must be prevented from circulating, or from trans- forming itself into a means of enjoyment. The hoarder, therefore, makes a sacrifice of the lusts of the flesh to his gold fetish. He acts in earnest up to the Gospel of abstention