SINGLENESS OF ITS OFFICE” (Opdyke, [A Treatise on Political Economy, New York, 
1851,] [p.] 267). 

The differentiation of the functions performed by gold, whether 
as universal commodity, coin, raw material for luxury articles, 
material for accumulation, etc., enables them to indicate to the 
senses the succession of the form determinations of money. To 
this differentiation corresponds the fact that gold and silver can 
always be melted down and so again reduced to their purely 
metallic state, and from that state similarly to any other, i.e. that 
gold and silver, in contrast to other commodities, are not bound to 
the definite use form which is imparted to them. They can pass 

2 Marx quotes in Italian.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 457 

from the form of bullion to the form of coin, etc., and back again, 
without losing their value as raw materials, [B’-15] without 
damaging the processes of production and consumption. 

As means of circulation gold and silver have the advantage over 
other commodities in that their high natural specific gravity— 
representing a relatively large weight in a small space—is matched 
by an economic specific gravity, the ability to contain (objectify) 
relatively much labour time, i.e. a large exchange value, in a small 
space. The latter naturally depends on their relatively rare 
occurrence as natural objects. Hence, facility of transportation, 
transfer, etc. In short, the facility of real circulation, which is, 
naturally, the first condition for their economic function as means 
of circulation. 

Finally, as the inert being of value, as the material of hoarding, 
they are relatively indestructible, infinitely durable, not liable to be 
oxidised in the air (“treasures that neither moth nor rust doth 
corrupt”*), are refractory, with gold especially being insoluble in 
acids, except in free chlorine (aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and 
hydrochloric acids). As a main point, one should finally note the 
aesthetic properties of gold and silver, which make them the direct 
manifestation of affluence, ornament, luxury, and spontaneous 
festive moods, of wealth as such. Brightness of colour, malleability, 
facility of being worked with tools, and fitness for ornamentation 
and other purposes. Gold and silver are to some extent a native 
light brought forth from the underworld itself. Apart from the 
rarity of gold and silver, their greater softness, as compared with 
iron and even copper (in the hardened form in which it was used 
by the ancients), makes them unfit for use as instruments of 
production. But the use value of metals largely depends on their 
role in the immediate process of production. Gold and silver are 
also excluded from it, just as they are generally not indispensable 
objects of consumption. 

“Money must have a direct” (use) “value, but one based on a besoin factice» Its 
material must not be indispensable for man’s existence, since the entire quantity of 
money used as coin” //generally as money [which] is also accumulated in the form 
of hoard// “cannot be individually employed; it must always circulate” (H. Storch, 
lc. [Cours d’économie politique], Vol. I, pp. 113, 114). 

(Equally, that part which is accumulated as hoard cannot be 
employed “individually” because the whole point of accumulation 
is to keep it intact.) 

a Matthew 6:19, 20.— Ed. 
b Factitious need.— Ed. 

458 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

That, consequently, is one aspect according to which the nature 
of the use value of gold and silver is reduced to being something 
superfluous, to not entering either in the satisfaction of immediate 
want as object of consumption, or as agent in the immediate 
process of production. That is precisely the aspect according to 
which the use value of money should not come into collision with 
its function of hoard (money) or means of circulation, in other 
words, the need for it as an individual use value should not come 
into collision with the need springing from circulation, from the 
society itself, the need for it as money in any of its determinations. 
That is only the negative aspect. 

In his polemic against money, Peter Martyr, who seems to have 
been very fond of chocolate, says, therefore, of the Bacs or cacao 
which, among other things, served as money among the Mexicans: 

“O blessed money which furnishes mankind with a sweet and nutritious 
beverage and protects its innocent possessors from the infernal disease of avarice, 
since it cannot be long hoarded, nor hidden underground” (De orbe novo).?9 

On the other hand, gold and silver are superfluities not only in 
the negative sense, i.e. are objects which can be dispensed with, 
but their aesthetic properties which make them the material of 
luxury, finery and splendour, make them the positive forms of 
superabundance, or means of satisfying other than everyday wants 
and bare necessities. That is why they have use value in themselves 
apart from their function as money. But just as they are the 
natural representatives of purely quantitative relations—in virtue 
of the sameness of their quality—so also in their individual use 
they are the immediate natural representatives of superabundance 
and so of wealth as such, both because of their natural aesthetic 
properties, and also of their expensiveness. 

Malleability is one of the properties that make gold and silver 
fit for use as material for jewellery. Dazzling to the eye. Exchange 
value is above all an overplus of necessary use values designated 
for exchange. This overplus is exchanged for what is superfluous 
as such, ie. for what goes beyond the bounds of immediate 
necessity; for the festive in contrast to the everyday. Use value as 
such expresses above all the individual’s relation to Nature; 
exchange value, alongside use value, is his command over the use 
values of others, his social relation; and even initially, moreover, 
values of festive use going beyond the bounds of immediate 
necessity. 

The white colour of silver, which reflects all the rays of light in 
their original mix; the red-yellow colour of gold, which absorbs the 

Chapter Two. Money 459 

whole mix of colours of a light beam falling on it and reflects red 
alone. 

Add here what was said earlier about the mining countries.* 

/[In his history of the German language, Grimm shows the 
connection between the names of gold and silver and_ their 
colour.//? 

[B-16] We have seen that gold and silver fail to meet the 
demand being made on them as exchange value become indepen- 
dent, as immediately present money, that of being an unchanging 
value magnitude. Here, their nature as a particular commodity 
enters into conflict with their function as money. But as Aristotle 
already noted, they possess a more permanent value magnitude 
than do other commodities on average. 

For the metallic circulation as such, apart from the general 
effect of the appreciation or depreciation of the precious metals 
on all economic relationships, the fluctuations of the value ratio 
between gold and silver are of particular importance, since they 
continuously serve alongside each other as the material of money 
in one and the same country or in different countries. The purely 
economic causes of these successive changes—conquest and other 
political upheavals which had a great influence on the relative 
value of the precious metals in the ancient world lie beyond the 
bounds of purely economic examination—must be reduced to 
changes in the labour time required for the production of the 
same quantities of these metals. It itself depends, on the one hand, 
on the relative quantities in which gold and silver occur in Nature, 
and on the other, on the greater or lesser difficulty in procuring 
them in their purely metallic state. What was said earlier makes it 
clear that gold, whose extraction from rivers or from alluvial 
deposits does not require either mining or chemical or mechanical 
contrivances, was discovered, despite its greater absolute rarity, 
before silver, and for a long time, despite its greater absolute 
rarity, remained relatively depreciated as compared to silver. That 
is why Strabo’s assertion! that in one Arab tribe 10 pounds of 
gold was given for 1 pound of iron, and 2 pounds of gold for 1 
pound of silver does not appear to be in any way incredible. It is 
clear, on the other hand, that as the productive power of social 
labour develops, the technology, and hence simple labour, 

a See this volume, pp. 440-42.— Ed. 

b J. Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Leipzig, 1853, Vol. 1, pp. 7 and 9 
(cf. this volume, p. 386).— Ed. 

¢ Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, V, 8.— Ed. 

460 Original Text of A Contribution te the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

becomes dearer, and while the original surface sources of gold are 
depleted and the Earth’s crust increasingly opened up, the 
relatively rarer or more frequent occurrence of both metals will 
have a substantial effect on the productivity of labour, and gold 
will appreciate relative to silver. (However, it is not the absolute 
quantitative proportion in which the two metals occur in Nature, 
although an essential moment in the labour time necessary for 
their production, but the labour time itself that determines their 
relative value. That is why although, according to the Paris 
Académie des Sciences (1840), the [quantitative] ratio of silver to 
gold was estimated at 52:1, their value ratio was only 15:1.) 

Given a definite development of the productive power of social 
labour—i.e. the less the significance, on the one hand, of the 
relative mechanical or chemical impediments to be overcome, and, 
on the other hand, of the relative remoteness of the gold- or 
silver-producing countries, the alternative discovery of new gold or 
silver deposits must be of ever more decisive significance, so that 
gold, as against silver, has the chance of being discovered not only 
in mines but also in alluvial deposits. It is quite probable, 
therefore, that there will now again be a reverse movement in the 
value ratio of the two, i.e. a fall in the value of gold as compared 
with that of silver. The discovery of silver mines depends on the 
advance of technology and civilisation in general. Given these, any 
changes in the discovery of rich silver or gold deposits become 
crucial. On the whole, we find a repetition of the same movement 
in the change of the value ratio between gold and silver. The first 
two movements begin with a relative depreciation of gold and end 
with its appreciation. The latter begins with its appreciation and 
seems to be heading towards a re-establishment of its original 
lower value ratio to silver. In ancient Asia, the ratio of gold to 
silver was 6:1 or 8:1 (under Manu’ it was even lower) (thus in 
China and Japan, the latter still existed in the early 19th century); 
10:1, the ratio in Xenophon’s time, can be regarded as the 
average ratio for the middle period of antiquity. In the late 
Roman period—the opening up of the Spanish silver mines by 
Carthage had roughly the same role to play in antiquity as the 
discovery of America had in the new period—the ratio is roughly 
the same as that after the discovery of America, i.e. 14 or 15:1, 
although in Rome we often find an even greater depreciation of 
silver. 

For the Middle Ages, the average ratio can once again be 
re-established as in Xenophon’s time, as 10:1, although that is the 
period in which local fluctuations are extremely great. The 

Chapter Two. Money 461 

average ratio in the centuries following upon the discovery of 
America is 15:1 or 18:1. The new discoveries of gold make it 
probable that the ratio will once again be reduced to 10:1 or 8:1, 
or that, at any rate, there will be a movement in the value ratio of 
the two metals in reverse to that since [B’-17] the 16th century. 
This is not yet the place for an examination of this special 
question in greater depth. 

5) THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LAW 
OF APPROPRIATION IN THE SIMPLE CIRCULATION 

The economic. relations of individuals who are subjects of 
exchange are to be considered here in the simple form in which 
they appear in the process of exchange described above, without 
recourse to more highly developed relations of production. 
Indeed, the economic determinations of form constitute the 
framework within which they enter into intercourse with each 
other (confront each other). 

“The worker has an exclusive right to the value resulting from his labour” 
(Cherbuliez, Richefsse] ou pauvre{té}], Paris, 1841, p. 48).# 

The subjects of the process of exchange appear above all as 
proprietors of commodities. Since on the basis of the simple 
circulation, there is, after all, only one method by means of which 
anyone becomes the proprietor of any commodity, namely, through 
a new equivalent, the property in the commodity preceding the 
exchange, i.e. the property in the commodity appropriated not 
through circulation, the property in the commodity which, on the 
contrary, is still to enter circulation, springs directly from the 
labour of its possessor, with labour as the original mode of 
appropriation. The commodity, as exchange value, is only a 
product [of labour], objectified labour. It is thereby above all the 
objectiveness of him whose labour is represented in it; his own 
objective being for others produced by himself. It is true that the 
production of commodities does not fall within the simple process 
of exchange as it unfolds at the various moments of circulation. 
Commodities are rather implied as finished use values. They must 
be to hand before the exchange begins, simultaneously as it 
happens in buying and selling, or at least as soon as the 
transaction is completed, as in the form of circulation in which 
money serves as means of payment. Whether simultaneously or 
not, they always enter into circulation as being to hand. The 

a Marx quotes in French.— Ed. 

462 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

origination of commodities, and so also the original process of their 
appropriation, lies, therefore, beyond circulation. But since the equiva- 
lent of another can be appropriated only through circulation, 1.e. 
through the alienation of one’s own equivalent, one’s own labour 
must be implied as the original process of appropriation, with 
circulation in effect merely as the mutual exchange of labour 
incarnated in diverse products. 

Labour and property in the results of one’s own labour appear, 
therefore, as the basic prerequisite without which the secondary 
appropriation through circulation would not take place. Within 
circulation, property based on one’s own labour is the basis for the 
appropriation of the labour of others. Indeed, a close look at the 
process of circulation shows that its premiss is that the exchangers 
should appear as the proprietors of the exchange values, i.e. of 
quantities of labour time materialised in use values. How they 
became the proprietors of these commodities is a process running 
behind the back of the simple circulation and ending before it 
begins. Private property is a premiss of circulation, but the process 
of appropriation itself is not revealed, does not appear within 
circulation; it is rather preposited to it. In circulation itself, in the 
process of exchange, as it emerges on the surface of the bourgeois 
society, each gives only while taking, and takes only while giving. 
In order to do the one or the other, he must have. The procedure 
through which he has placed himself in the position of having 
does not constitute any of the moments of circulation itself. The 
subjects are subjects of circulation only as private proprietors of 
exchange value, be it in the form of commodity or in the form of 
money. How they became private proprietors, i.e. how they 
appropriated objectified labour, is a circumstance which appears not 
to fall within the examination of the simple circulation at all. 
However, the commodity is, on the other hand, the premiss of 
circulation. And since from its standpoint, alien commodities, i.e. 
alien labour, can be appropriated only through the alienation of 
one’s own labour, the pre-circulation [B’-18] process of commodity 
appropriation necessarily appears from this standpoint as appropria- 
tion through labour. Since the commodity as exchange value is merely 
objectified labour, and from the standpoint of circulation, itself only 
the movement of exchange value, alien objectified labour can be 
appropriated only through an exchange of equivalent, the 
commodity can, in fact, be nothing but the objectification of one’s own 
labour, and just as the latter is, in fact, the actual process of 
appropriation of the products of Nature, it equally appears as the 
juridical title to property. Circulation merely shows how this 

Chapter Two. Money 463 

immediate appropriation, through the medium of a social opera- 
tion, transforms property in one’s own labour into property in social 
labour. 

That is why all modern economists have proclaimed, in a more 
economic or more juridical manner, one’s own labour to be the 
original title to property, and property in the result of one’s own 
labour, the basic premiss of the bourgeois society. (Cherbuliez: see above. 
See also A. Smith) This premiss itself rests on the premiss of 
exchange value as an economic relationship dominating the whole 
aggregation of relationships of production and commerce, and so is itself 
a historical product of the bourgeois society, the society of the 
developed exchange value. 

On the other hand, since the examination of the more concrete 
economic relationships than those represented by the simple 
circulation seems to bring out laws contradicting [the said law of 
appropriation], all the classical economists, including Ricardo, may 
like to allow this view, springing as it does from the bourgeois society 
itself, the right to be called a universal law, but banish its strict 
reality to the golden age when no property existed as yet. That is to 
say, to an age preceding the economic fall of man, as Boisguil- 
lebert, for example, does. 

That would produce the strange result that the truth about the bourgeois 
society’s law of appropriation would have to be transferred to a time 
when this society itself did not as yet exist, and the basic law of 
property, to the time of propertylessness. This illusion is 
transparent. Production initially rests on the primitive com- 
munities, within which private exchange appears only as a quite 
superficial and incidental exception. But with the historical 
disintegration of these communities, relations of domination and 
servitude, relations of violence at once set in, and they are in 
crying contradiction with the mild commodity circulation and its 
corresponding relations. However that may be, the process of 
circulation, as it appears on the surface of the society, knows no 
other way of appropriation, and if contradictions should arise in 
the progress of the examination, they must, like this law of the 
original appropriation through labour, be derived from the development of 
exchange value itself. 

The law of appropriation through one’s own labour being assumed, 
and it is an assumption that is not arbitrary, but one which springs 

* A. Smith.!0! 

a A. Smith, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, Vol. 1, 
pp. 60 and 61.— Ed. 

464 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

from the examination of circulation itself, there becomes apparent 
of itself, in circulation, a realm of bourgeois liberty and bourgeois 
equality based on this law. 

While the appropriation of commodities through one’s own 
labour presents itself as the first necessity, the social process 
through which this product must first be posited as an exchange 
value and as such once again transformed into a use value for 
individuals, is the second. After the appropriation through labour, 
or the objectification of labour, the alienation of the product of 
labour, or its transformation into a social form, appears as the next law. 
Circulation is a movement in which one’s own product is posited 
as exchange value (money), i.e. as a social product, and the social 
product, as one’s own (as individual use value, an object of 
individual consumption). 

It is now also clear that: 

Another premiss of exchange relating to the movement as a 
whole is that the subjects of exchange produce while being 
subsumed under the division of social labour. After all, the 
commodities exchanged for one another are, in fact, nothing but 
labour objectified in various use values, i.e. objectified in various 
ways, being in fact merely the objective being of the division of 
labour, objectification of qualitatively distinct types of labour 
corresponding to the different systems of wants. When I produce 
a commodity, the assumption is that though my product has use 
value, it has none for me, that for me it is not an immediate 
means of subsistence (in the broadest sense), but an immediate 
exchange value; it becomes a means of subsistence for me only 
after it assumes in money the form of universal social product and 
can then be realised in any form of alien, qualitatively distinct 
labour. Hence I produce for myself only by producing for the 
society, each of whose members, for his part, works for me in 
another circle. 

[B’-19] It is clear, furthermore, that the premiss about the 
exchangers producing exchange values implies not only a division 
of labour in general, but its specifically developed form. In Peru, 
for instance, labour was also divided; it was also divided in small 
SELF-Supporting * Indian communities. But it is a division of labour 
which, far from being based on exchange value, on the contrary, 
implies a more or less direct communal [gemeinschaftliche] 
production. The basic premiss about the subjects of circulation 

2 In the manuscript, the English word is given in brackets after the 
corresponding German (“selbstgentigsamen”’).— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 465 

having produced exchange values, products directly posited in the 
social determinateness of exchange value, and so also subsumed 
under a definite historically shaped division of labour, incorpo- 
rates a mass of other premisses which do not stem from the will of 
the individual or from his immediate natural character, but from 
the historical conditions and relations in virtue of which the 
individual already finds himself to be a social individual deter- 
mined by the society; this premiss also includes the relations 
manifested in the individuals’ relations of production other than 
the simple ones in which they confront one another in circulation. 

The exchanger has produced a commodity, and that for 
commodity producers. This implies: On the one hand, that he has 
produced as an independent private individual on his own 
initiative, only out of his own want and his own capability, out of 
himself and for himself —neither as a member of a naturally evolved 
community, nor as an individual taking part in production directly as 
a social individual—and accordingly he does not regard his product 
as an immediate source of existence. On the other hand, however, he 
has produced exchange value, a product which becomes a product for 
himself only through the medium of a determinate social process, a 
determinate metamorphosis. Consequently, he has produced in such 
a connection and under such conditions of production and relations 
of commerce which resulted only from an historical process but 
which appear for himself to be a natural necessity. The 
independence of individual production is, accordingly, sup- 
plemented with a social dependence that finds a corresponding 
expression in the division of labour. 

The private character of the production of the exchange-value- 
producing individual itself appears as an historical product— his 
isolation, his self-establishment as an independent point within the 
production is determined by a division of labour which, for its part, 
rests on a whole range of economic conditions through which the 
individual is conditioned on every side in his connections with 
other individuals and in his own mode of existence. 

In so far as the commodities an English farmer and a French 
peasant sell are products of the soil, they stand in the same 
economic relationship. But the peasant sells only the small surplus 
of his family’s product. He consumes the main part of it himself, 
and so regards the greater part of his product not as exchange 
value, but as use value, a direct means of subsistence. By contrast, 
the English farmer depends entirely on the sale of his product, i.e. 
on its being a commodity, and so on the social use value of his 
product. His production is, therefore, completely gripped and 

466 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

determined by exchange value. It is clear now what a supremely 
different development of the productive forces of labour and its 
division, what kind of different relations of individuals within 
production are required, for instance, to have corn produced as 
mere exchange value and so going entirely into circulation; what 
kind of economic processes are required to turn a French peasant 
into an English farmer. 

In his analysis of exchange value, Adam Smith still makes the 
mistake of accepting the undeveloped form of exchange value in 
which it still appears merely as a surplus over and above the use 
value turned out by the producer for his own subsistence, as its 
adequate form, whereas it is only a form of its historical 
manifestation within a system of production which it has not yet 
caught hold of as a universal form. But in the bourgeois society it 
has to be regarded as the dominant form under which any direct 
relationship of the producers to their products as use values disappears; 
all products present themselves as products for trade. ‘Take a worker at a 
modern factory, say, a cotton mill. If he has produced no 
exchange value, he has produced nothing at all, since he cannot 
put his finger on any single tangible use value, and say: this is my 
product. The more many-sided the system of social wants, and the 
more one-sided the individual’s production, i.e. the greater the 
development of the social division of labour, the more decisive the 
importance of the production of the product as exchange value, or 
the character of the product as exchange value. 

An analysis of the specific form of the division of labour, the 
conditions of production on which it is based, and the economic 
relationships of the members of the society to which these 
conditions of production are reduced, would show that the whole 
system of bourgeois production is the premiss for exchange value 
appearing on its surface as a mere point of departure, and the 
process of exchange, as it unfolds in the simple circulation, as a 
social exchange of matter, simple but encompassing both the whole of 
production and the whole of consumption. It would transpire, 
therefore, that already other, more complicated relations of 
production, more or less conflicting with the liberty and independ- 
ence of individuals, their economic relationships, are the premiss 
that, as free private producers in simple relations of purchase and sale, 
they should confront each other in the process of circulation and 
should figure as its independent subjects. But from the standpoint of 
the simple circulation, these relationships are obliterated. When consid- 
ering it itself, we find that the division of labour in fact appears in it 
only in the result (its premiss), that the subjects of exchange 

Chapter Two. Money 467 

produce different commodities meeting different wants, and that 
while each depends on the production of all, all depend on the 
production of each, reciprocally supplementing each other, so that 
the product of each single individual, to the extent of its value 
magnitude, is a means for participation in the product of social 
[B-20] production in genera] through the medium of the process 
of circulation. 

The product is exchange value, objectified general labour, al- 
though it is, in the immediate sense, the objectification of the 
independent private labour of the individual alone. 

That the commodity first has to be alienated, the coercion for 
the individual showing that his immediate product is no product 
for himself, but becomes such only in the social process of 
production and must assume this general and yet external form; 
that the produce of particular labour must assert itself socially as 
the objectification of general labour, assuming the form of a thing 
(money) which is exclusively assumed as the immediate objectifica- 
tion of general labour, and equally that through this very process 
this general social labour is posited as an external thing, as 
money—these determinations constitute the mainspring, the 
pulse-beat of circulation itself. The consequent social relations 
present themselves, for that reason, directly from an examination 
of the simple circulation, and do not lie behind it as economic 
relations enclosed in the division of labour. 

How does the individual certify his private labour as general 
labour, and its product, as general social product? Through the 
particular content of his labour, its particular use value, the object 
of another individual’s want, so that the latter gives up his own 
product for it as equivalent. //That this must assume the form of 
money is a point to be examined later to show that this 
transformation of commodity into money is itself an essential 
moment of the simple circulation.// Consequently, through his 
labour being a particularity in the totality of social labour, a 
particular complementary branch of it. As soon as labour possesses 
a content determined by social connection—and this is the 
material determinateness and premiss—it counts as general 
labour. The form of the generality of labour asserts itself through 
its reality as a member of the totality of labours, as a particular 
mode of the existence of social labour. 

The individuals confront each other only as proprietors of 
exchange values, as such individuals who have given themselves 
reified being for each other through their product, the commodi- 
ty. Without this objective mediation, they have no relation to each 

468 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

other from the standpoint of the social exchange of matter under 
way in circulation. They exist for each other only as things, 
something that is merely further developed in the money relation, 
in which their community itself appears as an external and hence a 
casual thing with respect to all. That the social connection resulting 
from the collision of independent individuals appears with respect to 
them simultaneously both as objective necessity and as external bond 
in effect expresses their independence for which social being, though a 
necessity, is no more than a means, and therefore appears to the 
individuals themselves as something external, and in money, even as a 
tangible thing. They produce in and for the society as social 
individuals, but at the same time this appears merely as a means for 
objectifying their individuality. Since, on the one hand, they are not 
subsumed under any naturally evolved community and, on the 
other, are not consciously communal individuals subsuming the 
community under themselves, this community must also exist as an 
independent, external, casual thing [ein ... Sachliches] with respect to 
them as independent subjects. That is precisely the condition for 
their simultaneously being in some social connection as independent 
private persons. 

Since, consequently, the division of labour //in which the social 
conditions of production under which the individuals produce 
exchange values can be summed up// in the simple process of 
exchange, in circulation, appears only as 1) non-production of 
immediate means of subsistence by the individual himself, by his 
direct labour; 2) as the being of general social labour as a naturally 
evolved totality fragmenting itself into a circle of particularities in 
such a way that the subjects of circulation possess complementary 
commodities and that each subject satisfies some aspect of the 
totality of an individual’s social wants, while the economic 
relationships stemming from this determinate division of labour 
are themselves obliterated, in our analysis of exchange value we 
have not gone on to analyse the division of labour, but merely 
accepted it as a fact identical with exchange value, a fact which, 
indeed, merely expresses in active form, as a particularisation of 
labour, that which the different use value of commodities—and 
without it neither exchange, nor exchange value would have 
existed —expresses in objective form. In effect, Adam Smith, like 
other economists before him, Petty, Boisguillebert, the Italians,’ 

3 Marx left a space here to insert the names of Italian economists later.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 469 

asserting the division of labour as being correlative with exchange 
value, was saying the same thing. And Steuart grasped, before all 
the others, the division of labour and the production of exchange 
values as being something identical and, in commendable distinc- 
tion from other economists, conceived it as a form of social 
production and social exchange of matter mediated by a specific 
historical process. 

What Adam Smith says about the productive power of the 
division of labour is an absolutely extraneous standpoint which has 
no relevance to the matter either here or in the place where he 
expressed it, and is, besides, relevant to a definite stage in the 
development of manufacture, but not at all to the modern factory 
system in general. 

The division of labour with which we are dealing here is a 
spontaneous and free division within the society taken as a whole, 
and manifesting itself as production of exchange values, and not 
the division of labour withm a factory—its resolution and 
combination in a single branch of production, but rather a social 
division of these branches of production themselves, arising, as it 
were, without the participation of individuals. The division of 
labour within the society would correspond to the principle of the 
division of labour [B’-21] within a factory perhaps in the Egyptian 
rather than in the modern system. The repulsion from each other 
of the various branches of social labour and their transformation 
into free ones, independent of each other and bound up in a 
totality and unity only through internal] necessity (and not as in 
that division, through a conscious resolution and _ conscious 
combination of the resolved parts) are totally different things 
determined by totally different laws of development, however 
great the correspondence between a given form of the one and a 
given form of the other may be. 

While Adam Smith may have less than adequately com- 
prehended the simple form of the division of labour in which it is 
only an active form of exchange value, and its other form in which 
it represents a definite productive power of labour, he was even 
less clear about the form in which the economic antagonisms of 
production—the qualitative social determinations subsumed under 
which the individuals confront each other as capitalist and 
wage worker, industrial capitalist and rentier, tenant farmer 
and ground-rent-collecting landlord, etc.—themselves appear as 
the economic forms of a determinate mode of the division of 
labour. 

If the individual produces his own immediate means of 

470 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

subsistence, as, for instance, it most often happens in countries 
where primitive agricultural relationships continue to exist, his 
production has no social character, and his labour is not social. If 
the individual produces as a private individual— so that this position 
of his is itself not in any sense a product of Nature but a refined result of 
a social process—the social character reveals itself in that in the 
content of his labour the individual is determined by the social 
connection and works only as its member, i. e. to satisfy the wants 
of all the others—so that social dependence exists for him—but 
he himself is engaged only in this or that labour of his choice; his 
particular relationship to particular [kinds of] labour is not socially 
determined; his choice is determined in a natural way in virtue of 
his natural capabilities, inclinations, natural conditions of produc- 
tion in which he finds himself, etc.; so that the particularisation of 
labour, its social fragmentation into a totality of all the particular 
branches in fact presents itself from the part of the individual in 
such a way that his own spiritual and natural particularity 
simultaneously assumes the form of a social particularity. From his 
own nature and its particular premisses springs for him the 
particularity of his labour—above all its objectification—which, 
however, [he] simultaneously regards as the assertion [Gel- 
tendmachung] of a particular system of wants and realisation of a 
particular branch of social activity. 

The division of labour so comprehended as social reproduction 
of the particular. individuality, which thereby simultaneously 
constitutes an element of mankind’s total development and 
simultaneously enables the individual, by means of his particular 
activity, to have gratification of the general production, the 
all-round social gratification, this concept, springing as it does 
from the standpoint of the simple circulation and so _ being 
confirmation instead of suspension of the freedom of the 
individuals, is still current in bourgeois political economy. 

This natural distinction between individuals and their wants is 
the motivation for their social integration as exchangers. D’abord 
they confront each other in the act of exchange as persons 
mutually recognising each other as proprietors, as persons whose 
will permeates their commodities, with the reciprocal appropria- 
tion through the reciprocal alienation taking place only according 
to their common will, i. e. essentially by means of contract. This 
includes the juridical concept of person and also of the freedom 
which it contains. That is why in Roman law, servus is correctly 
defined as one who cannot acquire through exchange. 

Furthermore, in the consciousness of the exchanging subjects all 

Chapter Two. Money 471 

of this presents itself in such a way that in the transaction each is 
only an end to himself; that each is only a means for the other; 
and finally, that the reciprocity in which each is simultaneously 
means and end, attaining his own end only by becoming means 
for the other, and means for the other only in so far as he attains 
his own end—that this reciprocity is a necessary ract implied as a 
natural condition of exchange but that as such it is indifferent to 
both subjects of the exchange and is of interest to either only in so 
far as it is his interest. This means that the common interest which 
appears as the content of the exchange act as a whole, while being 
present as a fact in the consciousness of both parties, is not as such 
the motivation, but exists, so to say, only behind the backs of the 
individual interests reflected in themselves. If he so wishes, the 
subject can, of course, have the uplifting sense that the satisfaction 
of his unconcerned individual interest is precisely the realisation of 
the sublated individual interest, of the general interest. From the 
act of exchange itself, each of the subjects returns upon himself as 
the ultimate end of the entire process, as the dominant subject. In 
this way, therefore, the subject’s complete freedom is realised. 
Voluntary transaction; no coercion on any part; becoming means 
for the other only as means for oneself or end for oneself; finally, 
the consciousness that the general or common interest is nothing 
but the all-sidedness of the egoistical interest. 

If, therefore, every aspect of circulation is a realisation of 
individual freedom, the circulation process considered as such, 
i. e. in the determinations of its economic form, constitutes the full 
realisation of social equality (for the relations of freedom have no 
direct bearing on the economic determinations of the form of 
exchange, but relate only to its juridical form, or to its content, to 
use values, or wants as such). Subjects of circulation are, as such, 
above all exchangers, and that each of them is posited in this 
determination, that is, in the same determination, in effect 
constitutes their social determination. They confront each other in 
fact only as subjectivised exchange values, i. e. as living equival- 
ents, as having the same value. As such, they are not only equal: 
there is even no [B’-1]} difference between them. They confront 
each other only as possessors of exchange values and as those in 
need of exchange, as agents of the same general indifferent social 
labour. Moreover, they exchange exchange values of equal 
magnitude, for it is presupposed that there is an exchange of 
equivalents. The equalness of that which each gives and takes is 
here an explicit moment of the process itself. In the same way that 
they confront each other as the subjects of exchange, so they 

472 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

certify themselves in the act of this exchange. As such it is merely 
this certification. They are posited as exchangers and so as equals, 
and their commodities (objects) as equivalents. They exchange 
their reified being only as equivalents. They themselves are of 
equal value and in the act of exchange identify themselves as 
being equivalent and indifferent with respect to each other. The 
equivalents are the objectification of one subject for the other; 
which means that they themselves are of equal value and identify 
themselves in the act of exchange as being equivalent and 
indifferent to each other. In the exchange, the subjects turn out to 
be of the same value to each other only through the equivalents 
and identify themselves as such by exchanging the objectification 
in which the one exists for the other. Since they exist for each 
other only as subjects of equivalence, they are simultaneously 
indifferent to each other as being of the same value. They are not 
concerned with their other differences. Their individual particu- 
larity does not enter into the process. The physical difference in 
the use value of their commodities is extinguished in the ideal 
being of commodity as price, and to the extent that this physical 
difference is the motivation for exchange, they are a reciprocal 
want for each other (each representing the want of the other), a 
want that can be satisfied only by the same quantum of labour 
time. This natural difference is the basis for their social equality 
and posits them as subjects of the exchange. If subject A had the 
same want as subject B, and if his commodity satisfied the same 
want as the commodity of subject B, there would be no relation 
between them in the sense of economic relations (from the 
standpoint of their production). The reciprocal satisfaction of their 
wants by means of the physical difference of their labour and their 
commodity makes their equality a relation filled with social 
content, and their particular labour a particular mode of the 
existence of social labour in general. 

Whenever money is involved, it is so remote from abolishing this 
relation of equality that it is, in fact, its real expression. Above all 
to the extent that money functions as the price-positing element, 
as measure, the function of money consists, also in form, in 
positing commodities as being qualitatively identical, in expressing 
their identical social substance in which there is only a quantitative 
difference. In circulation, the commodity of each then, in fact, 
appears as the same thing [as the commodity of the other] and is 
given the same social form of means of circulation in which any 
particularity of the product is extinguished and the proprietor of 
each commodity becomes the proprietor of the tangibly subjec- 

Chapter Two. Money 473 

ufied generally significant commodity. That money non let? 
applies here in the proper sense. Whether a thaler which one has 
in one’s hand has realised the price of manure or of silk is 
absolutely unnoticeable, and any individual difference has been 
extinguished in the hands of its possessor, since the thaler 
functions as thaler. Indeed, this extinction is all-sided, since all 
commodities are transformed into coin. At a definite moment, 
circulation posits each not only as being equal to the other, but 
also as the same, and its movement consists in each alternately 
taking the place of the other from the standpoint of the social 
function. It is true that in circulation the exchangers also confront 
each other qualitatively as buyer and seller, as commodity and 
money, but, first, they change places, and the process consists both 
in the establishment of inequality and in the transcendence of 
the inequality, so that the latter appears to be merely formal. The 
buyer becomes the seller, the seller becomes the buyer, and each 
can become buyer only as seller. The formal difference exists for 
all the subjects of circulation simultaneously in the form of the 
social metamorphoses through which they have to pass. Besides, 
the commodity, notionally as price, is as good money as the money 
confronting it. In money, when it itself circulates so that it appears 
now in the hands of the one, now of the other, and is indifferent 
to the place of its appearance, the equality is expressed materially, 
and the difference no more than formally. As far as the process of 
exchange is considered, each confronts the other as possessor of 
means of circulation, as money itself. The specific natural 
distinction which lies in the commodities is extinguished and keeps 
being extinguished through circulation. 

When we consider generally the social relation of individuals 
within their economic process, we simply have to keep to the form 
determinations of the process itself. But there is no other 
difference in circulation except that between commodity and 
money, and circulation is equally its ceaseless disappearance. 
Equality appears here as social product, just as generally exchange 
value is social being. 

Since money is only realisation of exchange value, and a 
developed exchange-value system, a money system, the money 
system can, in fact, be only the realisation of this system of 
‘equality and freedom. 

The use value of the commodity contains for the exchanger a 
particular, individual aspect of production (labour); but in his 

4 Does not smell (Vespasian).— Ed. 

474 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

commodity, as exchange value, all commodities similarly present 
themselves as objectification of the social homogeneous Jabour 
pure and simple, and their proprietors as equally estimable and 
equally worthy functionaries of the social process. 

[B”-2] It was earlier shown that as far as money appears in its 
third function, it sublates, as the general material for contracts, the 
universal means of payment, all specific differences between the 
performances and posits them equal. It makes all equal before 
money, but money is merely its own objectified social nexus. With 
money figuring as material for accumulation and hoarding, the 
equality may at first appear to be sublated since the possibility 
arises for one individual to enrich himself more, to acquire a 
greater title to general production than another. However, [in the 
simple circulation] no individual can extract money at the expense 
of another. He can take in the form of money only that which he 
gives in the form of commodity. The one enjoys the content of 
wealth, the other takes possession of its universal form. If one is 
impoverished and the other enriched, that is a matter of their good 
will, their thrift, industry, morality, and so on, and does not at all 
follow from the economic relations themselves, the relations of 
commerce, in which the individuals confront each other in 
circulation. Even inheritance and similar juridical relations which 
may extend the inequality arising in this way have no effect on 
social equality. If the initial position of individual A is not in 
contradiction with these, the contradiction cannot, of course, arise 
from individual A taking the place of individual B and 
perpetuating the initial position. On the contrary, here the social 
law acquires force beyond the bounds of the [individual’s] natural 
lifetime: there is a consolidation of this social law in contrast to the 
accidental working of Nature, whose influence as such would 
rather be abolition of the freedom of the individual. Besides, since 
in this relation the individual is merely the individualisation of 
money, he is as such as immortal as money itself. Finally, hoarding 
activity is a heroic, religious idiosyncrasy, a fanatical asceticism 
which is, of course, not inherited as blood is. Since only 
equivalents are exchanged, the heir must throw the money into 
circulation once again if he is to realise it as gratification. If he 
fails to do that, he will simply continue to be a useful member of 
the society, taking from it no more than he gives. But the nature 
of things is such, however, that extravagance, the “charming 

leveller”,* as Steuart calls it, once again evens out the inequality, so 

a J. Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, Vol. 1, Dublin, 1770, 
p. 367.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 475 

that it itself puts in only a fleeting appearance. 

That is why the process of exchange of exchange values 
developed in circulation not only respects freedom and equality, 
but is also their real basis, while they are its products. As pure 
ideas, they are idealised expressions of its various moments; being 
developed in juridical, political and social relations, they are 
merely reproduced in other degrees. This has also been historical- 
ly confirmed. Not only was the trinity of property, freedom and 
equality first theoretically formulated on that basis by Italian, 
English and French economists of the 17th and 18th centuries. 
They were also first realised in the modern bourgeois society. The 
ancient world, for which exchange value did not serve as the basis 
of production and which, on the contrary, collapsed in conse- 
quence of its development, produced a freedom and equality of a 
totally opposite and essentially no more than local content. On the 
other hand, since moments of the simple circulation were 
developed in the ancient world, among the free, at any rate, it is 
also clear that the definitions of juridical person, the subject of the 
process of exchange, were developed in Rome, especially in 
imperial Rome, whose history is precisely the history of the 
disintegration of the communal system of antiquity, as also the 
essential definitions of the law of the bourgeois society which, 
however, was necessarily above all brought to the fore as the law 
of the emerging industrial society as against the Middle Ages. 

That is the origin of the error of the socialists, especially the 
French, who strive to prove that socialism is a realisation of 
bourgeois ideas, not discovered, but given historical currency by 
the French Revolution, and vainly try to demonstrate that 
exchange value originally (in time) or in its concept (in its adequate 
form) is a system of universal freedom and equality but perverted 
by money, capital, etc. Or they assert that up to now history has 
merely made unsuccessful attempts to put them through in a form 
corresponding to their true nature, and that now they, Proudhon, 
for instance, have discovered the panacea through which the true 
history of these relations is to be substituted for their perverted 
history. The system of exchange values, and the money system 
even more so, are, in fact, a system of freedom and equality. But 
the contradictions which appear in a deeper analysis are immanent 
contradictions, complications of that very property, freedom and 
equality which occasionally pass into their opposites. The hope, for 
instance, that exchange value should not develop from a form of 
commodity and money into a form of capital, or that labour 
producing exchange value should not develop into wage labour is 

17* 

476 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

as pious as it is stupid. What distinguishes these socialists from 
bourgeois apologists is, on the one hand, the sense of the 
contradictions of the system, and, on the other, the utopianism, 
the failure to understand the necessary distinction between the 
real and the ideal shape of the bourgeois society and the 
consequent desire to undertake the superfluous business of once 
again realising the ideal expression itself, the clarified and [B”-3] 
reflected image emitted by reality as such. 

Contrasted to this concept, on the other hand, is the trivial 
argument that the contradictions in this view resting on the 
examination of the simple circulation which arise as soon as we go 
on to more concrete stages of the production process, descending 
from the surface to its depths, are, in fact, a mere semblance. It 1s, 
in fact, asserted and argued with the aid of abstraction from the 
specific form of the more developed spheres of the social process 
of production, of the more developed economic relationships, that 
all the economic relationships are merely so many more names for 
the selfsame relationships of the simple exchange, commodity 
exchange, and the corresponding determinations of property, 
freedom and equality. From everyday experience, for instance, it 
is taken that, alongside money and commodities, exchange-value 
relationships also present themselves in the form of capital, 
interest, ground rent, wages, etc. Through the process of a very 
trivial abstraction, arbitrarily discarding now one, now the other 
aspect of the specific relationship, the latter is reduced to abstract 
determinations of the simple circulation, thereby proving that the 
economic relations in which individuals find themselves in those 
more developed spheres of the production process are merely 
relations of the simple circulation, etc. 

That is just how Mr. Bastiat has put together his economic 
theodicy, the Harmonies économiques. In contrast to the classical 
political economy of Steuart, Smith and Ricardo, who have the 
strength of mind relentlessly to depict production relationships in 
their pure form, this feeble high-flown rhetoric claims to be a step 
forward. However, Bastiat is not the inventor of this harmonious 
view, but has, on the contrary, borrowed it from the American 
Carey. 

Carey, for whose views the historical background was provided 
only by the New World, of which he is a member, in the highly 
voluminous works of his first period argued the existence of the 
economic “harmony” which is still everywhere a reduction [of all 
economic relations] to the abstract determinations of the simple 
process of exchange, by explaining everywhere the distortion of 

Chapter Two. Money 477 

these simple relationships by the intervention of the State, on the 
one hand, and England’s influence on the world market, on the 
other. The harmonies in themselves are there. But in the 
non-American countries they are distorted by the State, and in 
America itself, by the most developed form in which these 
relationships appear, their world-market reality, in the form of 
England.* Carey finds no other means of restoring them than 
ultimately to call for help from his denounced devil, the State, 
and to stand it as the guardian angel at the gates of the 
harmonious paradise, namely, protective tariffs. But since he is 
after all a researcher and not a writer of fiction, like Bastiat, in his 
latest work he is forced to go farther. America’s development 
over the past 18 years has dealt such a blow at his harmonious 
view that he now sees the distortion of the “natural” “harmonies”, 
to which he is still firmly attached, no longer in the external 
influence of the State, but in trade! A truly remarkable result this: 
to extol exchange value as the basis of harmonious production, 
and then to declare that the developed form of exchange, trade, 
abolishes this exchange value in its immanent laws! ** That is the 
desperate form in which Carey expresses his belated conclusion 
that the development of harmonious exchange value is dishar- 
monic. 

* It is harmonious, for instance, if, within a country, patriarchal production 
gives way to industrial production, and the process of dissolution accompanying 
this development is conceived only in its positive aspect. But it becomes 
disharmonious, if England’s large-scale industry puts a terrible end to the 
patriarchal or petty-bourgeois forms of another country’s national production. The 
concentration of capital within a country and the dissolving effect of this 
concentration present themselves to him only in their positive aspect. But the effect 
of the concentrated English capital on other national capitals, which he exposes as 
England’s monopoly, is disharmony itself. 

** Carey is, in fact, America’s only original economist, and what makes his works 
so important is that the bourgeois society in its freest and broadest reality always 
provides them with their material foundation. In abstract form, he describes the 
breadth of American [economic] conditions and contrasts them with those of the 
Old World. Bastiat’s only real background is the pettiness of French economic 
conditions, whose long ears keep sticking out from his harmonies, and in contrast 
to these, he formulates the idealised English and American production relation- 
ships as “the demands of practical reason”.!03 That is why Carey is rich in 
independent, so to say, bona fide studies of specific economic questions. Wherever 
Bastiat pretends, by way of exception, to descend from his glib and coquettish 
platitudes to an examination of real categories (for instance, in ground rent) there 
he simply rewrites Carey. So while the latter combats mainly the objections to his 
harmonious view, objections in the form in which they have been developed by the 
English classical economists themselves, Bastiat skirmishes with the socialists. 
Carey’s more profound view finds in political economy itself the contradiction 

478 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ.