Let us now take the process of circulation in its totality: 

Let us consider first of all the formal character of the simple 
circulation. 

Indeed, circulation represents only a formal process mediating 
both moments—use value and exchange value—which directly 
coincide and directly fall apart in the commodity, whose direct 
unity it is. The commodity keeps alternating each of these two 
determinations. So far as the commodity is posited as price, and 
while also being exchange value, its being as use value appears to 
be its reality, while its being as exchange value is merely its 
relation [to other commodities], its notional being. In money, 
although it is also use value, it is its being as exchange value that 
appears as its reality, since use value, when it appears as universal, 
is merely notional. 

In the commodity, the material has price; in money, exchange 
value possesses material. 

Both forms of circulation are to be considered: C—M—C and 
M—C—M. 

The commodity which is exchanged for another commodity by 
means of money passes out of circulation in order to be consumed 
as use value. Its determination as exchange value and hence as 
commodity is extinguished. It is now use value as such. If, 
however, it is self-established against circulation in the form of 
money, it then represents only the substance-free universal form 
of wealth and becomes a useless use value, gold, silver, when it 
does not re-enter circulation as a means of purchase or means of 
payment. Indeed, there is a contradiction in that the exchange 
value become independent, i.e. the absolute existence of exchange 
value, should be the form in which it 1s withdrawn from exchange. 
The only reality, economically, which hoarding has in circulation, 
is a subsidiary one for the function of money as means of 
circulation (in the two forms of means of purchase and means of 
payment)—the formation of reservoirs which make it possible to 
expand and contract the currency (hence the function of money as 
universal commodity). 

There are two moments in circulation. First, equivalents, i.e. the 
same value magnitudes, are exchanged for each other; at the same 
time, however, the determinations of both sides change places. 


which, as harmonist, he has to overcome, while the vain and stubborn rhetorician 
[Bastiat] discerns this contradiction as lying only beyond the bounds of political 
economy. 


Chapter Two. Money 479 


The exchange value fixed in money disappears (for the owner of 
the money) as soon as money realises itself in the commodity as use 
value; and the use value existing in the commodity disappears (for its 
owner) as soon as its price is realised in money. Through the simple 
act of exchange, either of the two can lose its determination in favour 
of the other only when it realises itself in the other. Neither can 
retain one determination while passing into the other. 

Considered in itself, circulation is the mediation of preposited 
extremes. But it does not posit these extremes. It itself must be 
mediated as the totality of mediation, as total process. That is why 
its immediate being is pure appearance. It is the phenomenon of a 
process running behind its back. It is now negated in each of its 
moments: as commodity, as money, and as the relation of the two, 
as the simple exchange of the two, circulation. 

The repetition of the process from both points, money and 
commodity, does not spring from the conditions of circulation 
itself. The act cannot again be rekindled of itself. Circulation does 
not, therefore, carry within itself the principle of self-renewal. It 
proceeds from preposited moments, and not from those created by 
itself. Commodities must be thrown into it again and again, and 
that from outside, as fuel into the fire. Otherwise, it flickers out in 
indifference. It would flicker out in money as an indifferent 
result, in so far as money would no longer have any connection 
with commodities, prices, circulation, cease to be money and 
express a production relationship; leaving no more than its 
metallic being, with its economic being annihilated. 

Money, as “universal form of wealth’, as exchange value 
become independent, confronts the whole world of real wealth. It 
is the pure abstraction of the latter, hence, fixed in this way, an 
imaginary magnitude. Wherever universal wealth appears to exist 
in an entirely material, tangible form, it has its existence only in 
my head, and is a pure chimera. As the material representative of 
universal wealth, money is realised only when it is thrown back 
into circulation, when it disappears in exchange for the particular 
species of wealth. In circulation, it is always real only when it is 
given out. Should I want to hold on to it, it evaporates in my 
hands as a mere spectre of wealth. Making it disappear is the only 
possible way of securing it as wealth. The dissolution of the stores 
in ephemeral gratifications is its realisation. It can now again be 
stored by other individuals, but then the process starts once again. 
The independence of money with respect to circulation is mere 
appearance. So in its determination of consummate exchange 
value, money sublates itself. 


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


In the simple circulation, exchange value in its form as money 
appears as a simple thing for which circulation is only an external 
movement, or which, as subject, is individualised in a particular 
material. Furthermore, circulation itself appears [B’-5] merely 
as a formal movement: realisation of the prices of commodities, 
exchange (eventually) of different use values for each other. Both 
are preposited as the point of departure of circulation: the exchan- 
ge value of the commodity, and the commodities of different use 
value. The withdrawal of the commodity through consumption, 
i.e. its annihilation as exchange value, and the withdrawal of 
money, its becoming independent, which is again another form of 
its annihilation, likewise drop out of circulation. A definite price 
(exchange value measured in money, i.e. exchange value itself, the 
value magnitude) is preposited to circulation, which in money only 
gives it a formal being. But it does not originate in it. 

//The simple circulation, merely the exchange of commodity and 
money (the exchange of commodities in mediated form), precisely 
because it is only mediating movement between presupposed 
points of departure, can (up to the formation of hoards) 
historically exist without exchange value taking hold of the 
production of a people, whether on the whole surface or in its 
depths. At the same time, however, historical development shows 
how circulation itself leads to bourgeois, i.e. exchange-value- 
positing, production and creates for itself a basis other than that 
from which it directly sprang. The exchange of surpluses is 
commerce creating exchange and exchange value. However, it 
extends only to the act of exchange itself and runs alongside 
production itself. But then if the appearance of exchange-seeking 
intermediaries (Lombards, Normans, etc.) is repeated and regular 
trade develops under which the producing peoples are engaged 
only in what could be called passive trade, in so far as the impetus 
to exchange-creating activity comes from outside and not from the 
inner structure of production, the surplus of production must 
no longer be an accidental, occasional one, but a constantly recurring 
surplus, so that the product itself acquires a tendency towards 
circulation and creation of new exchange values. 

Initially, the influence is rather a material one. The range of 
wants is enlarged; the aim is to satisfy new wants, and hence the 
greater regularity and scale of production. The organisation of 
production within the country has itself already been modified by 
circulation and exchange value, but has not yet been taken hold of 
either over its entire surface or throughout its whole depth. That 
is the so-called civilising influence of foreign trade. The extent to 


Chapter Two. Money 481 


which the movement positing exchange value seizes upon the 
whole of production then depends partly on the intensity of the 
said external influence, partly upon the level of internal develop- 
ment. 

For instance, in England in the 16th century, the development 
of the Dutch industry made English wool production of great 
commercial importance, and, on the other hand, especially 
increased the need for Dutch and Italian commodities. In order to 
have more wool for export as means of exchange, arable land was 
converted into sheep-walks and the small-tenant system was 
broken up, producing that rather violent economic upheaval 
which Thomas More deplored (denounced).* 

So agriculture lost its character of labour for use value—as the 
immediate source of subsistence—and the exchange of its surplus 
ceased to be something indifferent and external for the internal 
structure of agricultural relationships. In some places, agriculture 
itself began entirely to be determined by circulation and trans- 
formed into production creating solely exchange values. In this 
way, not only was there a change in the mode of production, but 
also a disintegration of all the corresponding old, traditional 
relationships of population and production, economic relation- 
ships. So here the prerequisite for circulation was a production 
involving exchange value only in the form of surplus, a surplus 
over the use value; but it gave way to a production which can exist 
only in relation to circulation, with the creation of exchange value 
as its immediate object. This is an example of the historical retreat 
of the simple circulation into capital, into the exchange value as a 
production-dominating form. 

The movement, therefore, gets hold only of the surplus of the 
production aimed at the creation of immediate use value and 
proceeds only within those limits. The less the whole internal 
economic structure of the society is still caught up by exchange 
value, the more they [participants in the exchange] appear as 
external extremes of circulation—firmly given in advance and 
taking a passive attitude to it. The whole movement as such 
appears independent with respect to them as intermediary trade 
whose carriers, such as the Semites in the interstices of the ancient 
world, and the Jews, Lombards and Normans in the interstices of 
the medieval society, alternately represent with respect to them the 
different moments of circulation—-money and commodity. They 
are the mediators of the social exchange of matter. 


a Thomas More, Utopia, Book I.— Ed. 


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


At this point, however, we have nothing to do with the historical 
transition of circulation into capital. The simple circulation is, 
rather, an abstract sphere of the bourgeois process of production 
as a whole, which through its own determinations shows itself to 
be a moment, [B’-6] a mere form of appearance of some deeper 
process lying behind it, even resulting from it and producing 
it—industrial capital.// 

The simple circulation, on the one hand, is an exchange of 
present commodities and merely the mediation of these preposited 
extremes, which lie beyond it. All activity is limited to exchange 
and the positing of the formal determinations through which the 
commodity passes as the unity of exchange value and use value. 
As such a unity, the commodity was preposited or some other 
determinate product was a commodity only as the immediate unity 
of both these determinations. Indeed, the commodity is such a 
unity, a commodity not in an inert (fixed) being, but only in the 
social movement of circulation in which, on the one hand, both 
determinations of the commodity—use value and exchange 
value—are allocated between the various parties. For the seller it 
becomes exchange value, for the buyer, use value. For the seller it 
is means of exchange, i.e. the opposite of direct use value, because it 
is use value for the other; in other words, it is negated direct, 
individual use value; on the other hand, however, as price its magni- 
tude as means of exchange, its purchasing power is measured. For 
the buyer, it becomes use value as its price is realised, i.e. as its 
ideal being is realised as money. Only because the buyer realises 
the commodity for another in the determination of pure exchange 
value, the commodity for himself becomes a commodity in the 
determination of use value. Use value itself appears as two-fold: in 
the hands of the seller, it is merely a particular materialisation of 
exchange value, the existence of exchange value, and for the 
buyer, use value as such, i.e. an object satisfying particular wants; 
for both, the commodity appears as price. One of them, however, 
wants to realise it as price, as money; the other realises money in 
it. 

It is specific for the being of commodity as means of exchange 
that the use value appears 1) as sublated direct (individual) use 
value, i.e. as use value for others, for the society; 2) as 
materialisation of exchange value for the possessor of the 
commodity. 

The bifurcation and the alternation of the commodity in both 
determinations—commodity and money—is the main content of 
circulation. But the commodity does not simply confront money; 


Chapter Two. Money 483 


its exchange value appears in it notionally as money; as price, it is 
notional money, and money with respect to it is merely the reality 
of its own price. In the commodity, the exchange value is also 
notional determination, notional equation with money. It then 
acquires in money as coin an abstract, one-sided but fleeting 
existence as mere value; value then is extinguished in the use 
value of the purchased commodity. From the moment the 
commodity becomes simple use value, it ceases to be a commodity. 
Its being as exchange value is extinguished. But so long as it is in 
circulation, it is always posited in a two-fold way, not only in that it 
exists as commodity with respect to money, but also in that it 
always exists as commodity with a price, exchange value measured 
in the measuring unit of exchange values. 

The movement of the commodity passes through various 
moments when it is price, becomes coin, and finally is transformed 
into use value. It 1s presupposed as use value and exchange value, 
for only then it is a commodity. But it realises these determina- 
tions formally in circulation and, moreover, so that, firstly, as has 
been said, it passes through various determinations; and, secondly, 
so that in the process of exchange its being as use value and 
exchange value is always distributed between the two sides, 
between the two extremes of the exchange. In circulation, its 
two-fold nature is dismembered and it becomes in each of the 
conditions presupposed in it only as a result of this formal process. 
The unity of both determinations appears as a restless movement 
passing through definite moments and at the same time always 
two-sided. Always only in this social relationship so that the various 
determinations of the commodity are, in fact, no more than alternating 
relations in which the subjects of the exchange are in the process of 
exchange. This relation appears, however, as an objective relation- 
ship in which they are placed by the content of the exchange, by 
its social determinateness, independently of their will. In price, 
coin, as money, these social relations appear with respect to these 
subjects as external and subsuming. The negation of the com- 
modity in one of its determinations is always its realisation in the 
other. As price it is already notionally negated as use value and 
posited as exchange value. As realised price, i.e. as money, it is ne- 
gated use value. As realised money, i.e. as transcended means of 
purchase, it is negated exchange value, realised use value. It is 
initially use value and exchange value only 85vvdper7; only in 
circulation does it become posited as both, and circulation is the 


4 Potentially.— Ea. 


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


alternation of these determinations. While being the alternation 
and confrontation of these determinations, therefore, circulation is 
also always their equation to each other. 

In so far, however, as we examine the form C—M—C, 
exchange value, whether in its form of price, or in its form of 
coin, or in the form of the equating movement, in the form of the 
movement of exchange itself, appears only as a fleeting mediation. 
Commodity is eventually exchanged for commodity, or more 
precisely, since the determination of the commodity 1s extin- 
guished, it is use values of different quality that are exchanged for 
each other, while circulation itself merely served, on the one hand, 
to allow them to change hands in accordance with the want, and 
on the other, to allow them to change hands in accordance with 
the labour time they contain; [B"-7] to allow them to substitute 
for each other to the extent to which they are equally weighty 
moments of the general social labour time. Now, however, the 
commodities thrown into circulation have reached their goal. In 
the hands of their new possessor, each of them ceases to be a 
commodity; each of them becomes an object of want, and as such 
is consumed in accordance with its nature. 

There, therefore, circulation comes to an end. Nothing remains 
but the means of circulation as a mere residue. But as such a 
residue it loses its form determination. It sinks into its matter that 
remains in the form of the inorganic ash of the whole process. As 
soon as the commodity has become a use value as such, it is 
thrown out of circulation and has ceased to be a commodity. That 
is why it is not from this aspect of content (substance) that we 
should seek further determinations of form. The use value 
becomes in circulation only that as what it was posited indepen- 
dently of circulation—an object of a definite want. As such an 
object, it was and remains a physical motive of circulation; but is 
left by it, as the social form, altogether unaffected. In the 
C—M—C movement, the physical matter appears as the actual 
content of the movement; the social movement, only as a fleeting 
mediation for the satisfaction of individual wants. The change of 
material of the social labour. In this movement, the sublation of 
the form determination, i.e. those springing from the social 
process, appears not only as the result but also as the goal; in 
much the same way as court proceedings appear to the peasant, 
though not to his lawyer. So in order to examine the further 
determination of form arising from the movement of circulation 
itself, we must keep to the side where the formal aspect, exchange 
value as such, is further developed, and is given a deeper 


Chapter Two. Money 485 


determination through the process of circulation itself. That 
means the aspect of the development of money, the M—C—M 
form. 

Being objectified in circulation, exchange value, as an objectified 
quantum of social labour time, proceeds up to its being as money 
in the form of hoard and universal means of payment. If money is 
now fixed in this form, its form determination is equally 
extinguished; it ceases to be money and becomes mere metal, 
mere use value, which, however, since it does not have to serve as 
such in its metal quality, is useless, i.e. it does not realise itself as 
the commodity does in consumption as use value. 

We have seen how the commodity realises the moments it 
contains by continually denying one of them. From the standpoint 
of the movement of the commodity as such, exchange value exists 
notionally in it as price; the commodity becomes abstract means of 
exchange in coin, but in its final realisation in another commodity, 
its exchange value is extinguished, and it drops out of the process 
as simple use value, immediate object of consumption (C—M— 
C). That is the movement of the commodity in which its being as 
use value is the dominant moment, and the movement in fact 
consists only in that it assumes the want-corresponding form of 
the use value, instead of that in which it is a commodity. 

If, however, we consider the further development of exchange 
value in money, we shall find that in the first movement [C—M] 
it reaches only its being as notional money, or coin, as unit [of 
value measurement] and number [of units]. But if we take both 
movements [C—M and M—C] together, it will transpire that 
money, existing in price only as ideal measuring unit, as imagined 
material of general labour, in coin—only as value token, as 
abstract and fleeting being of value, as materialised conception, i.e. 
as symbol—in its form, finally, as money, first, negates both 
determinations, but also contains both as moments, and simultane- 
ously firmly establishes itself in a materialisation independent of 
circulation, in a constant, even if negative, relation to it. 

What becomes, emerges, is produced in circulation, when its form itself 
is considered, is money itself and nothing else. Commodities are 
exchanged in circulation, but they do not originate in it. Money, as 
price and coin, is already an own product of circulation, but only 
formally. The exchange value of the commodity is the premiss of 
price, just as the coin itself is nothing but the self-established form 
of the commodity as similarly premissed means of exchange. 
Circulation does not create exchange value, just as it does not 
create its magnitude. For commodity to be measured in money, 


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


both money and commodity must relate to each other as exchange 
values, that is, as the objectification of labour time. In price, the 
exchange value of the commodity is given only an expression that 
is separate from its use value; similarly, the value token springs 
only from the equivalent, from the commodity as means of 
exchange. As means of exchange, the commodity must be use 
value, but it can become such only through alienation, since it is 
use value not for him in whose hands it is commodity, but for him 
who acquires it in exchange as use value. Its use value for the 
possessor of the commodity consists merely in its exchangeability, 
its alienability to the extent of the exchange value it represents. So, 
as universal means of exchange, it becomes mere use value in 
circulation as stable existence of exchange value, while its use value as 
such is extinguished. That the exchange value is posited as price, 
and the means of exchange as money, appears as a simple formal 
change [of determinations]. Every commodity as realised exchange 
value is the money of account for the other commodities, their 
price-giving element, just as every commodity is means of 
exchange (but here it comes up against the limits within which it is 
means of exchange, for it can be such only with respect to him 
who possesses the commodity which the exchanger wants, and 
would have to pass through a series of exchanges in order 
eventually to become means of exchange; apart from the clumsiness 
of this process, it would once again come into [B"-8] conflict with 
its own nature as use value, for it would then have to be divisible 
into portions so as successively to satisfy all the different 
exchanges in the required proportions), means of circulation, coin. 
In price and coin, both determinations are transferred only to a 
single commodity. This appears merely as a simplification [of the 
process of exchange]. In the relationships in which a commodity 
appears as the measure of value of all the other commodities, it is 
a means of exchange, an equivalent alienable against them; it can 
actually serve as an equivalent, as a means of exchange. The process 
of circulation merely gives these determinations a more abstract 
form in money as coin and means of exchange. 

The form C—M—C, this stream of circulation, in which money 
figures only as measure and coin, appears therefore only as a 
mediated form of barter in whose basis and content nothing has 
changed. The reflecting consciousness of the peoples therefore 
perceives money in its determinations of measure and coin as 
arbitrary, as inventions conventionally introduced for the sake of 
convenience; for the transformations undergone by the determina- 
tions contained in the commodity as a unity of use value and 


Chapter Two. Money 487 


exchange value are no more than formal. Price is merely a 
determinate expression of exchange value, a generally understand- 
able expression [given] to exchange value in the language of 
circulation itself, just as coin, which can also actually exist as a 
mere symbol, is no more than a symbolic expression of exchange 
value, but as means of exchange remains precisely no more than a 
means for the exchange of the commodity, which is why no new 
content is brought in. It is true that price and coin originate from 
commerce: they are, in fact, commerce-created expressions, the 
commercial expressions of the commodity as exchange value and 
means of exchange. 

But things stand differently with money. It is a product of 
circulation which has grown out of it, as it were, contrary to initial 
agreement. 

Money is not merely a mediating form of commodity exchange. 
It is a form of exchange value growing out of the circulation 
process, a social product which, in virtue of the relations into 
which individuals enter in circulation, creates itself. As soon as gold 
and silver (or any other commodity) have developed themselves as 
measure of value and means of circulation (as the latter, whether 
in bodily form or as symbol), they become money without the 
society’s aid or desire. Their power appears as a kind of fate, and 
the consciousness of men, especially in social orders declining 
because of a deeper development of exchange-value relations, 
rebels against the power which a physical matter, a thing, acquires 
with respect to men, against the domination of the accursed metal 
which appears as sheer insanity. It is in money, and in its most 
abstract and hence most senseless, incomprehensible form, the 
form in which all mediation is sublated, that this transformation of 
social interrelations into a_ solid, overwhelming, individual- 
subsuming social relationship first appears. And this appearance is 
all the harder in that it springs from the premiss of free, 
untrammelled, atomistic private persons linked with each other 
in production only by reciprocal wants. Money itself contains 
within itself the negation of itself as mere measure [of values] and 
coin. 

//Considered in itself, the commodity should, in fact, be merely 
the being of exchange value for its possessor; for him, its 
materialisation only has the meaning of being the objectification of 
general labour time, which is exchangeable for any other 
objectification of it; is, consequently, immediate universal equival- 
ent, money. This aspect, however, is concealed and appears only as 
one side.// 


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


The old philosophers, and similarly Boisguillebert, regard this as 
a perversion, a misuse of money, which turns from slave into 
master, depreciates natural wealth and eliminates the equal 
measures of equivalents. In his De Republica, Plato wants forcibly 
to keep money as mere means of circulation and measure [of 
value], but not to allow it to become money as such.* For the same 
reason, Aristotle regards the form of circulation C—M—C, in 
which money functions only as measure and coin—a movement 
which he calls economic—as natural and reasonable, and brands 
the form M—C—M, the chrematistic? one, as unnatural and 
inappropriate. What is here being attacked is only exchange value 
which becomes the content and end-in-itself of circulation, i.e. the 
setting up of exchange value as something independent, and value 
as such becoming the aim of exchange and acquiring an 
independent form, at first still in the simple, tangible form of 
money. Use value is the aim of selling for the sake of buying; and 
value itself, of buying for the sake of selling. 

We have seen, it is true, that money is, in fact, only a means of 
circulation suspended in its function, whether it will later enter 
circulation as means of purchase or means of payment. But its 
independent attitude with respect to circulation, its withdrawal 
from the latter, robs it of both its values: of its use value, since it 
does not have to serve as metal; of its exchange value, since it 
possesses this exchange value only as a moment of circulation, as 
an abstract symbol of the commodities’ own value reciprocally 
opposed to each other; as a moment of the movement of the form 
of the commodity itself. So long as money remains withdrawn 
from circulation, it is as worthless as if it lay buried in the deepest 
pit. But if it re-enters [B’-9] circulation, its intransience is at an 
end, the value it contains disappears in the use values of the 
commodities for which it is exchanged, and it once again becomes 
a mere means of circulation. That is one moment. Money comes out 
of circulation as its result, t.e. as adequate being of exchange value, as 
universal equivalent for itself and congealed in itself. 

On the other hand: As the aim of exchange, i.e. as movement 
which has for its content exchange value itself, money itself, the 
only content [of the process] is an increase of exchange value, 
accumulation of money. But this increase is, in fact, purely formal. 
Here value does not come from value, but value in the form of 


a Cf. this volume, pp. 351-52.— Ed. 
6 Money-making.— Ed. 
¢ Aristotle, De Republica, Book I, Ch. 8-10.— Ed. 


Chapter Two. Money 489 


the commodity is thrown into circulation in order to extract it 
from there in the form of useless value as hoard. 


“All say that you are rich; I assert that you are poor. For the proof of wealth is 
use of it.” 104 


In content, therefore, enrichment appears as voluntary impover- 
ishment. Only the absence of wants, the renunciation of wants, the 
divorce from use value of the value which exists in the form of 
commodity, makes it possible to pile it up in the form of money. 
The fact is that the real movement of the form M—C—M exists 
not in the simple circulation, where equivalents are merely 
transferred from the form of commodity into that of money and 
vice versa. If I exchange one thaler for a commodity with a value 
of one thaler, and this again for one thaler, it is a process which 
has no content. Only one thing should be examined in the simple 
circulation: the content of this form itself, ie. money as an 
end-in-itself. It is clear that it occurs in such a form; apart from | 
the quantity, the predominant form of trade consists in exchang- 
ing money for commodity and commodity for money. It may, and 
does, happen that not as much money as was set out may be the 
result of this process. In a bad deal, less may return than was 
given out. Only the principle should be considered here; the 
further determinateness does not belong in the simple circulation 
itself. In the simple circulation itself, the increase of the value 
magnitude, the movement in which the increase of the value itself 
is the aim, may appear only in the form of accumulation, through 
the phase C—M, a continuously resumed sale of the commodity, 
when money is not allowed to run its full course and once again to 
be transformed into commodity after the commodity has been 
transformed into money. That is why money appears not as the 
point of departure, as the form M—C—M requires, but always 
only as the result of the exchange. It is the point of departure 
only in so far as, for the seller, the commodity has the significance 
of price alone, as still only would-be money, and he throws it into 
circulation in this transient form in order to withdraw it from 
there in its everlasting form. The exchange value was, in fact, the 
premiss of circulation, i.e. money, and the result of circulation, in 
so far as it ends in the accumulation of money, is once again the 
exchange value’s adequate being and increase. 

Money, therefore, even in its concrete determination as money, 
in which it is already a negation of itself as mere measure [of 
value] and mere coin, is negated in the movement of circulation in 


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


which it is posited as money. But what is negated here is merely 
the abstract form in which the exchange value becoming 
independent appears in money, and also the abstract form of the 
process of this becoming independent. From the standpoint of 
exchange value, the whole of circulation is negated, since it does 
not carry within itself the principle of self-renewal. 

Circulation proceeds from both determinations of the commodi- 
ty, from it as use value, and from it as exchange value. In so far as 
the first determination prevails, circulation ends with the use value 
becoming independent; the commodity becomes an object of 
consumption. In so far as the second determination prevails, 
circulation ends with the second determination, the exchange 
value becoming independent. The commodity becomes money. 
But the commodity passes into this latter determination only 
through the process of circulation, and it continues to be related 
to circulation. In this latter determination, the commodity further 
develops as objectified general labour time—in its social form. It 
is from this latter aspect, therefore, that there should be a further 
determination of social labour, which initially appears as the 
exchange value of the commodity, and then as money. The 
exchange value is the social form as such; its further analysis, 
therefore, is a further analysis of, or a deepening into, the social 
process which throws the commodity onto its surface. 

If we now [knowing that] the independence of the exchange 
value results from the process of circulation, proceed from the 
exchange value as such, as we earlier proceeded from the 
commodity, we shall find that: 

1) The exchange value exists in a dual form, as commodity and 
as money; the latter appears as its adequate form; but in the 
commodity, so long as it remains commodity, money is not lost, 
but exists as its price. Thus, the existence of the exchange value is 
doubled so that it exists once in use values, and once in money. 
Both forms, however, are exchanged for each other, and through 
this mere exchange as such the value does not perish. 

2) If money is to be preserved as money, it must, just as it 
appears in the form of residue and a result of the process of 
circulation, [B”-10] be capable of re-entering this process, i.e. of 
not being converted in circulation into a mere means of circulation 
disappearing in the form of commodity in exchange for a mere 
use value. Money, while it is in one determination, should not be 
Jost in the other, i.e. it should remain money also in its being as 
commodity, and, in its being as money, exist only as a transient 
form of commodity; in its being as commodity it should not lose 


Chapter Two. Money 49] 


its exchange value, and, in its being as money, its relation to use 
value. Its entry into circulation must itself be a moment of its 
stay-by-itself, and its stay-by-itself, entry into circulation. Thus, the 
exchange value is now determined as a process and not merely as 
a disappearing form of use value indifferent to this use value itself 
as physical content, and not merely as a thing in the form of 
money; it is determined as relation to its own self through the 
process of circulation. On the other hand, circulation is itself no 
longer determined as a merely formal process in which the 
commodity passes through its various determinations, but the 
exchange value itself, and, to be sure, the exchange value 
measured in money must be premissed as posited by circulation, 
and as so posited by it appear as being premissed to it. Circulation 
itself must appear as a moment of the production of exchange 
values (as the process of production of exchange values). In the 
process of exchange value becoming independent in money, only 
its indifference is in fact posited with respect to the particular use 
value in which it incorporates itself. The independent universal 
equivalent is money, whether it exists in the form of commodity or 
in the form of money. The process of exchange value becoming 
independent in money must itself appear only as a moment of the 
movement, as a result of circulation, but as one determined for 
starting it again, without congealing in this form. 

Money, i.e. the independent exchange value arising in the 
process of circulation as a result of and simultaneously as a living 
impetus to circulation (only in the limited form of hoarding, it is 
true), has negated itself merely as coin, ie. as a merely fleeting: 
form of exchange value, as merely dissolving in circulation; it has 
also negated itself as independently confronting circulation. If it is 
not to petrify as a hoard, it must once again enter into circulation 
in the same way as it left it, and not as simple means of 
circulation, but so that its being as means of circulation, and so its 
transition into commodity were themselves only a change of form 
to reappear in its adequate form as adequate exchange value, but 
simultaneously as multiplied, increased exchange value, valorised 
exchange value. Value valorising, i.e. multiplying, itself in circulation 
is in general exchange-value-for-itself which passes through 
circulation as an end-in-itself. This valorisation, this quantitative 
increase of value—the only process which value can perform as 
such— appears in the accumulation of money only as the opposite of 
circulation, i.e. through its own sublation. Moreover, circulation 
must itself be posited as a process in which value is retained and 
valorised. 


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


In circulation, however, money becomes coin and, as such, is 
exchanged for commodity. If this exchange is to be more than 
formal, if the exchange value is not to be lost in the consumption 
of the commodity, so that there is not merely a change in the form 
of the exchange value (once as its universal abstract being in 
money, and again, its being in a particular use value of the 
commodity), the exchange value must in fact be exchanged for a 
use value, and the commodity must be consumed as a use value, 
but in this consumption it must be retained as an exchange value, 
in other words, its disappearance must disappear, and must itself 
be merely a means for the emergence of a greater exchange value, 
for the reproduction and production of exchange value— 
productive consumption, i.e. consumption through labour in order to 
objectify labour, to create exchange value. The production of 
exchange value is in general only the production of a greater 
exchange value, a multiplication of it. Its simple reproduction 
modifies the use value in which it exists, just as the simple 
circulation does it, but without creating, without producing it. 

The exchange value become independent implies circulation as 
a developed moment and appears as an uninterrupted process 
which posits circulation and from it keeps returning in itself in 
order to posit it once again. As self-positing movement, the 
exchange value no longer appears as a merely formal movement 
of preposited exchange values, but is at the same time a 
self-producing and self-reproducing movement. Production itself 
is here no longer present before its results, i.e. it is not preposited 
but appears as production which at the same time itself produces 
these results; but it posits the exchange value as no longer merely 
leading to circulation, but as one which simultaneously implies 
developed circulation in its [B’-11] process. 

In order to establish itself as something independent, the 
exchange value would not only have to emerge as result from 
circulation, but would also have to be capable of re-entering 
circulation, to be retained in it, becoming commodity. In money, 
the exchange value has received an independent form with respect 
to the circulation C—M—C, ie. with respect to its final 
dissolution in simple use value. But this form, when fixed, is only 
negative, fleeting, or illusory. Money exists only in relation to 
circulation and as a possibility of entering it. But it loses this 
determination as soon as it realises itself. It falls back to both its 
functions as measure and means of circulation. As mere money, it 
does not go beyond this determination. Simultaneously, however, 
it is posited in circulation that it remains money, whether it exists 


Chapter Two. Money 493 


as such or as the price of the commodity. The movement of 
circulation must not appear as the movement of its disappearance, 
but, on the contrary, as the movement of its actual self-positing as 
exchange value, its realisation as exchange value. If commodity is 
exchanged for money, the form of exchange value, exchange 
value posited as exchange value, money, is congealed in this 
determination only so long as money is kept out of the exchange 
in which it functions as value, so long as it evades it, and is, 
consequently, a purely illusory realisation of value, its purely ideal 
realisation in the form in which the independence of the exchange 
value exists tangibly. 

The same exchange value must become money, commodity, 
commodity, money, as the form M—C—M requires. In the 
simple circulation, the commodity becomes money and then 
commodity; it is another commodity which once again posits itself 
as money. ‘The exchange value is not retained in this change of its form. 
But in circulation it is already posited that money is both money and 
commodity, and is retained in the alternation of both determinations. 

In circulation, the exchange value appears two-fold: once as 
commodity and again as money. If it is in the one determination, 
it is not in the other. This is true of any particular commodity; 
and equally of money as a means of circulation. But implicit in 
circulation as a whole is that the same exchange value, exchange 
value as subject, once posits itself as commodity, and again as 
money, and is in fact the movement aimed at positing itself in 
these two determinations and maintaining itself in each of these as 
its opposite, in the commodity as money, and in money as 
commodity. That is what is present in the simple circulation in 
itself, but is not posited in it. 

Where these determinations in the simple circulation are 
positively independent of each other, as in the commodity 
becoming the object of consumption, circulation ceases being a 
moment of the economic process; where negatively, as in money, it 
becomes insanity, an insanity stemming from the economic process 
itself. 

It cannot be said that the exchange value realises itself in the 
simple circulation, because the use value does not confront it as 
such, as use value determined by itself. Conversely, the use value 
as such does not itself become exchange value or becomes it only 
in so far as the determination of use values—that of being 
objectified general labour—is superimposed on them as an 
external scale. Their unity still immediately falls asunder, and 
their difference still immediately forms a unity. That the use value 


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


as such is mediated through the exchange value, and that the 
exchange value mediates itself through the use value, now has to 
be posited. 

In the simple circulation, we had only two formally distinct 
determinations of exchange value—money and commodity price; 
and only two physically distinct use values—C—C, for which 
money, the exchange value, is merely a fleeting mediation, a form 
which these use values temporarily adopt. No real relationship was 
established between the exchange value and the use value. It is 
true that in the use value, the exchange value also exists as price 
(notional determination); it is true that in money, the use value 
also exists as its reality, its material. In the one case, it is the 
exchange value that was merely notional, and in the other, the use 
value. The commodity as such—its particular use value—.is, 
therefore, merely a physical motive for the exchange, but as such 
it drops out of the economic form determination; or the economic 
form determination is merely the superficial form, the formal 
determination which does not penetrate into the sphere of the real 
substance of wealth and has no relation to that substance as such; 
that is why if this form determination as such is to be established 
in the form of hoard it [form determination] is imperceptibly 
transformed into a natural undifferentiated product, a metal, on 
which even its last relation to circulation is extinguished. The 
metal as such does not, of course, express any social relation; in it 
even the form of coin, the last sign of life of its social significance, 
has been extinguished. 

Having emerged from circulation as its prerequisite and result, 
the exchange value must similarly enter it once again. 

We have already seen in the examination of money, and it 
clearly appears in hoarding, that the growth of money, its 
multiplication is the only process of the form of circulation which 
is the end-in-itself for value, i.e. that value become independent 
and retaining itself in the form of exchange value (above all 
money), is simultaneously the process of its increase; that its 
retention of itself as value is simultaneously its advance beyond its 
quantitative limits, its expansion as a magnitude of value and that 
the process of the exchange value becoming independent has no 
other content. The maintenance of the exchange value as such by 
means of circulation appears simultaneously as its self-expansion, 
and this self-expansion is [B’-12] its self-valorisation, its active 
positing of itself as value-creating value; as value reproducing 
itself while preserving itself, but simultaneously positing itself as 
value, i.e. as surplus value. In hoarding, this process is still purely 


Chapter Two. Money 495 


formal. In so far as the individual is concerned, this process 
appears as a movement without content converting wealth from a 
useful into a useless and, in terms of determination, unnecessary 
form. In so far as the economic process as a whole is concerned, 
hoarding serves merely as a condition of the metallic circulation 
itself. So long as money remains hoard, it does not function as 
exchange value, it is merely imaginary. On the other hand, the 
expansion—the positing of itself as value, value which not only 
preserves itself through circulation, but originates from it, i.e. 
posits itself as surplus value—is likewise merely imaginary. The 
same value magnitude which earlier existed in the form of 
commodity now exists in the form of money; it is accumulated in 
the latter form, because it is abandoned in the other. If it is 
realised, it disappears in consumption. The preservation and 
expansion of value is, therefore, merely abstract, formal. Only the 
form of this is posited in the simple circulation. 

As a form of universal wealth, as exchange value become 
independent, money is incapable of any other movement but the 
quantitative one: to expand itself. By concept it is the essence of 
all the use values; but its quantitative limits, as the limits of what is 
always merely a definite magnitude of value, a definite sum 
of gold and silver, is in contradiction with its quality. That is 
why rooted in its nature is a constant drive to go beyond its own 
limits. 

(As consuming wealth, for instance in the epoch of the Roman 
emperors, money for that reason appears as boundless, insane 
dissipation, which tries to raise even the consumption of food to its 
imaginary boundlessness, i.e. one which treats money, as such a 
form of wealth, at the same time directly as a use value. Pear! salad, 
etc.) 

For value, firmly established as value, its expansion, therefore, 
coincides with its self-preservation, and it preserves itself only by 
constantly driving beyond its quantitative limits, which contradicts 
its inner universality. So enrichment is an end-in-itself. The 
end-determining activity of exchange value become independent 
can only be enrichment, i.e. its own self-expansion; reproduction 
and not a merely formal one, but one in which it expands. But as 
a quantitatively determinate magnitude of value, money is also 
only a limited representative of universal wealth, or a representa- 
tive of limited wealth which extends just so far as does the 
magnitude of its exchange value exactly measured according to it. 
Consequently, it does not at all have the capability which it should 
have had according to its general concept, the capability of buying 


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


all the objects of consumption, all the commodities, the totality of 
material wealth; it is not a “précis de toutes les choses”.” 

So, fixed as wealth, as the universal form of wealth, as value that 
counts as value, money is a constant drive to go beyond its 
quantitative limits; an endless process. Its own viability consists 
exclusively in this; it preserves itself as self-important value distinct 
from use value only when it continually multiplies itself by means of 
the process of exchange itself. The active value is only a 
surplus-value-positing value. The only function [of money] as 
exchange value is exchange itself. In this function, therefore, it 
must expand itself, but not through its withdrawal [from 
circulation] as in hoarding. In it money does not function as 
money. When withdrawn as hoard, it functions neither as 
exchange value nor as use value, is dead, unproductive hoard. No 
kind of action originates from it itself. Its expansion is an external 
addition from circulation, when the commodity is again thrown 
into circulation and value is converted from the form of 
commodity into the form of money, and then as the latter is 
hidden for safe-keeping, i.e. when money in general ceases to be 
money. Once it again enters circulation, it disappears as exchange 
value. 

Resulting from circulation as adequate exchange value and 
independent but again entering circulation, in it and through it 
perpetuating and valorising (multiplying) itself, money is capital 
In capital money has lost its rigidity and from a tangible thing has 
become a process. Money and commodity as such, just as the 
simple circulation itself, exist for capital merely as particular 
abstract moments of its being in which it just as continually 
appears, passing from the one into the other, and just as 
continually disappears. The process of becoming independent 
appears not only in the form that capital confronts circulation as 
an independent abstract exchange value—money—but also in that 
circulation is simultaneously the process of its becoming indepen- 
dent, that it stems from circulation as something become 
independent. 

The form M—C—M clearly expresses that the establishment of 
the independence of money must appear as a process, equally as a 
premiss and a result of circulation. This form as such does not, 
however, receive any content in the simple circulation, and does 
not even appear as the movement of content—a movement of 
circulation for which the exchange value is not only a form, but 
also the content and the end itself, and which, for that reason, is 
the form of the exchange-value-in-process itself. 


Chapter Two. Money 497 


The exchange value become independent, money as such, 
always appears in the simple circulation only as the result, caput 
mortuum of the movement. It must equally appear as its premiss; 
its result, as its premiss; and its premiss [B”-13] as its result. 

Money must preserve itself as money both in its form of money 
and in the form of commodity; the change of these determina- 
tions, the process in which it goes through these metamorphoses, 
must at the same time appear as a process of its production, as 
creator of itself, i.e. as augmentation of its value magnitude. When 
money becomes commodity, and commodity as such is necessarily 
consumed as use value and must disappear, this disappearance 
must itself disappear, this annihilation must annihilate itself, so 
that the consumption of the commodity as use value itself appears 
as a moment of the process of the self-reproducing value. 

Money and commodity, like their relation to each other in 
circulation, now equally appear as mere premisses of capital, as, on 
the other hand, the form of its being; equally as mere existing 
elementary premisses for capital, as, on the other hand, forms of 
its being and its results. 

The intransience for which money strives as it negatively sets 
itself with respect to circulation (by withdrawing itself from it) is 
acquired by capital in that it preserves itself precisely by giving 
itself up to circulation. Capital as exchange value implying 
circulation, preposited to it and preserving itself in it, alternately 
assumes the form of both these moments contained in the simple 
circulation, but not as in the simple circulation, in which it merely 
passes from either form into the other, but so that in each of the 
determinations it simultaneously preserves the relation to the 
opposite moment. If it appears as money, it is now merely a 
one-sided abstract expression of it as universality; shedding this 
form as well, it sheds only its opposite-based determination (sheds 
the opposite-based form of universality). If it is posited as money, 
i.e. as this opposite-based form of the universality of exchange 
value, it is simultaneously posited within it that it must lose not 
universality as in the simple circulation, but its opposite-based 
determination, or that it assumes the form of money no more than 
fleetingly, i.e. is once again exchanged for the commodity, but a 
commodity which even in its particularity expresses the universali- 
ty of the exchange value and so keeps changing its determinate 
form. 

Commodity is not only an exchange value, but also a use value, 
and as the latter it must be appropriately consumed. When the 
commodity serves as use value, i.e. during its consumption, the 


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


exchange value must simultaneously preserve itself and appear as 
the end-determining soul of consumption. The process of the 
disappearance of the commodity must, therefore, appear at the 
same time as a process of the disappearance of its disappearance, 
i.e. as a reproducing process. The consumption of the commodity, 
therefore, is not aimed at any immediate enjoyment, but itself 
appears as a moment of the reproduction of its exchange value. The 
exchange value, therefore, is, as a result, not only the form of the 
commodity, but appears as the fire in which its very substance is 
consumed. This determination stems from the very concept of use 
value. And in the form of money, capital, on the one hand, will 
appear no more than fleetingly as means of circulation, and, on 
the other hand, only as a moment, as its fleeting positedness in the 
determinateness of adequate exchange value. 

On the one hand, the simple circulation is an existing premiss 
for the commodity, and its extremes, money and commodity, 
appear as elementary premisses, as forms turning into capital 
according to possibility; or they are merely abstract spheres of the 
process of production of preposited capital. On the other hand, 
they return into it as into their abyss or lead to it. (The above 
historical example to be given here.*) 

In capital, money, the preposited exchange value become 
independent, appears not only as exchange value, but, being 
independent exchange value, as a result of circulation. Indeed, no 
formation of capital takes place before the sphere of the simple 
circulation has developed up to a definite level, even if from 
altogether different conditions of production than capital itself. 
On the other hand, money is posited as positing circulation as the 
movement of its own process, the movement of its own realisation, 
as a self-perpetuating and self-valorising value. As premiss, it is 
here simultaneously result of the process of circulation, and 
as result, simultaneously also premiss of its determinate form, 
which was determined as the form M—C—M (at first only this 
stream of it). It is a unity of commodity and money, but their 
unity-in-process, and to the same extent to which it is neither 
commodity nor money, it is at the same time both the one and 
the other. 

It preserves and valorises itself in and through circulation. On 
the other hand, the exchange value is no longer preposited as a 
simple exchange value, as it exists in the commodity in its simple 
determination, before it enters circulation, or, more precisely, as a 


a See this volume, pp. 480-81.— Ed. 


Chapter Two. Money 499 


merely implied determination, since the commodity becomes a 
fleeting exchange value only in circulation. It exists in the form of 
the objectivity { Gegenstandlichkeit}, but it is indifferent to whether it 
is the objectivity of the money or the commodity. It stems from 
circulation; so presupposes it. But it stems, at the same time, from 
itself as premiss with respect to circulation. 

In the actual exchange of money for commodity, as expressed in 
the form M—C—M, ie. in so far as the real being of the 
commodity is its use value, and the real being of the use value is 
its consumption, from the commodity realising itself as use value 
must once again emerge the exchange value itself, with money and 
the consumption of the commodity appearing equally as the form 
of its preservation and as its self-valorisation. Circulation appears 
with respect to the exchange value as a moment of the process of 
its own realisation. 

[B’-14] The real being of the commodity, its being as use value, 
drops out of the simple circulation. So should it also be with the 
moment in the process of capital in which the consumption of 
commodity appears as a moment of the self-valorisation of capital. 

So long as money, i.e. exchange value become independent, 
merely fixes itself with respect to its opposite, use value as 
such, it is, in fact, capable only of an abstract being. In its 
opposite, in its becoming use value, and in the process of the 
consumption of the use value, it must simultaneously preserve 
itself and wax as exchange value, i.e. transform the consumption 
of the use value itself—its active negation as well as_ its 
positing—into the reproduction and production of the exchange 
value itself. 

In the simple circulation, every commodity appears alternately 
as exchange value or as use value. As soon as it is realised as the 
latter, it drops out of circulation. In so far as the commodity is 
fixed as exchange value, in money, it drives towards the same 
formlessness, but as falling within the economic relation. At any 
rate, the exchange relationship (simple circulation) is of mterest to 
the commodities only in so far as they have exchange values. On 
the other hand, their exchange value is merely of transient interest 
in that it suspends the one-sidedness of the use value—of being 
use value only immediately for the individuals—i.e. carries the use 
value to its consumer; it changes nothing in the use value except 
that it posits it as a use value for others (for buyers). But in so far 
as the exchange value is fixed as such, in money, the use value 
now confronts it only as abstract chaos; and it is precisely through 
the separation from its substance that it peters out and drives out 


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


of the sphere of the simple exchange value, whose highest 
movement is the simple circulation, and whose highest accomplish- 
ment is money. Within the sphere itself, however, the difference 
exists only as a formal, superficial differentiation. Money in its 
highest fixation is itself once again commodity.’ 


2 The bottom of page 14 and the whole of page 15 of the manuscript were left 
blank.— Ed. 


501