Part One — Commodities and Money Chapters 1–3. The commodity and its two factors, the value-form, the fetish, and the genesis of money.

Part One is the analytic opening of Capital, and it is the part Marx himself flags as the hardest and the most consequential. Three chapters take the commodity apart down to its cell and rebuild the whole apparatus of value, exchange, and money out of what is found inside it. Nothing in the rest of the volume — labour-power, surplus-value, the working day, accumulation — can be stated until the categories built here are standing. Chapter 1 dissects the commodity into use-value and value, tracks value back to the double character of the labour that produces it, derives the value-form through four stages up to the money-form, and then, in the fetishism section, explains why this whole structure presents itself to the people living inside it as a property of things rather than a relation between them. Chapter 2 stages the derivation a second time from the side of the commodity-owners, as an act they perform without grasping. Chapter 3 unfolds money into its functions: measure of value, means of circulation, and money as money — hoard, means of payment, world money.

The situation the Part enters is the critique of political economy. Classical political economy had already found that the magnitude of a commodity's value is governed by labour-time. What it had never asked is why the product of labour takes the value-form at all — why human labour should express itself as the objective value of a thing, and why that value should have to appear as exchange-value and finally as money. Marx's target across Part One is the form, not merely the magnitude, and the analysis is immanent: no external standard is imported, the commodity is made to yield its own contradictions, and each category is forced out of the insufficiency of the one before it. That is the through-line the reconstruction below follows — from the two factors of the commodity, through the dual character of labour, through the four forms of value to the money-form, and out into the fetish.

Marx sets the stakes in the Preface, and the brief takes his warning as its orientation. The difficulty is concentrated exactly where the payoff is.

Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty.

Marx, Preface to the First Edition, page 89.

The reason the difficulty pays is that what is under the microscope in Chapter 1 is not a minor category but the germ-cell of the entire mode of production. The famous image is Marx's own, and it is the best statement of why Part One is load-bearing out of all proportion to its length.

Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells. Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form.

Marx, Preface to the First Edition, page 90.

The reconstruction runs Chapter 1 section by section, at full quotation density, because Chapter 1 is the anchor of the volume; Chapters 2 and 3 follow. What the brief does not do — weigh the derivation against later theories of value, or measure the value-form analysis for what it may occlude — is left to the researcher who has the reconstruction in hand.

1 · The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value

The volume opens not with capital, labour, or class but with the commodity, and the first sentence states why. Capitalist wealth does not present itself as a stock of use-values or as a sum of activity; it presents itself as a heap of saleable things, and the single commodity is the unit that heap is built from. The analysis therefore begins where the wealth first appears.

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 125.

The commodity is taken apart into two factors. The first is use-value. A commodity is before anything else a thing outside us that satisfies a need, and the character of the need is irrelevant to the analysis.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

Marx, Capital I, page 125.

Use-value is bound to the physical body of the thing and to its consumption; it is not a relation but a property. Marx pins it down so it can be set aside, and in doing so drops the phrase — material bearers of exchange-value — that names the whole problem the chapter will work on: the useful thing is also the carrier of something else.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities provide the material for a special branch of knowledge, namely the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use-values are only realized [verwirklicht] in use or in consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers [Träger] of … exchange-value.

Marx, Capital I, page 126.

Exchange-value enters as the second factor, and it enters as a puzzle. It shows up first as a mere proportion, a ratio at which one use-value trades for another, and that ratio shifts with time and place — which makes the idea of a value intrinsic to the thing look self-contradictory.

Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind. This relation changes constantly with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e. an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms.

Marx, Capital I, page 126.

The way out is the reduction argument, the analytic engine of the whole section. A single commodity has many exchange-values (so much boot-polish, so much silk, so much gold), and if all of these express the exchange-value of one quarter of wheat, then all of them must express something equal. Exchange-value is therefore not the thing itself but the appearance of a content behind it.

It follows from this that, firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it.

Marx, Capital I, page 127.

Two commodities set equal — a quarter of corn to a hundredweight of iron — assert a common element of identical magnitude in both, a third thing that is neither. Marx illustrates the move with the triangle reduced to base-times-height, then forecloses the obvious wrong answer: the common element is not any natural property of the things, because exchange abstracts from exactly those.

This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into consideration only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e. turn them into use-values. But clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values. Within the exchange relation, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided only that it is present in the appropriate quantity.

Marx, Capital I, page 127.

Strip the use-value away and one property survives: the things are all products of labour. But the abstraction cannot stop at the useful thing; it takes the useful character of the labour with it. Once concrete labours — joiner, mason, spinner — are no longer distinguishable, what is left is labour with no qualitative determination, labour as such.

Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Marx, Capital I, page 128.

What remains once both the useful thing and the useful labour are gone is value, and Marx names its strange mode of being in the register that will carry through to the fetish section: a spectral objectivity, congealed labour, a social substance crystallized in the thing.

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values [Warenwerte].

Marx, Capital I, page 128.

The section now fixes the relation between the two terms it began with. Exchange-value was the starting appearance; value is the content behind it. The order will later be reversed — the investigation returns to exchange-value as the form value is forced to take — but for now value is to be examined on its own, apart from its form. This sentence is the hinge that Section 3 is built to swing back on.

The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is therefore its value. The progress of the investigation will lead us back to exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value. For the present, however, we must consider the nature of value independently of its form of appearance [Erscheinungsform].

Marx, Capital I, page 128.

With value defined, the question turns to its magnitude. Value is abstract human labour objectified in the article; its magnitude is the quantity of that labour, measured by its duration in time.

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified [vergegenständlicht] or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.

Marx, Capital I, page 129.

Marx raises the objection his own definition invites — that a lazy or unskilful worker, needing more time, would make more valuable goods — and answers it with the concept that keeps the labour theory from collapsing into an absurdity. The labour that counts is not any individual's labour but a social average; the measure is socially necessary labour-time. This is the load-bearing definition of the section, and the power-loom case shows it is not a stipulation but a mechanism: raise productivity and the same hour of individual labour comes to count as less social labour, so value falls.

However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour-power. Each of these units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labour-power and acts as such, i.e. only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value.

Marx, Capital I, page 129.

The consequence is the inverse law of value and productivity, stated first as a determination of magnitude and then compressed into a single proposition. Value tracks the labour socially necessary, not the labour actually spent; and because productivity governs how much labour is necessary, value moves against it.

In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value. Inversely, the less the productivity of labour, the greater the labour-time necessary to produce an article, and the greater its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labour which finds its realization within the commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 131.

The section closes by separating the terms it has bound together, so that neither use-value nor value nor commodity collapses into the others. A thing can be useful without being a value; a thing can be a product of labour without being a commodity, since it must be produced as a use-value for others and transferred through exchange; and nothing can be a value if it is not useful at all, because then the labour in it does not count.

A thing can be a use-value without being a value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not mediated through labour. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc. fall into this category. A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity. He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values. … Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

Marx, Capital I, page 131. The ellipsis marks Marx’s own parenthetical on the medieval corn-rent and corn-tithe, which he added to block the misreading that any product made for another is thereby a commodity.

2 · The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities

Section 1 found two factors in the commodity. Section 2 finds the same doubling in the labour that makes it, and Marx marks this as the discovery he is proudest of and the point on which the whole understanding of political economy turns. The claim is not that there are two kinds of labour but that the same labour has two characters depending on whether it is regarded as making a useful thing or as forming value.

on it was seen that labour, too, has a dual character: in so far as it finds its expression in value, it no longer possesses the same characteristics as when it is the creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation.

Marx, Capital I, page 132.

The first side is useful labour: productive activity of a definite kind, aimed at a definite result, whose product is a use-value. Different use-values are the products of qualitatively different useful labours, and Marx makes the difference a condition of exchange itself — commodities that were products of identical labour could not confront each other as commodities. The heterogeneity of useful labours is the social division of labour.

As the coat and the linen are qualitatively different use-values, so also are the forms of labour through which their existence is mediated – tailoring and weaving. If the use-values were not qualitatively different, hence not the products of qualitatively different forms of useful labour, they would be absolutely incapable of confronting each other as commodities. Coats cannot be exchanged for coats, one use-value cannot be exchanged for another of the same kind.

Marx, Capital I, page 132.

Marx then guards the concept against a symmetrical misreading: the social division of labour is necessary for commodity production, but commodity production is not necessary for the division of labour. The Indian commune and the internal division of a factory both divide labour without exchange. What makes products into commodities is not division as such but that they are the products of independent private labours.

This division of labour is a necessary condition for commodity production, although the converse does not hold; commodity production is not a necessary condition for the social division of labour. Labour is socially divided in the primitive Indian community, although the products do not thereby become commodities. Or, to take an example nearer home, labour is systematically divided in every factory, but the workers do not bring about this division by exchanging their individual products. Only the products of mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities.

Marx, Capital I, page 132.

Useful labour, taken on this first side, is not a historical peculiarity of capitalism but a condition of human life in any society whatever. This is the trans-historical floor of the analysis, and Marx states it in the vocabulary of metabolism — the exchange between humanity and nature that no social form can suspend.

Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.

Marx, Capital I, page 133.

Because labour only ever reshapes given matter, it is not the sole source of material wealth; nature is the other parent. Marx borrows Petty's formula to fix the point, which blocks the reading that would make labour the source of all wealth outright rather than of value specifically.

Use-values like coats, linen, etc., in short, the physical bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour. If we subtract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, the linen, etc., a material substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention. When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only change the form of the materials.

Marx, Capital I, page 133.

Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

Marx, Capital I, page 134.

Now the second side. Abstract from the determinate purpose of the labour — from its useful character — and what is left is expenditure of human labour-power as such. Marx gives this abstraction its physiological content: the plain outlay of the body, common to tailoring and weaving alike.

If we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of the labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., and in this sense both human labour. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labour-power.

Marx, Capital I, page 134.

Value, then, represents not any particular labour but human labour in general, simple average labour. The problem of skilled work is handled by reduction: complex labour counts as multiplied simple labour, and the multiplier is fixed not by decree but by a social process the producers neither see nor control.

But the value of a commodity represents human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general. … More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labour, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour. The various proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers; these proportions therefore appear to the producers to have been handed down by tradition.

Marx, Capital I, page 135. The ellipsis omits Marx’s aside comparing labour to a general or a banker who counts for much while “man as such plays a very mean part.”

A footnote to this passage sets a boundary that governs how the whole of Part One must be read: at this stage of the presentation, wages and the value of labour are not yet in play. The value under analysis is the value of the product in which a day of labour is objectified, not any payment for labour.

The reader should note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value the worker receives for (e.g.) a day’s labour, but of the value of the commodity in which his day of labour is objectified. At this stage of our presentation, the category of wages does not exist at all.

Marx, Capital I, page 135 (Marx’s note 15).

The magnitude of value, on this second side, counts only quantitatively — duration — where on the first side labour counted only qualitatively. From this splitting Marx draws the result that most sharply separates value from wealth: the two can move in opposite directions. A rise in productivity multiplies use-values while lowering the value of the total mass, and the paradox is not a paradox but a direct consequence of labour's two characters.

Nevertheless, an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This contradictory movement arises out of the twofold character of labour.

Marx, Capital I, page 137.

Productivity is an attribute of concrete useful labour only. Abstract from the useful form and productivity has nothing to grip; so the same labour-time yields the same value however productive the labour, while yielding more or fewer use-values as productivity rises or falls.

The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity. But it provides different quantities of use-values during equal periods of time; more, if productivity rises; fewer, if it falls.

Marx, Capital I, page 137.

The section closes by stating the two sides as one proposition, which is the formulation the rest of the volume leans on whenever it needs the double character in compressed form.

On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values.

Marx, Capital I, page 137.

3 · The Value-Form, or Exchange-Value

This is the section Marx warns is the hardest in the book, and it is the one that repays Section 1's promise to return to exchange-value as the form value is compelled to take. Value has been shown to be purely social, containing not an atom of matter; it can therefore appear only in the relation of one commodity to another. What no earlier economics attempted — and what Marx sets himself here — is to derive money rather than presuppose it, by tracing the value-expression through its forms from the simplest to the money-form. The claim staked at the outset is that when the derivation is done, money stops being a mystery.

Now, however, we have to perform a task never even attempted by bourgeois economics. That is, we have to show the origin of this money-form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear.

Marx, Capital I, page 139.

Form A — the simple, isolated, or accidental form. x commodity A = y commodity B; Marx's running example is 20 yards of linen = 1 coat. The whole mystery is already here. The two commodities play opposite parts: the linen expresses its value in the coat (the relative form), the coat serves as the body in which that value is expressed (the equivalent form). These two forms are inseparable but mutually exclusive — poles of one expression.

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this simple form. Our real difficulty, therefore, is to analyse it. … The value of the first commodity is represented as relative value, in other words the commodity is in the relative form of value. The second commodity fulfils the function of equivalent, in other words it is in the equivalent form.

Marx, Capital I, page 139. The ellipsis drops the sentence identifying the two commodities of the example as playing an active and a passive part.

The polarity is strict: a commodity cannot express its value in itself. The tautology of a thing set equal to itself says nothing about value, which is why value must always be expressed in another commodity, and why the same commodity cannot occupy both poles of one equation at once.

I cannot, for example, express the value of linen in linen. 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is not an expression of value. The equation states rather the contrary: 20 yards of linen are nothing but 20 yards of linen, a definite quantity of linen considered as an object of utility. The value of the linen can therefore only be expressed relatively, i.e. in another commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 140.

Analysing the relative form, Marx shows how one commodity's body is pressed into service as the mirror of another's value. In the value-relation the coat counts only as embodied value — the "body of value" — and so the linen's value gets a form distinct from its own natural form, borrowed from the coat. The formulation that condenses the whole move is the one worth carrying whole.

Hence, in the value-relation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the form of the coat counts as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other. As a use-value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is identical with the coat, and therefore looks like the coat.

Marx, Capital I, page 143.

Turning to the equivalent form, Marx first gives its plain definition and then extracts from it three peculiarities that between them contain the entire secret money will later monopolize. The definition:

The equivalent form of a commodity, accordingly, is the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.

Marx, Capital I, page 147.

The first peculiarity: in the equivalent form a use-value becomes the appearance of its opposite. The coat's plain bodily form comes to express value.

The first peculiarity which strikes us when we reflect on the equivalent form is this, that use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value.

Marx, Capital I, page 148.

The second: the concrete labour that made the equivalent (tailoring) comes to count as the manifestation of abstract human labour. And the third: the private labour embodied in the equivalent counts as labour in directly social form. These two are stated in sequence, and both travel.

The equivalent form therefore possesses a second peculiarity: in it, concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour.

Marx, Capital I, page 150.

Thus the equivalent form has a third peculiarity: private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form.

Marx, Capital I, page 151.

Marx sets these peculiarities against Aristotle, whom he credits as the first to analyse the value-form and who then halted for want of the one concept Greek slave society could not supply. Aristotle saw that exchange requires commensurability but declared true commensurability of unlike things impossible — a makeshift. Marx's diagnosis is historical, not a correction of Aristotle's logic: the equality of all labour as human labour could not be read off the value-form in a society founded on the inequality of men.

‘There can be no exchange,’ he says, ‘without equality, and no equality without commensurability’. Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. ‘It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable,’ i.e. qualitatively equal. This form of equation can only be something foreign to the true nature of the things, it is therefore only ‘a makeshift for practical purposes’.

Marx quoting Aristotle, Capital I, page 151 (the interpolated Greek of the original is omitted).

The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities.

Marx, Capital I, page 152.

Taking the simple form as a whole, Marx states the result that makes the value-form more than a technicality: the outer relation between two commodities is the surface on which the commodity's inner split between use-value and value is thrown. And he registers the form's insufficiency, which is what drives the derivation onward — the simple form is embryonic, an accidental one-to-one relation that must metamorphose before it can become price.

The internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. Hence the simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition between use-value and value which is contained within the commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 153.

We perceive straight away the insufficiency of the simple form of value: it is an embryonic form which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price-form.

Marx, Capital I, page 154.

Form B — the total or expanded form. z commodity A = u B or v C or w D or … The linen now expresses its value in the whole series of other commodities. This is more than an accumulation of Form A: the endless series makes visible that the value is indifferent to which body expresses it, that it is congealed undifferentiated human labour. From this Marx draws the anti-empiricist thesis that the magnitudes of value govern the exchange proportions, not the other way round.

The value of the linen remains unaltered in magnitude, whether expressed in coats, coffee, or iron, or in innumerable different commodities, belonging to as many different owners. The accidental relation between two individual commodity-owners disappears. It becomes plain that it is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their values, but rather the reverse, the magnitude of the value of commodities which regulates the proportion in which they exchange.

Marx, Capital I, page 156.

But Form B is defective, and the defects are what force the next step: the series never ends, it is a motley mosaic, and human labour gets no single unified form of appearance because every commodity's expanded expression differs from every other's.

Firstly, the relative expression of value of the commodity is incomplete, because the series of its representations never comes to an end. The chain, of which each equation of value is a link, is liable at any moment to be lengthened by a newly created commodity, which will provide the material for a fresh expression of value. Secondly, it is a motley mosaic of disparate and unconnected expressions of value.

Marx, Capital I, page 156.

Form C — the general form. Reverse Form B — let all commodities express their value in one excluded commodity, the linen — and the defects vanish. The move is not additive but qualitative: the general form can only be produced jointly, by the whole world of commodities acting together, and the excluded commodity becomes the universal equivalent, the body in which all others read their value.

The general form of value, on the other hand, can only arise as the joint contribution of the whole world of commodities. A commodity only acquires a general expression of its value if, at the same time, all other commodities express their values in the same equivalent; and every newly emergent commodity must follow suit.

Marx, Capital I, page 159.

The physical form of the linen counts as the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all human labour. Weaving, the private labour which produces linen, acquires as a result a general social form, the form of equality with all other kinds of labour.

Marx, Capital I, page 159.

The universal equivalent is structurally barred from the relative form: it cannot express its own value in itself without collapsing into tautology. Marx also marks, in a footnote, why the whole thing is antagonistic — direct exchangeability for one commodity is possible only because it is denied to the rest, so the socialist dream of universal direct exchangeability is like imagining all Catholics could be popes.

This has allowed the illusion to arise that all commodities can simultaneously be imprinted with the stamp of direct exchangeability, in the same way that it might be imagined that all Catholics can be popes.

Marx, Capital I, page 161 (Marx's note 26).

Form D — the money form. The final step is the smallest, and that is the point. Replace the linen with gold and nothing in the structure changes: Form D differs from Form C only in that one particular commodity, gold, has become welded by social custom to the universal-equivalent position. Money is not a new principle but the general form of value with a fixed body. Gold works as money only because it first circulated as an ordinary commodity.

As against this, form D differs not at all from form C, except that now instead of linen gold has assumed the universal equivalent form. Gold is in form D what linen was in form C: the universal equivalent. The advance consists only in that the form of direct and universal exchangeability, in other words the universal equivalent form, has now by social custom finally become entwined with the specific natural form of the commodity gold. Gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it previously confronted them as a commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 162.

With gold installed, the simple relative expression of a commodity's value in gold is the price-form. The section ends on the sentence that discharges the promise made on page 139: the money that seemed a mystery is nothing but the simple value-form grown up.

The only difficulty in the concept of the money form is that of grasping the universal equivalent form, and hence the general form of value as such, form C. Form C can be reduced by working backwards to form B, the expanded form of value, and its constitutive element is form A: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or x commodity A = y commodity B. The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money-form.

Marx, Capital I, page 163.

4 · The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret

The final section asks what the first three have made available to ask: given that value is congealed social labour appearing in the body of a thing, why does that structure present itself to the people caught in it as a natural property of things rather than as their own social relation? Marx opens on the reversal that the whole section will explain — the commodity looks trivial and turns out to be the strangest object in the analysis.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Marx, Capital I, page 163.

He locates the source by elimination. The mystery does not come from use-value, and it does not come from the determinants of value taken by themselves — labour as physiological expenditure, its measurement by duration, its social form are all clear enough. The enigma is generated by the commodity-form, which projects the social character of labour onto the products as if it were a natural property of the things.

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.

Marx, Capital I, pages 164–165.

Marx then names the phenomenon and reaches for religion as the only analogy adequate to it. In religion the products of the human head take on independent life; in the commodity the products of the human hand do the same. The fetish is not an error of perception to be corrected but a form the product takes as soon as it is produced for exchange.

It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Marx, Capital I, page 165.

The origin is the specific social character of the labour: private producers working independently, whose labours become part of the total social labour only through the exchange of their products. Because the social relation runs through the things, the producers relate socially as owners of things and not as persons cooperating, and they perform the reduction of their labours to abstract human labour without knowing they are doing it.

To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things.

Marx, Capital I, page 166.

Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it.

Marx, Capital I, pages 166–167.

Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language.

Marx, Capital I, page 167.

A crucial move follows, and it is the one that keeps the fetishism section from being a theory of mere false consciousness: even after science discovers that value is congealed labour, the objective semblance does not dissolve. The law of value operates behind the producers' backs as a natural law enforced through crisis, and knowing the law does not abolish the form in which it rules.

The reason for this reduction is that in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him. The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery destroys the semblance of the merely accidental determination of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour, but by no means abolishes that determination’s material form.

Marx, Capital I, page 168.

From this Marx draws the consequence that reaches past Chapter 1 into the standing of economics itself: the categories of political economy are not simply mistaken, they are valid forms of thought for a society that really is organized this way. The fetish is objective, and so are the concepts that reflect it.

The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production.

Marx, Capital I, page 169.

To show that the fetish is specific to commodity production and not a feature of production as such, Marx runs four counter-cases where the social character of labour is transparent: Robinson alone on his island, medieval Europe bound by personal dependence, the patriarchal peasant family, and — the case that matters most — an association of free producers holding the means of production in common. In that last case labour-time still governs, but openly, as conscious social apportionment rather than a law imposed through things.

Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. … We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution.

Marx, Capital I, pages 171–172. The ellipsis marks the omitted middle sentences distinguishing the social product of the association from Robinson's individual product and dividing it into means of production and means of subsistence.

The counter-cases converge on a single condition under which the fetish falls away, and Marx states it as the criterion of a transparent social life: production has to become the conscious, planned work of freely associated producers before the veil comes off. He immediately adds that this is not a matter of insight alone but of a material foundation won through a long historical development.

The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development.

Marx, Capital I, page 173.

The section closes the account of classical political economy that has been building since Section 1. Its failure was not that it missed the magnitude of value — Ricardo got closest there — but that it never asked why labour takes the value-form at all, treating that form as natural rather than historical. Marx's footnote states the point that makes the whole value-form analysis load-bearing: the value-form is the most abstract and most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production, and to naturalize it is to lose the historical specificity of the commodity, money, and capital together.

But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product.

Marx, Capital I, pages 173–174.

The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc.

Marx, Capital I, page 174 (Marx's note 34).

Marx notes that the fetish is only easiest to see in the commodity because it is the simplest form; in the more concrete forms — money, capital, ground-rent — it deepens and becomes harder to penetrate, which sets the agenda for the rest of the work. He ends the chapter by letting the commodities speak, and then letting the economist speak their fetishism back, capped by the line that has become the section's signature.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen, nevertheless find that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects.

Marx, Capital I, page 177.

Chapter 1 derived money analytically, by unfolding the value-form. Chapter 2 stages the same result a second time, now as something the commodity-owners do rather than something the analyst reads off the form. The commodity cannot walk to market, so its owner must, and the first thing established is the juridical shell — property, contract — that the exchange requires and that merely reflects the economic relation beneath it. The persons enter the account only as masks for the commodities.

As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other.

Marx, Capital I, page 179.

The owner's relation to his own commodity is the pivot. It has no use-value for him — if it did, he would not sell it — so for its owner it is only a bearer of exchange-value, while for others it is a use-value. That asymmetry forces every commodity to change hands, and Marx extracts from it the sequencing thesis that value-realization precedes use-value realization.

All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this changing of hands constitutes their exchange, and their exchange puts them in relation with each other as values and realizes them as values. Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values.

Marx, Capital I, page 179.

Here the contradiction that money exists to resolve is stated at the level of the actors. For each owner his own commodity is the universal equivalent and every other a particular equivalent; but the same act cannot be purely private for each and purely social for all at once. The owners cannot think their way out — they act first, driven by the nature of the commodity working through them.

To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity counts as the particular equivalent of his own commodity. Hence his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all the others. But since this applies to every owner, there is in fact no commodity acting as universal equivalent, and the commodities possess no general relative form of value under which they can be equated as values and have the magnitude of their values compared.

Marx, Capital I, page 180.

In their difficulties our commodity-owners think like Faust: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ They have therefore already acted before thinking. The natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities.

Marx, Capital I, page 180.

The resolution is money, and Marx's verb is chemical: money crystallizes out of the exchange process as the independent form that the latent opposition between use-value and value is driven to take. This is the historical-genetic counterpart to Chapter 1's logical derivation.

Money necessarily crystallizes out of the process of exchange, in which different products of labour are in fact equated with each other, and thus converted into commodities. The historical broadening and deepening of the phenomenon of exchange develops the opposition between use-value and value which is latent in the nature of the commodity. The need to give an external expression to this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value, which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been achieved by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money.

Marx, Capital I, page 181.

Marx grounds this historically: exchange originates not inside a community but at its edges, between communities, and only rebounds inward. As it spreads, the universal-equivalent function detaches from momentary contacts and fixes onto particular commodities, finally onto the precious metals, whose natural properties fit the social function. The formula he borrows compresses the point that the money-function is social while its bearer is natural.

The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the latter. However, as soon as products have become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become commodities in the internal life of the community.

Marx, Capital I, page 182.

The truth of the statement that ‘although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver’, is shown by the appropriateness of their natural properties for the functions of money.

Marx, Capital I, pages 183–184.

The chapter states its own governing question, the one that separates Marx's project from the classical economists who were content to note that money is a commodity.

The difficulty lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money.

Marx, Capital I, page 186.

It closes on the inversion that is the practical face of the fetish: the mediation that produced money disappears into its result, so that money seems to be the reason commodities have value rather than the outcome of their value-relation. The commodity-owners find the value-form waiting for them as an external thing, and the money-fetish turns out to be the commodity-fetish come into the open.

What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind. Without any initiative on their part, the commodities find their own value-configuration ready to hand, in the form of a physical commodity existing outside but also alongside them.

Marx, Capital I, page 187.

Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. … The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes.

Marx, Capital I, page 187. The ellipsis drops the intervening sentence on the products of labour universally taking the commodity-form.

Chapters 1 and 2 established that money must arise from the value-form. Chapter 3 unfolds what money then does, working through its functions in a fixed order that is itself an argument: measure of value, means of circulation, and finally money as money — hoard, means of payment, world money. Marx assumes gold as the money commodity throughout for simplicity. The chapter's payoff is the demonstration that circulation harbours the possibility of crisis and that the money-functions, taken together, dissolve the direct barter relation into a system in which sale and purchase come apart.

1 · The Measure of Value

The first function is to measure value. Marx immediately forecloses the reading in which money is what makes commodities comparable. The order runs the other way: commodities are already commensurable as congealed human labour, and money is only the outward form that their immanent measure — labour-time — is forced to assume.

It is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. Quite the contrary. Because all commodities, as values, are objectified human labour, and therefore in themselves commensurable, their values can be communally measured in one and the same specific commodity, and this commodity can be converted into the common measure of their values, that is into money. Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time.

Marx, Capital I, page 188.

Because value is measured in gold only ideally, the measuring can be done in imagined gold; no actual metal is needed to price a commodity. Price is the money-name of a commodity's value, a purely notional form distinct from the commodity's body. Marx separates two functions that share one name — measure of value and standard of price — since conflating them produced centuries of confused monetary theory.

As measure of value, and as standard of price, money performs two quite different functions. It is the measure of value as the social incarnation of human labour; it is the standard of price as a quantity of metal with a fixed weight. As the measure of value it serves to convert the values of all the manifold commodities into prices, into imaginary quantities of gold; as the standard of price it measures those quantities of gold.

Marx, Capital I, page 192.

Price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity.

Marx, Capital I, pages 195–196.

The most consequential result of the section is that the price-form builds in a gap between price and value. Because price is the exchange-ratio with an external money commodity, it can diverge from the magnitude of value — and Marx insists this is not a flaw but exactly what fits a system whose laws operate only as averages asserting themselves through constant deviation.

The possibility, therefore, of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e. the possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is not a defect, but, on the contrary, it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities.

Marx, Capital I, page 196.

Beyond this quantitative gap the price-form admits a qualitative one: things with no value at all can take a price, so the price-form can name a value that is not there. This is where Marx registers that the form, once detached, floats free of its content.

The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e. between the magnitude of value and its own expression in money, but it may also harbour a qualitative contradiction, with the result that price ceases altogether to express value, despite the fact that money is nothing but the value-form of commodities. Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value.

Marx, Capital I, page 197.

2 · The Means of Circulation

(a) The metamorphosis of commodities. The section opens with Marx's most explicit statement of dialectical method in Part One: the contradictions of exchange are not abolished by money but given a form of motion in which they can move. The image is the ellipse — a body that both falls toward and flies from another — and the point governs everything that follows about money and crisis.

We saw in a former chapter that the exchange of commodities implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions. The further development of the commodity does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form within which they have room to move. This is, in general, the way in which real contradictions are resolved. For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another and at the same time constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion within which this contradiction is both realized and resolved.

Marx, Capital I, page 198.

Exchange is a social metabolism — Marx's term, Stoffwechsel — mediated by a change of form. The commodity's circuit is C–M–C: sold for money, the money spent on another commodity; selling in order to buy. The materially decisive moment is the sale, C–M, because it is where value must prove itself socially, and Marx dramatizes the danger of that moment as a deadly leap.

The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity into the body of the gold is the commodity’s salto mortale, as I have called it elsewhere. If the leap falls short, it is not the commodity which is defrauded but rather its owner.

Marx, Capital I, pages 200–201.

What makes the leap perilous is that the private labour embodied in the commodity has to validate itself as a portion of total social labour, and nothing guarantees it will. Even labour that is socially necessary in the individual case can turn out socially superfluous in the mass, if too much of society's labour went into that line — a result the market delivers after the fact and behind the producers' backs.

Let us suppose, finally, that every piece of linen on the market contains nothing but socially necessary labour-time. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole may contain superfluously expended labour-time. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total social labour-time has been expended in the form of weaving.

Marx, Capital I, page 202.

Each C–M is at the same time some other commodity's M–C: one person's sale is another's purchase, and the same money that concludes one metamorphosis opens the next. This is the thesis the crisis argument will turn against the "every sale is a purchase" complacency.

This single process is two-sided: from one pole, that of the commodity-owner, it is a sale, from the other pole, that of the money-owner, it is a purchase. In other words, a sale is a purchase, C–M is also M–C.

Marx, Capital I, page 203.

Circulation therefore differs from direct barter not just in form but in essence: it breaks the local and personal limits of barter and weaves a network of dependence beyond anyone's control, leaving money deposited at every node. From this Marx mounts the decisive move of the chapter — against the dogma (Say, Mill, Ricardo) that because every sale is a purchase, supply and demand must balance and a general glut is impossible. Sale and purchase are one act between two persons and two acts for one person; splitting them is precisely what makes crisis possible.

Circulation sweats money from every pore. Nothing could be more foolish than the dogma that because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, the circulation of commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium between sales and purchases. … Sale and purchase are one identical act, considered as the alternating relation between two persons who are in polar opposition to each other, the commodity-owner and the money-owner. They constitute two acts, of polar and opposite character, considered as the transactions of one and the same person.

Marx, Capital I, page 208. The ellipsis drops the sentence parsing the two possible meanings of the equilibrium dogma.

To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to say also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other. Hence, if the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing – a crisis. … the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of the commodity are the developed forms of motion of this immanent contradiction. These forms therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility. For the development of this possibility into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities.

Marx, Capital I, page 209. The ellipsis drops the intervening sentence itemizing the antitheses immanent in the commodity (use-value/value, private/social labour, concrete/abstract labour, personification/reification).

(b) The circulation of money. The money side of C–M–C is one-sided: money does not return to its starting point but moves ceaselessly away, passing from hand to hand. Marx then exposes the inversion this produces — because money's motion is continuous while each commodity drops out after one exchange, it appears that money moves the commodities, when in truth money's movement is only the reflex of theirs.

Hence although the movement of money is merely the expression of the circulation of commodities, the situation appears to be the reverse of this, namely the circulation of commodities seems to be the result of the movement of money.

Marx, Capital I, pages 211–212.

From this Marx derives the law of the quantity of the circulating medium, which reverses the quantity theory of money. The quantity of money needed is determined by the sum of prices and the velocity of turnover — not the other way round — and its restatement makes the value of money, not its amount, the governing term.

Hence, for a given interval of time during the process of circulation, we have the following equation: the quantity of money functioning as the circulating medium = the sum of the prices of the commodities divided by the number of times coins of the same denomination turn over. This law holds generally.

Marx, Capital I, page 216.

The law that the quantity of the circulating medium is determined by the sum of the prices of the commodities in circulation, and the average velocity of the circulation of money, may also be stated as follows: given the sum of the values of commodities, and the average rapidity of their metamorphoses, the quantity of money or of the material of money in circulation depends on its own value.

Marx, Capital I, pages 219–220.

(c) Coin. The symbol of value. As circulating medium money takes the form of coin, and here Marx traces how the function detaches from the substance. Coins wear down, so nominal content and metallic content diverge; the process itself pushes the coin toward being a mere token of its official content, which opens the possibility of replacing gold with valueless symbols.

In its form of existence as coin, gold becomes completely divorced from the substance of its value. Relatively valueless objects, therefore, such as paper notes, can serve as coins in place of gold.

Marx, Capital I, pages 223–224.

Paper money is possible because the minimum mass of gold that permanently haunts circulation exists purely as the bearer of the circulating function; its material existence is absorbed by its functional existence, so it can serve as a symbol of itself. The law of paper issue follows: paper can represent only the quantity of gold that would otherwise circulate, and over-issue simply depreciates the paper's gold-representation.

Paper money is a symbol of gold, a symbol of money. Its relation to the values of commodities consists only in this: they find imaginary expression in certain quantities of gold, and the same quantities are symbolically and physically represented by the paper. Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value.

Marx, Capital I, page 225.

3 · Money

The final section takes up money in the functions where it acts as money proper — not as ideal measure and not as a fleeting medium, but fixed as the sole adequate form of value against all commodities. Marx runs three: hoarding, means of payment, world money.

(a) Hoarding. When the circuit is broken — when a sale is not followed by a purchase — money is withdrawn and immobilized. The seller sells not to buy but to hold the money-form itself, and the drive to do so has no internal limit.

Commodities are thus sold not in order to buy commodities, but in order to replace their commodity-form by their money-form. Instead of being merely a way of mediating the metabolic process [Stoffwechsel], this change of form becomes an end in itself. The form of the commodity in which it is divested of content is prevented from functioning as its absolutely alienable form, or even as its merely transient money-form. The money is petrified into a hoard, and the seller of commodities becomes a hoarder of money.

Marx, Capital I, pages 227–228.

Because money is the universal form of wealth into which anything can be converted, the hoarding drive answers to a real feature of the money-form and not merely to a psychology; but every actual sum is finite, so the hoarder is condemned to a task without end. Marx compresses the money-fetish of the hoard into a portrait.

This contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation. … The hoarder therefore sacrifices the lusts of his flesh to the fetish of gold. He takes the gospel of abstinence very seriously. On the other hand, he cannot withdraw any more from circulation, in the shape of money, than he has thrown into it, in the shape of commodities. The more he produces, the more he can sell. Work, thrift and greed are therefore his three cardinal virtues, and to sell much and buy little is the sum of his political economy.

Marx, Capital I, page 231. The ellipsis drops the intervening image of the hoarder as a world conqueror who finds a new frontier with every annexation.

(b) Means of payment. Once sale and payment come apart in time — goods delivered now, paid for later — money takes a new function. The buyer becomes a debtor and the seller a creditor, and money enters only at the due date, no longer mediating the exchange but concluding it as the independent embodiment of value. A contradiction is built into this function, and it is the one that surfaces as monetary crisis.

There is a contradiction immanent in the function of money as the means of payment. When the payments balance each other, money functions only nominally, as money of account, as a measure of value. But when actual payments have to be made, money does not come onto the scene as a circulating medium, in its merely transient form of an intermediary in the social metabolism, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, the independent presence of exchange-value, the universal commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 235.

In the crisis the whole chain of deferred payments seizes, and the belief that commodities are as good as money reverses into its opposite. This is the passage where the abstract contradiction of the value-form is shown becoming a concrete social catastrophe.

This contradiction bursts forth in that aspect of an industrial and commercial crisis which is known as a monetary crisis. … Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, no matter what its cause, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. ‘Commodities alone are money,’ he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity. As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction.

Marx, Capital I, page 236. The ellipsis drops the sentence noting that such a crisis occurs only where the chain of payments and an artificial system of settling them are fully developed.

Marx notes that credit-money grows directly out of this function, as debt-certificates begin to circulate — a form whose full development belongs to later Parts and is only marked here.

(c) World money. Leaving the domestic sphere, money sheds its local liveries — coin, small change, token — and reverts to bullion. On the world market the value-form appears in its most adequate shape, as the money commodity whose natural body is directly the social form of abstract human labour. This is the point at which money's mode of existence catches up with its concept.

When money leaves the domestic sphere of circulation it loses the local functions it has acquired there, as the standard of prices, coin, and small change, and as a symbol of value, and falls back into its original form as precious metal in the shape of bullion. In world trade, commodities develop their value universally. Their independent value-form thus confronts them here too as world money.

Marx, Capital I, page 240.

World money serves as the universal means of payment, as the universal means of purchase, and as the absolute social materialization of wealth as such (universal wealth). Its predominant function is as means of payment in the settling of international balances.

Marx, Capital I, page 242.

The chapter, and with it Part One, closes on the note it has been sounding since the fetishism section: the movements of the money-commodity across the world market are the surface on which the social metabolism of independently laboring producers plays out, and the hoards that swell in the vaults register, when they rise above their level, the interruption of that metabolism — the stagnation that Chapter 3 has shown to be latent in the value-form from the first metamorphosis onward.