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Every commodity is directly money. That was Gray's theory deducted from his incomplete and, therefore, false analysis of commodities. The "organic" structure of "labor money," the "national bank" and the "ware-docks" are mere fantastic visions in which the dogma is made by a legerdemain to appear to us as a universal law. The dogma that a commodity is money or that the isolated labor of the individual contained in it is direct social labor, will of course not become true through the mere fact that a bank believes in it and carries on operations accordingly. It is more likely that bankruptcy would play in that case the part of the practical critic. What remains concealed in Gray's writings and hidden from himself as well, namely, that labor-money is a well-sounding economic phrase for the pious wish to get rid of money, and with money, of exchange value, and with exchange value, of commodities, and with commodities, of the capitalistic mode of production, was clearly expressed by some English socialists of whom a few preceded and others followed Gray.64
But it remained for Mr. Proudhon and his school to preach in all earnest the degradation of money and the exaltation of the commodity as the gist of socialism and thus to reduce socialism to an elementary misconception of the necessary connection between commodity and money.65
After the commodity has received in the process of price determination the form in which it becomes capable of circulation, and after gold has acquired the character of money in the same process, circulation will both present and solve the contradictions which are inherent in the process of exchange of commodities. The actual exchange of commodities, i. e., the social interchange of matter consists of a change of form in which is unfolded the double character of the commodity as use-value and exchange value, and at the same time its own change of form is crystallized in distinct forms of money. To describe this change of form is to describe circulation. As we have seen, given a world of commodities and with it a system of division of labor, commodity is but a developed form of exchange value; in the same manner, circulation implies a steady stream of exchange transactions which are being continually renewed on all sides. The second assumption we make is that commodities Pg 108enter the process of exchange with a definite price or that they appear to each other in that process in a double capacity, really as use-values, ideally—in price—as exchange values.
The liveliest streets of London are crowded with stores whose show windows are filled with the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, Russian furs and tropical spices, but all of these things of joy bear fatal white labels marked with Arabian figures with the laconic characters , s., d. Such is the picture of the commodity appearing in circulation.
On close examination the process of circulation is seen to consist of two distinct cycles. If we denote commodity by the letter C and money by the letter M we can express these two forms as follows:
C—M—C
M—C—M.
In this chapter we are interested exclusively in the first form, i. e., in the form which serves as the direct expression of the circulation of commodities.
The process C—M—C consists of the movement C—M, the exchange of the commodity for money, or selling; the opposite movement M—C, exchange of money for a commodity, or buying; and of the unity of the two movements C—M—C, exchange of the commodity for money in order to exchange the money for a commodity, or selling in order to buy. But the result which marks the end of the process is C—C, exchangePg 109 of commodity for commodity, real interchange of matter.
If we look at it from the extreme end of the first commodity, C—M—C represents its transformation into gold and its retransformation from gold into a commodity; a movement in which the commodity exists first as a particular use-value, then divests itself of that character, acquires the character of exchange value or universal equivalent, in which capacity it has nothing in common with its natural form, then throws off the last form as well to remain finally an actual use-value for the satisfaction of particular wants. In this last form it falls out of the sphere of circulation into that of consumption. The entire process of circulation C—M—C thus includes the combined series of metamorphoses, which every single commodity undergoes in order to become a direct use-value to its possessor. The first metamorphosis is accomplished in the first phase of the circulation process, C—M; the second in the last phase, M—C; and the entire process constitutes the curriculum vitae of the commodity. But the process C—M—C represents the combined metamorphosis of a single commodity and constitutes at the same time the sum of certain one-sided metamorphoses of other commodities, since every metamorphosis of the first commodity constitutes its transformation into another commodity and therefore the transformation of the other commodity into it; hence it constitutes a twofold transformation which takes place at the same stage of circulation. We must then consider separatelyPg 110 each of the two processes of exchange into which circulation C—M—C breaks up.
C—M or sale: commodity C enters the process of circulation not only as a particular use-value, e. g., a ton of iron, but as a use-value of a certain price, say, 3 17s. 10-1/2d., or an ounce of gold. While this price is on the one hand the exponent of the quantity of labor-time contained in a ton of iron, i. e., of the magnitude of its value, it at the same time expresses the pious wish of the iron to become gold, i. e., to give to the labor-time it contains the aspect of universal social labor-time. Unless this trans-substantiation takes place, the ton of iron not only ceases to be a commodity, but even a product, for it is a commodity only because it is a non-use-value to its owner; that is to say, his labor counts as actual labor only in so far as it is labor useful to others, and the thing is useful to him only as abstract universal labor. It is, therefore, the business of iron, or of its owner, to find that point in the world of commodities where iron attracts gold. But this difficulty, the salto mortale of the commodity, is overcome when the sale actually takes place, as is assumed here on the analysis of simple circulation. When the ton of iron is realized as a use-value through its alienation, i. e., by passing from the hands in which it is a non-use-value to hands in which it is a use-value, it at the same time realizes its price and from mere imaginary gold it becomes real gold. In place of the name one ounce of gold or 3 17s. 10-1/2d., an ounce of real gold has appeared, but the ton of iron has cleared that place. Not only does the commodity—which in its price had been ideally convertedPg 111 into gold—actually turn into gold through the sale C—M, but gold, which as a measure of value had been only ideal money and in fact figured merely as a money name of commodities—is now turned into actual money66 by the same process. Just as gold became the ideal universal equivalent, because all commodities measured their values by it, so does it now become the absolutely alienable commodity, real money, because it is the product of the universal alienation of commodities for it—and the sale C—M is the process by means of which that universal alienation takes place. But gold becomes real money only through sale, because the exchange values of commodities were already ideal gold in their prices.
