Where capitalist production rules, wealth first shows itself as a huge collection of commodities. The single commodity is the basic form of that wealth. So our investigation begins by examining the commodity.

A commodity is first of all a thing outside us. Its own properties let it meet some human need. The source of the need does not matter: hunger, imagination, either way. At this point it also does not matter how the thing meets the need. It may do so directly, as something consumed, like food. Or it may do so indirectly, as something used to make other things, like a tool or material.

Useful things have to be pinned down in two ways: quality and quantity. Iron, paper, and the rest have many properties, so people can use them in many ways. Those uses are not all obvious from the start; history discovers them. The measures are historical too: societies have to arrive at accepted ways of saying how much of a useful thing there is. Measures differ partly because the measured things differ, and partly because of convention.

A thing is a use-value because it is useful, but only in a tied-down way. The usefulness does not float apart from the thing; it exists only in the commodity's own body and properties, as with iron, corn — British usage for wheat — or a diamond. So the commodity-body itself is the useful good. This character does not depend on whether people need much labour or little labour to get at those useful properties. And use-values are always definite amounts: a dozen watches, yards of linen, tons of iron. Their different useful qualities supply the material for a special field, the commercial knowledge of goods. Still, a use-value is realized only when it is used or consumed. Use-values are the material content of wealth in every social form. In the society we are studying, they are also the material bearers of exchange-value.

Exchange-value first appears as a relation of amounts: this much of one kind of use-value for that much of another. This relation keeps changing with time and place. So exchange-value seems accidental and purely relative. An exchange-value that belongs inside the commodity itself, an intrinsic exchange-value, seems like a contradiction in terms. We need to look more closely.

Take one commodity: a quarter of wheat. It can exchange for x amount of blacking — shoe polish — or y amount of silk or z amount of gold, and so on. So the wheat has many exchange-values instead of one. But each of those amounts is the exchange-value of the same quarter of wheat. As exchange-values, they must be able to replace one another; they must be equal in size. Two results follow. First, the valid exchange-values of the same commodity express something equal. Second, exchange-value in general can only be a way of expressing something else: the form of appearance of a content distinguishable from it.

Now take two commodities, corn and iron. Whatever their exchange relation is, it can always be put as an equation: a given amount of corn is set equal to some amount of iron, for example, 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this say? The same amount of something common is present in two different things, in 1 quarter of corn and in x cwt. of iron. So both are equal to a third something, which by itself is neither corn nor iron. Each one, considered as exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to that third.

A simple example from geometry makes the reduction clear. To measure and compare the areas of straight-sided shapes, we break them down into triangles. Then the triangle itself is expressed in something quite unlike its visible shape: half its base times its height. In the same way, the exchange-values of commodities have to be reduced to something common, of which each shows more or less.

This common thing cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Their bodily properties count at all only where those properties make the things useful, that is, make them use-values. But the exchange relation itself is plainly marked by setting use-values aside. Inside it, one use-value counts just as much as any other, as long as the right amount is there. Or, as old Barbon says:

One kind of ware is as good as another when their exchange-values are equally large. Between things with equally large exchange-values, there is no difference or distinction.

As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality. As exchange-values, they can differ only in quantity. So, as exchange-values, they contain not an atom of use-value.

When we set aside the use-value of commodity-bodies, only one property is left to them: they are products of labour. But the product of labour has already been changed in our hands. The parts and shapes that made it useful are stripped away. We are no longer dealing with a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Everything about it that can meet the senses is wiped out. The labour shown in it is stripped in the same way. It no longer counts as joiner's work, mason's work, spinning, or any other definite productive labour. Once the useful character of the products disappears, the useful character of the labours in them disappears too. Their different concrete forms no longer stand apart. They are all reduced to equal human labour, abstract human labour.

Now consider what is left of the products of labour. Nothing remains of them but the same ghostly objectivity: a mere jelly of undifferentiated human labour, that is, human labour-power spent without regard to the form in which it was spent. These things now show only this: human labour-power was spent to make them, and human labour has been accumulated in them. As crystals of this common social substance, they are values — commodity-values.

In the exchange relation of commodities, exchange-value had appeared to us as something entirely independent of their use-values. If we now really set aside the use-value of the products of labour, we get their value, as just determined. So the common element that presents itself in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is its value. The investigation will lead us back to exchange-value as the necessary way value must be expressed, the form of appearance of value. For now, though, value has to be considered apart from that form.

A use-value, a useful good, has value only because abstract human labour has been made objective in it, or materialized in it. How do we measure the size of this value? By the amount of the value-forming substance in it: labour. And labour itself is measured by how long it lasts, in parts of time such as an hour or a day.

It might seem, then, that the lazier or clumsier a worker is, the more valuable his commodity will be, since he takes more time to make it. But the labour that forms value is equal human labour, the spending of the same human labour-power. The whole labour-power of society, as it appears in the values of commodities, counts here as one human labour-power, even though it is made up of countless individual labour-powers. Each worker's labour-power counts as the same as another's only so far as it works as average social labour-power. That means it uses no more than the average time needed to make a commodity: socially necessary labour-time — the time needed to produce a use-value under normal conditions, with the average skill and intensity of labour. After power-looms were introduced in England, perhaps only half as much labour was needed to turn a given amount of yarn into cloth. The hand-weaver still needed the same private hour as before. But the product of that hour now counted as only half a social hour, and its value fell by half.

So the size of a thing's value is fixed only by the amount of socially necessary labour, or the socially necessary labour-time needed to make that use-value. A single commodity counts here as an average sample of its kind. Commodities that contain equal amounts of labour, or that can be made in the same time, have the same size of value. The value of one commodity stands to the value of any other as the labour-time needed for the one stands to the labour-time needed for the other. As values, all commodities are only definite amounts of congealed labour-time.

A commodity's value would stay constant if the labour-time needed to make it stayed constant. But that labour-time changes whenever the productive power of labour changes. The productive power of labour depends on many things: the average skill of workers, the development of science and its practical use, the social organization of production, the size and effectiveness of the means of production, and natural conditions.

The same amount of labour may appear as 8 bushels of corn in a good season, but only 4 in a bad one. The same labour gets more metal from rich mines than from poor ones. Diamonds are rare in the earth's crust, so finding them costs much labour-time on average. That is why a small volume of diamonds represents a lot of labour. One writer on precious metals doubted that gold has ever been paid for at its full value; this is even truer of diamonds. By one estimate from 1823, the whole eighty-year output of the Brazilian diamond mines had not brought the price of one and a half years' average output from Brazil's sugar or coffee plantations, although the diamonds represented much more labour, and therefore more value. With richer mines, the same amount of labour would appear in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If coal could be turned into diamonds with little labour, their value could fall below that of bricks.

In general: the greater the productive power of labour, the less labour-time is needed to make an article, the less labour is crystallized in it, and the smaller its value. Conversely, the smaller the productive power of labour, the more labour-time is needed, and the greater the value. The size of a commodity's value therefore varies directly with the quantity of labour and inversely with the productive power of the labour realized in it.

Usefulness alone does not make value. Air, untouched soil, wild meadows and woods serve human needs without any labour going into them: useful, but no value.

Labour alone does not make a commodity either. Make something for your own use, and you have made a use-value, but not a commodity. For a commodity, the thing must be a use-value for others — useful to someone besides its maker. And even that is not enough. The medieval peasant grew quit-rent corn for the feudal lord and tithe-corn for the priest, yet neither became a commodity just because it was grown for someone else. A product becomes a commodity only when it passes to the other person through exchange.

Last: nothing can have value without being useful. If a thing is useless, the labour in it is useless too. It counts as no labour at all, and it forms no value.

A commodity looked, at first, like two things bundled together — a use-value and an exchange-value. It turns out labour has the same kind of double nature: the labour that shows up as value isn't doing the same job as the labour that makes something useful. No one before me had actually picked this apart and critically demonstrated it — the twofold character of the labour inside a commodity. Since this distinction is the hinge political economy turns on, it's worth working through carefully.

Take two commodities: a coat and 10 yards of linen. Suppose the coat has twice the value of the linen. Then, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W.

A coat is useful — it satisfies some particular want. Making one takes a specific kind of work, and that work can be pinned down by what it's aiming at, how it goes about it, what raw material it acts on, what tools it uses, and what it ends up producing. When labour is useful this way — when its whole point is to turn out something useful — we call it useful labour. Looked at this way, labour is being judged purely by what it accomplishes, nothing else.

A coat and linen are different kinds of use-values. So the labours that bring them into being are different in kind too: tailoring and weaving. If these things were not different kinds of use-values, and therefore products of different kinds of useful labour, they could not face one another as commodities at all. A coat is not exchanged for a coat. The same kind of use-value is not exchanged for the same kind.

Across the many different use-values, or commodity-bodies (the physical things as commodities), we also find many different useful labours, divided into kinds, classes, subkinds, and varieties. Taken together, these labours make up a social division of labour.

This division of labour is a condition for commodity production. But the reverse is not true: commodity production is not a condition for a social division of labour. In the primitive Indian community, labour is socially divided although the products do not become commodities. Or take the closer example of a factory: labour is divided by a system, but not because the operatives (factory workers) exchange their own individual products with one another.

Only products of independent private labours, carried on separately from one another, face each other as commodities.

So we have seen: every commodity's use-value contains a definite, purposeful productive activity, or useful labour. Use-values cannot face each other as commodities unless different kinds of useful labour are contained in them. In a society whose products generally take the form of commodities, a society of commodity producers, these different useful labours are carried on independently, as private undertakings of independent producers. Their difference then grows into a many-branched system: a social division of labour.

A coat does not care whether it is worn by the tailor or by the tailor's customer. In both cases it works as a use-value. Nor is the relation between the coat and the labour that made it changed, in itself, because tailoring has become a special trade, an independent branch of the social division of labour. Wherever the need for clothing forced people to do it, human beings made clothes for thousands of years before any one person became a tailor.

But the existence of a coat, linen, or any other part of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of Nature (not already supplied without human work) has always had to pass through a special, purposeful productive activity. That activity fits particular materials from nature to particular human wants. So, as the maker of use-values, as useful labour, labour is a condition of human life in every form of society. It is an eternal natural necessity. Without it, human beings could not carry on their material exchange with nature, and so could not live.

Coats, linen, and things like them — commodity-bodies — are made of two things put together: raw material from nature, and labour. Strip away all the useful labour that went into a coat or a length of linen, and something is still left over — the natural material itself, the stuff nature hands over before anyone touches it. In making anything, people can only do what nature itself does: reshape matter into new forms. And even then, nature's own forces are doing part of the work alongside them.

So labour by itself doesn't create the use-values it produces, and it alone doesn't create material wealth either. William Petty put it well: labour is the father of wealth, the earth its mother.

Now let us pass from the commodity as a use-object to commodity-value.

We assumed the coat is worth twice as much as the linen — but that's just a difference in size, not what interests us here. What matters is this: if the coat is worth double 10 yards of linen, then 20 yards of linen carries exactly as much value as one coat. Looked at purely as values, a coat and a length of linen are made of the same stuff — both are objectified amounts of the same kind of labour.

But tailoring and weaving are qualitatively different kinds of labour. There are social conditions where the same person tailors and weaves by turns. Then these two different ways of working are only changes in the labour of the same individual, not fixed special jobs of different people. In the same way, the coat our tailor makes today and the trousers he makes tomorrow both call for only different forms of the same individual labour. Plainly, in our capitalist society too, as the demand for labour shifts, a given portion of human labour is supplied now as tailoring, now as weaving. This change of form may not happen without friction, but it has to happen. If we leave aside the definite shape of the productive activity, and therefore the useful character of the labour, what remains is expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are both productive expenditures of human brain, muscle, nerve, hand, and so on; in this sense both are human labour. They are only two different ways to expend human labour power. Of course, human labour power itself must be more or less developed before it can be expended in one form or another.

But the value of the commodity represents human labour in the abstract: expenditure of human labour in general. In bourgeois society, a general or a banker plays a great role, while the human being as such plays a very shabby one; it is the same here with human labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour power — the labour power that, on average, every ordinary person has in their bodily organism without special development. Simple average labour itself changes from country to country and from one period of culture to another, but in any given society it is fixed. More complicated labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied, simple labour, so that a smaller amount of complicated labour equals a larger amount of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly taking place. A commodity may be the product of the most complicated labour; its value sets it equal to the product of simple labour, and so represents only a definite amount of simple labour. The different proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measure are fixed by a social process behind the backs of the producers, and therefore seem to them to be given by custom. For simplicity, from now on every kind of labour power counts for us directly as simple labour power. That only saves us the trouble of making the reduction.

So, just as we abstract from the difference between the use-values of coat and linen when we treat them as values, we also abstract from the difference between the useful forms of the labours shown in those values: tailoring and weaving. The use-values coat and linen are combinations of purposeful productive activities with cloth and yarn. The values coat and linen, by contrast, are mere alike masses of congealed labour. So the labours contained in these values count not by their productive relation to cloth and yarn, but only as expenditures of human labour power.

Tailoring and weaving are elements that form the use-values coat and linen precisely through their different qualities. They are the substance of coat-value and linen-value only insofar as we abstract from their special quality and both have the same quality: the quality of human labour.

Coat and linen are not just values in general. They are values of a definite magnitude, a definite size. By our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as 10 yards of linen. Where does this difference in their magnitudes of value come from? From the fact that the linen contains only half as much labour as the coat. To produce the coat, labour power has to be expended for twice as long as it takes to produce the linen.

So, with respect to use-value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only by its quality. With respect to magnitude of value, it counts only by quantity, after it has already been reduced to human labour with no further quality. There the question is how the labour is done and what kind of labour it is. Here the question is how much of it there is: its length of time. Since a commodity's magnitude of value represents only the amount of labour contained in it, commodities must always be equal values in some proportion.

If the productive power of all the useful labours needed to make a coat stays unchanged, then the magnitude of value of the coats rises with their number. If 1 coat represents x labour-days, then 2 coats represent 2x labour-days, and so on.

But suppose the labour needed to make one coat doubles, or falls by half. In the first case, one coat has as much value as two coats had before. In the second case, two coats have only as much value as one coat had before. In both cases, one coat still gives the same service as before, and the useful labour contained in it remains of the same quality. But the amount of labour expended in producing it has changed.

A larger quantity of use-values is, in itself, greater material wealth: two coats are more than one. With two coats, two people can be clothed; with one coat, only one, and so on. Still, a growing mass of material wealth can go together with a simultaneous fall in its magnitude of value. This opposite movement springs from the twofold character of labour.

Productive power is always the productive power of useful, concrete labour. It really determines only how effective purposeful productive activity is in a given time. Useful labour therefore becomes a richer or poorer source of products in direct proportion as its productive power rises or falls. By contrast, a change in productive power does not in itself affect the labour represented in value. Since productive power belongs to the concrete useful form of labour, it can no longer touch labour once we abstract from that concrete useful form.

The same labour therefore gives the same magnitude of value in the same lengths of time, no matter how productive power changes. But in the same time it supplies different quantities of use-values: more when productive power rises, fewer when it falls. So the same change in productive power that increases the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the mass of use-values it supplies, also lowers the magnitude of value of this increased total mass, if it shortens the total labour-time needed to produce it. The reverse is also true.

All labour is, on one hand, expenditure of human labour power in the physiological sense; in this quality, as equal human labour or abstract human labour, it forms commodity-value. All labour is, on the other hand, expenditure of human labour power in a special, purpose-determined form; in this quality, as concrete useful labour, it produces use-values.

Commodities show up in the world as useful things — iron, linen, corn, and so on. That is their plain, everyday shape. But being useful is not what makes something a commodity: a commodity is two things at once — a useful object and a 'depository of value', something that carries value. So a thing counts as a commodity, takes the commodity form, only when it has both of those forms together: a natural, physical form and a value form.

The reality of the value of commodities — the fact that value is objective at all — is unlike Dame Quickly: we do not know where to find it. It is the opposite of the rough material body of a commodity. Not one atom of matter enters it. Turn a single commodity any way you like; as an object of value, it still cannot be grasped.

But remember: commodities have this reality of value only because they express the same social unity — human labour. Since that reality is purely social, it goes without saying that value can appear only in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact, we started from exchange-value, the exchange relation of commodities, to get on the track of the value hidden there. Now we have to return to the form under which value first appeared to us.

Everyone knows that commodities have one value form in common, even if they know nothing else. It stands out sharply from their many bodily forms as use-values: the money form. But the job now is to do what bourgeois economy has never even tried: trace the genesis, the coming-into-being, of that money form. That means following the expression of value already contained in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest and faintest shape to the dazzling money form. Then the money riddle disappears.

The simplest value relation is obviously one commodity related to one single commodity of a different kind, no matter which one. That two-commodity relation gives the simplest expression of value for one commodity.

This one simple case already holds the whole mystery of the value form. That's why working through it is the real hard part.

In this simple case, two different kinds of commodities — A and B, here linen and coat — play two different roles. The linen shows its value by pointing to the coat; the coat provides the material for that showing. The linen is active, the coat passive. When its value gets displayed this way, the linen is in relative value-form — 'relative form' for short. The coat, as the body the value is displayed in, is in equivalent form.

Relative form and equivalent form belong together — they depend on each other and can't be separated. But they also exclude each other, as opposite poles of the same value-expression, always split across the two different commodities the expression relates.

Take linen itself: you can't state linen's value in linen. Saying '20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen' states no value at all — it just says a given amount of the useful thing linen equals itself. So linen's value can only be stated relatively, in some other commodity — which means some other commodity has to stand across from it in equivalent form.

And that other commodity can't do both jobs at once: acting as the equivalent, it isn't stating its own value — it's only lending its body as the material for linen's.

The formula '20 yards of linen = 1 coat' does technically flip: read backwards, it says 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen. But making the coat's value relative means flipping the whole equation — and the moment you do, linen takes over the equivalent role from the coat. A single commodity can't hold both roles in one expression at once; the two forms are poles, and poles exclude each other.

Whether a commodity is in relative form or in the opposite equivalent form depends entirely on its place each time in the expression of value. It depends on whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed, or the commodity in which value is expressed.

Two commodities set equal to each other — linen and a coat, say — are hiding something simpler inside them: a plain statement of value. To find it, set the ratio aside for a moment; how many coats a given amount of linen fetches isn't yet the question. Most people do the opposite and stop at the ratio, seeing only a proportion between two amounts of stuff. What gets missed is that you can only compare amounts of different things once they've been reduced to the same unit. Two things only get a shared 'name' — become measurable against each other at all — once they're both expressed that way.

The exact ratio doesn't matter for this point — 20 yards of linen could equal 1 coat, 20 coats, any number of coats. Whatever the number, saying so already assumes linen and coats are the same kind of thing, both ways of expressing one shared unit of value. That assumption — linen equals coat — is what makes the equation possible at all.

But linen and coat don't play the same role in that equation, even though they've just been made equal. Only linen's value gets expressed. How? By pointing to the coat as its stand-in — as something it could be traded for. In this pairing, the coat is doing the job of value itself, a value-thing; that's the only sense in which it matches linen. Linen, meanwhile, gets to show its own value for the first time — it gets an independent way of saying what it's worth — and it can only do that by treating the coat as its equal, as something it could trade places with.

Chemistry makes the point. Butyric acid and propyl formate are different bodies. Yet both are made of the same chemical substances, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, in the same proportions: C4H8O2. If butyric acid were equated with propyl formate, then, in that relation, propyl formate would count simply as a form in which C4H8O2 exists. It would also be said that butyric acid consists of C4H8O2. So, by equating propyl formate with butyric acid, their shared chemical substance would be expressed as distinct from their bodily form.

When we say that, as values, commodities are only congealed human labour, our analysis has reduced them to the abstraction called value. But that by itself still gives them no value-form separate from their natural forms. In the value-relation of one commodity to another, it is different. There, a commodity's character as value comes out through its own relation to the other commodity.

When the coat, as a value-thing, is equated with the linen, the labour contained in the coat is equated with the labour contained in the linen. Tailoring makes the coat, and weaving makes the linen. These are different concrete kinds of labour. But the equation with weaving reduces tailoring, in fact, to what is really the same in both: their common character as human labour. By this detour it is also said that weaving, insofar as it weaves value, has no distinguishing marks from tailoring. It is abstract human labour.

Only the equivalent-expression of different commodities brings out the specific character of value-forming labour. It does this by actually reducing the different labours contained in different commodities to what they share: human labour in general.

Still, it is not enough to express the specific character of the labour that makes up the linen's value. Human labour-power in a fluid state, or human labour itself, forms value, but it is not value. It becomes value only in a congealed state, in an objectified form. So expressing linen's value as congealed labour takes something more: that value has to show up as objective — as something with its own separate, thing-like existence, different from linen's own body, yet shared with another commodity. As it happens, that problem is already solved.

Paired with linen this way, the coat counts as linen's match — the same kind of thing — because it is value. So it shows up as something in which we see nothing but value, something whose ordinary physical shape represents value.

But the coat, on its own, is just a useful object — nothing more. A coat sitting there doesn't announce its value any more than any random scrap of linen does. What that shows is that paired with linen, the coat carries more weight than it does standing alone — the way someone in a fancy uniform seems to count for more than the same person in plain clothes.

Human labour-power has really been spent to make the coat, in the form of tailoring. So human labour has been built up in it. Looked at from this side, the coat is a depository of value — it holds the labour built up in it — even though its most threadbare look never lets this show.

In the linen's value-relation, the coat counts only from this side: as embodied value, as a body of value. Despite its buttoned-up appearance, the linen has recognized in it a kindred, beautiful value-soul. But the coat cannot represent value for the linen unless, for the linen, value at the same time takes the form of a coat. In the same way, person A cannot treat person B as majesty unless, for A, majesty takes B's bodily shape, and changes face, hair, and much else with each new ruler.

So in this pairing, where the coat stands in for linen's value, the coat's own form counts as the form of value. Linen's value shows up in the coat's body — one commodity's value, carried by another's usefulness.

As something useful, linen looks nothing like a coat. As value, though, it counts as coat-equal, and so takes on the look of a coat. That's how linen ends up with a value-form different from its own natural form. Its being-value shows up in its sameness with the coat, the way a Christian's sheep-like nature shows up in being like the Lamb of God.

Everything the earlier analysis of commodity-value told us, the linen now says for itself as soon as it deals with another commodity, the coat. It says it in the only language it knows: commodity-language.

To say that its own value comes from abstract human labour, the linen says this: the coat, insofar as it counts as equal to the linen and therefore as value, consists of the same labour as the linen. To say that its sublime value-objectivity is different from its stiff linen body, it says this: value looks like a coat, and therefore the linen, as a thing of value, is as like the coat as one egg is like another.

Besides Hebrew, commodity-language has many more or less exact dialects. German's own word for being worth makes the point less sharply than the Romance languages do, whose verb for 'to be worth' says it outright: setting commodity B equal to commodity A is A's own way of expressing its value. 'Paris is well worth a mass' says the same thing plainly — one thing speaks its value in another.

By means of the value-relation, then, the natural form of commodity B becomes the value-form of commodity A. The body of B becomes A's value-mirror. When A relates itself to B as a body of value, as human labour made material, A turns B's use-value into the material for A's own expression of value. A's value, expressed in B's use-value in this way, has the form of relative value.

Every commodity whose value is to be expressed is a useful object in a given amount: 15 bushels of corn, or 100 lbs of coffee, and so on. This given amount of a commodity contains a definite amount of human labour.

So the value-form has to express not just value in general, but value in a definite amount, or value-magnitude. In the value-relation of commodity A to commodity B, of linen to coat, the coat is therefore not only set equal to linen qualitatively as value-body in general. A definite amount of that value-body, for example 1 coat, is set equal to a definite amount of linen, for example 20 yards.

The equation '20 yards of linen = 1 coat,' or '20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat,' presupposes that just as much value-substance is in 1 coat as in 20 yards of linen. In other words, the two quantities of commodities cost the same amount of labour, or the same amount of labour-time.

But the labour-time necessary to produce 20 yards of linen or 1 coat changes whenever the productive power of labour in weaving or tailoring changes. We now need to look more closely at how such changes affect the relative expression of value-magnitude.

Case I. Let the value of the linen change while the value of the coat stays constant. If the labour-time needed to make the linen doubles, say because flax-bearing soil becomes more exhausted, then the linen's value doubles. Instead of 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, we would have 20 yards of linen = 2 coats, because 1 coat now contains only half as much labour-time as 20 yards of linen.

If, on the other hand, the labour-time needed to make the linen falls by half, say because looms improve, the value of the linen falls by half. Then: 20 yards of linen = 1/2 coat. So the relative value of commodity A, that is, its value expressed in commodity B, rises and falls directly with the value of A, while the value of B stays the same.

Case II. Let the value of the linen stay the same while the coat's value changes. If the labour-time needed to make the coat doubles, say because the wool clip is poor, then instead of 20 yards of linen = 1 coat we now have: 20 yards of linen = 1/2 coat. If, on the other hand, the coat's value falls by half, then 20 yards of linen = 2 coats.

So when commodity A's value stays the same, its relative value, expressed in commodity B, falls or rises in inverse ratio to the change in B's value.

Compare Cases I and II, and this follows: the same size change in relative value can come from exactly opposite causes. Starting from 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, we get 20 yards of linen = 2 coats either because the linen's value doubles or because the value of coats falls by half.

And we get 20 yards of linen = 1/2 coat either because the linen's value falls by half or because the coat's value doubles.

Case III. Let the amounts of labour needed to produce linen and coat change at the same time, in the same direction, and in the same proportion. Then the equation stays as before: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, no matter how much their values have changed.

Their change in value shows up only when they are compared with a third commodity whose value has stayed constant. If the values of all commodities rose or fell at the same time and in the same proportion, their relative values would stay unchanged.

Their real change in value would show itself this way: the same labour-time would now generally yield a larger or smaller quantity of commodities than before.

Case IV. The labour-times needed to produce linen and coat, and therefore their values, may change at the same time in the same direction but by unequal amounts, or in opposite directions, and so on.

All possible combinations of this kind affect a commodity's relative value in ways that follow simply by applying Cases I, II, and III.

Real changes in value-magnitude, then, are not mirrored in their relative expression, or in the size of relative value, in a single clear way or in a complete way. A commodity's relative value can change even though its own value stays the same.

Its relative value can stay the same even though its own value changes. And, finally, changes happening at the same time in its own value-magnitude and in the relative expression of that magnitude do not have to line up at all.

Here is something already at work in what we've seen. Say the linen — commodity A — expresses its value in the use-value of a different kind of commodity, the coat — commodity B. That act presses a special form onto the coat: the equivalent form. The linen shows it has value precisely because the coat gets treated as equal to it, without the coat taking on any value-form of its own — it stays in its ordinary bodily shape. In other words, the linen expresses its value by making the coat directly exchangeable with it. So a commodity is 'in the equivalent form' exactly when it can be directly exchanged for another commodity.

When coats serve as the equivalent for linen, coats get the special feature of standing in directly exchangeable form with linen. But that still tells us nothing about the ratio in which coats and linen exchange. If the value-magnitude of the linen is given, that ratio depends on the value-magnitude of the coats. Whether the coat is written as equivalent and linen as relative value, or the linen as equivalent and coat as relative value, the coat's value-magnitude is still determined by the labour-time needed to produce it. That is independent of its value-form. But as soon as the coat occupies the equivalent place in the expression of value, its value-magnitude is not expressed as value-magnitude. In the value-equation it appears only as a definite amount of a thing.

For example: 40 yards of linen are worth what? Two coats. Here the coat plays the equivalent. The use-value coat counts, against the linen, as a body of value. So a definite number of coats is enough to express a definite quantity of value in the linen. Two coats can express the value-magnitude of 40 yards of linen. But they can never express their own value-magnitude, the value-magnitude of coats.

Bailey, like many before and after him, was misled by this surface fact: in the value-equation, the equivalent always has only the form of a simple amount of some thing, some use-value. He therefore saw the expression of value as only a quantitative relation. But the equivalent form of a commodity contains no quantitative determination of value at all.

The first peculiarity that stands out in the equivalent form is this: use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value.

The commodity's natural form becomes its value-form. But mark the limit: for commodity B, whether coat, corn, iron, or anything else, this switch happens only inside the value-relation in which some other commodity A, such as linen, relates to it. Only there.

No commodity can treat itself as its own equivalent. So no commodity can make its own natural skin the expression of its own value. It has to relate to another commodity as equivalent. It has to make the other commodity's natural skin into its own value-form.

Here is an illustration, using a measure that belongs to commodity-bodies simply as bodies — that is, as use-values: weight. A sugar-loaf — a solid cone of refined sugar, the form sugar once came in before it was granulated — is a body, so it is heavy and has weight; but you cannot see or feel a sugar-loaf's weight just by looking at it or handling it. So we take several pieces of iron whose weight has been fixed in advance.

By itself, the iron's bodily form is no more the form of appearance of heaviness than the sugar-loaf's is. Still, to express the sugar-loaf as heaviness, we put it into a weight-relation with the iron. In that relation, the iron counts as a body that represents nothing but heaviness. Amounts of iron therefore serve as the measure of the sugar's weight; opposite the sugar-loaf, they represent weight itself in a bodily shape — the form of appearance of heaviness.

The iron plays this role only inside this relation, when sugar, or any other body whose weight is being found, is brought to it. If both things were not heavy, they could not enter this relation, and one could not express the heaviness of the other. Put both on the scales, and we see that, as heaviness, they are indeed the same; in the right proportion, they have the same weight. Just as the iron body, as a weight-measure, represents only heaviness opposite the sugar-loaf, the coat body, in our expression of value, represents only value opposite the linen.

But the weight analogy stops here. In expressing the sugar-loaf's weight, iron stands for a natural property the two bodies share: their heaviness. In expressing the linen's value, the coat stands for a supernatural property of both — their value, something purely social.

The relative value-form of a commodity, such as linen, expresses its being value as something completely different from its own body and its own properties: for example, as equality with a coat. That very expression points to a hidden social relation.

The equivalent form works the other way round. What defines this form is that the coat's own physical thing, just as it stands, expresses value — and so possesses the value-form by nature. To be exact, this holds only inside the value-relation in which the linen-commodity relates to the coat-commodity as equivalent. But a thing doesn't get its properties from its relations to other things — relations only bring existing properties into view. So the coat's equivalent form — its being directly exchangeable — looks just as natural to it as its weight or its warmth.

That is why the equivalent form is riddling. The crude bourgeois eye of the political economist is struck by the riddle only when this form faces him fully finished as money. Then he tries to explain away the mystical character of gold and silver. He puts less dazzling commodities in their place, and with fresh pleasure recites the catalogue of all the lowly commodities that have once played the role of commodity-equivalent. He does not suspect that even the simplest expression of value, such as 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, already gives the riddle of the equivalent form to be solved.

The body of the commodity that serves as equivalent always counts as the embodiment of abstract human labour. At the same time, it is always the product of a definite useful, concrete labour. So that concrete labour becomes the expression of abstract human labour.

Take the coat. If the coat counts only as a realization of abstract human labour, then tailoring, the work actually realized in it, counts only as the form in which abstract human labour is realized. In the linen's expression of value, tailoring is useful not because it makes clothes, and therefore people too, but because it makes a body that can be seen as value: congealed labour, no different from the labour objectified in the linen's value. To make such a mirror of value, tailoring itself must mirror nothing except its abstract quality of being human labour.

In tailoring, just as in weaving, human labour-power is spent. Both therefore have the general property of being human labour. In certain cases, such as the production of value, they may count only from this angle. None of that is mysterious.

But in the commodity's expression of value, the matter gets inverted. To express, for example, that weaving forms the linen's value not in its concrete form as weaving, but in its general character as human labour, tailoring is set against it. Tailoring is the concrete labour that produces the linen's equivalent, and it is put forward as the tangible form in which abstract human labour is realized.

So a second peculiarity of the equivalent form is this: concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, abstract human labour.

Because this concrete labour, tailoring, counts as a mere expression of undifferentiated human labour, it has the form of equality with another labour, the labour contained in the linen. For that reason, although it is private labour, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is still labour in directly social form. That is why it presents itself in a product that is directly exchangeable with another commodity.

So a third peculiarity of the equivalent form is this: private labour becomes the form of its opposite, labour in directly social form.

The two peculiarities of the equivalent form just developed become clearer if we go back to the great researcher who first analyzed the value-form, just as he first analyzed so many forms of thought, society, and nature. This is Aristotle.

First, Aristotle says clearly that the money-form of the commodity is only the more developed shape of the simple value-form: the expression of one commodity's value in any other commodity. For he says:

That bed-for-house equation is no different from saying:

Aristotle also sees that the value-relation inside this expression requires the house to be made qualitatively equal to the bed. Without such an essential equality, these visibly different things could not be related to each other as commensurable quantities. As Aristotle says, "Exchange cannot be without equality, and equality cannot be without commensurability."

Here, however, Aristotle stops. He gives up the further analysis of the value-form. He says it is "in truth impossible" that such different things should be commensurable, that is, qualitatively equal. So this equating can only be something foreign to the true nature of the things, a mere "makeshift for practical need."

Aristotle therefore tells us himself where his further analysis breaks down: he lacks the concept of value.

What is the equal thing, the common substance, that the house represents for the bed in the bed's expression of value? Such a thing, Aristotle says, cannot exist "in truth."

Why?

The house stands for something equal to the bed only insofar as it stands for what is really the same in both the bed and the house. And that is human labour.

Aristotle could not read out of the value-form itself that, in the form of commodity-values, all labours are expressed as equal human labour and therefore as equally valid — because Greek society rested on slave labour, and so had the inequality of people and their labour-powers as its natural basis.

The secret of the value-expression is this: all labours count as equal and equally valid because, and only insofar as, they are human labour in general. That secret can be deciphered only once human equality already has the firmness of a popular prejudice. And that can happen only in a society where the commodity-form is the general form of the product of labour, so that the relation of people to one another as owners of commodities is the dominant social relation.

Aristotle's genius shines precisely in this: he discovered a relation of equality in the value-expression of commodities at all. Only the historical limit of the society he lived in kept him from finding out what this equality-relation consists in "in truth."

Look at the simple form of a commodity's value, and you find it sitting inside one particular relation: A's relation to a different kind of commodity, B — a value-relation, or, in plainer terms, an exchange relation. Commodity A's value is expressed qualitatively when commodity B can be exchanged directly with A. It is expressed quantitatively when a definite amount of B can be exchanged with the given amount of A. Put another way:

A commodity's value gets its own separate expression once it takes the shape of exchange-value. Earlier in this chapter, the everyday phrase was that a commodity is a use-value and an exchange-value — put precisely, that phrasing is wrong. A commodity is a use-value, or a useful thing, and it is a value. The commodity presents itself as the twofold thing it is only once its value gets a form of appearance of its own, distinct from its natural shape: that form is exchange-value. A commodity by itself, taken alone, never has this form — it only gets it inside a value- or exchange-relation with a second, different kind of commodity. Once a reader has grasped that, going back to the old shorthand does no damage; it is just a convenient abbreviation.

What the analysis has proved is a direction, and it matters which way it runs: a commodity's value-form — the shape its value takes when expressed — grows out of the value itself. It is not the reverse: value and its size do not grow out of being expressed as exchange-value. Getting that backwards is exactly the delusion shared by two camps that otherwise despise each other — the mercantilists, revived by later writers, and their opposite number, the Free-trade salesmen typified by Bastiat.

Each camp grabs one half of the picture. The mercantilists fasten onto the qualitative half — the equivalent form, which reaches its most developed shape in money. The Free-trade salesmen, who need to move their goods at whatever price they can get, fasten onto the quantitative half instead — the relative form. For this second camp, value and its magnitude have no reality anywhere except in the exchange relation itself — which in practice means nowhere but the day's price list.

Macleod, the Scot whose specialty is dressing up Lombard Street's muddled thinking in learned language, manages to combine both mistakes at once: he is the superstition of the mercantilists and the enlightenment of the Free-traders rolled into one.

A closer look at commodity A's expression of value in its value-relation to commodity B has shown this: inside that relation, A counts as nothing but a use-value, and B as nothing but the shape value takes. So the inner opposition wrapped up in the commodity, the opposition between use-value and value, is represented by an external opposition: a relation between two commodities. One side — the commodity whose value is being expressed — plays a single role here: plain use-value. The other side, the commodity doing the expressing, plays the opposite role: exchange-value, nothing else. The simple value-form of a commodity is therefore the simple form of appearance of the opposition contained in it between use-value and value.

The product of labour is an object of utility in every kind of society. But the product of labour becomes a commodity only in a historically specific stage of development: a stage that presents the labour spent making a useful article as that article's "objective" property, that is, as its value. It follows that the commodity's simple value-form is also the product of labour's simple commodity-form. So the development of the commodity-form also coincides with the development of the value-form.

The first look shows what is inadequate in the simple value-form. It is only a germ-form: it has to ripen into the price-form through a series of metamorphoses.

Say A's value shows up in some other commodity B. All that expression does is mark A's value off from A's own use-value — it links A to exactly one other kind of commodity, nothing more. It falls well short of showing that A is qualitatively equal to, and quantitatively proportional with, every other commodity there is.

One relative form, one equivalent: that is the rule at this simple stage — a single commodity's relative value-form always pairs with a single other commodity's equivalent form. Take the linen's own case: in expressing the linen's value, the coat counts as equivalent — it has the form of being directly exchangeable — only for that one commodity, linen, and nothing wider than that.

Still, the single value-form passes over by itself into a more complete form. By means of that form, the value of commodity A is indeed expressed in only one commodity of another kind. But it is entirely indifferent what kind that second commodity is: coat, iron, corn, and so on. Depending, then, on whether A enters a value-relation with this or that other kind of commodity, the same commodity ends up with several different simple expressions of value. How many are possible depends only on how many other kinds of commodity there are. So its single isolated expression of value becomes a series of different simple expressions of value, one that can always be extended further.

The value of linen — to take one commodity — is now expressed in countless other pieces of the commodity world. Every other commodity's body becomes a mirror held up to linen's value. Only now does this value itself truly appear as a congelation of undifferentiated human labour.

That is because the labour that forms the value of the linen is now expressly shown as labour equal to every other kind of human labour, whatever natural form that labour has, and whether it takes shape in a coat, corn, iron, gold, or anything else. Through its own value-form, linen now stands in a social relation reaching past any single other commodity to the whole commodity-world. As a commodity, it holds citizenship in that world. At the same time, the endless series of its expressions says that commodity-value is indifferent to the particular use-value form in which it appears.

In the first form, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, it can seem like pure luck that this coat trades for exactly this much linen, and no more or less. In the second form, by contrast, something shows through at once behind that accidental appearance: a background essentially different from it and determining it.

The value of linen keeps the same magnitude whether it is shown in coats, coffee, iron, or any number of different commodities owned by all sorts of different people. The accidental relation between two individual commodity owners falls away. It becomes plain that it is not exchange that regulates the value-magnitude of the commodity. On the contrary, the value-magnitude of the commodity regulates its exchange-ratios.

Every commodity - coat, tea, corn, iron, and so on - counts in the value-expression of the linen as an equivalent, and therefore as a body of value. The definite natural form of each of these commodities is now one particular equivalent form alongside many others.

The same holds for the many definite, concrete, useful kinds of labour contained in those different commodity bodies. They now count as so many particular forms in which human labour as such is realised or appears.

First, the relative value-expression of the commodity is unfinished, because the series that shows it never closes. The chain of value equations can always be lengthened by every new kind of commodity that appears and supplies material for a new expression of value. Second, the series is a motley mosaic: value-expressions that fall apart from one another and differ in kind. Third, if the relative value of every commodity is expressed in this expanded form, as it must be, then each commodity's relative value-form is its own endless series of value-expressions — different from every other commodity's.

The defects of the expanded relative value-form are mirrored in the equivalent form that goes with it. Since the natural form of each single kind of commodity is here one particular equivalent form beside countless other particular equivalent forms, there are only limited equivalent forms, and each one shuts out every other. Likewise, the definite, concrete, useful kind of labour contained in each particular commodity-equivalent is only a particular form of appearance of human labour, and therefore not an exhaustive one.

Human labour does get its complete or total form of appearance in the whole circle of those particular forms taken together. But in that way it has no unified form of appearance.

The expanded relative value-form is, for all that, just a stack of simple first-form equations, like these:

But each equation, read the other way round, already contains the same equation in reverse:

In fact, say one owner trades his linen for many other goods, stating its value across a whole series of them. Then the reverse must hold for each of those trades: every one of those other owners is trading his goods for linen, and so stating the value of his own goods in that same third commodity, linen.

So we turn the series around: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or = 10 lbs of tea, and so on. In doing this, we are not adding a new relation. We are expressing the reverse relation that, as a matter of fact, is already contained in the series. Then we get:

How the value-form has changed

Commodities now express their values in two ways at once. First, the expression is simple, because each value is shown in one single commodity. Second, it is unified, because all of them use the same commodity. Since the value-form is both simple and shared, it is general.

Form I and Form II got only this far: they expressed the value of a commodity as something different from its own use-value, or from its own commodity body.

Form I gives equations like these: 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, 10 lbs of tea = 1/2 ton of iron, and so on. The coat's value is expressed as equality with linen; the tea's value is expressed as equality with iron. But being equal to linen and being equal to iron are value-expressions as different from each other as linen and iron themselves.

So this form clearly belongs, in practice, only to the earliest beginnings. Products of labour are turned into commodities there only through accidental, occasional exchange.

Form II separates a commodity's value from its own use-value more fully than Form I. Take the coat. Its value now stands opposite the coat's own natural form in every possible other shape: as equal to linen, equal to iron, equal to tea, and so on. It appears as everything except equal to a coat.

But for that very reason, any value-expression shared by all commodities is directly shut out. In the value-expression of each single commodity, all the other commodities appear only in the form of equivalents. The expanded value-form first actually appears when a product of labour, cattle for example, is no longer exchanged with different commodities only now and then, but already by habit.

The newly won form expresses the values of the whole commodity world in one and the same kind of commodity, set apart from that world, for example linen. It shows the values of all commodities by their equality with linen.

When value is expressed as equality with linen, it is set apart not only from the commodity's own use-value, but from every use-value, from every useful body. In just that way, value is expressed as what the commodity has in common with all commodities. Only this form, therefore, really relates commodities to one another as values, or lets them appear to one another as exchange-values.

The two earlier forms expressed the value of one commodity at a time: either in one different commodity, or in a whole series of different commodities. In both cases, giving itself a value-form is, so to speak, the private business of the single commodity. It does this without the other commodities helping. Toward it, the others play only the passive role of equivalents.

The general value-form is different. It arises only as the common work of the whole commodity world. One commodity gets a general expression of value only because all the other commodities, at the same time, express their values in that same equivalent. And every new kind of commodity that appears has to do the same.

This makes something come into view: the value-objectivity of commodities is only the "social existence" of these things. So it can be expressed only through the social relation that runs among them on all sides. Their value-form therefore has to be a socially valid form.

In the form of being equal to linen, all commodities now appear in two ways at once. They appear as the same in kind, as values at all. And they appear as quantities of value that can be compared. Because each commodity mirrors its value-size in one and the same material, linen, these value-sizes also mirror one another.

For example: 10 lbs of tea = 20 yards of linen, and 40 lbs of coffee = 20 yards of linen. Therefore 10 lbs of tea = 40 lbs of coffee. Or, in this value comparison, 1 lb of coffee stands for only one-fourth as much value-substance, labour, as 1 lb of tea.

The general relative value-form of the commodity world stamps the character of the universal equivalent onto the equivalent-commodity excluded from that form: here, linen. Linen's own natural form is now the common value-shape of this world. Because of that, linen is immediately exchangeable with every other commodity. Its bodily form counts as the visible incarnation, the general social chrysalis, of all human labour.

Weaving, the private labour that produces linen, is thereby at the same time placed in a generally social form: the form of equality with all other kinds of labour. The countless equations that make up the general value-form set, one after another, the labour realized in linen equal to the labour represented in every other commodity. In this way they make weaving the general form in which human labour as such appears.

So the labour made objective in commodity-value is not shown only negatively, as labour from which every concrete form and useful feature of real labours has been abstracted away. Its own positive nature comes out explicitly. It is the reduction of all real labours to their shared character as human labour, to the expenditure of human labour-power.

The general value-form presents products of labour as mere congealed masses of undifferentiated human labour. But through its own structure, it shows that it is the social expression of the commodity world. In this way it reveals that within this world, labour's generally human character forms its specifically social character.

How the relative form and equivalent form develop together

The level reached by the relative value-form has a matching level in the equivalent form. But this is the point to hold fast: the equivalent form develops only as the expression and result of the relative form's development. It has no independent development of its own.

In the simple, isolated relative value-form, one commodity makes another commodity its single equivalent. In the expanded form of relative value, one commodity expresses its value in all other commodities; that stamps on those others the form of different particular equivalents. Finally, one particular kind of commodity receives the universal equivalent form because all the other commodities make it the material of their unified, general value-form.

To the same extent that the value-form as such develops, the opposition between its two poles also develops: the relative value-form and the equivalent form.

Even Form I, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, already contains this opposition. But it does not yet fix the opposition in place. Read the same equation one way, and linen is in the relative value-form while the coat is in the equivalent form. Read it the other way, and the two commodity extremes trade places. Here it still takes real effort to hold the two poles apart.

In Form II, only one kind of commodity at a time can fully unfold its relative value. It has the expanded relative value-form only because, and only so far as, all the other commodities stand opposite it in the equivalent form.

Here the two sides of the value-equation can no longer simply be reversed, as in 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or = 10 lbs of tea, or = 1 quarter of corn, and so on. Reversing it changes the whole character of the expression. It turns the total, expanded form into the general value-form.

Form III, finally, gives the commodity world a general social relative value-form because, and only so far as, with one single exception, every commodity belonging to that world is excluded from the universal equivalent form.

One commodity, linen, is therefore in the form of immediate exchangeability with all the others, or in immediately social form, because, and only so far as, all the other commodities are not in that form.

Conversely, the commodity that figures as the universal equivalent is itself excluded from the unified, and therefore general, relative value-form of the commodity world. If linen, or any commodity in the universal equivalent form, also took part in that general relative value-form, it would have to serve as its own equivalent. We would get: 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen. That is a tautology. It expresses neither value nor value-size.

To express the relative value of the universal equivalent itself, we must instead reverse Form III. The universal equivalent has no relative value-form in common with the other commodities. Its value is expressed relatively in the endless series of all the other commodity-bodies. So the expanded relative value-form, or Form II, now appears as the specific relative value-form of the equivalent-commodity.

From the general value-form to the money-form

The universal equivalent form is a form of value as such. So it can belong to any commodity.

On the other hand, a commodity is in the universal equivalent form, Form III, only because, and only so far as, all the other commodities exclude it as their equivalent. And only from the moment when this exclusion finally settles on one specific kind of commodity does the unified relative value-form of the commodity world gain objective firmness and general social validity.

The specific kind of commodity with whose natural form the equivalent form socially grows together becomes the money-commodity, or functions as money. It becomes this commodity's specifically social function, and therefore its social monopoly, to play the role of universal equivalent within the commodity world.

Among the commodities that, in Form II, figure as particular equivalents of linen, and, in Form III, express their relative value together in linen, one definite commodity has historically conquered this privileged place: gold. So if, in Form III, we put the commodity gold in the place of the commodity linen, we get:

Essential changes happen in the move from Form I to Form II, and again from Form II to Form III. But Form IV differs from Form III in nothing except which commodity carries the role: instead of linen, gold now has the universal equivalent form. Gold in Form IV remains what linen was in Form III: the universal equivalent.

The only advance is this one thing: the form of being directly exchangeable for all other commodities, the universal equivalent form, has now, through social habit, finally grown together with gold's own natural form as a commodity.

Gold faces the other commodities as money only because it had already faced them as a commodity. Like every other commodity, it also served as an equivalent: first as a single equivalent in isolated exchanges, then as a particular equivalent alongside other commodity-equivalents. Little by little, in narrower or wider circles, it served as the universal equivalent.

Once gold has historically conquered the monopoly of this place in the value-expression of the world of commodities, it becomes the money-commodity. Only from that moment, when gold is already the money-commodity, does Form IV differ from Form III, or the general form of value turn into the money-form.

The simple relative expression of a commodity's value becomes its price-form when the commodity is expressed in another commodity that already works as the money-commodity, for example linen expressed in gold. So linen's price-form is:

The hard part in understanding the money-form is only the hard part of understanding the universal equivalent form: the general form of value as such, Form III. Form III resolves backward into Form II, the expanded form of value, and Form II's constituting element is Form I: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or x commodity A = y commodity B. Because this backward path lands on the simple commodity-form, that simple form is the germ of the money-form.

At first glance, a commodity looks obvious and ordinary. But once we analyze it, it turns out to be a very tangled thing, full of strange refinements that look almost metaphysical and theological. As a useful thing, there is no mystery in it. It can satisfy human needs through its properties, and it can have those properties because human labour gave them to it.

It is plain to the senses that people change natural materials into forms useful to them. Wood changes shape when it is made into a table. Still, the table remains wood, an ordinary thing we can see and touch. But as soon as it appears as a commodity, it turns into a thing we can touch and yet cannot grasp by touch alone. It still stands on its feet, but toward all other commodities it stands on its head, and out of its wooden head it comes up with fancies stranger than if it began dancing by itself.

So the commodity's mystical character does not come from its use-value. It also does not come from what the determinations of value contain.

First, however different useful labours or productive activities may be, they are functions of the human body. Whatever their content and form, each is basically an expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, sense organs, and so on. Second, beneath the determination of the magnitude of value lies the length of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour. Quantity is visibly different from the quality of the labour. In every kind of society, people have had reason to care how much labour-time it costs to produce the means of life, though not in the same way at every stage of development.

Finally, as soon as people work for one another in any way, their labour also receives a social form.

Where, then, does the riddle-character of the product of labour come from, once that product takes the commodity-form? Clearly from this form itself.

The equality of human labours takes the thing-like form of the products of labour having the same objectivity as values. The measure of human labour-power spent, measured by its duration, takes the form of the products' magnitude of value. Finally, the relations among the producers, in which those social determinations of their labours are put into effect, take the form of a social relation of the products of labour.

The mystery of the commodity-form is simply this. It reflects the social features of people's own labour back to them as objective features of the products themselves, as if these things had social properties by nature. It also reflects the producers' social relation to the total labour as a social relation among objects, existing outside the producers. Through this swap, products of labour become commodities: things we can sense, yet more than merely sensuous, or social things.

The impression of light on the optic nerve appears not as a private stimulus inside the nerve, but as the objective shape of a thing outside the eye. Yet in seeing, light really is thrown from one thing, the outside object, onto another thing, the eye. That is a physical relation between physical things. The commodity-form is different. The value-relation of products, the relation in which that form presents itself, has absolutely nothing to do with the products' physical nature or with the relations among things that arise from that nature.

Here, only a definite social relation of people themselves takes, for them, the fantastic form of a relation of things. To find an analogy, we have to flee into the misty region of religion. There, the products of the human head seem to be independent figures with lives of their own, standing in relation to one another and to human beings. So it is, in the commodity world, with the products of the human hand. This is what I call fetishism: it clings to products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and for that reason it cannot be separated from commodity production.

This fetish-character of the commodity world comes, as the earlier analysis has already shown, from the peculiar social character of the labour that produces commodities.

Useful objects become commodities only because they are products of private labours carried on independently of one another. Taken together, these private labours form society's total labour. Since producers first enter social contact only through the exchange of their products, the specifically social features of their private labours also appear only within this exchange.

Or put another way: private labours actually function as parts of society's total labour only through the relations into which exchange places the products of labour, and through those products, the producers themselves. Therefore, to the producers, the social relations of their private labours appear as what they are: not as directly social relations of persons in their work itself, but rather as thing-like relations of persons and social relations of things.

Only inside exchange do products of labour get an equal social objectivity as values, separate from their visibly different objectivity as useful things. This split in the product, into useful thing and value-thing, works itself out only in practice, once exchange has grown wide and important enough that useful things are produced for exchange, so that their character as values already matters while they are being produced.

From that moment, the private labours of the producers actually have a double social character. On one side, as definite useful labours, they must satisfy a definite social need. In this way they prove themselves as parts of the total labour, the spontaneously grown system of the social division of labour. On the other side, they satisfy the many needs of their own producers only insofar as each special useful private labour can be exchanged with every other useful kind of private labour, and so counts as equal to it.

Completely different labours can be equal only by abstracting from their real inequality. They have to be reduced to the one character they share: expenditure of human labour-power, abstract human labour. The minds of the private producers mirror this double social character of their private labours only in the forms that appear in practical dealings, in the exchange of products: the social usefulness of their private labours appears in the form that the product must be useful, and useful for others; the social equality of different kinds of labour appears in the form of the common value-character of these materially different things, the products of labour.

People do not relate their products of labour to one another as values because these things already count for them as mere thing-like wrappers of equal human labour. The reverse happens. By equating their different products with one another as values in exchange, they equate their different labours with one another as human labour. They do not know this is what they are doing, but they do it.

So value does not carry on its forehead what it is. Rather, value turns every product of labour into a social hieroglyph. Later, people try to decipher the hieroglyph and get behind the secret of their own social product, because making useful objects count as values is a social product just as much as language is.

The late scientific discovery that products of labour, insofar as they are values, are only thing-like expressions of the human labour spent in producing them marks an epoch in human development. But it does not drive away the objective semblance of the social characters of labour. What holds only for this particular form of production, commodity production, is that the specifically social character of independent private labours consists in their equality as human labour and takes the form of the products having a character as values. Before and after that discovery, to people caught within the relations of commodity production, this still appears just as fixed as air continues to exist in the physical form of air after science breaks air down into its elements.

What first matters in practice to people exchanging products is how much of someone else's product they get for their own, and therefore in what proportions the products exchange. Once these proportions have grown into a certain habitual firmness, they seem to spring from the nature of the products themselves. A ton of iron and two ounces of gold then seem equal in value, just as a pound of gold and a pound of iron are equally heavy despite their different physical and chemical properties.

In fact, the value-character of products of labour becomes fixed only through their actual working as magnitudes of value. These magnitudes change constantly, independently of the will, foresight, and action of the exchangers. The exchangers' own social action has for them the form of a movement of things. They stand under the control of those things, instead of controlling them.

Only when commodity production is fully developed can experience itself give rise to the scientific insight that these private labours, carried on independently but dependent on one another on all sides as spontaneously grown parts of the social division of labour, are constantly reduced to their socially proportional measure. This happens because, in the accidental and constantly shifting exchange-relations of their products, the labour-time socially necessary to produce those products forcibly asserts itself as a regulating law of nature, the way gravity does, say, when a house comes crashing down over a person.

The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret hidden beneath the apparent movements of relative commodity-values. Discovering this removes the semblance that the magnitudes of value of products are determined by mere accident, but it by no means removes their thing-like form.

Thinking about the forms of human life, including their scientific analysis, generally takes the opposite path from real development. It begins after the fact, and therefore with the finished results of the development process. The forms that stamp products of labour as commodities, and that commodity circulation therefore presupposes, already have the solidity of natural forms of social life before people try to give an account of them. They do not try to account for the historical character of these forms, which already count for them as unchangeable, but for their content.

That is why only the analysis of commodity prices led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and only the common money-expression of commodities led to fixing their character as values. But this very finished form - the money-form of the commodity world - objectively conceals the social character of private labours and therefore the social relations of private labourers, instead of revealing them.

If I say that a coat, boots, and so on relate to linen as the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the craziness of the expression is obvious. But when the producers of coats, boots, and so on relate these commodities to linen - or to gold and silver, which changes nothing here - as the universal equivalent, the relation of their private labours to the total labour of society appears to them exactly in this crazy form.

Forms of this kind are precisely the categories of bourgeois economy. They are socially valid, and therefore objective, thought-forms for the relations of production of this historically definite social mode of production: commodity production. So all the mysticism of the commodity world, all the magic and ghostliness that clouds products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes at once as soon as we flee to other forms of production.

Political economy likes Robinson Crusoe stories, so start with Robinson on his island. He is modest, but he still has different needs. So he has to do different useful jobs: make tools, make furniture, tame llamas, fish, hunt, and so on. Prayer and the like do not count here, because Robinson enjoys them and treats them as rest.

Even though his productive jobs differ, Robinson knows they are only different activities of the same Robinson, different ways of spending human labour. Need itself forces him to divide his time carefully among them. Whether one job takes more or less of his total activity depends on how hard it is to get the useful result he wants. Experience teaches him this. Since he rescued a clock, ledger, ink, and pen from the wreck, he soon keeps books on himself like a good Englishman.

His inventory lists the useful things he has, the different operations needed to make them, and the average labour-time that definite amounts of these different products cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the things that make up his self-made wealth are so simple and transparent that even Herr Wirth could grasp them without any special mental effort. And still, all the essential features of value are already there.

Now move from Robinson's bright island to the dark European Middle Ages. Instead of one independent man, everyone is dependent: serfs and lords, vassals and feudal superiors, lay people and priests. Personal dependence marks the social relations of material production, and also the forms of life built on that production.

Precisely because personal dependence is already the given social basis, labour and its products do not have to take on a fantastic shape different from what they really are. They enter the social machinery as services in kind and payments in kind. The natural form of the labour, its particular kind, is its directly social form here - not its general form, as under commodity production.

Corvee labour is measured by time just as commodity-producing labour is. But each serf knows that what he spends in the lord's service is a definite amount of his own personal labour-power. The tithe owed to the priest is clearer than the priest's blessing. So whatever we think of the social masks in which people face each other here, the social relations of persons in their labours appear as their own personal relations. They are not disguised as social relations of things, of products of labour.

To look at common, directly social labour, we do not have to go back to its earliest spontaneous form at the dawn of settled peoples. A nearer example is a patriarchal peasant family producing for its own use: corn, cattle, yarn, linen, clothing, and so on. These different things face the family as different products of family labour. But they do not face one another as commodities.

The different jobs that make these products - farming, cattle-tending, spinning, weaving, tailoring, and the rest - are social functions in their natural form, because they are functions of the family. The family has its own spontaneous division of labour, just as commodity production does. Differences of sex and age, along with the changing natural conditions of the seasons, regulate how work and labour-time are divided among the family members.

Here, the spending of each person's labour-power, measured by duration, appears from the start as a social determination of the work itself. That is because the individual labour-powers act from the start only as organs, as working parts, of the family's common labour-power.

Finally, for a change, imagine an association of free people. They work with means of production held in common, and they spend their many individual labour-powers self-consciously as one social labour-power. All the determinations of Robinson's labour appear again, but now socially instead of individually. Robinson's products were only his own personal products, so they were directly useful objects for him. The association's total product is a social product.

One part of that product serves again as means of production. It stays social. Another part is consumed by the members as means of subsistence, as goods for life. So it has to be distributed among them. The way it is distributed will change with the particular kind of social production organism and with the producers' level of historical development.

Just to draw a parallel with commodity production, suppose that each producer's share of the means of subsistence is determined by labour-time. Labour-time would then play a double role. Its planned social distribution regulates the right proportion between the different kinds of work and the different needs. On the other side, labour-time also measures each producer's individual share in the common labour, and therefore in the part of the common product that can be consumed individually. Here the social relations of people to their labour and to their products remain transparently simple, in distribution as well as in production.

For a society of commodity producers, the general social relation of production has a precise form. Producers relate to their products as commodities, that is, as values. In that objective, thing-like form, they relate their private labours to one another as equal human labour. The religion that best fits such a society is Christianity, with its cult of the abstract human being, especially in its bourgeois forms: Protestantism, Deism, and the like.

In the old Asiatic, ancient, and similar modes of production, the product's change into a commodity, and therefore people's existence as commodity producers, plays only a subordinate role. But that role grows more important as the old communities enter the stage of decline. Trading peoples in the strict sense exist in the ancient world only in its gaps: like Epicurus's gods in the spaces between worlds, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society.

Those old social organisms of production are much simpler and more transparent than the bourgeois one. But they rest either on the immaturity of the individual human being, who has not yet torn himself loose from the umbilical cord of the natural species-bond with others, or on direct relations of rule and servitude. They are conditioned by a low level of the productive power of labour, and by correspondingly narrow relations among people inside the material process by which they produce their lives - hence narrow relations to one another and to nature.

This real narrowness in people's material relations is reflected in ideas in the old nature religions and popular religions. The religious reflection of the real world can disappear at all only once the relations of practical everyday life present people, day after day, with transparent and reasonable relations to one another and to nature.

The shape of social life, that is, of the material production process, strips off its mystical veil only when it stands as the product of freely associated people and is under their conscious, planned control. But for that, society needs a material basis, or a set of material conditions of existence. Those conditions are themselves the spontaneously grown product of a long and painful history.

Political economy has indeed analyzed value and value-magnitude, even if imperfectly, and it has discovered the content hidden in these forms. But it has never even asked why this content takes that form: why labour presents itself in value, and why the measure of labour by its duration presents itself in the value-magnitude of the product of labour.

These forms carry their historical mark on their face. They belong to a society where the production process masters people, and people have not yet mastered the production process. But to bourgeois consciousness, they count as self-evident necessities of nature, just as productive labour itself does. So political economy treats earlier forms of the social production organism much as the Church Fathers treated pre-Christian religions.

How far some economists are fooled by the fetishism that sticks to the world of commodities, or by the objective appearance of labour's social determinations, is shown by one dull, absurd quarrel: the quarrel over nature's role in forming exchange-value. Since exchange-value is a definite social way of expressing the labour spent on a thing, it can contain no more natural matter than an exchange rate does.

The commodity-form is the most general and least developed form of bourgeois production. That is why it appears early, though not in the same dominant and characteristic way as today. For that reason, its fetish-character still seems relatively easy to see through. In more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity disappears.

Where did the illusions of the monetary system come from? The monetary system could not tell, by looking at gold and silver, that when they function as money they represent a social production-relation, but in the form of natural things with strangely social properties. And modern political economy smiles down grandly on the monetary system; but does its own fetishism not become tangible as soon as it deals with capital? How long ago did the physiocratic illusion disappear, the illusion that ground-rent grows out of the earth and not out of society?

To avoid getting ahead of ourselves, one more example from the commodity-form itself will be enough. If commodities could speak, they would say: Our use-value may interest human beings. It does not belong to us as things. What does belong to us as things is our value. The way we deal with one another as commodity-things proves this. We relate to one another only as exchange-values.

Now listen to the economist speaking out of the commodity's soul:

"Value" (that is, exchange-value) "belongs to things; riches" (that is, use-value) "belong to human beings. Value, taken in this sense, necessarily involves exchange; riches do not." "Riches" (that is, use-value) "are something people have; value is something commodities have. A person or a community is rich; a pearl or a diamond is valuable ... A pearl or a diamond has value as a pearl or diamond."

So far, no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value in a pearl or a diamond. But the economic discoverers of this supposed chemical substance, who make a special claim to critical depth, decide this: a thing's use-value does not depend on the properties it has as a thing, while its value does belong to it as a thing.

What confirms them is a strange fact. The use-value of things is realized for human beings without exchange, in the direct relation between a thing and a human being. Their value is the opposite: it is realized only in exchange, that is, in a social process. Who would not remember good Dogberry here, teaching the night watchman Seacoal:

"To be a good-looking man is a gift of circumstances; but to be able to read and write comes by nature."