Marx’s
Capital Volume 1, Part 3
Exchange
In his 1863
plan for the work, Karl Marx proposed to begin Volume 1 of Capital with
“1. Introduction. Commodity.
Money.” In the published version, four years later, an additional short
item – Exchange – was introduced between Commodity and Money.
This is a
helpful, brief, readable chapter that manages to reprise the definition of
Commodity and the description of its implications given in the preceding
chapter, while prefiguring the definition of Money that arrives in Chapter 3.
So this
chapter on Exchange is a useful summary. In this regard it is typical of the
work as a whole. Marx takes care in Capital, Volume 1, to allow the reader to
rest at intervals and re-look at the material in a different way, or else to show
off the new parts again in their relation to the whole.
Marx begins
this chapter on Exchange by saying, of commodities:
“In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as
commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another,
as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way
that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his
own, except by means of an act done by
mutual consent.”
“In the course of our investigation we shall find, in general, that the
characters who appear on the economic stage are but the personifications of the
economic relations that exist between them.
“All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for
their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands.
“At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products into commodities
is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one special commodity into
money.
“What appears to happen is, not that
gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing their
values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally
express their values in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of
the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind.”
The section
of Chapter 3 on Price is also included in today’s attached instalment.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, Chapter 2,
Exchange, with part of Chapter 3, on Price.
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