Part One: Commodities and Money (Chapters 1–3)

Preface to the First Edition

The work whose first volume I now submit to the public is the continuation of my "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," published in 1859. Beginnings are always difficult in every science; and the understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will present the greatest difficulty. In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use; the force of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form.

The physicist observes natural processes where they occur in their most typical form. What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and exchange corresponding to it. Its classic ground is England; that is why England serves as the chief illustration of my theoretical ideas. If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him: De te fabula narratur! — the tale is told of you. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

A word to avoid misunderstanding. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them. Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as before the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti — Go on your way, and let the people talk.

In the Afterword to the second edition (1873) Marx adds that his method is the direct opposite of Hegel's: with Hegel the dialectic "is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

Chapter 1. The Commodity

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as "an immense collection of commodities," and the single commodity as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

A commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. Use-values form the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be; in our society they are also the material bearers of exchange-value. Exchange-value appears first as the quantitative relation in which use-values of one sort are exchanged for those of another: a quarter of wheat, say, for so many hundredweight of iron. What does this equation tell us? That in two different things there exists something common to both, of equal magnitude. This common something cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. If we leave aside their use-value, there remains only one property: that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour has been changed in our hands: if we abstract from its use-value, we also abstract from the useful character of the labour embodied in it — the joiner's, the mason's, the spinner's. There remains nothing but a congealed quantity of homogeneous human labour, of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. As crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are values.

How is the magnitude of this value measured? By the quantity of labour it contains, measured in time. But it might seem that the lazier and clumsier a man, the more valuable his commodity, since he takes more time to make it. Not so: the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, and the labour-time that counts is the socially necessary labour-time — the time required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. When the power-loom was introduced into England, the hand-loom weaver still needed as much time as before to turn yarn into cloth; but the product of his hour now represented only half an hour of social labour, and fell to half its former value.

The labour contained in commodities is itself twofold. As useful, concrete labour — tailoring, weaving — it produces use-values; as abstract human labour, the expenditure of human brains, nerves and muscles in general, it produces value. I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities; and this is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns.

Then the form of value. Everyone knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value-form common to them all, which contrasts in the most striking way with the motley natural forms of their use-values: the money-form. Our task is to trace the genesis of this money-form. The simplest relation of value is that of one commodity to another: 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat. Here the linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in which the linen's value is expressed. The linen's value becomes visible in the body of the coat — as if the coat, buttoned up as it is, were value incarnate. From this simple form we go to the expanded form, in which the linen expresses its value in an endless series of other commodities — a coat, ten pounds of tea, forty pounds of coffee, a quarter of corn; then, reversing it, to the general form, in which all commodities express their value in one single commodity, separated out from the rest; and at last, when that commodity is by custom fixed as gold, to the money-form: 20 yards of linen are worth 2 ounces of gold.

The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret

A commodity appears at first sight a very trivial thing, easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it. The form of wood is altered by making a table out of it; yet the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own accord.

Whence, then, this enigmatic character? Clearly, from the commodity-form itself. The equality of all human labours takes the form of the equal value of their products; and so the social relations between the producers appear as a social relation between things. It is a definite social relation between men themselves which here assumes, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. To find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion, where the products of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities.

All the mystery of commodities vanishes as soon as we come to other forms of production. Let us take Robinson on his island — since political economy is fond of Robinsonades. Modest though he is, he has to satisfy various wants: he must make tools and furniture, tame goats, fish and hunt; and he keeps a book of the labour-time each costs him; and all the relations between Robinson and the objects that form his wealth are here so simple and clear that even Mr Sedley Taylor could understand them. Or let us go to the dark Middle Ages: there, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent — serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains; but just because personal dependence forms the groundwork of that society, the social relations of individuals in their labour appear as their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between things. The corvée is measured by time as surely as the labour that produces commodities, but every serf knows that what he spends in his lord's service is a definite quantity of his own labour-power. Let us, finally, imagine an association of free men, working with the means of production in common, and expending their many individual labour-powers in full self-awareness as one single social labour-power. There, too, the social relations of men to their labour and its products would be transparent in their simplicity.

The life-process of society does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as the product of freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.

Chapters 2 and 3. Exchange; Money, or the Circulation of Commodities

Commodities cannot go to market and exchange themselves. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are the owners of commodities. These must treat each other as persons whose will resides in those objects, and recognise each other as private owners; and this juridical relation, whose form is the contract, is only the mirror of the economic relation. The persons exist for one another only as representatives of commodities. Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of exchange, whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another.

Gold first serves as the measure of values, by expressing the values of commodities as prices — imaginary quantities of gold; then as means of circulation. The circulation of commodities takes the form C–M–C: commodity — money — commodity; selling in order to buy. The weaver sells his linen for £2, and with the £2 buys a family Bible. The first metamorphosis, the sale, is the commodity's salto mortale — its fatal leap; for if the leap fails, it is not the commodity that is hurt, but its owner. And since the sale and the purchase are separated in time and place, so that one may sell without at once buying, the possibility of crises is already contained in the circulation of commodities. Money becomes, too, the object of hoarding: the hoarder sacrifices the lusts of the flesh to his gold fetish; he takes the gospel of abstinence seriously. Then money becomes means of payment, as goods are bought on credit and paid for later; and at last world money, the universal means of purchase in the market of the world.