Marx: The Critique of Political EconomyA concept-organized master reference for the Grundrisse and Capital, Volumes I–III — from the forms of appearance to the actual relations

01The Commodity: Use-Value, Exchange-Value, Value

The elementary form of capitalist wealth, and the cell in which the whole architecture of appearance is already contained: a useful thing whose exchange relation points past every natural property to a purely social substance.

The corpus opens here, and the opening sentence already states the method: wealth appears as an immense collection of commodities, and the analysis begins with the form of appearance.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 125.

The commodity is first taken at its most innocent, as an external useful thing.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 125.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 126.

Exchange-value then enters as something the thing seems to have, and immediately begins to dissolve under inspection: it presents itself as accidental and relative, yet behaves as if something lawful stands behind it.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 126.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 127.

The decisive move rules out every natural property of the body of the commodity as the common element the exchange relation expresses.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 127.

What remains after the abstraction is the substance of value, and it is nothing bodily at all.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 128.

Two boundary determinations complete the concept. A thing can be useful without being a value at all; value belongs only to products of labour that pass through the social form of exchange.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 131.

And the two poles do not sit peacefully side by side: the commodity carries an internal opposition that will drive the entire development of the value-form, of money, and eventually of crisis.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 153.

Across the corpusThe commodity opens Volume I and never leaves the corpus: the Grundrisse reaches the same cell from the side of money (entry 04), Volume II treats the commodity as one phase-form of industrial capital in motion (entry 14), and Volume III returns to it at the very end, when the finished revenue forms have to be traced back to the components of commodity value (entries 16 and 21).

See also02 Socially necessary labour time · 03 The dual character of labour · 04 The value-form and money · 05 Fetishism

02Value as Socially Necessary Labour Time

The substance and measure of value: not labour time as such, but the labour time socially necessary under normal conditions of production with the average degree of skill and intensity — a social average that asserts itself behind the backs of the producers.

The definition arrives inside the first analysis of the commodity, and it is worth carrying whole, because everything in it is load-bearing: the homogeneity of social labour-power, the social average, and the normality conditions that make the measure historical rather than physiological.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 129.

The immediate corollary binds value to productivity inversely, which is the seed both of relative surplus-value (entry 09) and of the falling rate of profit (entry 18).

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 131.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 137.

Value is therefore not a property things acquire by being useful, but objectified abstract labour.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 129.

The measure is socially validated only in exchange, and the validation can fail retroactively: labour time individually well spent can prove socially superfluous. This recurrence in the chapter on money already contains the possibility of overproduction.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 202.

In the analysis of relative surplus-value the law stops being a definition and becomes coercion: it makes itself felt on the individual capitalist as an external necessity, which is how a social average disciplines agents who have never heard of it.

The law of the determination of value by labour-time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 436.

Volume III restates the measure at the level of a whole sphere of production, as market value, when the finished forms of competition have to be reconciled with the law of value.

Market value is to be viewed on the one hand as the average value of the commodities produced in a particular sphere, and on the other hand as the individual value of commodities produced under average conditions in the sphere in question, and forming the great mass of its commodities. Only in extraordinary situations do commodities produced under the worst conditions, or alternatively the most advantageous ones, govern the market value, which forms in turn the centre around which market prices fluctuate – these being the same for all commodities of the same species..

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 279.

The Grundrisse had already run the concept against the Proudhonist time-chit and shown why value cannot be decreed into transparency: the average is real but dynamic, continually devaluing the labour time already embodied.

The time-chit, representing average labour time, would never correspond to or be convertible into actual labour time; i.e. the amount of labour time objectified in a commodity would never command a quantity of labour time equal to itself, and vice versa, but would command, rather, either more or less, just as at present every oscillation of market values expresses itself in a rise or fall of the gold or silver prices of commodities.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 139.

Across the corpusFirst stated at Capital, Volume I, page 129; recurs as social validation in the money chapter (Volume I, page 202); becomes coercive law in relative surplus-value (Volume I, page 436); is generalized to market value in Volume III (page 279); and is anticipated polemically in the Grundrisse critique of labour-money (page 139).

See also03 The dual character of labour · 09 Surplus-value · 17 Average profit · 13 Machinery and disposable time

03The Dual Character of Labour: Concrete and Abstract

The pivot Marx himself called the whole secret of the critical conception: the same act of labour counts twice, as concrete useful labour producing use-value and as expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract producing value.

The distinction is introduced on the two-fold nature of the labour embodied in commodities, and the corpus treats it as the point on which comprehension of political economy turns.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 132.

Concrete labours are as qualitatively different as the use-values they produce; without that difference there would be nothing to exchange.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 132.

Useful labour is a transhistorical condition of human existence; the point is precisely that this is not what makes it value-forming.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 133.

Against every labour-metaphysics, labour is not even the sole source of material wealth.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 134.

Abstraction from the determinate quality of the activity leaves the expenditure of human labour-power as such, and that expenditure is the substance of value.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 134.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 135.

The summary formulation carries the double character whole.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 137.

The Grundrisse Introduction supplies the historical epistemology of the category: the abstraction “labour as such” becomes practically true only in a society where individuals pass with indifference from one labour to another, which is why the most abstract category is itself a historic product.

this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 104.

This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 105.

Across the corpusIntroduced at Capital, Volume I, pages 131–137, and presupposed everywhere after; the Grundrisse Introduction (pages 104–105) grounds the category historically, and the fetishism analysis (entry 05) shows what happens when the social character of abstract labour can appear only in the relation of things.

See also02 Socially necessary labour time · 05 Fetishism · 08 Living labour

04The Value-Form and Money

The analysis bourgeois economy never attempted: how value, a purely social substance, must take the form of a relation between things, and why that development terminates necessarily in money.

The program is announced as a task without precedent: not to reduce value to labour (classical economy did that) but to derive the form value takes.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 139.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 139.

In the simple expression of value the equivalent commodity counts, in its very body, as the embodiment of abstract labour, and the inversions begin at once. The equivalent form has three peculiarities, and the second and third carry the whole social paradox.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 143.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 150.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 151.

The reason antiquity could not decipher the expression of value is that its secret is historical: the equality of human labours in general.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 152.

The general form of value is a joint social deed, and one commodity’s natural body becomes the visible incarnation of all human labour.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 159.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 159.

Money is then nothing mysterious in itself; the difficulty is entirely in the universal equivalent form.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 163.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 181.

With money in place the inversion completes itself in everyday perception: commodities seem to be commensurable because money exists, whereas money exists because commodities are commensurable as values.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 187.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 188.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 195.

The Grundrisse states the social content of the money-form with a bluntness the published text distributes across chapters: in commodity society the individual’s social power exists as a thing he carries with him, and money itself becomes the community.

The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 156.

Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 158.

Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. The community of antiquity presupposes a quite different relation to, and on the part of, the individual. The development of money in its third role therefore smashes this community.

Marx, Grundrisse, page 225.

Across the corpusThe derivation runs at Capital, Volume I, pages 139–163; the retrospective methodological verdict on the form (the most abstract and most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production) sits at Volume I, page 174, and is gathered in entry 22; the Grundrisse money chapter (pages 156–225) carries the social ontology of the form.

See also01 The commodity · 05 Fetishism · 06 The general formula · 22 Essence and appearance

05The Fetishism of the Commodity

The founding statement of the corpus’s theory of appearance: in commodity production the definite social relation between producers assumes, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things — an objective illusion, not a mistake in their heads.

The section opens by revoking the innocence the commodity was granted on page 125.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 163.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 164.

The central formulation, with the analogy to the religious world, deserves to be carried in full wherever the concept is used.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 165.

Two consequences follow: the social relations really do appear as what they are not, and the appearance is practically true — producers act through it, without knowing it.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 166.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 166.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 167.

The magnitude of value asserts itself as a law of nature precisely because the social process runs behind the backs of the producers.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 168.

Hence the standing of the economic categories themselves: objective forms of thought, socially valid for this mode of production and for no other.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 169.

The counter-image of the association of free men shows the fetish is historical, not anthropological; and the analysis states its own conditions of dissolution.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 171.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 173.

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

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 177.

Volume III returns to the concept at the very end of the corpus and completes it: the finished revenue forms are the fetish raised to a system, the religion of everyday life. The full development is gathered in entry 21; the recurrence is marked here.

Capital-profit (or better still capital-interest), land–ground-rent, labour-wages, this economic trinity as the connection between the components of value and wealth in general and its sources, completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity.

Marx, Capital, Volume III, page 968.

Across the corpusFirst statement at Capital, Volume I, pages 163–177; developed through the wage-form (entry 10), the cost-price and interest fetishes (entries 16 and 19), and completed in the trinity formula as the religion of everyday life (Capital, Volume III, pages 968–969; entry 21).

See also04 The value-form and money · 10 The wage-form · 19 Interest and M–M′ · 21 The trinity formula · 22 Essence and appearance

06M–C–M′: The General Formula for Capital and Its Contradiction

Capital first appears as a form of circulation: buying in order to sell dearer. The formula defines capital as self-valorizing value and immediately generates the contradiction whose solution is labour-power.

Alongside selling-in-order-to-buy appears its inversion, and the difference of form conceals a difference of world.

But alongside this form we find another form, which is quite distinct from the first: M–C–M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the re-conversion of commodities into money: buying in order to sell. Money which describes the latter course in its movement is transformed into capital, becomes capital, and, from the point of view of its function, already is capital.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 248.

The path C–M–C proceeds from the extreme constituted by one commodity, and ends with the extreme constituted by another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of needs, in short use-value, is therefore its final goal. The path M–C–M, however, proceeds from the extreme of money and finally returns to that same extreme. Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange-value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 250.

The complete form of this process is therefore M–C–M′, where M′ = M + ΔM, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call ‘surplus-value’.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 251.

C–M–C has its measure in need; M–C–M′ has no terminus at all, and its bearer, the capitalist, is this movement become conscious.

The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 253.

As the conscious bearer [Träger] of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing – the valorization of value – is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 254.

This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 254.

Value here becomes the subject of a process, money and commodity mere forms it passes through.

It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. … In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization [Selbstverwertung]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 255.

M–C–M′ is in fact therefore the general formula for capital, in the form in which it appears directly in the sphere of circulation.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 257.

Then the contradiction. Circulation of equivalents transfers value but creates none; even systematic cheating only redistributes what exists.

In so far, therefore, as the circulation of commodities involves a change only in the form of their values, it necessarily involves the exchange of equivalents, provided the phenomenon occurs in its purity.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 260.

The formation of surplus-value, and therefore the transformation of money into capital, can consequently be explained neither by assuming that commodities are sold above their value, nor by assuming that they are bought at less than their value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 263.

A sells wine worth £40 to B, and obtains from him in exchange corn to the value of £50. A has converted his £40 into £50, has made more money out of less, and has transformed his commodities into capital. Let us examine this a little more closely. Before the exchange we had £40 of wine in the hands of A, and £50 worth of corn in those of B, a total value of £90. After the exchange we still have the same total value of £90. The value in circulation has not increased by one iota; all that has changed is its distribution between A and B. What appears on one side as a loss of value appears on the other side as surplus-value; what appears on one side as a minus appears on the other side as a plus. The same change would have taken place if A, without the disguise provided by the exchange, had directly stolen the £10 from B.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 265.

However much we twist and turn, the final conclusion remains the same. If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, we still have no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no value.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 266.

Yet surplus-value cannot arise outside circulation either, and the antinomy is stated in full rigour: it must happen both within circulation and not within it.

The commodity-owner can create value by his labour, but he cannot create values which can valorize themselves. He can increase the value of his commodity by adding fresh labour, and therefore more value, to the value in hand, by making leather into boots, for instance. The same material now has more value, because it contains a greater quantity of labour. The boots have therefore more value than the leather, but the value of the leather remains what it was. It has not valorized itself, it has not annexed surplus-value during the making of the boots.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 268.

Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation. We therefore have a double result.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 268.

The solution must be a commodity whose consumption is itself creation of value; the larval capitalist must find it on the market.

The money-owner, who is as yet only a capitalist in larval form, must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning. His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation. These are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Marx, Capital, Volume I, page 269.

Across the corpusPosed at Capital, Volume I, pages 248–269, and resolved in the purchase and consumption of labour-power (entry 07). The Grundrisse reaches the same threshold from money as such (pages 250–280 of the notebooks; entries 04 and 08), and Volume II generalizes the formula into the circuit of industrial capital (entry 14). M–M′, the formula’s truncation and consummate fetish, is gathered in entry 19.

See also07 Labour-power · 08 Living labour · 14 The circuits of capital · 19 Interest and M–M′