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.
