The
Metamorphosis Of Commodities Continued
When the commodity is exchanged for money, money is at the same time
exchanged for the commodity. The commodity becomes Exchange Value,
but the Money becomes Use Value . The linen goes out of the hands of
its owner, and money comes in. But, likewise, the owner of the money
gives it up in return for the Use Value of the linen. What appears
as one exchange is in reality two: (C-M) and (M-C), if viewed from
both standpoints.
But, the owner of the money only obtained it by themselves selling a
commodity, so what here appears as M-C, is in reality just the last
part of another series of transactions (C-M-C). The only exception
to this is the gold producer, who exchanges gold (money) directly for
other commodities.
So, the way commodities metamorphose, to use Marx's term, in a
money economy, comprises two stages. The first stage is that the
owner of a commodity C sells it for money M. The second stage is
that they buy another commodity C using the money they have received
from the sale. So, the two stages can be summed up as C-M and M-C.
In reality, the seller will sell a lot of a single commodity C, and
will use the money M to buy many different commodities to meet their
range of needs. But, while the first part of the transaction C-M, is
the first stage for the seller, for the buyer, of the linen, it is
the second stage. For them it appears as M-C. They have given up
money (Exchange Value) to acquire the commodity linen whose Use Value
they wish to consume. Similarly, the seller of the linen, in the
second stage, where they hand over the money they have received for
the linen, in order to buy a bible, complete, for the seller of the
bible, the first stage. The bible seller sees things as C-M. They,
in turn, can use the £2, received for the bible, to buy a bottle of
brandy for £2. To them this is the second stage, M-C, whereas for
the brandy seller it is the first stage C-M, and so on ad infinitum.
In other words, the market place is not made up of one group of
sellers and one group of buyers. Everyone occupies the role of buyer
and seller alternately. The owners of commodities “metamorphose”
the commodities they own, into the commodities they desire, by
continual acts of buying and selling. Money intervenes in this
process as the transient equivalent form.
If we put together these two stages by which one commodity is
metamorphosed into another we get a circuit C-M-M-C. The commodity
begins in its commodity form (linen) which comprises its two
contradictory elements (Use Value and Exchange Value). For the owner
it has no Use Value (that is why they want to sell it). In the
process of selling, the linen becomes money, i.e. its Use Value is
stripped away, leaving only its quantity of Exchange Value, which
then takes the physical form of money.
Because it has no Use Value for the owner it only exists as Exchange
Value. The example of light can again be useful here. Light can be
considered either as a wave of energy or as a particle. The Exchange
Value can be though of as a wave of energy, and the thing it takes
shape in as the particle. The wave is energy and the photon the
particle. As energy it is manifest through the other bodies it
energises. As matter it is light incarnate. The same with the
Exchange Value. It is manifest as it “energises” different
commodities, as money it is materialised Value incarnate. In the
money the Exchange Value simply takes a different shape to that it
had in the linen. Or another non-scientific way of viewing it might
be that the Exchange Value is like a spirit, which possesses a
different body.
But, money stands in the opposite position. It is pure Exchange
Value, with no Use Value of its own. Its Use Value is contained not
in itself, but in all the commodities it can buy. When it is
exchanged for the bible, therefore, the buyer realises that Use
Value.
The totality of all these circuits constitutes the circulation of
commodities. At first sight, it might appear that all that the
introduction of money has done here is to make the process of
exchange easier than it would have been by direct barter. But, Marx
shows that a much more significant change than that has occurred.
Under barter, the linen seller could only have exchanged it with the
bible seller, if the latter wanted linen rather than brandy! In
fact, a whole series of exchanges have been made possible that
otherwise could not have occurred. At the same time, a new set of
dependent relations are established. The brandy seller can only sell
it, if the bible seller sells his bible to the linen seller, who can
only buy the bible if they sell their linen and so on.
But, these new relations mean that the constraints on exchange and
the circulation of commodities are lifted. Barter meant exchange was
necessarily limited by individual and personal relations, which meant
such exchanges would be geographically confined, i.e. limited to
local trades. Now, money means buyers can be found far and wide, and
money can be used to source purchases in a similar manner. A whole
new series of social relations are developed as a result of the
introduction of money.
Under barter, the exchange completes the circuit of the commodities.
With money, the completion of one circuit merely opens another. Each
time a commodity disappears from the circuit (when it is consumed)
its place is taken by money, which never disappears from the circuit.
However, this fact, that every sale is at the same time a purchase is
not an acceptance of “Say's Law”. Supply does not create its own
demand. As Marx says,
“Nothing
can be more childish than the dogma, that because every sale is a
purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of
commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium of sales and
purchases. If this means that the number of actual sales is equal to
the number of purchases, it is mere tautology. But its real purport
is to prove that every seller brings his buyer to market with him.
Nothing of the kind. The sale and the purchase constitute one
identical act, an exchange between a commodity-owner and an owner of
money.. Hence the identity of sale and purchase implies that the
commodity is useless, if, on being thrown into the alchemistical
retort of circulation, it does not come out again in the shape of
money; if, in other words, it cannot be sold ... No one can sell
unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to
purchase, because he has just sold. Circulation bursts through all
restrictions as to time, place, and individuals, imposed by direct
barter, and this it effects by splitting up, into the antithesis of a
sale and a purchase, the direct identity that in barter does exist
between the alienation of one’s own and the acquisition of some
other man’s product... If the interval in time between the two
complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity
become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase
become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their
oneness, asserts itself by producing — a crisis. The antithesis,
use-value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound
to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularised
concrete kind of labour has to pass for abstract human labour; the
contradiction between the personification of objects and the
representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and
contradictions, which are immanent in commodities, assert themselves,
and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases of the
metamorphosis of a commodity. These modes therefore imply the
possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crises. The
conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of a
long series of relations, that, from our present standpoint of simple
circulation, have as yet no existence.” (pp 114-5)
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