Where commodity production and exchange dominates, and where commodities are bought and sold for money, not only is production and consumption separated, but purchase and sale is also separated. The bible producer no longer exchanges a bible with a value of 10 hours, for 10 bottles of wine, but exchanges their bible for money, with a value of 10 hours. Money always initially takes the form of a money commodity, be it cattle, copper, silver or gold, but also, as Marx describes, money itself is not a commodity, although all commodities are money. It is exchange-value incarnate, a representative of all commodities, the general commodity, and thereby the physical measure of their exchange-value. The seller of the bible no longer exchanges it for money as an exchange of use values, with an equal value, but exchanges the bible for money only for its exchange-value. The only use value of money is its exchange-value, and once this situation arises, it becomes possible for there to be sellers who are not buyers, as well as buyers who are not sellers. The failure of Ricardo to recognise that money, even in the form of a money-commodity, is not a commodity, is central to the error in his theory of money, but also to his error in relation to the acceptance of Say's Law.
The bible producer may sell their bible, on the market, for £10, but, having sold it, they are now under no compulsion to use the £10 to buy wine from the wine producer, who now has produced but cannot sell. They have bought, but cannot sell, because the bible producer has sold, but does not buy. The £10 they now have, in say gold coins, is not a commodity. As money, its only use value is as money, i.e. as exchange-value incarnate. If they wanted to use the gold contained in the coins as a commodity, they could only do so by ending its existence as money. In other words, they would have to melt down the coins, and transform them into gold, to be used as a commodity in the production of jewellery etc. It can only act as money, as the general commodity, by abandoning its use value as a commodity.
“Crisis results from the impossibility to sell. The difficulty of transforming the commodity—the particular product of individual labour—into its opposite, money, i.e., abstract general social labour, lies in the fact that money is not the particular product of individual labour, and that the person who has effected a sale, who therefore has commodities in the form of money, is not compelled to buy again at once, to transform the money again into a particular product of individual labour.” (p 509)
It's money, by separating purchase and sale, by creating the potential to sell without buying, which thereby creates this potential for crisis, because it creates the potential for producers to be unable to convert their commodity into money, and unless they can sell, and convert their commodity into money, they are unable to convert money into commodities, so the process of production is itself then disrupted.
“The difficulty of converting the commodity into money, of selling it, only arises from the fact that the commodity must be turned into money but the money need not be immediately turned into commodity, and therefore sale and purchase can be separated. We have said that this form contains the possibility of crisis, that is to say, the possibility that elements which are correlated, which are inseparable, are separated and consequently are forcibly reunited, their coherence is violently asserted against their mutual independence. Crisis is nothing but the forcible assertion of the unity of phases of the production process which have become independent of each other.” (p 509)
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