When every commodity is measured in terms of a money commodity, be it cattle or gold, each commodity also then appears to every other commodity as a quantity of universal labour, as a quantity of that labour that produces the money commodity.
“They are as values identical, i.e., materialisations of the same labour or the same materialisation of labour – gold. Since they are uniform materialisations of the same labour, they differ only in one way, quantitatively: in other words they represent different magnitudes of value, because their use-values contain unequal amounts of labour-time. These individual commodities can be compared with one another as embodiments of universal labour-time, since they have been compared with universal labour-time in the shape of the excluded commodity, i.e., gold.” (p 65)
It is not something specific about gold that makes it the money commodity, or about its relation to other commodities that determines their price. In this respect, it is no different to any other commodity. Iron could just as well be singled out as the money commodity, and everything that has been said in relation to gold would continue to apply, other than its proportional relations to other commodities would differ, because of its lower value. But, the proportional relations of all other commodities, measured in iron, would remain the same.
“The same dynamic relation, as a result of which commodities become exchange-values for one another, causes the labour-time contained in gold to represent universal labour-time, a given amount of which is expressed in different quantities of iron, wheat, coffee, etc., in short in the use-values of all commodities, or it may be displayed directly in the infinite series of commodity equivalents. Since the exchange-value of all commodities is expressed in gold, the exchange-value of gold is directly expressed in all commodities. Because the commodities themselves assume the form of exchange-value for one another, they turn gold into the universal equivalent or into money.” (p 65)
So, contrary to the idealist conceptions of the bourgeois economists, about money being introduced as a more convenient means of undertaking exchange, i.e. as the result of some conscious decision, it evolves naturally, on the basis of commodity production and exchange itself, and the transformation of the value of the product, measured directly in labour-time, into the exchange-value of the commodity, measured indirectly in the quantity of other use values.
“Gold becomes the measure of value because the exchange-value of all commodities is measured in gold, is expressed in the relation of a definite quantity of gold and a definite quantity of commodity containing equal amounts of labour-time. To begin with, gold becomes the universal equivalent, or money, only because it thus functions as the measure of value and as such its own value is measured directly in all commodity equivalents. The exchange-value of all commodities, on the other hand, is now expressed in gold.” (p 65-6)
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