Under barter, A exchanges with B, and simultaneously, B exchanges with A. However, under money economy, and the circulation of commodities, A does not exchange directly with B, and vice versa, and this is precisely what money facilitates. Now A sells to B, and instead of obtaining a commodity, required for their consumption, obtains money of equal value. A does not at all have to use this money to buy any commodities from B, and so A's supply has certainly created an equal demand, but not for other commodities, only for money. (Keynes calls it transactional demand for money). Sale still implies purchase, but, now, it is purchase not with another commodity, but with money.
A demands money, not because they want to consume it – they neither eat it, wear it, or use it in any other such way – but solely because of what it is, the universal equivalent, and exchangeable for any other commodity. A might not spend the money at all, and may delay spending any of it. But, if and when they do spend it, they may spend some of it buying a bible from C, wheat from D, cattle from E and so on. None of these exchanges imply that the money received by A from B, for the sale of wine, necessarily finds its way back to B, via all of these disparate channels, or a demand for B's linen.
Commodity circulation is certainly premised on the fact that society has developed commodity production to a level whereby the independent producers of them have come to specialise in different types of production, so that a social division of labour exists, and rather than meeting their consumption needs on the basis of direct production, the producers do so on the basis of such exchanges, in the market, but there is no longer any reason why all of these exchanges will balance the demand and supply of different commodities one with another, as exists under barter, because, now, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17, it is possible for all sellers, instead of demanding commodities, in exchange, to demand money, so that a generalised overproduction of commodities arises.
Under barter, commodities do not have a price. They have a series of exchange-values against all the other commodities, with which they are exchanged. As described earlier, as trade expands, some more regularly traded commodities, such as cattle, whose value is well known, come to act as an equivalent form of value, and, as such, to act as a measure of value themselves. The equivalent form of value does not take part in the actual exchange, it simply acts as a measure of value, and unit of account. For example, the producer of wine might have their wine denoted as 1 head of cattle, and the producer of linen their output as 2 head of cattle, so that the latter would exchange half their output for the whole output of the wine producer.
The cattle, here, acts as determining an “ideal price” for the wine and the linen. Whether the wine or linen achieve these prices is another matter, because it depends upon the level of supply and demand, in the market, for each. When one commodity, be it cattle or gold, arises as the money commodity, this indirect measure of the value of commodities, their exchange-value, expressed in it, becomes their price. This creates the conditions for the circulation of commodities, as use value and exchange-value are separated; production and consumption; supply and demand are separated and so the basis of commercial crises, or the overproduction of commodities arises.
“When, as a result of the establishing of prices, commodities have acquired the form in which they are able to enter circulation and gold has assumed its function as money, the contradictions latent in the exchange of commodities are both exposed and resolved by circulation. The real exchange of commodities, that is the social metabolic process, constitutes a transformation in which the dual nature of the commodity – commodity as use-value and as exchange-value – manifests itself; but the transformation of the commodity itself is, at the same time, epitomised in certain forms of money.” (p 86)
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