Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 2 by Karl Marx

Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange

• "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 alienate his own...The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property." - 178
• "For the owner, his commodity possesses no direct use-value.... It has use-value for others; but for himself its only direct use-value is as a bearer of exchange-value" - 179
• "only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent." - 180
• "The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the latter." - 182
• requirements of the money-form: "Only a material whose every sample possesses the same uniform quality can be an adequate form of appearance of value, that is a material embodiment of abstract and therefore equal human labour. On the other hand, since the difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the money commodity must be capable of purely quantitative differentiation, it must therefore be divisible at will, and it must also be possible to assemble it again from its component parts. Gold and silver possess these properties of nature." - 184
• "Money, like every other commodity, cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively in other commodities." - 186
• "This physical object, gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money. Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way." - 187
• "The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish." - 187