economy, which really has nothing in common with
The world of commodities implies the existence of a highly developed division of labor; this division is manifested directly in the great variety of use-values, which confront each other as particular commodities and which embody as many different kinds of labor. The division of labor embracing all the particular kinds of productive occupations, is the complete expression of social labor in its material aspect viewed as labor creating use-values. But from the standpoint of commodities and within the process of exchange, it exists only in its results, in the variety of the commodities themselves.
The exchange of commodities constitutes the social metabolic process, i. e. the process in which the exchange of the special products of private individuals is the result of certain social relations of production into which the individuals enter in this interchange of matter. As they develop, the mutual relations of commodities crystalize into various aspects of the universal equivalent and thus the process of exchange becomes at the same time the process of the formation of money. The whole of this process which takes the form of a succession of processes, constitutes circulation.