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nydus/A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyPublic

This work presents Karl Marx’s initial installment of a projected treatise on political economy, later incorporated into the broader scope of Capital. It provides a detailed analysis of money and the history of value theories, while also featuring the foundational formulation of the author’s materialistic interpretation of history.

Page 61 of 331
Table of Contents

CHAPTER II.

labor, namely, as labor materialized in money, from which all the peculiarities of the different kinds of concrete labor represented in the different use-values are completely eliminated. As value they are all identical, they are the incarnation of the same labor, or the same incarnation of labor, viz., gold. As uniform embodiments of the same labor they display only one difference, a quantitative one, by appearing as different quantities of value, because unequal quantities of labor-time are contained in their use-values. The mutual relation of these separate commodities is that of embodiments of universal labor-time, since they are related to universal labor-time as to an excluded commodity, viz., gold. The same relation the development of which causes commodities to appear to each other as exchange values, causes the labor time contained in gold to appear as universal labor-time, a given quantity of which is expressed in different quantities of iron, wheat, coffee, etc,—in short, in the use-values of all commodities, or is directly unfolded in the endless series of commodity-equivalents. While all commodities express their exchange values in gold, gold expresses its exchange value directly in all commodities. While commodities assume

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