of the process of circulation.39 It is rather the commensurability of commodities as incorporated labor-time, that turns gold into
Commodities enter the process of exchange in the concrete form of use-values. They are yet to be turned into the real universal equivalent through their alienation. The determination of their prices merely amounts to their ideal transformation into the universal equivalent, a process of equation to gold which is yet to be realized. But since commodities are, in their prices, transformed into gold only in imagination, or are converted only into imaginary gold, and since their money form is not differentiated as yet from their concrete selves, it follows that gold has also been turned into money only in imagination; it appears so far but as a measure of value, and in fact definite quantities of gold serve merely as names for certain quantities of labor-time. The form in which gold is crystallized in money always depends upon the way in which commodities express their own exchange value to each other.
Commodities now confront one another in a double capacity: actually as use-values, ideally as exchange values. The twofold aspect of