price. That will depend on whether or not it proves to be a use-value, whether or not the quantity of labor-time contained in it is the quantity necessarily required by society for the production of a quarter of wheat. The commodity as such is an exchange value, it has a price. In this difference between exchange value and price lies the demonstration of the fact that the particular individual labor contained in a commodity has first to be expressed through the process of alienation in terms of its counterpart, i. e. as impersonal, abstract, universal and, only in that form, social labor, viz. money. Whether it can be so expressed seems to be a matter of chance. Thus, although the exchange value of a commodity finds only ideally a distinct expression in price, and the twofold character of labor contained in the commodity exists as yet merely as two distinct forms of expression, and, although in consequence thereof, the embodiment of universal labor-time, gold, confronts actual commodities only as an imaginary measure of value, yet the fact that exchange value exists as price, or that gold exists as a measure of value implies the necessity of the alienation of commodities for hard cash and the possibility of their non-alienation. In short, here lies latent the entire contradiction which is inherent in the fact that products are commodities or that the particular work of a private individual can be of no account in society until it has taken the very opposite form of abstract universal labor. For that reason, the utopians, who want to have commodities but not money, who want a system of production based on private exchange without the necessary conditions underlying such a system, are consistent when they “destroy” money not in its tangible form but in its nebulous illusory form of a measure of value. Under the invisible measure of value there lurks the hard
The process by which gold has become the measure of value and exchange value has been turned into price, being once assumed, all commodities express in their prices but imagined quantities of gold of various magnitudes. As such various quantities of the same thing, gold, they are equated, compared and measured with each other, and thus arises the technical necessity of referring