Just as the sugar-loaf becomes gold,so the seller becomes a buyer.These distinctive social characters are,therefore,by no means due to individual human nature as such,but to the exchange relations of persons who produce their goods in the specific form of commodities.So little does the relation of buyer and seller represent a purely individual relationship that they enter into it only in so far as their individual labour is negated,that is to say,turned into money as non-individual labour.It is therefore as absurd to regard buyer and seller,these bourgeois economic types,as eternal social forms of human individuality,as it is preposterous to weep over them as signifying the abolition of individuality.[3]They are an essential expression of individuality arising at a particular stage of the social process of production.The antagonistic nature of bourgeois production is,moreover,expressed in the antithesis of buyer and seller in such a superficial and formal manner that this antithesis exists already in pre-bourgeois social formations,for it requires merely that the relations of individuals to one another should be those of commodity-owners.
An examination of the outcome of the circuit C --M --C shows that it dissolves into the exchange of C --C.Commodity has been exchanged for commodity,use-value for use-value,and the transformation of the commodity into money,or the commodity as money,is merely an intermediary stage which helps to bring about this metabolism.Money emerges thus as a mere medium of exchange of commodities,not however as a medium of exchange in general,but a medium of exchange adapted to the process of circulation,i.e.,a medium of circulation.[4]
If,because the process of circulation of commodities ends in C --Cand therefore appears as barter merely mediated by money,or because C--M --C in general does not only fall apart into two isolated cycles but is simultaneously their dynamic unity,the conclusion were to be drawn that only the unity and not the separation of purchase and sale exists,this would display a manner of thinking the criticism of which belongs to the sphere of logic and not of economics.The division of exchange into purchase and sale not only destroys locally evolved primitive,traditionally pious and sentimentally absurd obstacles standing in the way of social metabolism,but it also represents the general fragmentation of the associated factors of this process and their constant confrontation,in short it contains the general possibility of commercial crises,essentially because the contradiction of commodity and money is the abstract and general form of all contradictions inherent in the bourgeois mode of labour.Although circulation of money can occur therefore without crises,crises cannot occur without circulation of money.This simply means that where labour based on individual exchange has not yet evolved a monetary system,it is quite unable of course to produce phenomena that presuppose a full development of the bourgeois mode of production.This displays the profundity of the criticism that proposes to remedy the "shortcomings"of the bourgeois system of production by abolishing the "privileges"of precious metals and by introducing a so-called rational monetary system.A proposition reputed to be exceedingly clever may on the other hand serve as an example of economic apologetics.James Mill ,the father of the well-known English economist John Stuart Mill,says:
"Whatever...be the amount of the annual produce,it never can exceed the amount of the annual demand....Of two men who perform an exchange,the one does not come with only a supply,the other with only a demand;each of them comes with both a demand and a supply....
The supply which he brings is the instrument of his demand and his demand and supply are of course exactly equal to one another.It is,therefore,impossible that there should ever be in any country a commodity or commodities in quantity greater than the demand,without there being,to an equal amount,some other commodity or commodities in quantity less than the demand."[5]
Mill establishes equilibrium by reducing the process of circulation to direct barter,but on the other hand he insinuates buyer and seller,figures derived from the process of circulation,--into direct barter.
Using Mill's confusing language one may say that there are times when it is impossible to sell all commodities,for instance in London and Hamburg during certain stages of the commercial crisis of 1857/58there were indeed more buyers than sellers of one commodity,i.e.,money ,and more sellers than buyers as regards all other forms of money ,i.e,commodities.The metaphysical equilibrium of purchases and sales is confined to the fact that every purchase is a sale and every sale a purchase,but this gives poor comfort to the possessors of commodities who unable to make a sale cannot accordingly make a purchase either.[6]97The separation of sale and purchase makes possible not only commerce proper,but also numerous pro forma transactions,before the final exchange of commodities between producer and consumer takes place.It thus enables large numbers of parasites to invade the process of production and to take advantage of this separation.But this again means only that money,the universal form of labour in bourgeois society,makes the development of the inherent contradictions possible.
FOOTNOTES
1."There are two kinds of money,nominal and real,and it can be used in two distinct ways,to measure the value of things and to buy them.Nominal money is as suitable for valuing things as is real money and it may be even better.Money is also used for buying the things which have been valued....Prices and contracts are calculated in nominal money and are executed in real money"(Galiani,op.cit.,p.112et seq.].
