I. Value
[VII-63]
This section to be inserted earlier. The first category in which bourgeois wealth makes its appearance is that of the commodity. The commodity itself appears as the unity of two determinations. It is use value, i.e. an object for the satisfaction of some system of human wants. This is its material aspect, which can be common to the most disparate epochs of production and lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. Use value comes within that sphere as soon as it is modified by the modern production relations or itself exerts a modifying influence on them. What is usually said about this in general terms, for the sake of decorum, is confined to platitudes which had an historical value in the early beginnings of that science, when the social forms of bourgeois production were still being laboriously abstracted from the material and with great effort fixed as independent objects for investigation. In fact, however, the use value of the commodity is a given presupposition — the material basis in which a definite economic relation presents itself. It is only this definite relation which stamps the use value as a commodity. E.g., wheat possesses the same use value, whether it is grown by slaves, serfs or free labourers. It would not lose its use value were it to fall from the sky like snow.
Well, how does use value turn into a commodity? By being a bearer of exchange value. Although they are directly united in the commodity, use value and exchange value equally direcdy fall asunder. Exchange value not merely does not appear to be determined by use value, but the commodity, rather, only becomes a commodity, is only realised as exchange value, to the extent that its owner does not relate to it as a use value. Only by alienating it, by exchanging it for other commodities, does he appropriate use values. Appropriation by means of alienation is the basic form of the social system of production whose simplest, most abstract expression is exchange value. The use value of the commodity is presupposed, yet not for the owner of the commodity, but for society in general.
//Just as a Manchester family of factory workers in which the children stand in a relation of exchange to their parents and pay board and lodging to them does not represent the customary economic organisation of the family, so the system of modern private exchange does not, in general, represent the spontaneously evolved economy of societies. Exchange does not begin between individuals within a community, but at the point where the communities cease — at their frontiers, at the point of contact between different communities. Communal property has recently been rediscovered as a peculiarly Slavic curiosity. But in fact India offers us a pattern card of the most diverse forms of such an economic community, more or less decomposed but still entirely recognisable; and more thorough historical study finds it as the starting point of all cultured peoples. The system of production based upon private exchange is initially the historical dissolution of this spontaneously evolved communism. Yet a whole series of economic systems lies between the modern world, in which exchange value dominates production in its entire depth and width, and the social formations whose basis is decomposed communal property, without however [...][56]
Gold-Weighing Machines
GOLD-WEIGHING MACHINES[3]
[VII-64]
"Mr. Cotton's machine ... the most delicate ever yet constructed for weighing gold coin. Adopted by the Bank of England. Divides the sheep from the goats(1) ... In die transaction between the Bank of England and the public, die weighing of gold coin has been a most anxious and tedious process. As between die Bank and the Mint, the labour is not so minute; for 200 sovereigns being first accurately weighed, all the rest are weighed in groups of 200. The Mint officers are allowed a deviation of 12 grains in about 50 sovereigns; but they generally work to within half of this amount of error; and if die groups of sovereigns are correct within the prescribed limits no closer weighing is adopted. In die transactions between the Bank and die public, however, matters must be treated in more detail. It is no satisfaction to Smitii to know that if his sovereign is light, Brown has a correct one and Jones a heavy one, so that dierefore the Bank is just in the aggregate; each one demands that his sovereign should be of proper weight ... If a difference of even Vioo °f (2) grain existed between 2 sovereigns, it is said that diis machine would detect it. On a rough average, 30,000 sovereigns pass over die Bank counter every day; each machine can weigh 10,000 sovereigns in 6 hours; and there are 6 machines; so that die Bank can weigh all its issues of gold by these means, and have reserve power to spare. Between 1844 and 1848 there were 48 million gold coins weighed by these machines at the Bank ... These machines save £1,000 a year to the Bank in weighers' wages. (A child can turn the handle, but the machine judges for itself, casts the full-weight sovereigns to one side and the light ones to the other.) (Formerly liability of error on die part of the weighers (the 'personal equation', as the astronomers would term it) not equal.) An expert weigher could weigh about 700 sovereigns in an hour by the old balance; but the agitation of the air by die sudden opening of a door, die breathing of persons near die apparatus, the fatigued state of the hand and eye of the weigher — all led to minute errors" (Dodd's Curiosities of Industry, London, 1854 [pp. 19-21]).
Curiosities of Money. "When society rises above the level of mere bartering] transactions, any substance which is equally valued by buyer and seller may become money; ... One of the earliest cattle, but this is obviously a coin inapplicable to small purchasers, for it would puzzle the seller to give change out of an ox. Shells are used to a great extent as money, in India, the Indian islands, and Africa; the cowry shells of India have a value of about 32 to an English farthing. Cocoa-nuts, almonds, maize have all had to do duty as money. In hunting countries skins ... salt ... Dried fish [is] often the money in Iceland and Newfoundland; sugar has at times been a West-India money."
"Gold very solid and dense; divisible or separable in an extraordinary degree; very litde affected by air or moisture, or ordinary usage, etc. (its supply very limited).
" Wearing away of gold coin, by the constant friction to which it is exposed. No one can say whither the worn particles go.... When gone, somebody must bear the loss. A baker who takes a sovereign one day, and pays it away to his miller the next, does not pay the veritable sovereign itself; it is a lighter one than when he received it.... According to Jacob each gold coin in England bears an annual loss of about V900 by friction (little more than a farthing in the pound). In silver coins the loss is supposed to be 5 or 6 times greater, owing to the more unceasing circulation of silver than gold, and to the less fitness of the metal to bear friction" [ibid., pp. 14-17].
Endnotes
[56] Here the manuscript Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy breaks off. All the remaining sheets of this rather thick notebook are filled with excerpts from various books and periodicals.—253
[3] In his manuscript, to denote these categories Marx uses mostly the French terms "capital circulant" and "capital fixe", but sometimes he also uses the German ones "zirkulierendes Kapital" and "fixiertes Kapital", or the English "circulating capital", "floating capital", and "fixed capital".— 9, 201, 515, 526