Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/37

Rh between things, and between things and persons.

In commodities this mystification is as yet very simple. It is more or less plain to everybody that a relation of commodities as exchange values is nothing but a mutual relation between persons in their productive activity. This semblance of simplicity disappears in higher productive relations. All the illusions in regard to the monetary system are due to the fact that money is not regarded as something representing a social relation of production, but as a product of nature endowed with certain properties. The modern economists who sneer at the illusions of the monetary system, betray the same illusion as soon as they have to deal with higher economic forms, as, e.g., capital. It breaks forth in their confession of naive surprise, when what they have just thought to have defined with great difficulty as a thing suddenly appears as a social relation and then reappears to tease them again as a thing, before they have barely managed to define it as a social relation.

Since the exchange value of commodities is, in fact, nothing but a mutual relation of the labors of individuals—labors which are similar and universal—nothing but a material expression of a specific social form of labor, it is a tautology to say that labor is the only source of exchange value and consequently of wealth, "In its natural state, matter is always destitute of value." McCulloch, "A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy," 2nd edition, Edinburgh, 1825, p. 48. It is evident how high even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German "thinkers,"