Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/33

 Capital does not consist of means of subsistence, implements of labor, and raw material alone, nor only of material products; it consists just as much of exchange-values. All the products of which it consists are commodities. Thus capital is not merely the sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values, of social quantities.

Capital remains unchanged if we substitute cotton for wool, rice for corn, and steamers for railways; provided only that the cotton, the rice, the steamers—the bodily form of capital—have the same exchange value, the same price, as the wool, the corn, the railways, in which it formerly embodied itself. The bodily form of capital may change continually, while the capital itself undergoes not the slightest alteration.

But though all capital is a sum of commodities, that is, of exchange-values, not every sum of commodities, of exchange-values, is capital.

Every sum of exchange-values is an exchange value anand [sic] inversely, each exchange value is a sum of exchange-value. For instance, a house worth a thousand pounds is an exchange-value of a thousand pounds. A penny-worth of paper is the sum of the exchange-values of a hundred-hundredths of a penny. Products which may be mutually exchanged are commodities. The definite proportion in which they are exchangeable form their exchange value, or expressed in money, their price. The amount of these products can do nothing to alter their definition as being commodities, or as representing an, or as having a certain price. Whether a tree