Exchange-Value: From the Usefulness of “For People”to the Equivalence of “For Money”— A Reexamination of Marx’s Economic Manuscripts 1857-1858

The material aspect of the use-value obtained by labour in shaping things does not fall within the scope of the study of political economy, but is only the object of political economy when it becomes the material basis of the exchange-value relation under certain relations of production, such as those of bourgeois society. The shift from the need between human and nature: utility relation, in which labour is objectified in things, to another exchange-relation between people and people, in which the same relation is exchanged, is the origin of the mystery of the existence of the commodity that Marx later often identified. The equivalence relation, historically and objectively abstracted from the activity of commodity exchange, has to be re-objectified into a visible third object, money, when it acts as an intermediary in the real exchange process of physical commodities. The value relation is not a thing, but it expresses itself through the objectified material reality of money, making it a thing in opposition to the commodity itself. This is the alienation of the real value relations that occurs in economic relations, and the alienation of the opposite-and-me power of money when the “servant” created by human becomes the almighty money that drives and dominates us, and we kneel down to our own creation.