modities as incorporated labor-time, that turns gold into money.
Commodities enter the process of exchange in the concrete form of use-values. They are yet to be turned into the real universal equivalent through their alienation. The determination of their prices merely amounts to their ideal transformation into the universal equivalent, a process of equation to gold which is yet to be realized. But since commodities are, in their prices, transformed into gold only in imagination, or are converted only into imaginary gold, and since their money form is not differentiated as yet from their concrete selves, it follows that gold has also been turned into money only in imagination; it appears so far but as a measure of value, and in fact definite quantities of gold serve merely as names for certain quantities of labor-time. The form in which gold is crystallized in money
διαφέρει γὰρ οὐδὲν ἢ εἰ κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ οἰκίας, ἢ ὅσου αἱ πέντε κλῖναι." It is clear that exchange existed before coin. For it does not make any difference whether you give five beds for a house, or as much money as five beds are worth"). On the other hand, since commodities acquire only in price the form of exchange value with respect to one another, he makes them commensurable through money. "Διὸ δεῖ πάντα τετιμῆσθαι· οὕτω γὰρ ἀεὶ ἔσται ἀλλαγὴ, εἰ δὲ τοῦτο, κοινωνία. Τὸ δὴ νόμισμα ὥσπερ μέτρον σύμμετρα ποιῆσαν ἰσάξει, οὕτε γὰρ ἂν μὴ οὔσης ἀλλαγῆς κοινωνία ἦν, οὐτ’ ἀλλαγὴ ἰσότητος μὴ οὔσης, οὔτ’ ἰσότης, μὴ οὔσης συμμετρίας." ("Therefore all has to be appraised. In that way exchange may always take place, and, with it, society can exist. Coin, like measure, makes everything commensurable and equal, for without exchange there would be no society, without equality there would be no exchange, and without commensurability, no equality.") He does not conceal from himself that these different objects measured by money are entirely incommensurable
