But because this concrete labour, tailoring in our case, ranks as, and is directly indentified with, undifferentiated human labour, it also ranks as identical with any other sort of labor, and therefore with that embodied in linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, yet, at the same time, it ranks as labour directly social in its character. This is the reason why it results in a product directly exchangeable with other commodities. We have then a third peculiarity of the Equivalent form, namely, that the labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form.
The two latter peculiarities of the Equivalent form will become more intelligible if we go back to the great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or nature, and amongst them also the form of value. I mean Aristotle.
In the first place, he clearly enunciates that the money form of commodities is only the further development of the simple form of value—i. e., of the expression of the value of one commodity in some other commodity taken at random; for he says
5 beds = 1 house (κλίναι πέντε ἀντί οἰκίας) is not to be distinguished from
5 beds = so much money.
(κλίναι πέντε ἀντί … ὅσον αἱ πέντε κλίναι)
He further sees that the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that the house should qualitatively be made the equal of the bed, and that, without such an equalization, these two clearly different things could not be compared with each other as commensurable quantities. "Exchange," he says, "cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability" (οὔτ᾿ ἰσότης μὴ οὔσης συμμετρίας). Here, however, he comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. "It is, however, in reality, impossible (τῇ μὲν οὖν ἀληθείᾳ ἀδύνατον), that such unlike things can be commensurable"—i. e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only "a make-shift for practical purposes."
