modity that must furnish us the key to all the peculiarities of character which we have noticed in our wealth under the capitalist system of production, showing changes which have placed our wealth in a purely objective relation to man and given it purely social attributes and properties.
The distinctive property, again, of a commodity, that quality of the thing which makes an ordinary good an article of merchandise, is its exchange-value. That is to say, the fact that in addition to the quality which it possesses of being useful for consumption to the one who wants to use it that way, it has the further quality of being exchangeable, that is it can be useful for the purpose of exchange by one who has no use for it as an article of consumption. The exchange-value of an article therefore, while based on the property of the article of being ultimately useful for consumption, is something entirely different and apart from this use-value and independent of it in its variations. Indeed, the two qualities might be said to be antagonistic as they exclude each other: a thing is exchange-value only to the person who has no use-value in it, and it loses its exchange-value when its use-value asserts itself. It is its exchange-value that makes a thing a commodity, it remains therefore a commodity only as long as it is intended for exchange and loses that character when appropriated for use in consumption. The use-value of a thing is, on the one hand, something inherent in its nature, in the very mode of its existence, and does not depend on the social form of its production; it remains the same use-value no matter how produced. On the other hand, the use-value of a thing is a purely subjective relation between the thing and the person who uses it, and therefore any difference in the use-value of a thing when used by different persons is purely subjective with those persons. In neither of these aspects does it come within the sphere of political economy, whose object is the explanation of the peculiar phenomena of wealth under the capitalist system of production, phenomena which, as we have seen, are purely social in their nature.
