Duehring's economic society. But beyond the confines of that
society the world goes peacefully along its old way. Gold and silver
remain in the world-market, as world money, as the universal means of
purchase and payment, as the absolute social incorporation of wealth.
And in this ownership of the precious metals the individual societies
find a new motive for saving, for getting rich, for increasing their
supply,--the motive of becoming free and independent of the
communities beyond their borders and of converting into money their
piled up wealth in the world market. The profit hunters transform
themselves into traders in the means of circulation, into bankers,
into controllers of the means of production, though these may remain
forever as the property of the economic and trading communities in
name. Therewith the savers and profit mongers who have been converted
into bankers become the lords of the economic and trading communes.
The "sociality" of Herr Duehring is very distinct from the "cloudy
ideas" of the earlier socialists. It has no other end than the
resurrection of the high finance.

The only value with which political economy is acquainted is the value
of commodities. What are commodities? Products produced in a society
composed of more or less separated private producers and therefore
private products. But these private products first become commodities
when they are made not for private use but for the use of someone
else, that is for social use. They are converted into objects of
social use by means of exchange. The private producers are therefore
in a social relationship, they constitute a society. Their private
products, while the private products of each individual, are at the
same time, unconsciously and indeed involuntarily, social products
also. Wherein does the social character of these private products
consist? Plainly in two properties, in the first place because they
satisfy human needs but have no use-value for the producers, and in
the second place that, while they are the products of individual
private producers, they are at the same time plainly the products of
human labor, of human labor in general. In so far as they have a
use-value for other people they can be exchanged; in so far as they
all possess the common quality of human labor in general, they can be
mutually compared in exchange by means of this labor. In two similar
products under identical social conditions there may be unequal
am