Simmel

The fact of economic exchange confers upon the value of

things something super-individual. It detaches them from

dissolution in the mere subjectivity of the agents, and causes

them to determine each other reciprocally, since each exerts its

economic function in the other. The practically effective value

is conferred upon the object, not merely by its own desirability,

but by the desirability of another object. Not merely the

relationship to the receptive subjects characterizes this value,

but also the fact that it arrives at this relationship only at

the price of a sacrifice; while from the opposite point of view

this sacrifice appears as a good to be enjoyed, and the object in

question, on the contrary, as a sacrifice. Hence the objects

acquire a reciprocity of counterweight, which makes value appear

in a quite special manner as an objective quality indwelling in

themselves. While the object itself is the thing in controversy

-- which means that the sacrifice which it represents is being

determined -- its significance for both contracting parties

appears much more as something outside of these latter and

self-existent than if the individual thought of it only in its

relation to himself. We shall see later how also isolated

industry, by placing the workman over against the demands of

nature, imposes upon him the like necessity of sacrifice for

gaining of the object, so that in this case also the like

relationship, with the one exception that only a single party has

been changed, may endow the object with the same independent

qualities, yet with their significance dependent upon its own

objective conditions. Desire and the feeling of the agent stand,

to be sure, as the motor energy behind all this, but from this in

and of itself this value form could not proceed. It rather comes

only from the reciprocal counterbalancing of the objects.

To be sure, in order that equivalence and exchange of values

may emerge, some material to which value can attach must be at

the basis. For industry as such the fact that these materials are

equivalent to each other and exchangeable is the turning-point.

It guides the stream of appraisal through the form of exchange,

at the same time creating a middle realm between desires, in

which all human movement has its source, and the satisfaction of

enjoyment in which it culminates. The specific character of

economic activity as a special form of commerce exists, if we may

venture the paradox, not so much in the fact that it exchanges

values as that it exchanges values. To be sure, the significance

which things gain in and with exchange rests never isolated by

the side of their subjective-immediate significance, that is, the

one originally decisive of the relationship. It is rather the

case that the two belong together, as form and content connote

each other. But the Objective procedure makes an abstraction, so

to speak, from the fact that values constitute its material, and

derives its peculiar character from the equality of the same --

somewhat as geometry finds its tasks only in connection with the

magnitude -- relations of things, without bringing into its

consideration