In the direct barter of products, each commodity is directly a
 means of exchange to its owner, and to all other persons an equivalent,
 but that only in so far as it has use-value for them. At this stage, therefore,
 the articles exchanged do not acquire a value-form independent of their
 own use-value, or of the individual needs of the exchangers. The necessity
 for a value-form grows with the increasing number and variety of the commodities
 exchanged. The problem and the means of solution arise simultaneously.
 Commodity-owners never equate their own commodities to those of others,
 and exchange them on a large scale, without different kinds of commodities
 belonging to different owners being exchangeable for, and equated as values
 to, one and the same special article. Such last-mentioned article, by becoming
 the equivalent of various other commodities, acquires at once, though within
 narrow limits, the character of a general social equivalent. This character
 comes and goes with the momentary social acts that called it into life.
 In turns and transiently it attaches itself first to this and then to that
 commodity. But with the development of exchange it fixes itself firmly
 and exclusively to particular sorts of commodities, and becomes crystallised
 by assuming the money-form. The particular kind of commodity to which it
 sticks is at first a matter of accident. Nevertheless there are two circumstances
 whose influence is decisive. The money-form attaches itself either to the
 most important articles of exchange from outside, and these in fact are
 primitive and natural forms in which the exchange-value of home products
 finds expression; or else it attaches itself to the object of utility that
 forms, like cattle, the chief portion of indigenous alienable wealth. Nomad
 races are the first to develop the money-form, because all their worldly
 goods consist of moveable objects and are therefore directly alienable;
 and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact
 with foreign communities, solicits the exchange of products. Man has often
 made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material
 of money, but has never used land for that purpose. Such an idea could
 only spring up in a bourgeois society already well developed. It dates
 from the last third of the 17th century, and the first attempt to put it
 in practice on a national scale was made a century afterwards, during the
 French bourgeois revolution.