So, too, the economic categories, already discussed by us, bear
 the stamp of history. Definite historical conditions are necessary that
 a product may become a commodity. It must not be produced as the immediate
 means of subsistence of the producer himself. Had we gone further, and
 inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products
 take the form of commodities, we should have found that this can only happen
 with production of a very specific kind, capitalist production. Such an
 inquiry, however, would have been foreign to the analysis of commodities.
 Production and circulation of commodities can take place, although the
 great mass of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements
 of their producers, are not turned into commodities, and consequently social
 production is not yet by a long way dominated in its length and breadth
 by exchange-value. The appearance of products as commodities pre-supposes
 such a development of the social division of labour, that the separation
 of use-value from exchange-value, a separation which first begins with 167barter,
 must already have been completed. But such a degree of development is common
 to many forms of society, which in other respects present the most varying
 historical features. On the other hand, if we consider money, its existence
 implies a definite stage in the exchange of commodities. The particular
 functions of money which it performs, either as the mere equivalent of
 commodities, or as means of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard
 or as universal money, point, according to the extent and relative preponderance
 of the one function or the other, to very different stages in the process
 of social production. Yet we know by experience that a circulation of commodities
 relatively primitive, suffices for the production of all these forms. Otherwise
 with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means
 given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring
 into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence
 meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And
 this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore,
 announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social
 production. [4]