The currency of money is the constant and monotonous repetition
 of the same process. The commodity is always in the hands of the seller;
 the money, as a means of purchase, always in the hands of the buyer. And
 money serves as a means of purchase by realising the price of the commodity.
 This realisation transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer and
 removes the money from the hands of the buyer into those of the seller,
 where it again goes through the same process with another commodity. That
 this one-sided character of the money’s motion arises out of the two-sided
 character of the commodity’s motion, is a circumstance that is veiled over.
 The very nature of the circulation of commodities begets the
 opposite appearance. The first metamorphosis of a commodity is visibly,
 not only the money’s movement, but also that of the commodity itself; in
 the second metamorphosis, on the contrary, the movement appears to us as
 the movement of the money alone. In the first phase of its circulation
 the commodity changes place with the money. Thereupon the commodity, under
 its aspect of a useful object, falls out of circulation into consumption.
 [27] In its stead we have its value-shape — the money.
 
 It then goes through the second phase of its circulation, not under its
 own natural shape, but under the shape of money. The continuity of the
 movement is therefore kept up by the money alone, and the same movement
 that as regards the commodity consists of two processes of an antithetical
 character, is, when considered as the movement of the money, always one
 and the same process, a continued change of places with ever fresh commodities.
 Hence the result brought about by the circulation of commodities, namely,
 the replacing of one commodity by another, takes the appearance of having
 been effected not by means of the change of form of the commodities but
 rather by the money acting as a medium of circulation, by an action that
 circulates commodities, to all appearance motionless in themselves, and
 transfers them from hands in which they are non-use-values, to hands in
 which they are use-values; and that in a direction constantly opposed to
 the direction of the money. The latter is continually withdrawing commodities
 from circulation and stepping into their places, and in thus way continually
 moving further and further from its starting-point. Hence although the movement
 of the money is merely the expression of the circulation of commodities,
 yet the contrary appears to be the actual fact, and the circulation of
 commodities seems to be the result of the movement of the money. [28]