M' is only the result of the realisation of C'. Both M' and C'
 are merely different forms of self-expanded capital-value, one of them
 the commodity-form, the other the money-form. Both of them have this in
 common: that they are self-expanded capital-value. Both of them are materialised
 capital, because capital-value as such exists here together with the surplus-value,
 the fruit obtained through it and differing from it, although this relation
 is expressed only in the irrational form of the relation between two parts
 of a sum of money or of a commodity-value. But as expressions of capital
 in relation and contradistinction to the surplus-value produced by it,
 hence as expressions of self-expanded value, M' and C' are the same and
 express the same thing, only in different forms. They do not differ as
 money-capital and commodity-capital but as money and commodities. In so
 far as they represent self-expanded value, capital acting as capital, they
 only express the result of the functioning of productive capital, the only
 function in which capital-value generates value. What they have in common
 is that both of them, money-capital as well as commodity-capital, are modes
 of existence of capital. The one is capital in money-form, the other in
 commodity-form. The specific functions that distinguish them cannot therefore
 be anything else but differences between the functions of money and of
 commodities. Commodity-capital, the direct product of the capitalist process
 of production, is reminiscent of its origin and is therefore more rational
 and less incomprehensible in form than money-capital, in which every trace
 of this process has vanished, as in general all special use-forms of commodities
 disappear in money. It is therefore only when M' itself functions as commodity-capital,
 when it is the direct product of a productive process instead of being
 the converted form of this product, that it loses its bizarre form, that
 is to say, in the production of the money material itself. In the production
 of gold for instance the formula would be M — C<LMP ... P ... M' (M plus m), where M' would figure as a commodity product, because P furnishes more gold than was advanced for the elements of production of the gold in the first M, the money-capital. In this case the irrational
 nature of the expression M ... M' (M plus m) disappears. Here a part of
 a sum of money appears as the mother of another part of the same sum of money.