the society
which produces and exchanges commodities, a factor with new social
functions and operations. We can now examine this a little more
closely.

The economy of the production of commodities is by no means the only
science which has to reckon with relatively known factors. Even in
physics, we do not know how many single gas molecules there are in a
given volume of gas, pressure and temperature being given. But we
know, as far as Boyle's law is correct, that a given volume of that
gas has as many molecules as a similar volume of another selected gas
at the same pressure and the same temperature. We can therefore
compare the different volumes of different gases with respect to their
molecular content, and, if we take one litre of gas at 0 deg. Fahrenheit
as the unit we can refer the molecular content of each to this
standard. In chemistry the absolute atomic weights of separate
elements is unknown to us. But we know them relatively when we know
their mutual conditions. And just as the production of commodities and
their economy has a relative expression for the unknown quantities of
labor existing in commodities, since it compares these commodities
according to the relative amounts of labor which they contain, so
chemistry makes a relative expression for the amounts of atomic
weights unknown to it, since it compares the separate elements
according to their atomic weights and expresses the weight of the one
as multiples or factors of the other. And just as the production of
commodities elevates gold to the position of an absolute commodity, to
the universal equivalent for other commodities, the measure of values,
so chemistry elevates hydrogen to the position of a chemical
gold-commodity, since it fixes the atomic weight of hydrogen at 1 and
reduces the atomic weights of all the other elements in terms of
hydrogen and expresses them as multiples of its atomic weight.

The production of commodities is by no means the exclusive form of
social production. In the ancient Indian communities and the family
communities of the Southern Slavs products were not transformed into
commodities. The members of the community were directly engaged in
social production, the work was distributed as custom and
circumstances required as were the products as they came into the
realm of consumption. Direct social production and direct social
consumption exclude all exchange of commodities and hence the
transformation of products into c