Can any Marxists here help me with a problem I've run up

File: alcune_delle_illustrazioni_del_codex_seraphinianus_9799.jpg (87KB, 599x337px) Image search: [Google]

87KB, 599x337px

Can any Marxists here help me with a problem I've run up against reading Capital? I just started Chapter 3, on Money or the Circulation of Commodities, and can't quite square this circle vis-a-vis the consolidation of the money-form out of the exchange of commodities.

Take a primitive communist society, where all laborers understand their labor as unique, their products only as use-values for the satisfaction of the needs of the social whole. One of our communists sets out from home one day with 10 glass beads in his pocket. He meets with a member of another tribe, who wants the glass beads, and offers to trade him one ivory tusk for them, which we must assume the owner of the glass beads has no access to. Thus we have an exchange established, which corresponds the "accidental" of commodities, Form A, which Marx sets out in Chapter 1, section 3.A:

10 beads = 1 tusk
x Com. A = y Com. B

The members of each tribe hear of the exchange, and want in on the action. Trade begins to spread through the villages, or whatever, and soon we find that, on the basis of this first Form A exchange, a whole chain of values are computed, such that every commodity can express its value relative to any other commodity. This is Form B:

10 beads = 1 tusk = 2 hides = 1/2 tent = 5 arrows ={...}

Now, this is where I get confused. How can it be that we do not immediately pass from B into Form D, or the Money-form of value? Form C looks something like this

1 tusk =....]
2 hides =..]
5 arrows =] 10 glass beads
{...} =........]

The only difference between this and Form D is that in the money-form, the beads are now recognized as the universal equivalent. Is it therefore that, while the economy we are considering is still exchanging by making Form B equations, each commodity owner experiences his own commodity as being the equivalent value in Form C? When in the process does Form C even exist, if it is explicitly stated throughout that it is characterized by no universality of the equivalent value it expresses? What kind of exchange is designated by Form C, if Form B already covers the absolutely relative chain of equivalences, and Form D already covers the universal equivalent in the money commodity?