For Marx what is distinctive about capitalism is the fact that commodities are produced not for the purpose of consumption but for the purpose of reconverting them into money. The bourgeois entrepreneur, in other words, produces commodities as things destined for sale on the open market which will realize more capital than was originally invested in their manufacture. Marx refers to this transformation of money into money through the realization of surplus value as the Money-Commodity-Money, or M-C-M, relation. This relation arises out of a more primitive organization of productive activity in which the use-value of commodities functioned as the exclusive condition of exchange. Once money has emerged as a universal equivalent capable of purchasing any of the means of subsistence however, the 'simple circulation of commodities' based on the satisfaction of social need is displaced by the distributive powers of capital. The principal difference between the M-C-M relation and the barter economy therefore is that the latter begins with the need of the individual producer to secure enough of the means of subsistence to fulfil his/her needs, while the latter begins with the dispersal of commodities in order to allow the reflux of money to the capitalist (Marx, 1990: 249).