This consideration makes it particularly clear that exchange is just as productive, as creative of values, as is so-called production. In both cases it is a matter of securing goods at the cost of others which one gives up, and in such a manner that the end result yields a surplus of satisfactions over what obtained before the action. We can create neither matter nor energy anew, but only so attack the given that as many quanta as possible ascend from the realm of reality to the realm of value as well. … Only by virtue of this movement do objects become detached from the needing and enjoying ego with which they were fused, and thereby become values.

XREF: Aligns with later subjective-value economics (Menger, Austrian school) and contradicts classical labor theory of value. DEFINE: Clarifies value as arising from the act of exchange that yields surplus satisfaction, not from embedded labor.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 228