A commodity _is_ a use-value, wheat, linen, a diamond, a machine, etc., but as a commodity it is, at the same time, _not_ a use-value. If it were a use-value for its owner, i. e., a direct means for the satisfaction of his own wants, then it would not be a commodity. To him it is rather _a non-use-value_; it is merely the material depository of exchange-value, or simply a _means of exchange_; as an active bearer of exchange value, use-value becomes a means of exchange. To the owner it is a use-value only in so far as it constitutes exchange value.[12] It has yet _to become_ a use-value, viz., to others. Not being a use-value to its owner, it is a use-value to the owners of other commodities. If it is not, then the labor expended on it was useless labor, and the result of that labor is not a commodity. On the other hand, the commodity must become a use-value _to the owner himself_, because his means of existence lie outside of it in the use-values of commodities not belonging to him. In order to become a use-value, the commodity must meet the particular want of which it is the means of satisfaction. Use-values of commodities are thus _realized_ use-values through a universal change of hands by passing from the hands in which they were held as means of exchange into those where they become use values. Only through this universal transfer of commodities does the labor contained in them become useful labor. In this process of their mutual interchange as use-values, commodities do not acquire any new economic forms. On the contrary, even the form which marked them as commodities disappears. Bread, e. g., by changing hands from the baker to the consumer does not change its identity as bread. On the contrary, it is only the consumer that begins to regard it as a use-value, as a certain article of food, while in the hands of the baker it was only the bearer of an economic relation, a palpable yet transcendental object. Thus, the only change of form that commodities undergo while becoming use-values, consists in the fact that they cease to be, as a matter of form, non-use-values to their owners, and use-values to those who do not own them. To become use-values commodities must be universally alienated; they must enter the sphere of exchange; but they are subject to exchange in their capacity of exchange values. Hence, in order to be realized as use-values, they must be realized as exchange values.