Money is the universal commodity, if only because it is the 
universal form which every particular commodity notionally or 
actually assumes. 

As treasure and universal means of payment, money becomes 
the universal means of exchange on the world market, the 
universal commodity not only in concept, but also in mode of 
existence. The particular national form which it acquires in its 
function as coin is stripped from it in its existence as money. As 
such it is cosmopolitan.* Since a social exchange of matter can 
occur through the involvement of gold and silver—which are use 
values for the needs of enrichment, abstract wealth independent 
of any particular requirements—even if only one nation [B’-4] is 
immediately in need of the use values of another, gold and silver 
tend to become exceptionally effective agents in the creation of the 
world market, and in the extension of the social exchange of 
matter across any local, religious, political and racial distinctions. 
Even among the ancients, the hoarding by the State is significant 
as a reserve fund mainly for international means of payment, as a 
battle-ready equivalent in the event of crop-failures, and as a 
source of subsidies in time of war (Xenophon*). The great role of 

* The ancients were quick to note this cosmopolitan character of money: “What 
is his homeland, what is his tribe? He is a rich man.’ 97 

a Xenophon, De vectigalibus, IV, 9.— Ed. 

436 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

American silver as a link between America, from which it went to 
Europe as a commodity, thence to be exported as a means of 
exchange to Asia, especially India, there mostly to precipitate in 
the form of treasure, was the fact whose observation marked the 
start of the scientific struggle over the monetary system, since it 
led to the East India Company’s fight against the prohibition in 
England of the export of money (see Misselden’). 

In so far as gold and silver merely serve as means of exchange 
in this international commerce, they in fact perform the function 
of coin, but a coin stripped of its stamp, and one which, whether it 
exists in the form of coin or bar, is estimated only according to its 
metallic weight, and not only represents value, but is simultaneous- 
ly such. That gold and silver in this determination of world coin do 
not, however, necessarily perform a circular movement, as they do 
in their capacity as coin proper, but may one-sidedly continue to 
act in such a way that one of the parties to the exchange always 
remains the buyer and the other always the seller, is also one of 
those observations which immediately suggested themselves in the 
infancy of the bourgeois society. Hence, the exceptionally impor- 
tant role the discovery of new gold- and silver-producing lands has 
to play in the history of the development of the world market, 
both in breadth and in depth, since the use value they produce, 
instantly the universal commodity, on the other hand, also 
immediately imparts to them together with the possibility, in virtue 
of the abstract nature of their product, the necessity of commerce 
based on exchange value. 

Just as with the development of productive relations in general, 
money develops as means of payment within a given national circle 
of the bourgeois society, so it also develops in its determination as 
international means of payment. But as in that narrower, so in this 
wider circle, its importance stands out strikingly only when the 
mechanism of the mutual settlement of payments is disturbed. 
The development of money in this determination has increased to 
such an extent since 1825—an increase which has, naturally, kept 
in step with the expansion and intensity of international com- 
merce—that even the most outstanding economists of the 
preceding epoch, Ricardo, for example, still had no inkling at all 
of the volume in which ready money could be required as 
international means of payment for a nation such, for instance, as 

a [E. Misselden,] Free Trade. Or, the Meanes to Make Trade Florish, pp. 12, 13 and 
19-24. See present edition, Vol. 28, pp. 161 and 164-65.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 437 

England. Whereas specific requirement in the specific use value in 
which the exchange value is incarnated is the prerequisite for 
exchange value in the guise of any other commodity, there is no 
such limitation for gold and silver as abstract wealth. Like the 
noble man of whom the poet dreams,* gold (or silver) pays with 
what it is, and not with what it does. The possibility of functioning 
as means of purchase and means of payment is, naturally, always 
latent in it. Like the inert, assured being of the universal 
equivalent in which it is treasure, in no country is it limited by the 
need of it as means of circulation, by the volume in which it is 
required as means of circulation, or by any other need of its 
immediate use whatsoever. Its use value, abstract and purely social 
in itself, which it derives from its function of means of circulation, 
itself once again appears as some special aspect of its use as the 
universal equivalent, the material of abstract wealth in general. 
From its specific use value as metal, and hence as raw material for 
manufacturing, stems the totality of the various functions it can 
alternately fulfil within the social exchange of matter or in the 
performance of which it itself assumes the various forms of coin, 
bar, etc., thereby presenting itself as so many use values all of 
which reduce themselves to the various forms in which gold and 
silver as the abstract and therefore adequate being of exchange 
value as such confronts its being in some particular commodity. 

Here we have to consider money only in its abstract determina- 
tions of form. The laws regulating the distribution of precious 
metals on the world market imply economic relationships in their 
most concrete form, something that still les ahead of us. The 
same applies to all the circulation of money which it performs as 
capital, and not as universal commodity or universal equivalent. 

On the world market, money is always realised value. What 
makes it a magnitude of value lies in its immediate materiality, in 
the weight of the precious metal. When it appears as coin, its use 
value coincides with its use merely as means of circulation, and so 
can be replaced by a mere symbol. As world coin, it is effectively 
demonetised. The externality and the establishment of the 
independence of the social nexus in money with respect to 
individuals in their individual relations clearly stand out in gold 
and silver [B’-5] as world coin (still national as coin). (Here money 
appears in effect as their [the individuals’] community existing as a 
physical object outside them.) Indeed, what the early forerunners of 

a An apparent reference to Goethe’s “Das Gottliche”, which opens with the 
line: “(Let man be noble.” — Ed. 

438 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

political economy in Italy* celebrated was precisely this excellent 
invention which made a general exchange of matter in society 
possible without any individual contacts. As coin, money has a 
national, local character. If, as gold and silver, it is to serve as 
international means of exchange, it has to be melted down, and if it 
exists in the form of coin, this form is irrelevant, and the coin is 
reduced to its pure weight. In the most developed international 
system of exchange, gold and silver reappear in exactly the same 
form in which they already figured in primitive barter. As means 
of exchange, gold and silver, like the exchange itself, do not 
initially appear within the confines of some social community but 
at the point where it ends, on its border, at the few points of its 
contact with other communities. It appears to be _ posited, 
therefore, as the commodity as such, as the universal commodity 
which everywhere preserves its character of wealth. From the 
standpoint of this determination of form, its importance is similar 
in all places. So it is the material representative of universal wealth. 
In the mercantile system, for that reason, gold and silver are 
regarded as measure of the power of different communities. 

“So soon as the PRECIOUS METALS become OBJECTS OF COMMERCE, AN UNIVERSAL 
EQUIVALENT FOR EVERYTHING, they become also the MEASURE OF POWER BETWEEN 
NATIONS.” Hence the mercantile system (Steuart [An Inquiry into the Principles of 
Political Oeconomy, Vol. 1, Dublin, 1770, p. 327)). 

The determination of money—that of serving as international 
means of exchange and means of payment—is in effect not some 
kind of new determination in addition to its determination of 
being money in general, a universal equivalent and so both 
treasure and means of payment. The determination of universal 
equivalent contains the determination of money as universal 
commodity, in which capacity, it is true, money is realised only as 
world coin. In general, it is as international means of payment and 
means of exchange that gold and silver (as has been mentioned) 
first appear as money, and it is precisely from this appearance of 
theirs that the concept of them as a universal commodity is 
abstracted. The national, political limitation formally set on money 
generally as a measure (through the establishment of a measuring 
unit and its division into parts) which in coin may extend even 
to its content whenever the value tokens issued by the State are 
substituted for the real metal, all of this historically put in a later 
appearance than that form in which money appears as universal 

2 A reference, among others, to Geminiano Montanari, Antonio Genovesi and 
Ferdinando Galiani. See this volume, p. 165.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 439 

commodity, as world coin. But why? Because here it generally 
appears in its concrete form of money. 

To be measure and to be means of circulation are functions of 
money in the performance of which it assumes special forms of 
being only through these functions later becoming independent. 
Take, first, coin: initially it is nothing but a determinate 
weight-part of gold; the stamp is added as guarantee, as 
denominator of weight, so that it does not change anything yet; 
the stamp, the fagon, i.e. the indicator of value, becomes an 
independent sign, a symbol of value and, through the mechanism 
of circulation itself, becomes substance instead of form; at this 
point, the State has to intervene because such a token must be 
guaranteed by society’s power become independent, by the State. 
But in actual fact, money operates in circulation precisely as 
money, as gold and silver; being coin is merely its function. In this 
function it is particularised and can be sublimated into a pure 
token of value which, as such, requires legally established and 
legally enforced recognition. 

Second, take measure. Initially, the measuring units of money and 
their subdivisions are in fact mere weight-parts of money as metal; 
as money, it has the same measuring unit that it has as weight. 
The only difference is that as soon as the nominal value of these 
minted pieces of metal corresponding to the weight subdivisions 
begins to separate from the real value, the measure-serving 
subdivisions of gold and silver as gold and silver are separated 
from their measure-serving subdivisions as money; with the result 
that determinate weight-parts of the metal, to the extent that they 
function as measures of value, obtain their own names in this 
function. 

So, in world trade, gold and silver are estimated only according 
to their weight, without regard to their stamp; in other words, 
there is an abstraction from them as coins. In international trade, 
they appear entirely in the form or formlessness in which they 
initially appeared, and wherever they serve as means of exchange, 
they also simultaneously serve as equivalent value, as realised 
price, as real equivalent, as they had initially served in internal 
circulation. Wherever they serve as coin, as mere means of 
exchange, therefore, they simultaneously also serve as full-fledged 
representative of value. Meanwhile, their other functions remain 
the same in which they serve as money in general, as the form of 
treasure (be it as materially assured stock of means of subsistence 
for the future or as wealth in general) or as universal means of 
payment independent of the immediate wants of the exchangers 

440 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

and meeting only their general want or even the absence of any. 
As inert adequate equivalent which can be withheld from 
circulation, because it is not the object of any definite want, money 
is [B ’-6] stock, assurance of means of subsistence for the future in 
general: it is the form in which wealth is possessed by the 
want-free, i.e. in which the surplus, the part of wealth not 
immediately required as use value, is held, etc., It is assurance of 
future wants to the same extent as the form of wealth going 
beyond the bounds of want. 

Hence, the form of mioney as international means of exchange 
and payment is, in fact, not some particular form of it, but only 
one of its uses as money; the functions in which it most strikingly 
functions in its simple and simultaneously concrete form as 
money, as a unity of measure and means of circulation, and 
simultaneously as neither. This is its most primitive form. It 
appears as a particular form only alongside the particularisation 
which money can assume in the so-called internal circulation as 
measure and coin. 

In this character, gold and silver have an important role to play 
in creating the world market. Thus, the circulation of American 
silver from West to East; the metallic bond between America and 
Europe, on the one hand, and between America and Asia, Europe 
and Asia, on the other, since the beginning of the modern epoch... 
As world coin, money is essentially indifferent to its form of 
means of circulation, while its material is all-important. It does not 
appear for exchanging the surplus, but for balancing out the 
surplus in the overall process of international exchange. Here, the 
form directly coincides with its function of being commodity, as 
commodity that has currency in all places, as universal commodity. 

It is a matter of indifference whether money here circulates in 
minted or unminted form. Mexican dollars and IMPERIALS oF Russia 
are merely a form of the product of South American and Russian 
mines. The English sovereign serves in the same way, since it pays 
no seignorage (Tooke [A History of Prices, and of the State of the 
Circulation, from 1839 to 1847 inclusive, London, 1848, p. 226)). 

What is the relation between gold and silver and their direct 
producers in the countries where they are an immediate product, 
the objectification of a particular type of labour? In their hands, 
gold and silver are produced directly as commodity, i.e. as a use 
value which has no use value for its producer, but becomes such 
for him only through its alienation, through its being thrown into 
circulation. In his hands, it can only be treasure, because it is not 
the product of circulation, it has not been extracted from it, but 

Chapter Two. Money 44] 

has yet to enter it. It has first to be exchanged directly, in 
accordance with the labour time it contains, for other commodities 
alongside of which it exists, however, as a particular commodity. 
But, on the other hand, since it simultaneously has significance as 
a product of general labour, as its personification, which it is not 
as immediate product, it puts its producer in the privileged 
position of instantly appearing as buyer, instead of seller, In order 
to use the mined gold as money, he has to alienate it as a direct 
product, without being in need of the mediation required by the 
producer of any other commodity. He is a seller even in the form 
of buyer. 

The delusion that money as universal wealth satisfying all wants 
can be pulled up by the ears directly from earth or river-bed is 
illustrated, for instance, in a naive form in the following anecdote: 

“IN THE YEAR 760 THE POOR PEOPLE TURNED OUT IN NUMBERS TO WASH GOLD FROM 
THE RIVER SANDS SOUTH OF PRAGUE, AND 3 MEN WERE ABLE IN THE DAY TO EXTRACT A 
MARK (HALF A POUND) OF GOLD; AND SO GREAT WAS THE CONSEQUENT RUSH TO ‘THE 
DIGGINGS’, THAT IN THE NEXT YEAR THE COUNTRY WAS VISITED BY FAMINE” (Abhandlung 
von dem Alterthume des bohmischen. Bergwerks, by M. G. Korner. Schneeberg, 1758).%° 

Money transmitted as gold [or silver], in the form of [gold or] 
silver, can always be reconverted into means of circulation. 

“MONEY HAS THE QUALITY OF BEING ALWAYS EXCHANGEABLE FOR WHAT IT MEAS- 
URES” (Bosanquet [Metallic, Paper, and Credit Currency, London, 1842, p. 100)). 

“MONEY? CAN ALWAYS BUY OTHER COMMODITIES, WHEREAS OTHER COMMODITIES 
CANNOT ALWAYS BUY GOLD.” “THERE MUST BE A VERY CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF THE 
PRECIOUS METALS APPLICABLE AND APPLIED AS THE MOST CONVENIENT MODE OF 
ADJUSTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL BALANCES” (Tooke [An Inquiry into the Currency 
Principle, 2nd ed., London, 1844, pp. 10, 13)]). 

In the 16th century, in the infancy of the bourgeois society, gold 
and silver attracted the keen interest of States and the emergent 
political economy mainly as international money. The specific role 
which gold and silver play in international commerce was once 
again made perfectly clear and once again recognised by 
economists after the great gold outflows and crises of 1825, 1839, 
1847 and 1857. Here gold is the absolute and exclusive 
international means of payment, value-for-itself, the universal 
equivalent. Value must be transmitted In specie, it cannot be 
transmitted in any other form of merchandise. 

4 Tooke has “Gold”.— Ed. 

442 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

“GOLD AND SILVER ... MAY BE COUNTED UPON TO REALISE ON THEIR ARRIVAL [to the 
creditor] NEARLY THE EXACT SUM REQUIRED TO BE PROVIDED...” “GOLD AND SILVER 
POSSESS AN INFINITE ADVANTAGE OVER ALL OTHER DESCRIPTIONS OF MERCHANDISE FOR 
SUCH OCCASIONS, FROM THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF THEIR BEING UNIVERSALLY IN USE AS 
MONEY” [J]. Fullarton, On the Regulation of Currencies, 2nd ed., London, 1845, 
pp. 132-33]. 

(Hence Fullarton is aware that value is transmitted in gold and 
silver as money, and not as commodities, that [B’-7] it is their 
specific function as money, and therefore he is wrong in saying that 
they are transmitted as capital, and so already introducing 
irrelevant relations. Capital can also be transmitted in the form of 
rice, Twist, etc.) 

“IT IS NOT IN TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, OR INDIGO THAT DEBTS, WHETHER FOREIGN OR 
DOMESTIC, ARE USUALLY CONTRACTED TO BE PAID, BUT IN COIN; AND A REMITTANCE, 
THEREFORE, EITHER IN THE IDENTICAL COIN DESIGNATED, OR IN BULLION WHICH CAN BE 
PROMPTLY TURNED INTO THAT COIN THROUGH THE MINT OR MARKET OF THE COUNTRY 
TO WHICH IT IS SENT, MUST ALWAYS AFFORD TO THE REMITTER THE MOST CERTAIN, 
IMMEDIATE, AND ACCURATE MEANS OF EFFECTING HIS OBJECT, WITHOUT RISK OF 
DISAPPOINTMENT FROM THE FAILURE OF DEMAND OR FLUCTUATION OF PRICE” (Fullarton, 
le., pp. 132-33). 

“ANY OTHER ARTICLE” (which is of interest as a particular use value that is not 
money) “MIGHT IN QUANTITY OR KIND BE BEYOND THE USUAL DEMAND IN THE COUNTRY 
TO WHICH IT IS SENT” (Th. Tooke, An Inquiry into the Currency Principle etc, 2nd ed., 
London, 1844 [p. 10]). 

The economists’ reluctance to recognise money in this determi- 
nation is a survival of the old polemic against the monetary 
system. 

Money as universal international means of purchase and 
payment is not a new determination at all. Indeed, it is merely the 
same money in a universality of appearance which corresponds to 
the universality of its concept; it is, in fact, its most adequate mode 
of existence in which it manifests itself as universal commodity. 

Depending on the various functions fulfilled by money, one and 
the same piece of money can change its place. Today, it can be 
coin, and tomorrow, money, ie. inert equivalent, without changing 
its outward form of being. As the concrete existence of money, 
gold and silver thereby differ essentially from the token of value 
by which they can be substituted in the internal circulation: gold 
and silver coins can be melted down into bars, and thus preserve 
their indifferent form with respect to their local character as coin, 
or serve only as metallic weight, if they are transformed into 
money in the form of coin. They can, therefore, become raw 
material for articles of luxury, or be hoarded, or wander abroad as 
international means of payment, where they can again be 

Chapter Two. Money 443 

converted into the form of the national coin, into any national 
coin. They retain their value in any of these forms. 

That does not happen to a token of value. It is a token only 
where it is regarded as such, and it is regarded as such only where 
it is backed by the State power. That is why it is tied down to 
circulation and cannot revert to the indifferent form in which it is 
always value itself, with the possibility of assuming any national 
stamp or, indifferent to the latter, of serving in its immediate form 
of being as means of exchange and material for hoarding, or even 
of being converted into a commodity. It is not tied to any of these 
forms but assumes any one, depending on the want or the trend 
in circulation. To the extent that, as a particular commodity, it is 
not fashioned into articles of luxury, it exists above all in relation 
to circulation, and not only to internal, but also to world 
circulation, while always existing in an independent form and 
resisting absorption by it. Coin, isolated as such, i.e. as mere value 
token, exists only through and in circulation. Even when hoarded, 
it [value token] can be accumulated only as coin, because its power 
ceases at the country’s borders. Apart from the forms of hoarding 
which arise from the process of circulation itself, and are, strictly 
speaking, merely the latter’s points of rest, namely, apart from the 
formation of a stock of coin designated for circulation or a reserve 
for payments made in the same national coin, there can here be 
no question at all of any hoarding, i.e. of hoarding in the true 
sense of the word, because coin as a token of value lacks the 
essential element of hoarding, which is being not merely a 
symbolic value, but, apart from its social function, the immediate 
being of value itself, wealth, irrespective of any definite social 
nexus. That is why the laws which stipulate the token of value as 
such do not stipulate metallic money, because it is not tied to the 
function of coin. 

It is clear, furthermore, that hoarding, i.e. the withdrawal of 
money from circulation and its collection at definite points, is 
multiform: a temporary piling up stemming from the simple fact 
of the separation of purchase and sale, i.e. from the immediate 
mechanism of the simple circulation itself; its piling up stemming 
from the function of money as means of payment; and finally, 
hoarding proper seeking to hold on to money and preserve it as 
abstract wealth or, at any rate, as an excess of the available wealth 
over the immediate want of it and as a guarantee for the future or 
as something that can hamper the unwitting blockage of circula- 
tion. The latter forms, under which [B’-8] the achievement of 
independence, the adequate being of exchange value is already 

16* 

444 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

seen only in its immediate reified form of gold, tend increasingly 
to disappear in the bourgeois society. By contrast, the other forms 
of hoarding which spring from the mechanism of circulation itself 
and which are the conditions for money’s fulfilling its functions 
are developed to a greater extent, although they assume a 
different form which is to be considered in the section on the 
banking system. 

However, the simple metallic circulation shows that as a result of 
the various determinations in which money functions, or as a 
result of the process of circulation, the social exchange of matter, 
the available gold and silver precipitate in various forms as inert 
hoard, but in such a way that, while a part of the money existing 
as such hoard keeps changing its elements, with a constant change 
on the surface of the society in the portions of money which 
perform this or that function, passing from the hoard to 
circulation (national or international), being absorbed from circula- 
tion by reservoirs of hoard or fashioned into articles of luxury, the 
functioning of money as means of circulation is, nevertheless, 
never limited in consequence of these precipitations. The export 
or import of money alternately depletes or replenishes these 
various reservoirs, something that also results from the rise or fall 
in the aggregate price in the internal circulation, without the mass 
of money required for circulation itself rising above its mass or 
falling below it, because of the excess of gold and silver. That 
which is not required as means of circulation is withdrawn as 
hoard, just as hoard is absorbed by circulation as soon as it is 
required. That is why, among peoples with a purely metallic 
circulation, hoarding will be found in various forms, from 
individual to State, with the latter keeping watch over its State 
treasury. In the bourgeois society, this process is reduced to 
meeting the demands of the overall process of production and 
assumes other forms. It appears as a special business which was 
engendered by the division of labour in the overall process of 
production, and which is carried on, at the more naive stages of 
development, partly as the business of all private persons, and 
partly as the business of the State. Still, the basis remains the 
same; there is a constant functioning of money in various 
developed functions and even in the purely illusory one. 

This consideration of the purely metallic circulation is all the 
more important, since all the speculations of the economists over 
the higher, more mediated forms of circulation depend on the 
view of the simple metallic circulation. It goes without saying 
1) that when we speak of an increase or decrease of gold and 

Chapter Two. Money 445 

silver, it is always presupposed that the value of the gold and silver 
remains the same, i.e. the labour time required for their 
production has not changed. The fall or rise in the magnitude of 
their value as a result of a fall or rise in the labour time required 
for their production is not some kind of peculiarity that 
distinguishes them from other commodities, however much that 
may harm their function as means of payment. 2) The motives 
which—apart from the fall and rise of prices and apart from the 
need to purchase commodities from sellers not requiring any 
commodities in return (as in time of famine or war)—open up the 
hoards or fill them up again, i.e. the operation of the interest rate, 
cannot be considered here where money is still being regarded as 
money, and not as a form of capital. 

So, the mass of gold and silver present in a country must be and 
always will be, on the basis of the simple metallic circulation, and 
general trade resting on ready money, greater than the mass of 
gold and silver circulating as coin, although the relationship 
between the portion of money functioning as money and that 
functioning as coin will change in quantity, and the same money 
can alternately fulfil either function precisely as there is a change 
in the quantity and a substitution of each other in quality by the 
portions of money serving for national and international circula- 
tion. However, the mass of gold and silver is a constant reservoir 
for both streams of circulation, an outlet and inlet for them, 
serving as an inlet precisely because it serves as an outlet. 

As exchange value, every commodity, however indivisible its use 
value, such as the use value of a house may be, can be divided into 
any number of parts. In its price, it exists as such a divisible 
exchange value, i.e. as value assessed in money. So it can be 
alienated in any way, piece by piece, for money. However 
immovable and indivisible, the commodity can, therefore, be 
thrown into circulation piece by piece, through the title to 
property [B’-9] in its several parts. Thus, money has an eroding 
effect on immovable, indivisible property. 

“Money is a means by which property can be split up into innumerable 
fragments and devoured piecemeal through exchange” (Bray [Labour’s Wrongs and 
Labour’s Remedy, Leeds, 1839, pp. 140-41)). 

Without money there would be a mass of inexchangeable, 
inalienable objects, because money alone gives these objects an 
existence that is independent of the nature of their use value and 
its relations. 

446 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

“When immovable and immutable things came to be in commerce amongst 
men, as well as things which were movable and made for change, money came into 
use as the rule and measure (SQUARE) whereby these things received estimation and 
value” ({E. Misselden,] Free Trade, London, 1622 [p. 21)). 

“THE INTRODUCTION OF MONEY WHICH BUYS ALL THINGS ... BRINGS IN THE NECESSITY 
OF LEGAL ALIENATION” (i.e. OF FEUDAL ESTATES) (John Dalrymple, An Essay towards a 
General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, 4th ed. London, 1759, p. 124). 

Indeed, all the determinations in which money appears— 
standard of value, means of circulation, and money as such— 
merely express the different relationships in which individuals 
take part in overall production or relate to their own production 
as social production. But these relations of individuals to each 
other appear as social relations of things. 

“In 1593 the Cortes sent the following petition to Philip II: ‘The Cortes of 
Valladolid requested Your Majesty in 1586 not to permit the further importation 
into this kingdom of candles, glassware, jewellery, knives and similar articles 
coming from abroad, which, though they are of no use to human life, have to be 
exchanged for gold, as though the Spaniards were Indians’” (Sempéré [ Considérations 
sur les causes de la grandeur et de la décadence de la monarchie espagnole, Vol. I, 
pp. 275-76]).? 

“All hide and secretly bury their money deep in the ground, especially gentiles” 
(non-Moslems) ‘“‘who are almost the sole masters of trade and money, being held in 
thrall to the belief that the gold and silver they hide during their lifetime will serve 
them after their death” (Francois Bernier, Voyages contenant la description des états du 
Grand Mogol etc., Vol. I, Paris, 1830, p. 314). (At the Court of Aurangzeb.) 

“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast... 
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the 
beast, or the number of his name” (Apocalypse Vulgate). 

“The great and ultimate effect of trade is not wealth at large, but preferably 
abundance of silver and gold ... which are not perishable, nor so mutable as other 
commodities, but are wealth at all times and in all places.” 

(Their imperishable character consists, therefore, not only in the 
imperishableness of their material, but in that they always remain 
wealth, i.e. always abide in a definite form of exchange value.) 

“Abundance of wine, corn, fowls, flesh, etc., are riches but hic et nuncc” 
(depending upon their particular use value), “so as the raising of such 
commodities, and the following of such trade, which does store the country with 
gold and silver, is profitable before others” (Petty, Political Arithmetick, London, 
1699, pp. 178-79). 

“Gold and silver alone are not perishable’”’ (never cease to be exchange value) 
“but are esteemed for wealth at all times, and everywhere” //the utility of particular 
use values is temporally and spatially determined, like the very wants which they 

a Marx quotes from Sempéré and, further, from Bernier in French.— Ed. 
b Revelation 17:13 and 13:17.— Ed. 
¢ At a particular place and a particular time.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 447 

satisfy// ‘“‘whereas all other things are wealth, but pro hic et nunc” (l.c., p. 196). 

“The wealth of every nation consists chiefly in the share which it has in the 
foreign trade with THE WHOLE COMMERCIAL WORLD, RATHER THAN IN THE DOMESTIC 
TRADE of ordinary meat, drink, and clothes, which bring in little gold and silver, 
UNIVERSAL WEALTH...” ([ibid.,] p. 242). 

Just as gold and silver are in themselves universal wealth, so the 
possession of them appears as the product of world circulation, 
and not of circulation confined to immediate natural-ethnic* 
connections. 

It may appear odd that Petty, who says that labour is the father, 
as lands are the mother of wealth,’ who teaches the division of 
labour and who, generally, in a boldly brilliant manner everywhere 
concentrates on the process of production instead of the individual 
product, nevertheless here appears to be entirely captive to the 
language and notions of the monetary system. [B’'-10] One 
should not forget, however, that, in accordance with his premiss, 
as with the bourgeois premiss in general, gold and silver are only 
the adequate form of equivalent which always has to be 
appropriated only through the alienation of commodities and, so, 
through labour. Production for the sake of production, Le. 
development of the productive forces of wealth without regard to 
the limits of immediate want or consumption is expressed by Petty 
as follows: to produce and to exchange not for the sake of 
transient acts of consumption in which all commodities are 
dissolved, but for the sake of gold and silver. It is the English 
nation’s energetic, heedless and universal drive for enrichment in 
the 17th century that Petty here expresses and simultaneously 
incites. 

Firstly, the perversion of money: it turns from means into end, and 
degrades the other commodities: 

“The natural matter of commerce is MERCHANDISE... The artificial matter of 
commerce is money. Money, though it be in nature and time after merchandise, 
yet forasmuch as it is now in use” (in its present application) “has become the 
CHIEF.” 

Thus, Misselden, a London merchant, in his work Free Trade. Or, 
the Meanes to Make Trade Florish, London, 1622, p. 7. He compares 
the switch of ranks between money and commodity with the lot of 
the two [grand]sons of the old Jacob, who laid his s right hand on the 
younger, and his left hand on the elder (1.c.).” 

a The manuscript has “ethische” (ethic).— Ed. 
b [W. Petty,] A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, London, 1667, p. 47.— Ed. 

448 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

The contradiction between money as hoard and as commodities, 
whose exchange value ceases to exist upon the fulfilment of their 
object as use values, and the theory of renunciation: 

“The general remote cause of our want of money is the great excess of this 
Kingdom, in consuming the commodities of foreign countries, which prove to us 
DISCOMMODITIES, rather than COMMODITIES, in hindering us of so much TREASURE, 
which otherwise would be brought in, in lieu of these Toys. We consume amongst 
us a great abundance of the wines of Spain, of France, of the Rhine, of the Levant; 
the raisins of Spain, the corinths of the Levant, the lawns” (a sort of fine linen) 
“and cambrics” (another sort of fine linen) “of Hannault? and the Netherlands, 
the silks of Italy, the sugars and tobacco of the West Indies, the spices of the East 
Indies; all which are of no necessity unto us, and yet are bought with ready 
money... Even the old Cato said: Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet” 
(l.c., pp. 11-13). 

“The more the stock is increased in wares, the more it decreases IN TREASURE” 
({ibid.,] p. 23). 

Concerning the non-refluent circulation on the world market, 
especially in trade with Asia: 

“The other foreign remote causes of the want of money, are the trades 
maintained out of Christendom to Turkey, Persia and the East Indies, which trades 
are maintained for the most part with ready money, yet in a different manner 
from the trades of Christendom within itself. For although the trades within 
Christendom are driven with ready monies, yet those monies are still contained 
and continued within the bounds of Christendom. There is indeed a fluxus and 
refluxus, a flood and ebb of the monies of Christendom traded within itself: for 
sometimes there is more in one part of Christendom, sometimes there is less in 
another, as one country wants and another abounds: It comes and goes, and whirls 
about the circle of Christendom, but is still contained within the compass thereof. 
But the money that is traded out of Christendom into the parts aforesaid is 
continually issued out and never returns again” (l.c., pp. 19, 20). 

Dr. Martin Luther, the dean of German political economists, 
complains in a way similar to Misselden’s: 

“It cannot be denied that buying and selling are necessary practices, which 
cannot be dispensed with and may surely be used in a Christian manner, especially 
as regards things that serve necessity and honour; for thus the patriarchs also sold 
and bought cattle, wool, corn, butter, milk and other goods. These are gifts of God, 
which He produces from the soil and shares among men. But foreign trade, which 
brings merchandise from Calicut [B’-11] and India and other places— 
merchandise such as exquisite silks and jewellery and spices, which are only for 
ostentation and serve no need—and drains money from the country and the 
people, should not be permitted if we had a government with a prince. But I do 
not want to write of this now, for I think that, eventually, when we have no more 

a A province of the former Spanish Netherlands (i.e. present Belgium).— Ed. 
b The head of the family should be eager to sell, not eager to buy (Cato, De re 
rustica, I1, 7).— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 449 

money, it will cease of itself, just as finery and gluttony; for all writing and 
preaching will be in vain until we are compelled by necessity and poverty. 

“God has brought it about that we Germans must thrust our gold and silver 
into foreign countries making all the world rich while we ourselves remain beggars. 
England would surely have less gold if Germany refused to take her cloth, and the 
King of Portugal, too, would have less, if we refused to take his spices. If you 
calculate how much money is extracted, without need or cause, from the German 
territories during one fair at Frankfurt, you will wonder how it comes about that 
even a single farthing is still left in Germany. Frankfurt is the silver and gold drain 
through which everything that arises and grows, that is minted or struck here flows 
out of the German land; if the hole were plugged, one would not hear the present 
complaint that there is everywhere sheer debt and no money, that the entire 
country and all the towns are despoilt by usury. But never mind things will 
nevertheless continue in this way: we Germans have to remain Germans, we do not 
desist unless we have to” (Bticher vom Kaufhandel und Wucher, 1524).99 

Boisguillebert, who has as significant a place in French political 
economy as Petty in English political economy, one of the most 
impassioned opponents of the monetary system, attacks money in 
the various forms in which it appears as exclusive value in contrast 
to other commodities, as means of payment (with Boisguillebert, 
especially as taxes) and as hoard. (The specific being of value in 
money appears as the relative valuelessness, degradation of other 
commodities.) 

The passages quoted from Boisguillebert’s writings* are taken 
from a collection of his works in the Eugéne Daire edition: 
Economistes financiers du XVIII* siécle, Paris, 1843. 

“Since gold and silver are not and have never been wealth in themselves, and 
since they have only a relative value, and only to the extent that they can procure 
the necessities of life for which they serve merely as pledge and valuation, having 
them more or less is a matter of indifference, provided they can produce the same 
effect” (Le détail de la France, 1697, Part I, Ch. VII [Daire edition, p. 178)). 

The quantity of money does not affect the national wealth, “provided there is 
enough of it to maintain the prices determined by the commodities necessary for life” 
(lc., Part II, Ch. XVIII, p. 209). 

(Therefore, Boisguillebert formulates here the law that the mass 
of the circulating medium is determined by the prices, and not 
vice versa.) 

That money is merely a form of commodity itself is made evident in wholesale 
trade, where the exchange occurs without the intervention of money, after the 
“merchandise is valuated”; “money is only the medium and the agency, whereas 
commodities that benefit life are the aim and purpose” (I.c., p. 210). 

Money must be only a means of circulation, and always mobile; it must never 
become hoard, something immobile; it must be “in continual movement, which is 

a In the manuscript, the direct quotations from Boisguillebert are given in 
French, and the exposition of his ideas, in German.— Ed. 

450 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

only the case so long as it is mobile...; but as soon as it becomes immobile ... all is 
lost” (l.c., Part II, Ch. XIX, p. 213). 

In contrast to the finance for which money appears to be the sole 
object: 

“The science of finance is nothing but a thorough knowledge of the interests of 
agriculture and of commerce” (l.c., Part III, Ch. VIII, p. 241). 

Boisguillebert, in fact, turns his attention only to the material. 
content of wealth, to enjoyment, to use value: 

“True wealth ... [is] the complete enjoyment not only of the necessaries of life 
but also of all the superfluities and of all that can give pleasure to the senses” 
(Dissertation sur la nature des richesses, de Uargent et des tributs [Daire edition], p. 403). 

“These metals” (gold and silver) “have been turned into an idol, and 
disregarding the goal and purpose they were intended to fulfil in commerce, i.e. to 
serve as pledge in exchange and reciprocal transfer, [B'-12] they were allowed to 
abandon this service almost entirely in order to be transformed into divinities to 
whom more goods, valuables and even human beings were sacrificed and continue 
to be sacrificed, than were ever sacrificed to the false divinities in blind antiquity 
which for so long were the whole cult and the whole religion for most peoples” 
(Le., p. 395). “The misery of the peoples is due to the fact that the slave has been 
turned into a master or rather into a tyrant” (l.c.). This “usurpation” needs to be 
broken and “things restored to their natural state” (l.c.). 

With the abstract greed for enrichment, ‘a great blow was dealt at once 
at the equivalence in which it” (money) “should be with all the other commodities 
so as to be ready to effect their exchange at any moment” (p. 399). “Thus the 
slave of commerce has become its master... This facility which money offers 
for the commission of any crime makes it redouble its earnings in proportion to 
the hold corruption takes of hearts; and there is no doubt that almost all the infamies 
would be banished from a State if one could do likewise with the fatal metal” 
(p. 399). 

The depreciation of commodities for their conversion into 
money (sale at below their value) is the cause of all poverty (see 
l.c., Ch. V). In this sense, he says: 

“Money ... has become the executioner of all things” (I.c., p. 413). 

He compares the financial art of making money with the 

“alembic that evaporates a frightful quantity of goods and commodities in order 
to obtain this fatal extract” (p. 419). 

Through a depreciation of the precious metals “the commodities themselves will 
be restored to their just value” (l.c., p. 422). “Money ... declares war ... on the 
whole human race” (pp. 417-18). 

(Similarly, Pliny, Historia Naturalis, Book XXXIII, Ch. III.) 
By contrast: 
Money as world coin: 

“Intercourse between nations has spread across the whole globe to such an 
extent that one could say all the world has virtually become a single city in which a 

Chapter Two. Money 451 

permanent fair of all the commodities is taking place, so that everyone, without 
leaving his home, can, by means of money, obtain and enjoy everything produced 
by the earth, the animals and human industry. A marvellous invention!” 
(Montanari (Geminiano), Della Moneta; written ABOUT 1683. Custodi’s collection, 
Parte Antica, Vol. 3, (Milan, 1804,] p. 40).? 

“What is his country, what is his tribe? He is a rich man” (Athenaeus, 
Deipmosophistae, Book IV, 49). 

On the digging of gold in mines, Demetrius Phalereus says: 

“Greed hopes to extract Pluto himself from the bowels of the earth” (Lc., VI, 
23). 

“But from money first springs avarice... This grows by stages into a kind of 
madness, no longer avarice but a positive hunger for gold” (Pliny, Historia 
Naturalis, Book XXXIII, Ch. HI, 14).¢ 

“Money! Nothing worse 
in our lives, so current, rampant, so corrupting. 
Money—you demolish cities, root men from their homes, 
you train and twist good minds and set them on 
to the most atrocious schemes. No limit, 
you make them adept at every kind of outrage, 
every godless crime—money!” 

(Sophocles, Antigone [295-301]).4 

Money, as purely abstract wealth—in which every specific use 
value is extinguished, and hence also every individual relation 
between possessor and commodity—comes under the power of 
the individual likewise as an abstract person, relating to his 
individuality as totally alien and extraneous. At the same time, it 
gives him universal power as his private power, a contradiction 
depicted, ror wsrance, by Shakespeare: 

[B’-13] “Gold? glittering, precious gold?... 
Thus much of this will make black, white; 
foul, fair; 
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant. 
Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods? 
why, this 
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides; 
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their 
heads: 
This yellow slave 
Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d; 

a Marx quotes in Italian.— Ed. 

b Here and below Marx quotes from Athenaeus in Greek.— Ed. 

© Marx quotes in Latin.— Ed. 

d Marx quotes in Greek. English translation by Robert Fagles (Sophocles, The 
Three Theban Plays, London, 1982, p. 73).— Ed. 

452 Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

Make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves, 

And give them title, knee, and approbation, 

With senators on the bench: this is it 

That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; 

She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores 

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and 
spices 

To the April day again. Come, damned earth, 

Thou common whore of mankind” 

(Shakespeare, Timon of Athens [Act IV, Scene ITI}).4 

That which yields itself to all, and for which all is yielded, 
appears as the universal means of corruption and prostitution. 
(Similarly in the comedy of Aristophanes “Plutus”.) 

“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast... 
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the 
beast, or the number of his name” (Apocalypse). 

4) THE PRECIOUS METALS AS VEHICLES