[2) MONEY AS MEANS OF PAYMENT] 

[...] [B~1] obtains. Every peculiarity of the relation between the 
two [parties to the exchange] has been obliterated (exchange value 
as such, the general product of the social circulation, is here alone 
involved), and similarly all the political, patriarchal and other 
relationships stemming from the particularity of the relation. Both 
relate to each other as abstract social persons, merely representing 
exchange value as such before each other. Money has now become 
the sole nexus rerum between them, money sans phrase. The 
peasant no longer confronts the landowner as a peasant with his 
rural product and his rural labour, but as the money owner, for 
through the sale the immediate use value has been alienated and 
has assumed an indifferent form through the medium of the social 
process. On the other hand, the landowner no longer regards him 
as an uncouth individual producing means of subsistence in 
peculiar living conditions, but as one whose product—exchange 
value become independent, the universal equivalent, money—is 
no different from anyone else’s product. Thus, the idyllic aura 
that covered up the transaction in its previous form is dispelled. 

The absolute monarchy, itself already a product of the 
development of bourgeois wealth to a level incompatible with the 
old feudal relationships, is—in accordance with the uniform 
general power which it must be able to exercise at every point of 
the periphery—in need of a material instrument of that power: 
the universal equivalent, wealth in its constant battle-ready form in 
which it is completely independent of particular local, natural, 
individual relations. It needs wealth in the form of money. A 
system of services and deliveries in kind tends to impart, in 
accordance with their specific character, a particular character to 
their use as well. Money is alone capable of being immediately 

Chapter Two. Money 431 

converted into any particular use value. So the absolute monarchy 
is actively engaged in converting money into the universal means 
of payment. That can be done only through forced circulation, 
which makes products circulate at below their value. For the 
absolute monarchy, the conversion of all taxes into money taxes is 
a vital matter. So, whereas the conversion of [feudal] services into 
money services at an earlier stage appears as the shedding of 
relationships of personal dependence, as a victory of the bourgeois 
society, which buys its way out of the shackling fetters with 
cash—a process which, on the other hand, appears from the 
romantic viewpoint as a substitution of hard and insensitive money 
relationships for mankind’s motley ties—in the epoch of the rising 
absolute monarchy, whose art of finance consists in the forcible 
conversion of commodities into money, money is itself attacked by 
bourgeois economists as imaginary wealth to which natural wealth 
is being forcibly sacrificed. So, whereas Petty,* for instance, 
actually celebrates in money, as the material for hoarding, merely 
the general energetic drive for enrichment of the young bourgeois 
society in England, Boisguillebert,” in the reign of Louis XIV,. 
denounces money as the universal curse which causes the 
development of the real sources of the production of wealth to 
run dry, and whose dethronement alone can restore to the world 
of commodities, the true wealth and its general enjoyment, its 
good old rights. He could not as yet comprehend that the same 
black art of finance which threw men and commodities into the 
alchemistic retort in order to make gold, simultaneously caused all 
the relationships and illusions hemming the bourgeois mode of 
production to be vaporised, to leave simple money relationships, 
common exchange-value relationships, as a residue. 

“In feudal time cash payment had not grown to be the sole nexus of man 
to man. Not as buyer and seller alone, but in many senses still as soldier and 
captain, as loyal subject and guiding king, etc. was the low related to the high. With 
the supreme triumph of cash, a changed time has entered” (Th. Carlyle, On 
Chartism, London, 1840, p. 58). 

Money is “impersonal” property. I can carry it around with me 
in my pocket as the universal social power and the universal social 
nexus, the social substance. Money puts social power as a thing 
into the hands of the private person, who as such uses this power. 

a W. Petty, Several Essays in Political Arithmetick, pp. 178-79 and 196.— Ed. 

b P. Boisguillebert, Dissertation sur la nature des richesses, de Vargent et des tributs. 
In: Economistes financiers du XVIII siécle, Paris, 1843, pp. 395, 399, 413 and 
422.— Ed. 

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

The social nexus, the social exchange of matter, itself appears in 
money as something entirely external, not having any individual 
relation at all to its possessor, so that the power he wields appears 
to be something quite incidental and external to him. 

[B’-2] Without any further anticipation, this much is clear: With 
the development of the credit system there is an extraordinary 
spread of buying on time. To the extent that the credit system is 
developed, and hence production based on exchange value, the 
role of money as means of payment will increase, as compared 
with its role as means of circulation, as agent of purchase and sale. 
In countries with a developed modern mode of production, and 
therefore a developed credit system, money as specie effectively 
figures almost exclusively in retail trade and in petty trade 
between producers and consumers, while in the sphere of 
large-scale trading transactions it appears almost exclusively in the 
form of the universal means of payment. In so far as the payments 
are in balance, money appears as a transient form, a merely 
notional, imaginary measure of the exchange magnitudes of value. 
Its bodily involvement is confined to the settlement of relatively 
insignificant balances.* 

* “To prove how little,” says Mr. Slater (of the firm of Morrison, Dillon et Co, 
whose transactions are amongst the largest of the metropolis) ‘‘of real money enters 
into the operations of trade”, he gives an “analysis of a continuous course of 
commercial transactions, extending over several millions yearly, and which may be 
considered as a fair example of the general trade of the country. The proportions 
of receipts and payments are reduced to the scale of £1,000,000 only, during the 
year 1856, and are as under, viz.: 

Receipts £ Payments 

In bankers’ drafts and mercan- 

tile bills of exchange, pay- Bills of exchange pay- 

able after date woes 533,596 able after date .......... 302,674 
In cheques of bankers etc. pay- Cheques on London 

able on demand ................. 357,715 banker .......ccceseeeeeee 663,672 
In country banknotes ............... 9,627 
Bank of England Bank of 
MOLES fii oxi ceiscvedes secsseaacsbendadeaean ested 68,554 NOLES 4..ie.ccercsseevardascces 22,743 
GOld vcsiceeiecc: wee 28,089 Gold heccascseuessecdoce “ 9,427 
Silver and copper . a 1,486 Silver and copper 1,484 
Post-office orders 933 

£1,000,000 £1,000,000.” 

p. LXXI (Report from the Select 
Committee on the Bank Acts etc. 
1 July 1858.) [Marx quotes in 
English.] 

Chapter Two. Money 433 

The development of money as the universal means of payment 
goes hand in hand with the development of a higher, mediated 
form of circulation—that returns upon itself and that has already 
been taken under social control—in which the exceptional 
importance that money has on the basis of the simple metallic 
circulation, as it does, for instance, in hoarding in the strict sense 
of the term, is transcended. But then, if sudden credit upheavals 
should interrupt the mutual settlement of payments and upset the 
payments mechanism, it is money that is suddenly in demand as 
the real universal means of payment, with the requirement that 
the whole volume of wealth should have a two-fold existence: once 
as commodity and again as money, so that these two modes of 
existence are identical to each other. At such moments of crisis, 
money appears as exclusive wealth, which is manifested as such 
not in some merely imaginary depreciation, as it does in, say, the 
monetary system, but in the active depreciation of all real wealth. 
With respect to the world of commodities, value then continues to 
exist only in its adequate exclusive form—as money. 

The further elaboration of this point is here irrelevant. What is 
relevant, however, is that moments of monetary crises proper 
bring out a contradiction that is immanent to the development of 
money as the universal means of payment. It is not as a measure 
that money is demanded in such crises, since as such its 
corporeal presence is a matter of indifference; nor is it as coin, 
for it does not figure as such in payments; but it is demanded as 
exchange value become independent, as a materially present 
universal equivalent, as the embodiment of abstract wealth; in the 
form, that is, in which it is the object of hoarding in the strict 
sense of the term, as money. Its development as the universal 
means of payment shrouds the contradiction that exchange 
value has assumed forms independent of its mode of existence 
as money; and on the other hand, its mode of existence as money 
is posited precisely as the definitive and solely adequate one. 

In consequence of the balancing out of payments and their 
cancellation of each other as positive and negative amounts, 
money, aS means of payment, can appear as a merely notional 
form of commodity, as in the case with its being the measure [of 
value], and in its functioning in the formation of prices. The 
collision occurs from the fact that—contrary to the arrangement, 
contrary to the general assumption of modern trade, and 
whenever the mechanism of these mutual cancellations and the 
credit system on which it partly rests are disrupted —it must instantly 
be present and to hand in its real form. 

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

The law that the mass of money in circulation is determined by 
the aggregate price of the commodities in circulation is now 
supplemented as follows: by the aggregate price* of the payments 
falling due in the given period and the economy practised in 
effecting them. 

[B’-3] We have seen that the change in the value of gold and 
silver does not affect their function as measure of value, as money 
of account. By contrast, this value change becomes crucially 
important for money in its function as means of payment. What is 
to be paid is a determined quantity of gold or silver in which a 
determined value, i.e. a determined labour time, was objectified by 
the time the contract was concluded. But, like all other com- 
modities, gold and silver change the magnitude of their value with 
the change in the labour time required for their production, 
falling or rising in value as it falls or rises. Therefore, in the event 
that the realisation of the sale on the part of the buyer occurs later 
in ume than the alienation of the sold commodity, the same 
quantity of gold or silver may contain a different, a greater or 
lesser, value than at the conclusion of the contract. Gold and silver 
retain their specific quality of money, that of always being the 
realised and realisable universal equivalent, of always being 
exchangeable for all the commodities to the extent of their own 
value, regardless of any change in the magnitude of their own 
value. However, the latter is, potentialiter, subject to the same 
fluctuations as is the value of any other commodity. Consequently, 
whether payment is effected in a real equivalent, i.e. in the iniually 
anticipated value magnitude, depends on whether or not the 
labour time required for the production of the given quantity of 
gold or silver has remained the same. The nature of money, as 
incarnated in a specific commodity, here comes into collision with 
its function of exchange value become independent. The great 
revolutions in all economic relationships which, in the 16th and 
17th centuries, for instance, were caused by the fall in the value of 
the precious metals, or a similar but smaller-scale revolution in the 
ancient Roman Republic in the period between [the first silver 
denarius in 485 ab urbe condito]” and the start of the Second Punic 
War’ caused by the rise in the value of copper, in which the 
plebeians’ debts were contracted, are well known. A demonstration 

a In the manuscript, “Gesamtpreis” (aggregate price) is written over the word 
“Gesamtsumme” (sum-total).— Ed. 

b A hiatus in the manuscript. The text in square brackets is based on analogous 
passages in the 1857-58 manuscript (see present edition, Vol. 28, p. 119, and this 
volume, p. 212).— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 435 

of the influence of a rise or fall in the value of the precious 
metals, the material of money, on economic relationships implies 
an analysis of these relationships themselves, and so is not yet 
feasible at this point. 

What is self-evident is that the fall in the value of the precious 
metals, i.e. of money, always goes to benefit the payer at the 
expense of the payee, and a rise in their value, the other way 
round. 

The complete reification [Versachlichung], externalisation of the 
social exchange of matter on the basis of exchange values is 
strikingly manifested in the dependence of all social relationships 
on the production costs of metallic objects of natural origin which 
have no significance at all as instruments of production, as factors 
in the creation of wealth. 

3) MONEY AS INTERNATIONAL MEANS OF PAYMENT 
AND PURCHASE, AS WORLD COIN 

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 
OF THE MONEY RELATIONSHIP 

The process of bourgeois production initially takes possession of 
metallic currency as an existing and ready-made instrument, 
which, although it has been gradually transformed, always retains 
its basic construction. The question, therefore, why gold and 
silver, and not other commodities, serve as the material of money 
lies outside the confines of the bourgeois system. We _ shall 
therefore summarise only the most important aspects. The answer 
is simply that the specific natural properties of the precious 
metals, i.e. their properties as use values, correspond to the 
economic functions which make them more capable than all the 
other commodities of being the vehicles of money functions. 

Like labour time itself, the object to be recognised as its specific 
embodiment must be able to express purely quantitative differ- 
ences, thus presupposing identical, homogeneous quality. This is 
the first condition for the functioning of the commodity as a 
measure of value. If, for instance, one evaluates all commodities in 
terms of oxen, hides, corn, etc., one has in fact to measure them 
in ideal average oxen, average hides, and average corn, since there 
are qualitative differences between one ox and another, one lot of 

4 Marx quotes in English.— Ed. 
b See this volume, p. 446.— Ed. 

en thn mal, Uc tty GS 
toe. aes B prey. teonyelng 
veh silos cohen eae 
Seeks pctreniet nes 

<oS ~— tae feet 
lh Me Aas 

oa thence rea 

Teer Aatreniondy. SRB = (peta 

earl oe ~pom Tbe MN a ts Hite. 
“ee sapere = SM SU em 
CAS oe OE am as hh got Fame On \ 

age eto 

Page 13 of Notebook B’ with a fragment 
of the original text of the second chapter 
of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 

ge a 
ged i 

Chapter Two. Money 455 

corn and another, one hide and another, there is a difference in 
the use value of the specimens of one and the same kind. This 
requirement of absence of qualitative differences regardless of 
time and place, and hence, the requirement of equality at equal 
quantity is the first requirement from this aspect. 

The second, which also springs from the necessity of presenting 
a merely quantitative difference, is great divisibility and subse- 
quent combination of the parts so that, depending on the 
magnitude of the value of the [B’-14] commodity, the universal 
equivalent can be cut up into parts, without thereby damaging its 
use value. Gold and silver, as simple bodies, with a purely 
quantitative division, can be brought to one and the same degree 
of fineness. Sameness of quality. Similarly divisible and recombin- 
able. 

It can even be said of gold that it is the earliest known metal, 
the first discovered metal. In the great gold sluices, the rivers, 
Nature itself undertakes the work of the art and hence requires on 
the part of man in finding it no more than very crude work and 
neither science nor developed instruments of production. 

“THE PRECIOUS METALS UNIFORM IN THEIR PHYSICAL QUALITIES, SO THAT EQUAL 
QUANTITIES OF IT SHOULD BE SO FAR IDENTICAL AS TO PRESENT NO GROUND FOR 
PREFERRING THE ONE TO THE OTHER. THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH EQUAL NUMBERS OF 
CATTLE AND EQUAL QUANTITIES OF GRAIN.” 4 

Gold is, besides, found in a purer state than all the other metals: in a native, 
crystalline form, in separate pieces: “separated from the usually occurring bodies”, 
seldom alloyed with any other, except silver. Gold “isolated, individualised”. 

“GOLD DIFFERS REMARKABLY FROM THE OTHER METALS, WITH A VERY FEW EXCEP- 
TIONS, IN THE FACT, THAT IT IS FOUND IN NATURE IN ITS METALLIC STATE’ (the other 
metals are found in minerals (in their chemical being). “IRON AND COPPER, TIN, LEAD, 
AND SILVER ARE ORDINARILY DISCOVERED IN CHEMICAL COMBINATIONS WITH OXYGEN, 
SULPHUR, ARSENIC, OR CARBON; AND THE FEW EXCEPTIONAL OCCURRENCES OF THESE 
METALS IN AN UNCOMBINED, OR, AS IT WAS FORMERLY CALLED, VIRGIN STATE, ARE TO BE 
CITED RATHER AS MINERALOGICAL CURIOSITIES THAN AS COMMON PRODUCTIONS. GOLD, 
HOWEVER, IS ALWAYS FOUND NATIVE OR METALLIC... AGAIN GOLD, FROM THE CIR- 
CUMSTANCE OF ITS HAVING BEEN FORMED IN THOSE ROCKS WHICH ARE MOST EXPOSED TO 
ATMOSPHERIC ACTION IS FOUND IN THE DEBRIS OF THE MOUNTAINS; ...the FRAGMENTS of 
these ROCKS BROKEN OFF, ... BORNE BY FLOODS INTO THE VALLEYS, AND ROLLED INTO 
PEBBLES BY THE CONSTANT ACTION OF FLOWING WATER... Gold is deposited because of 
its specific gravity. So it is found in riverbeds and in alluvial deposits. Alluvial gold 
was the first gold to be discovered.” (River-sluicing learnt before mining)... 

“GOLD MOST FREQUENTLY OCCURS PURE, OR, AT ALL EVENTS, SO NEARLY SO THAT ITS 
METALLIC NATURE CAN BE AT ONCE RECOGNISED, whether in alluvial deposits or in 
QUARTZ VEINS... RIVERS ARE, INDEED, GREAT NATURAL CRADLES, SWEEPING OFF ALL THE 

aS. Bailey, Money and Its Victssitudes in Value, pp. 5-6. See present edition, 
Vol. 28, p. 110.— Ed. 

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

LIGHTER AND FINER PARTICLES AT ONCE, THE HEAVIER ONES EITHER STICKING AGAINST 
NATURAL IMPEDIMENTS, OR BEING LEFT WHEREVER THE CURRENT SLACKENS ITS FORCE OR 
VELOCITY... IN ALMOST ALL, PERHAPS IN ALL THE COUNTRIES OF EUROPE, AFRICA, AND 
ASIA, GREATER OR SMALLER QUANTITIES OF GOLD HAVE FROM EARLY TIMES BEEN WASHED 
BY SIMPLE CONTRIVANCES FROM THE AURIFEROUS DEPOSITS, ETC.” [Lectures on Gold for 
the Instruction of Emigrants about to Proceed to Australia. Delivered at the Museum of 
Practical Geology. London, 1852, pp. 171-72, 8, 10, 12, 93-94]. 

The washing and digging of gold are perfectly simple works, while 
MINING (SO also GOLD-MINING) IS AN ART REQUIRING THE EMPLOYMENT OF CAPITAL and 
more COLLATERAL sciencrs and arts than any other industry.//The 

washing of ore taken care of by Nature.// 

Exchange value as such implies a common substance and the 
reduction of all the differences to merely quantitative ones. In the 
function of money as measure, all values are reduced first of all to 
merely different quantities of the standard commodity. That is the 
case with the precious metals, which, therefore, appear as the 
natural substance of exchange value as such. 

“A peculiar feature of metals is that in them alone all relations are reduced to a 
single one, namely, their quantity, for they have not been endowed by Nature with 
any difference of quality either in their internal composition or in their external 
form and structure” (Galiani, I.c. [Della Moneta], pp. 126-27). 

( SAMENESS OF QUALITY IN ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD; ADMIT OF MINUTE DIVISION AND 
EXACT APPORTIONMENT.) 

This merely quantitative difference is just as important for 
money as means of circulation (coin) and means of payment, since 
money, a single piece of money, has no individuality, and the 
important thing is that what has to be returned is merely an equal 
quantity of the same material, but not the same piece: 

“MONEY IS RETURNED IN KIND ONLY; WHICH FACT DISTINGUISHES THIS AGENT FROM 
ALL OTHER MACHINERY ... INDICATES THE NATURE OF ITS SERVICE—CLEARLY PROVES THE 
SINGLENESS OF ITS OFFICE” (Opdyke, [A Treatise on Political Economy, New York, 
1851,] [p.] 267). 

The differentiation of the functions performed by gold, whether 
as universal commodity, coin, raw material for luxury articles, 
material for accumulation, etc., enables them to indicate to the 
senses the succession of the form determinations of money. To 
this differentiation corresponds the fact that gold and silver can 
always be melted down and so again reduced to their purely 
metallic state, and from that state similarly to any other, i.e. that 
gold and silver, in contrast to other commodities, are not bound to 
the definite use form which is imparted to them. They can pass 

2 Marx quotes in Italian.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 457 

from the form of bullion to the form of coin, etc., and back again, 
without losing their value as raw materials, [B’-15] without 
damaging the processes of production and consumption. 

As means of circulation gold and silver have the advantage over 
other commodities in that their high natural specific gravity— 
representing a relatively large weight in a small space—is matched 
by an economic specific gravity, the ability to contain (objectify) 
relatively much labour time, i.e. a large exchange value, in a small 
space. The latter naturally depends on their relatively rare 
occurrence as natural objects. Hence, facility of transportation, 
transfer, etc. In short, the facility of real circulation, which is, 
naturally, the first condition for their economic function as means 
of circulation. 

Finally, as the inert being of value, as the material of hoarding, 
they are relatively indestructible, infinitely durable, not liable to be 
oxidised in the air (“treasures that neither moth nor rust doth 
corrupt”*), are refractory, with gold especially being insoluble in 
acids, except in free chlorine (aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and 
hydrochloric acids). As a main point, one should finally note the 
aesthetic properties of gold and silver, which make them the direct 
manifestation of affluence, ornament, luxury, and spontaneous 
festive moods, of wealth as such. Brightness of colour, malleability, 
facility of being worked with tools, and fitness for ornamentation 
and other purposes. Gold and silver are to some extent a native 
light brought forth from the underworld itself. Apart from the 
rarity of gold and silver, their greater softness, as compared with 
iron and even copper (in the hardened form in which it was used 
by the ancients), makes them unfit for use as instruments of 
production. But the use value of metals largely depends on their 
role in the immediate process of production. Gold and silver are 
also excluded from it, just as they are generally not indispensable 
objects of consumption. 

“Money must have a direct” (use) “value, but one based on a besoin factice» Its 
material must not be indispensable for man’s existence, since the entire quantity of 
money used as coin” //generally as money [which] is also accumulated in the form 
of hoard// “cannot be individually employed; it must always circulate” (H. Storch, 
lc. [Cours d’économie politique], Vol. I, pp. 113, 114). 

(Equally, that part which is accumulated as hoard cannot be 
employed “individually” because the whole point of accumulation 
is to keep it intact.) 

a Matthew 6:19, 20.— Ed. 
b Factitious need.— Ed. 

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

That, consequently, is one aspect according to which the nature 
of the use value of gold and silver is reduced to being something 
superfluous, to not entering either in the satisfaction of immediate 
want as object of consumption, or as agent in the immediate 
process of production. That is precisely the aspect according to 
which the use value of money should not come into collision with 
its function of hoard (money) or means of circulation, in other 
words, the need for it as an individual use value should not come 
into collision with the need springing from circulation, from the 
society itself, the need for it as money in any of its determinations. 
That is only the negative aspect. 

In his polemic against money, Peter Martyr, who seems to have 
been very fond of chocolate, says, therefore, of the Bacs or cacao 
which, among other things, served as money among the Mexicans: 

“O blessed money which furnishes mankind with a sweet and nutritious 
beverage and protects its innocent possessors from the infernal disease of avarice, 
since it cannot be long hoarded, nor hidden underground” (De orbe novo).?9 

On the other hand, gold and silver are superfluities not only in 
the negative sense, i.e. are objects which can be dispensed with, 
but their aesthetic properties which make them the material of 
luxury, finery and splendour, make them the positive forms of 
superabundance, or means of satisfying other than everyday wants 
and bare necessities. That is why they have use value in themselves 
apart from their function as money. But just as they are the 
natural representatives of purely quantitative relations—in virtue 
of the sameness of their quality—so also in their individual use 
they are the immediate natural representatives of superabundance 
and so of wealth as such, both because of their natural aesthetic 
properties, and also of their expensiveness. 

Malleability is one of the properties that make gold and silver 
fit for use as material for jewellery. Dazzling to the eye. Exchange 
value is above all an overplus of necessary use values designated 
for exchange. This overplus is exchanged for what is superfluous 
as such, ie. for what goes beyond the bounds of immediate 
necessity; for the festive in contrast to the everyday. Use value as 
such expresses above all the individual’s relation to Nature; 
exchange value, alongside use value, is his command over the use 
values of others, his social relation; and even initially, moreover, 
values of festive use going beyond the bounds of immediate 
necessity. 

The white colour of silver, which reflects all the rays of light in 
their original mix; the red-yellow colour of gold, which absorbs the 

Chapter Two. Money 459 

whole mix of colours of a light beam falling on it and reflects red 
alone. 

Add here what was said earlier about the mining countries.* 

/[In his history of the German language, Grimm shows the 
connection between the names of gold and silver and_ their 
colour.//? 

[B-16] We have seen that gold and silver fail to meet the 
demand being made on them as exchange value become indepen- 
dent, as immediately present money, that of being an unchanging 
value magnitude. Here, their nature as a particular commodity 
enters into conflict with their function as money. But as Aristotle 
already noted, they possess a more permanent value magnitude 
than do other commodities on average. 

For the metallic circulation as such, apart from the general 
effect of the appreciation or depreciation of the precious metals 
on all economic relationships, the fluctuations of the value ratio 
between gold and silver are of particular importance, since they 
continuously serve alongside each other as the material of money 
in one and the same country or in different countries. The purely 
economic causes of these successive changes—conquest and other 
political upheavals which had a great influence on the relative 
value of the precious metals in the ancient world lie beyond the 
bounds of purely economic examination—must be reduced to 
changes in the labour time required for the production of the 
same quantities of these metals. It itself depends, on the one hand, 
on the relative quantities in which gold and silver occur in Nature, 
and on the other, on the greater or lesser difficulty in procuring 
them in their purely metallic state. What was said earlier makes it 
clear that gold, whose extraction from rivers or from alluvial 
deposits does not require either mining or chemical or mechanical 
contrivances, was discovered, despite its greater absolute rarity, 
before silver, and for a long time, despite its greater absolute 
rarity, remained relatively depreciated as compared to silver. That 
is why Strabo’s assertion! that in one Arab tribe 10 pounds of 
gold was given for 1 pound of iron, and 2 pounds of gold for 1 
pound of silver does not appear to be in any way incredible. It is 
clear, on the other hand, that as the productive power of social 
labour develops, the technology, and hence simple labour, 

a See this volume, pp. 440-42.— Ed. 

b J. Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Leipzig, 1853, Vol. 1, pp. 7 and 9 
(cf. this volume, p. 386).— Ed. 

¢ Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, V, 8.— Ed. 

460 Original Text of A Contribution te the Critique of Polit. Econ. 

becomes dearer, and while the original surface sources of gold are 
depleted and the Earth’s crust increasingly opened up, the 
relatively rarer or more frequent occurrence of both metals will 
have a substantial effect on the productivity of labour, and gold 
will appreciate relative to silver. (However, it is not the absolute 
quantitative proportion in which the two metals occur in Nature, 
although an essential moment in the labour time necessary for 
their production, but the labour time itself that determines their 
relative value. That is why although, according to the Paris 
Académie des Sciences (1840), the [quantitative] ratio of silver to 
gold was estimated at 52:1, their value ratio was only 15:1.) 

Given a definite development of the productive power of social 
labour—i.e. the less the significance, on the one hand, of the 
relative mechanical or chemical impediments to be overcome, and, 
on the other hand, of the relative remoteness of the gold- or 
silver-producing countries, the alternative discovery of new gold or 
silver deposits must be of ever more decisive significance, so that 
gold, as against silver, has the chance of being discovered not only 
in mines but also in alluvial deposits. It is quite probable, 
therefore, that there will now again be a reverse movement in the 
value ratio of the two, i.e. a fall in the value of gold as compared 
with that of silver. The discovery of silver mines depends on the 
advance of technology and civilisation in general. Given these, any 
changes in the discovery of rich silver or gold deposits become 
crucial. On the whole, we find a repetition of the same movement 
in the change of the value ratio between gold and silver. The first 
two movements begin with a relative depreciation of gold and end 
with its appreciation. The latter begins with its appreciation and 
seems to be heading towards a re-establishment of its original 
lower value ratio to silver. In ancient Asia, the ratio of gold to 
silver was 6:1 or 8:1 (under Manu’ it was even lower) (thus in 
China and Japan, the latter still existed in the early 19th century); 
10:1, the ratio in Xenophon’s time, can be regarded as the 
average ratio for the middle period of antiquity. In the late 
Roman period—the opening up of the Spanish silver mines by 
Carthage had roughly the same role to play in antiquity as the 
discovery of America had in the new period—the ratio is roughly 
the same as that after the discovery of America, i.e. 14 or 15:1, 
although in Rome we often find an even greater depreciation of 
silver. 

For the Middle Ages, the average ratio can once again be 
re-established as in Xenophon’s time, as 10:1, although that is the 
period in which local fluctuations are extremely great. The 

Chapter Two. Money 461 

average ratio in the centuries following upon the discovery of 
America is 15:1 or 18:1. The new discoveries of gold make it 
probable that the ratio will once again be reduced to 10:1 or 8:1, 
or that, at any rate, there will be a movement in the value ratio of 
the two metals in reverse to that since [B’-17] the 16th century. 
This is not yet the place for an examination of this special 
question in greater depth. 

5) THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LAW 
OF APPROPRIATION IN THE SIMPLE CIRCULATION 

The economic. relations of individuals who are subjects of 
exchange are to be considered here in the simple form in which 
they appear in the process of exchange described above, without 
recourse to more highly developed relations of production. 
Indeed, the economic determinations of form constitute the 
framework within which they enter into intercourse with each 
other (confront each other). 

“The worker has an exclusive right to the value resulting from his labour” 
(Cherbuliez, Richefsse] ou pauvre{té}], Paris, 1841, p. 48).# 

The subjects of the process of exchange appear above all as 
proprietors of commodities. Since on the basis of the simple 
circulation, there is, after all, only one method by means of which 
anyone becomes the proprietor of any commodity, namely, through 
a new equivalent, the property in the commodity preceding the 
exchange, i.e. the property in the commodity appropriated not 
through circulation, the property in the commodity which, on the 
contrary, is still to enter circulation, springs directly from the 
labour of its possessor, with labour as the original mode of 
appropriation. The commodity, as exchange value, is only a 
product [of labour], objectified labour. It is thereby above all the 
objectiveness of him whose labour is represented in it; his own 
objective being for others produced by himself. It is true that the 
production of commodities does not fall within the simple process 
of exchange as it unfolds at the various moments of circulation. 
Commodities are rather implied as finished use values. They must 
be to hand before the exchange begins, simultaneously as it 
happens in buying and selling, or at least as soon as the 
transaction is completed, as in the form of circulation in which 
money serves as means of payment. Whether simultaneously or 
not, they always enter into circulation as being to hand. The 

a Marx quotes in French.— Ed. 

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

origination of commodities, and so also the original process of their 
appropriation, lies, therefore, beyond circulation. But since the equiva- 
lent of another can be appropriated only through circulation, 1.e. 
through the alienation of one’s own equivalent, one’s own labour 
must be implied as the original process of appropriation, with 
circulation in effect merely as the mutual exchange of labour 
incarnated in diverse products. 

Labour and property in the results of one’s own labour appear, 
therefore, as the basic prerequisite without which the secondary 
appropriation through circulation would not take place. Within 
circulation, property based on one’s own labour is the basis for the 
appropriation of the labour of others. Indeed, a close look at the 
process of circulation shows that its premiss is that the exchangers 
should appear as the proprietors of the exchange values, i.e. of 
quantities of labour time materialised in use values. How they 
became the proprietors of these commodities is a process running 
behind the back of the simple circulation and ending before it 
begins. Private property is a premiss of circulation, but the process 
of appropriation itself is not revealed, does not appear within 
circulation; it is rather preposited to it. In circulation itself, in the 
process of exchange, as it emerges on the surface of the bourgeois 
society, each gives only while taking, and takes only while giving. 
In order to do the one or the other, he must have. The procedure 
through which he has placed himself in the position of having 
does not constitute any of the moments of circulation itself. The 
subjects are subjects of circulation only as private proprietors of 
exchange value, be it in the form of commodity or in the form of 
money. How they became private proprietors, i.e. how they 
appropriated objectified labour, is a circumstance which appears not 
to fall within the examination of the simple circulation at all. 
However, the commodity is, on the other hand, the premiss of 
circulation. And since from its standpoint, alien commodities, i.e. 
alien labour, can be appropriated only through the alienation of 
one’s own labour, the pre-circulation [B’-18] process of commodity 
appropriation necessarily appears from this standpoint as appropria- 
tion through labour. Since the commodity as exchange value is merely 
objectified labour, and from the standpoint of circulation, itself only 
the movement of exchange value, alien objectified labour can be 
appropriated only through an exchange of equivalent, the 
commodity can, in fact, be nothing but the objectification of one’s own 
labour, and just as the latter is, in fact, the actual process of 
appropriation of the products of Nature, it equally appears as the 
juridical title to property. Circulation merely shows how this 

Chapter Two. Money 463 

immediate appropriation, through the medium of a social opera- 
tion, transforms property in one’s own labour into property in social 
labour. 

That is why all modern economists have proclaimed, in a more 
economic or more juridical manner, one’s own labour to be the 
original title to property, and property in the result of one’s own 
labour, the basic premiss of the bourgeois society. (Cherbuliez: see above. 
See also A. Smith) This premiss itself rests on the premiss of 
exchange value as an economic relationship dominating the whole 
aggregation of relationships of production and commerce, and so is itself 
a historical product of the bourgeois society, the society of the 
developed exchange value. 

On the other hand, since the examination of the more concrete 
economic relationships than those represented by the simple 
circulation seems to bring out laws contradicting [the said law of 
appropriation], all the classical economists, including Ricardo, may 
like to allow this view, springing as it does from the bourgeois society 
itself, the right to be called a universal law, but banish its strict 
reality to the golden age when no property existed as yet. That is to 
say, to an age preceding the economic fall of man, as Boisguil- 
lebert, for example, does. 

That would produce the strange result that the truth about the bourgeois 
society’s law of appropriation would have to be transferred to a time 
when this society itself did not as yet exist, and the basic law of 
property, to the time of propertylessness. This illusion is 
transparent. Production initially rests on the primitive com- 
munities, within which private exchange appears only as a quite 
superficial and incidental exception. But with the historical 
disintegration of these communities, relations of domination and 
servitude, relations of violence at once set in, and they are in 
crying contradiction with the mild commodity circulation and its 
corresponding relations. However that may be, the process of 
circulation, as it appears on the surface of the society, knows no 
other way of appropriation, and if contradictions should arise in 
the progress of the examination, they must, like this law of the 
original appropriation through labour, be derived from the development of 
exchange value itself. 

The law of appropriation through one’s own labour being assumed, 
and it is an assumption that is not arbitrary, but one which springs 

* A. Smith.!0! 

a A. Smith, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, Vol. 1, 
pp. 60 and 61.— Ed. 

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

from the examination of circulation itself, there becomes apparent 
of itself, in circulation, a realm of bourgeois liberty and bourgeois 
equality based on this law. 

While the appropriation of commodities through one’s own 
labour presents itself as the first necessity, the social process 
through which this product must first be posited as an exchange 
value and as such once again transformed into a use value for 
individuals, is the second. After the appropriation through labour, 
or the objectification of labour, the alienation of the product of 
labour, or its transformation into a social form, appears as the next law. 
Circulation is a movement in which one’s own product is posited 
as exchange value (money), i.e. as a social product, and the social 
product, as one’s own (as individual use value, an object of 
individual consumption). 

It is now also clear that: 

Another premiss of exchange relating to the movement as a 
whole is that the subjects of exchange produce while being 
subsumed under the division of social labour. After all, the 
commodities exchanged for one another are, in fact, nothing but 
labour objectified in various use values, i.e. objectified in various 
ways, being in fact merely the objective being of the division of 
labour, objectification of qualitatively distinct types of labour 
corresponding to the different systems of wants. When I produce 
a commodity, the assumption is that though my product has use 
value, it has none for me, that for me it is not an immediate 
means of subsistence (in the broadest sense), but an immediate 
exchange value; it becomes a means of subsistence for me only 
after it assumes in money the form of universal social product and 
can then be realised in any form of alien, qualitatively distinct 
labour. Hence I produce for myself only by producing for the 
society, each of whose members, for his part, works for me in 
another circle. 

[B’-19] It is clear, furthermore, that the premiss about the 
exchangers producing exchange values implies not only a division 
of labour in general, but its specifically developed form. In Peru, 
for instance, labour was also divided; it was also divided in small 
SELF-Supporting * Indian communities. But it is a division of labour 
which, far from being based on exchange value, on the contrary, 
implies a more or less direct communal [gemeinschaftliche] 
production. The basic premiss about the subjects of circulation 

2 In the manuscript, the English word is given in brackets after the 
corresponding German (“selbstgentigsamen”’).— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 465 

having produced exchange values, products directly posited in the 
social determinateness of exchange value, and so also subsumed 
under a definite historically shaped division of labour, incorpo- 
rates a mass of other premisses which do not stem from the will of 
the individual or from his immediate natural character, but from 
the historical conditions and relations in virtue of which the 
individual already finds himself to be a social individual deter- 
mined by the society; this premiss also includes the relations 
manifested in the individuals’ relations of production other than 
the simple ones in which they confront one another in circulation. 

The exchanger has produced a commodity, and that for 
commodity producers. This implies: On the one hand, that he has 
produced as an independent private individual on his own 
initiative, only out of his own want and his own capability, out of 
himself and for himself —neither as a member of a naturally evolved 
community, nor as an individual taking part in production directly as 
a social individual—and accordingly he does not regard his product 
as an immediate source of existence. On the other hand, however, he 
has produced exchange value, a product which becomes a product for 
himself only through the medium of a determinate social process, a 
determinate metamorphosis. Consequently, he has produced in such 
a connection and under such conditions of production and relations 
of commerce which resulted only from an historical process but 
which appear for himself to be a natural necessity. The 
independence of individual production is, accordingly, sup- 
plemented with a social dependence that finds a corresponding 
expression in the division of labour. 

The private character of the production of the exchange-value- 
producing individual itself appears as an historical product— his 
isolation, his self-establishment as an independent point within the 
production is determined by a division of labour which, for its part, 
rests on a whole range of economic conditions through which the 
individual is conditioned on every side in his connections with 
other individuals and in his own mode of existence. 

In so far as the commodities an English farmer and a French 
peasant sell are products of the soil, they stand in the same 
economic relationship. But the peasant sells only the small surplus 
of his family’s product. He consumes the main part of it himself, 
and so regards the greater part of his product not as exchange 
value, but as use value, a direct means of subsistence. By contrast, 
the English farmer depends entirely on the sale of his product, i.e. 
on its being a commodity, and so on the social use value of his 
product. His production is, therefore, completely gripped and 

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

determined by exchange value. It is clear now what a supremely 
different development of the productive forces of labour and its 
division, what kind of different relations of individuals within 
production are required, for instance, to have corn produced as 
mere exchange value and so going entirely into circulation; what 
kind of economic processes are required to turn a French peasant 
into an English farmer. 

In his analysis of exchange value, Adam Smith still makes the 
mistake of accepting the undeveloped form of exchange value in 
which it still appears merely as a surplus over and above the use 
value turned out by the producer for his own subsistence, as its 
adequate form, whereas it is only a form of its historical 
manifestation within a system of production which it has not yet 
caught hold of as a universal form. But in the bourgeois society it 
has to be regarded as the dominant form under which any direct 
relationship of the producers to their products as use values disappears; 
all products present themselves as products for trade. ‘Take a worker at a 
modern factory, say, a cotton mill. If he has produced no 
exchange value, he has produced nothing at all, since he cannot 
put his finger on any single tangible use value, and say: this is my 
product. The more many-sided the system of social wants, and the 
more one-sided the individual’s production, i.e. the greater the 
development of the social division of labour, the more decisive the 
importance of the production of the product as exchange value, or 
the character of the product as exchange value. 

An analysis of the specific form of the division of labour, the 
conditions of production on which it is based, and the economic 
relationships of the members of the society to which these 
conditions of production are reduced, would show that the whole 
system of bourgeois production is the premiss for exchange value 
appearing on its surface as a mere point of departure, and the 
process of exchange, as it unfolds in the simple circulation, as a 
social exchange of matter, simple but encompassing both the whole of 
production and the whole of consumption. It would transpire, 
therefore, that already other, more complicated relations of 
production, more or less conflicting with the liberty and independ- 
ence of individuals, their economic relationships, are the premiss 
that, as free private producers in simple relations of purchase and sale, 
they should confront each other in the process of circulation and 
should figure as its independent subjects. But from the standpoint of 
the simple circulation, these relationships are obliterated. When consid- 
ering it itself, we find that the division of labour in fact appears in it 
only in the result (its premiss), that the subjects of exchange 

Chapter Two. Money 467 

produce different commodities meeting different wants, and that 
while each depends on the production of all, all depend on the 
production of each, reciprocally supplementing each other, so that 
the product of each single individual, to the extent of its value 
magnitude, is a means for participation in the product of social 
[B-20] production in genera] through the medium of the process 
of circulation. 

The product is exchange value, objectified general labour, al- 
though it is, in the immediate sense, the objectification of the 
independent private labour of the individual alone. 

That the commodity first has to be alienated, the coercion for 
the individual showing that his immediate product is no product 
for himself, but becomes such only in the social process of 
production and must assume this general and yet external form; 
that the produce of particular labour must assert itself socially as 
the objectification of general labour, assuming the form of a thing 
(money) which is exclusively assumed as the immediate objectifica- 
tion of general labour, and equally that through this very process 
this general social labour is posited as an external thing, as 
money—these determinations constitute the mainspring, the 
pulse-beat of circulation itself. The consequent social relations 
present themselves, for that reason, directly from an examination 
of the simple circulation, and do not lie behind it as economic 
relations enclosed in the division of labour. 

How does the individual certify his private labour as general 
labour, and its product, as general social product? Through the 
particular content of his labour, its particular use value, the object 
of another individual’s want, so that the latter gives up his own 
product for it as equivalent. //That this must assume the form of 
money is a point to be examined later to show that this 
transformation of commodity into money is itself an essential 
moment of the simple circulation.// Consequently, through his 
labour being a particularity in the totality of social labour, a 
particular complementary branch of it. As soon as labour possesses 
a content determined by social connection—and this is the 
material determinateness and premiss—it counts as general 
labour. The form of the generality of labour asserts itself through 
its reality as a member of the totality of labours, as a particular 
mode of the existence of social labour. 

The individuals confront each other only as proprietors of 
exchange values, as such individuals who have given themselves 
reified being for each other through their product, the commodi- 
ty. Without this objective mediation, they have no relation to each 

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

other from the standpoint of the social exchange of matter under 
way in circulation. They exist for each other only as things, 
something that is merely further developed in the money relation, 
in which their community itself appears as an external and hence a 
casual thing with respect to all. That the social connection resulting 
from the collision of independent individuals appears with respect to 
them simultaneously both as objective necessity and as external bond 
in effect expresses their independence for which social being, though a 
necessity, is no more than a means, and therefore appears to the 
individuals themselves as something external, and in money, even as a 
tangible thing. They produce in and for the society as social 
individuals, but at the same time this appears merely as a means for 
objectifying their individuality. Since, on the one hand, they are not 
subsumed under any naturally evolved community and, on the 
other, are not consciously communal individuals subsuming the 
community under themselves, this community must also exist as an 
independent, external, casual thing [ein ... Sachliches] with respect to 
them as independent subjects. That is precisely the condition for 
their simultaneously being in some social connection as independent 
private persons. 

Since, consequently, the division of labour //in which the social 
conditions of production under which the individuals produce 
exchange values can be summed up// in the simple process of 
exchange, in circulation, appears only as 1) non-production of 
immediate means of subsistence by the individual himself, by his 
direct labour; 2) as the being of general social labour as a naturally 
evolved totality fragmenting itself into a circle of particularities in 
such a way that the subjects of circulation possess complementary 
commodities and that each subject satisfies some aspect of the 
totality of an individual’s social wants, while the economic 
relationships stemming from this determinate division of labour 
are themselves obliterated, in our analysis of exchange value we 
have not gone on to analyse the division of labour, but merely 
accepted it as a fact identical with exchange value, a fact which, 
indeed, merely expresses in active form, as a particularisation of 
labour, that which the different use value of commodities—and 
without it neither exchange, nor exchange value would have 
existed —expresses in objective form. In effect, Adam Smith, like 
other economists before him, Petty, Boisguillebert, the Italians,’ 

3 Marx left a space here to insert the names of Italian economists later.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 469 

asserting the division of labour as being correlative with exchange 
value, was saying the same thing. And Steuart grasped, before all 
the others, the division of labour and the production of exchange 
values as being something identical and, in commendable distinc- 
tion from other economists, conceived it as a form of social 
production and social exchange of matter mediated by a specific 
historical process. 

What Adam Smith says about the productive power of the 
division of labour is an absolutely extraneous standpoint which has 
no relevance to the matter either here or in the place where he 
expressed it, and is, besides, relevant to a definite stage in the 
development of manufacture, but not at all to the modern factory 
system in general. 

The division of labour with which we are dealing here is a 
spontaneous and free division within the society taken as a whole, 
and manifesting itself as production of exchange values, and not 
the division of labour withm a factory—its resolution and 
combination in a single branch of production, but rather a social 
division of these branches of production themselves, arising, as it 
were, without the participation of individuals. The division of 
labour within the society would correspond to the principle of the 
division of labour [B’-21] within a factory perhaps in the Egyptian 
rather than in the modern system. The repulsion from each other 
of the various branches of social labour and their transformation 
into free ones, independent of each other and bound up in a 
totality and unity only through internal] necessity (and not as in 
that division, through a conscious resolution and _ conscious 
combination of the resolved parts) are totally different things 
determined by totally different laws of development, however 
great the correspondence between a given form of the one and a 
given form of the other may be. 

While Adam Smith may have less than adequately com- 
prehended the simple form of the division of labour in which it is 
only an active form of exchange value, and its other form in which 
it represents a definite productive power of labour, he was even 
less clear about the form in which the economic antagonisms of 
production—the qualitative social determinations subsumed under 
which the individuals confront each other as capitalist and 
wage worker, industrial capitalist and rentier, tenant farmer 
and ground-rent-collecting landlord, etc.—themselves appear as 
the economic forms of a determinate mode of the division of 
labour. 

If the individual produces his own immediate means of 

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

subsistence, as, for instance, it most often happens in countries 
where primitive agricultural relationships continue to exist, his 
production has no social character, and his labour is not social. If 
the individual produces as a private individual— so that this position 
of his is itself not in any sense a product of Nature but a refined result of 
a social process—the social character reveals itself in that in the 
content of his labour the individual is determined by the social 
connection and works only as its member, i. e. to satisfy the wants 
of all the others—so that social dependence exists for him—but 
he himself is engaged only in this or that labour of his choice; his 
particular relationship to particular [kinds of] labour is not socially 
determined; his choice is determined in a natural way in virtue of 
his natural capabilities, inclinations, natural conditions of produc- 
tion in which he finds himself, etc.; so that the particularisation of 
labour, its social fragmentation into a totality of all the particular 
branches in fact presents itself from the part of the individual in 
such a way that his own spiritual and natural particularity 
simultaneously assumes the form of a social particularity. From his 
own nature and its particular premisses springs for him the 
particularity of his labour—above all its objectification—which, 
however, [he] simultaneously regards as the assertion [Gel- 
tendmachung] of a particular system of wants and realisation of a 
particular branch of social activity. 

The division of labour so comprehended as social reproduction 
of the particular. individuality, which thereby simultaneously 
constitutes an element of mankind’s total development and 
simultaneously enables the individual, by means of his particular 
activity, to have gratification of the general production, the 
all-round social gratification, this concept, springing as it does 
from the standpoint of the simple circulation and so _ being 
confirmation instead of suspension of the freedom of the 
individuals, is still current in bourgeois political economy. 

This natural distinction between individuals and their wants is 
the motivation for their social integration as exchangers. D’abord 
they confront each other in the act of exchange as persons 
mutually recognising each other as proprietors, as persons whose 
will permeates their commodities, with the reciprocal appropria- 
tion through the reciprocal alienation taking place only according 
to their common will, i. e. essentially by means of contract. This 
includes the juridical concept of person and also of the freedom 
which it contains. That is why in Roman law, servus is correctly 
defined as one who cannot acquire through exchange. 

Furthermore, in the consciousness of the exchanging subjects all 

Chapter Two. Money 471 

of this presents itself in such a way that in the transaction each is 
only an end to himself; that each is only a means for the other; 
and finally, that the reciprocity in which each is simultaneously 
means and end, attaining his own end only by becoming means 
for the other, and means for the other only in so far as he attains 
his own end—that this reciprocity is a necessary ract implied as a 
natural condition of exchange but that as such it is indifferent to 
both subjects of the exchange and is of interest to either only in so 
far as it is his interest. This means that the common interest which 
appears as the content of the exchange act as a whole, while being 
present as a fact in the consciousness of both parties, is not as such 
the motivation, but exists, so to say, only behind the backs of the 
individual interests reflected in themselves. If he so wishes, the 
subject can, of course, have the uplifting sense that the satisfaction 
of his unconcerned individual interest is precisely the realisation of 
the sublated individual interest, of the general interest. From the 
act of exchange itself, each of the subjects returns upon himself as 
the ultimate end of the entire process, as the dominant subject. In 
this way, therefore, the subject’s complete freedom is realised. 
Voluntary transaction; no coercion on any part; becoming means 
for the other only as means for oneself or end for oneself; finally, 
the consciousness that the general or common interest is nothing 
but the all-sidedness of the egoistical interest. 

If, therefore, every aspect of circulation is a realisation of 
individual freedom, the circulation process considered as such, 
i. e. in the determinations of its economic form, constitutes the full 
realisation of social equality (for the relations of freedom have no 
direct bearing on the economic determinations of the form of 
exchange, but relate only to its juridical form, or to its content, to 
use values, or wants as such). Subjects of circulation are, as such, 
above all exchangers, and that each of them is posited in this 
determination, that is, in the same determination, in effect 
constitutes their social determination. They confront each other in 
fact only as subjectivised exchange values, i. e. as living equival- 
ents, as having the same value. As such, they are not only equal: 
there is even no [B’-1]} difference between them. They confront 
each other only as possessors of exchange values and as those in 
need of exchange, as agents of the same general indifferent social 
labour. Moreover, they exchange exchange values of equal 
magnitude, for it is presupposed that there is an exchange of 
equivalents. The equalness of that which each gives and takes is 
here an explicit moment of the process itself. In the same way that 
they confront each other as the subjects of exchange, so they 

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

certify themselves in the act of this exchange. As such it is merely 
this certification. They are posited as exchangers and so as equals, 
and their commodities (objects) as equivalents. They exchange 
their reified being only as equivalents. They themselves are of 
equal value and in the act of exchange identify themselves as 
being equivalent and indifferent with respect to each other. The 
equivalents are the objectification of one subject for the other; 
which means that they themselves are of equal value and identify 
themselves in the act of exchange as being equivalent and 
indifferent to each other. In the exchange, the subjects turn out to 
be of the same value to each other only through the equivalents 
and identify themselves as such by exchanging the objectification 
in which the one exists for the other. Since they exist for each 
other only as subjects of equivalence, they are simultaneously 
indifferent to each other as being of the same value. They are not 
concerned with their other differences. Their individual particu- 
larity does not enter into the process. The physical difference in 
the use value of their commodities is extinguished in the ideal 
being of commodity as price, and to the extent that this physical 
difference is the motivation for exchange, they are a reciprocal 
want for each other (each representing the want of the other), a 
want that can be satisfied only by the same quantum of labour 
time. This natural difference is the basis for their social equality 
and posits them as subjects of the exchange. If subject A had the 
same want as subject B, and if his commodity satisfied the same 
want as the commodity of subject B, there would be no relation 
between them in the sense of economic relations (from the 
standpoint of their production). The reciprocal satisfaction of their 
wants by means of the physical difference of their labour and their 
commodity makes their equality a relation filled with social 
content, and their particular labour a particular mode of the 
existence of social labour in general. 

Whenever money is involved, it is so remote from abolishing this 
relation of equality that it is, in fact, its real expression. Above all 
to the extent that money functions as the price-positing element, 
as measure, the function of money consists, also in form, in 
positing commodities as being qualitatively identical, in expressing 
their identical social substance in which there is only a quantitative 
difference. In circulation, the commodity of each then, in fact, 
appears as the same thing [as the commodity of the other] and is 
given the same social form of means of circulation in which any 
particularity of the product is extinguished and the proprietor of 
each commodity becomes the proprietor of the tangibly subjec- 

Chapter Two. Money 473 

ufied generally significant commodity. That money non let? 
applies here in the proper sense. Whether a thaler which one has 
in one’s hand has realised the price of manure or of silk is 
absolutely unnoticeable, and any individual difference has been 
extinguished in the hands of its possessor, since the thaler 
functions as thaler. Indeed, this extinction is all-sided, since all 
commodities are transformed into coin. At a definite moment, 
circulation posits each not only as being equal to the other, but 
also as the same, and its movement consists in each alternately 
taking the place of the other from the standpoint of the social 
function. It is true that in circulation the exchangers also confront 
each other qualitatively as buyer and seller, as commodity and 
money, but, first, they change places, and the process consists both 
in the establishment of inequality and in the transcendence of 
the inequality, so that the latter appears to be merely formal. The 
buyer becomes the seller, the seller becomes the buyer, and each 
can become buyer only as seller. The formal difference exists for 
all the subjects of circulation simultaneously in the form of the 
social metamorphoses through which they have to pass. Besides, 
the commodity, notionally as price, is as good money as the money 
confronting it. In money, when it itself circulates so that it appears 
now in the hands of the one, now of the other, and is indifferent 
to the place of its appearance, the equality is expressed materially, 
and the difference no more than formally. As far as the process of 
exchange is considered, each confronts the other as possessor of 
means of circulation, as money itself. The specific natural 
distinction which lies in the commodities is extinguished and keeps 
being extinguished through circulation. 

When we consider generally the social relation of individuals 
within their economic process, we simply have to keep to the form 
determinations of the process itself. But there is no other 
difference in circulation except that between commodity and 
money, and circulation is equally its ceaseless disappearance. 
Equality appears here as social product, just as generally exchange 
value is social being. 

Since money is only realisation of exchange value, and a 
developed exchange-value system, a money system, the money 
system can, in fact, be only the realisation of this system of 
‘equality and freedom. 

The use value of the commodity contains for the exchanger a 
particular, individual aspect of production (labour); but in his 

4 Does not smell (Vespasian).— Ed. 

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

commodity, as exchange value, all commodities similarly present 
themselves as objectification of the social homogeneous Jabour 
pure and simple, and their proprietors as equally estimable and 
equally worthy functionaries of the social process. 

[B”-2] It was earlier shown that as far as money appears in its 
third function, it sublates, as the general material for contracts, the 
universal means of payment, all specific differences between the 
performances and posits them equal. It makes all equal before 
money, but money is merely its own objectified social nexus. With 
money figuring as material for accumulation and hoarding, the 
equality may at first appear to be sublated since the possibility 
arises for one individual to enrich himself more, to acquire a 
greater title to general production than another. However, [in the 
simple circulation] no individual can extract money at the expense 
of another. He can take in the form of money only that which he 
gives in the form of commodity. The one enjoys the content of 
wealth, the other takes possession of its universal form. If one is 
impoverished and the other enriched, that is a matter of their good 
will, their thrift, industry, morality, and so on, and does not at all 
follow from the economic relations themselves, the relations of 
commerce, in which the individuals confront each other in 
circulation. Even inheritance and similar juridical relations which 
may extend the inequality arising in this way have no effect on 
social equality. If the initial position of individual A is not in 
contradiction with these, the contradiction cannot, of course, arise 
from individual A taking the place of individual B and 
perpetuating the initial position. On the contrary, here the social 
law acquires force beyond the bounds of the [individual’s] natural 
lifetime: there is a consolidation of this social law in contrast to the 
accidental working of Nature, whose influence as such would 
rather be abolition of the freedom of the individual. Besides, since 
in this relation the individual is merely the individualisation of 
money, he is as such as immortal as money itself. Finally, hoarding 
activity is a heroic, religious idiosyncrasy, a fanatical asceticism 
which is, of course, not inherited as blood is. Since only 
equivalents are exchanged, the heir must throw the money into 
circulation once again if he is to realise it as gratification. If he 
fails to do that, he will simply continue to be a useful member of 
the society, taking from it no more than he gives. But the nature 
of things is such, however, that extravagance, the “charming 

leveller”,* as Steuart calls it, once again evens out the inequality, so 

a J. Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, Vol. 1, Dublin, 1770, 
p. 367.— Ed. 

Chapter Two. Money 475 

that it itself puts in only a fleeting appearance. 

That is why the process of exchange of exchange values 
developed in circulation not only respects freedom and equality, 
but is also their real basis, while they are its products. As pure 
ideas, they are idealised expressions of its various moments; being 
developed in juridical, political and social relations, they are 
merely reproduced in other degrees. This has also been historical- 
ly confirmed. Not only was the trinity of property, freedom and 
equality first theoretically formulated on that basis by Italian, 
English and French economists of the 17th and 18th centuries. 
They were also first realised in the modern bourgeois society. The 
ancient world, for which exchange value did not serve as the basis 
of production and which, on the contrary, collapsed in conse- 
quence of its development, produced a freedom and equality of a 
totally opposite and essentially no more than local content. On the 
other hand, since moments of the simple circulation were 
developed in the ancient world, among the free, at any rate, it is 
also clear that the definitions of juridical person, the subject of the 
process of exchange, were developed in Rome, especially in 
imperial Rome, whose history is precisely the history of the 
disintegration of the communal system of antiquity, as also the 
essential definitions of the law of the bourgeois society which, 
however, was necessarily above all brought to the fore as the law 
of the emerging industrial society as against the Middle Ages. 

That is the origin of the error of the socialists, especially the 
French, who strive to prove that socialism is a realisation of 
bourgeois ideas, not discovered, but given historical currency by 
the French Revolution, and vainly try to demonstrate that 
exchange value originally (in time) or in its concept (in its adequate 
form) is a system of universal freedom and equality but perverted 
by money, capital, etc. Or they assert that up to now history has 
merely made unsuccessful attempts to put them through in a form 
corresponding to their true nature, and that now they, Proudhon, 
for instance, have discovered the panacea through which the true 
history of these relations is to be substituted for their perverted 
history. The system of exchange values, and the money system 
even more so, are, in fact, a system of freedom and equality. But 
the contradictions which appear in a deeper analysis are immanent 
contradictions, complications of that very property, freedom and 
equality which occasionally pass into their opposites. The hope, for 
instance, that exchange value should not develop from a form of 
commodity and money into a form of capital, or that labour 
producing exchange value should not develop into wage labour is 

17* 

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

as pious as it is stupid. What distinguishes these socialists from 
bourgeois apologists is, on the one hand, the sense of the 
contradictions of the system, and, on the other, the utopianism, 
the failure to understand the necessary distinction between the 
real and the ideal shape of the bourgeois society and the 
consequent desire to undertake the superfluous business of once 
again realising the ideal expression itself, the clarified and [B”-3] 
reflected image emitted by reality as such. 

Contrasted to this concept, on the other hand, is the trivial 
argument that the contradictions in this view resting on the 
examination of the simple circulation which arise as soon as we go 
on to more concrete stages of the production process, descending 
from the surface to its depths, are, in fact, a mere semblance. It 1s, 
in fact, asserted and argued with the aid of abstraction from the 
specific form of the more developed spheres of the social process 
of production, of the more developed economic relationships, that 
all the economic relationships are merely so many more names for 
the selfsame relationships of the simple exchange, commodity 
exchange, and the corresponding determinations of property, 
freedom and equality. From everyday experience, for instance, it 
is taken that, alongside money and commodities, exchange-value 
relationships also present themselves in the form of capital, 
interest, ground rent, wages, etc. Through the process of a very 
trivial abstraction, arbitrarily discarding now one, now the other 
aspect of the specific relationship, the latter is reduced to abstract 
determinations of the simple circulation, thereby proving that the 
economic relations in which individuals find themselves in those 
more developed spheres of the production process are merely 
relations of the simple circulation, etc. 

That is just how Mr. Bastiat has put together his economic 
theodicy, the Harmonies économiques. In contrast to the classical 
political economy of Steuart, Smith and Ricardo, who have the 
strength of mind relentlessly to depict production relationships in 
their pure form, this feeble high-flown rhetoric claims to be a step 
forward. However, Bastiat is not the inventor of this harmonious 
view, but has, on the contrary, borrowed it from the American 
Carey. 

Carey, for whose views the historical background was provided 
only by the New World, of which he is a member, in the highly 
voluminous works of his first period argued the existence of the 
economic “harmony” which is still everywhere a reduction [of all 
economic relations] to the abstract determinations of the simple 
process of exchange, by explaining everywhere the distortion of 

Chapter Two. Money 477 

these simple relationships by the intervention of the State, on the 
one hand, and England’s influence on the world market, on the 
other. The harmonies in themselves are there. But in the 
non-American countries they are distorted by the State, and in 
America itself, by the most developed form in which these 
relationships appear, their world-market reality, in the form of 
England.* Carey finds no other means of restoring them than 
ultimately to call for help from his denounced devil, the State, 
and to stand it as the guardian angel at the gates of the 
harmonious paradise, namely, protective tariffs. But since he is 
after all a researcher and not a writer of fiction, like Bastiat, in his 
latest work he is forced to go farther. America’s development 
over the past 18 years has dealt such a blow at his harmonious 
view that he now sees the distortion of the “natural” “harmonies”, 
to which he is still firmly attached, no longer in the external 
influence of the State, but in trade! A truly remarkable result this: 
to extol exchange value as the basis of harmonious production, 
and then to declare that the developed form of exchange, trade, 
abolishes this exchange value in its immanent laws! ** That is the 
desperate form in which Carey expresses his belated conclusion 
that the development of harmonious exchange value is dishar- 
monic. 

* It is harmonious, for instance, if, within a country, patriarchal production 
gives way to industrial production, and the process of dissolution accompanying 
this development is conceived only in its positive aspect. But it becomes 
disharmonious, if England’s large-scale industry puts a terrible end to the 
patriarchal or petty-bourgeois forms of another country’s national production. The 
concentration of capital within a country and the dissolving effect of this 
concentration present themselves to him only in their positive aspect. But the effect 
of the concentrated English capital on other national capitals, which he exposes as 
England’s monopoly, is disharmony itself. 

** Carey is, in fact, America’s only original economist, and what makes his works 
so important is that the bourgeois society in its freest and broadest reality always 
provides them with their material foundation. In abstract form, he describes the 
breadth of American [economic] conditions and contrasts them with those of the 
Old World. Bastiat’s only real background is the pettiness of French economic 
conditions, whose long ears keep sticking out from his harmonies, and in contrast 
to these, he formulates the idealised English and American production relation- 
ships as “the demands of practical reason”.!03 That is why Carey is rich in 
independent, so to say, bona fide studies of specific economic questions. Wherever 
Bastiat pretends, by way of exception, to descend from his glib and coquettish 
platitudes to an examination of real categories (for instance, in ground rent) there 
he simply rewrites Carey. So while the latter combats mainly the objections to his 
harmonious view, objections in the form in which they have been developed by the 
English classical economists themselves, Bastiat skirmishes with the socialists. 
Carey’s more profound view finds in political economy itself the contradiction 

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