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performance of their peculiar functions.
65
Whenever these hoards are strikingly above their
average level, it is,
with some exceptions, an indication of stagnation in the circulation of
commodities, of an interruption in the even flow of their metamorphoses.
66
1
The question — Why does not money directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may
represent, for instance, x hours’ labour, is at bottom the same as the question why, given the
production of commodities, must products take the form of commodities? This is evident, since their
taking the form of commodities implies their differentiation into commodities and money. Or, why
cannot private labour — labour for the account of private individuals — be treated as its opposite,
immediate social labour? I have elsewhere examined thoroughly the Utopian idea of “labour-money”
in a society founded on the production of commodities (l. c., p. 61, seq.). On this point I will only say
further, that Owen’s “labour-money,” for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre.
Owen pre-supposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with
the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the
individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined
for consumption. But it never enters into Owen’s head to pre-suppose the production of commodities,
and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary conditions of that
production.
2
Savages and half-civilised races use the tongue differently. Captain Parry says of the inhabitants on
the west coast of Baffin’s Bay: “In this case (he refers to barter) they licked it (the thing represented to
them) twice to their tongues, after which they seemed to consider the bargain satisfactorily
concluded.” In the same way, the Eastern Esquimaux licked the articles they received in exchange. If
the tongue is thus used in the North as the organ of appropriation, no wonder that, in the South, the
stomach serves as the organ of accumulated property, and that a Kaffir estimates the wealth of a man
by the size of his belly. That the Kaffirs know what they are about is shown by the following: at the
same time that the official British Health Report of 1864 disclosed the deficiency of fat-forming food
among a large part of the working-class, a certain Dr. Harvey (not, however, the celebrated discoverer
of the circulation of the blood), made a good thing by advertising recipes for reducing the superfluous
fat of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
3
See Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c.” “Theorien von der Masseinheit des Geldes,” p. 53, seq.
4
“Wherever gold and silver have by law been made to perform the function of money or of a measure
of value side by side, it has always been tried, but in vain, to treat them as one and the same material.
To assume that there is an invariable ratio between the quantities of gold and silver in which a given
quantity of labour-time is incorporated, is to assume in fact, that gold and silver are of one and the
same material, and that a given mass of the less valuable metal, silver, is a constant fraction of a given
mass of gold. From the reign of Edward III. to the time of George II., the history of money in England
consists of one long series of perturbations caused by the clashing of the legally fixed ratio between
the values of gold and silver, with the fluctuations in their real values. At one time gold was too high,
at another, silver. The metal that for the time being was estimated below its value, was withdrawn
from circulation, mated and exported. The ratio between the two metals was then again altered by law,
but the new nominal ratio soon came into conflict again with the real one. In our own times, the slight
and transient fall in the value of gold compared with silver, which was a consequence of the Indo-
Chinese demand for silver, produced on a far more extended scale in France the same phenomena,
export of silver, and its expulsion from circulation by gold. During the years 1855, 1856 and 1857, the
excess in France of gold-imports over gold-exports amounted to £41,580,000, while the excess of
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silver-exports over silver-imports was £14,704,000. In fact, in those countries in which both metals
are legally measures of value, and therefore both legal tender, so that everyone has the option of
paying in either metal, the metal that rises in value is at a premium, and, like every other commodity,
measures its price in the over-estimated metal which alone serves in reality as the standard of value.
The result of all experience and history with regard to this equation is simply that, where two
commodities perform by law the functions of a measure of value, in practice one alone maintains that
position.” (Karl Marx, l.c., pp. 52, 53.)
5
The peculiar circumstance, that while the ounce of gold serves in England as the unit of the standard
of money, the pound sterling does not form an aliquot part of it, has been explained as follows: “Our
coinage was originally adapted to the employment of silver only, hence, an ounce of silver can always
be divided into a certain adequate number of pieces of coin, but as gold was introduced at a later
period into a coinage adapted only to silver, an ounce of gold cannot be coined into an aliquot number
of pieces.” Maclaren, “A Sketch of the History of the Currency.” London, 1858, p. 16.
6
With English writers the confusion between measure of value and standard of price (standard of
value) is indescribable. Their functions, as well as their names, are constantly interchanged.
7
Moreover, it has not general historical validity.
8
It is thus that the pound sterling in English denotes less than one-third of its original weight; the
pound Scot, before the union, only 1-36th; the French livre, 1-74th; the Spanish maravedi, less than 1-
1,000th; and the Portuguese rei a still smaller fraction.
9
“Le monete le quali oggi sono ideal, sono le piû antiche d’ogni nazione, e tutte furono un tempo real,
e perche erano reali con esse si contava” [“The coins which today are ideal are the oldest coins of
every nation, and all of them were once real, and precisely because they were real they were used for
calculation”] (Galiani: Della moneta, l.c., p. 153.)
10
David Urquhart remarks in his “Familiar Words” on the monstrosity (!) that now-a-days a pound
(sterling), which is the unit of the English standard of money, is equal to
about a quarter of an ounce
of gold. “This is falsifying a measure, not establishing a standard.” He sees in this “false
denomination” of the weight of gold, as in everything else, the falsifying hand of civilisation.
11
When Anacharsis was asked for what purposes the Greeks used money, he replied, “For reckoning.”
(Ashen. Deipn. 1. iv. 49 v. 2. ed. Schweighauser, 1802.)
12
“Owing to the fact that money, when serving as the standard of price, appears under the same
reckoning names as do the prices of commodities, and that therefore the sum of £3 17s. 10 1/2d. may
signify on the one hand an ounce weight of gold, and on the other, the value of a ton of iron, this
reckoning name of money has been called its mint-price. Hence there sprang up the extraordinary
notion, that the value of gold is estimated in its own material, and that, in contradistinction to all other
commodities, its price is fixed by the State. It was erroneously thought that the giving of reckoning
names to definite weights of gold, is the same thing as fixing the value of those weights.” (Karl Marx,
l.c., p. 52.)
13
See “Theorien von der Masseinheit des Geldes” in “Zur Kritik der Pol Oekon. &c.,” p. 53, seq. The
fantastic notions about raising or lowering the mint-price of money by transferring to greater or
smaller weights of gold or silver, the names already legally appropriated to fixed weights of those
metals; such notions, at least in those cases in which they aim, not at clumsy financial operations
against creditors, both public and private but at economic quack remedies, have been so exhaustively
treated by Wm. Petty in his “Quantulumcunque concerning money: To the Lord Marquis of Halifax,
1682,” that even his immediate followers, Sir Dudley North and John Locke, not to mention later
ones, could only dilute him. “If the wealth of a nation” he remarks, “could be decupled by a