Marx’s comments on James Mill's book

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MARX'S

NOTEBOOK COMMENTS

ON JAMES MILL,

ÉLÉMENTS D'ÉCONOMIE POLITIQUE

[From a translation of Mill's book, by J. T. Parisot, Paris, 1823]

by

KARL MARX

Written in the first half of 1844

Full text of conspectus first published in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe,

Erste Abteilung, Band 3, Berlin, 1932.

English translation Clemens Dutt for the Collected Works

Transcribed for the Internet by 

[e-mail]

Marx kept a wide variety of notebooks throughout his life. He often

used them to aid in his study of other authors. A common practice was

to transcribe long sections from a particular book, and then comment

on those sections at some length.

 During his time in Paris, Marx kept nine notebooks -- largely

dedicated to his growing interest in economics. They date from the

end of 1843 to January 1845.

 The "Paris Notebooks" deal with books by J. B. Say, Adam Smith,

David Ricardo, McCulloch, James Mill, Destott de Tracy, Sismondi,

Jeremy Bentham, Boisguillebert, Lauderdale, Schütz, List, Skarbek

and Buret. Most of Marx’s accompanying commentary on these

authors is very fragmentary; and, ideas are often restated far more

clearly in the 

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

 (1844).

 The exception to this is the material addressing James Mill’s book,

Elements of Political Economy (London, 1821). Marx used an 1823

French translation of the English author’s tome. The Mill part of the

Paris Notebooks is quite lengthy -- it starts on page 25 of the fourth

notebook and continues into the fifth.

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 Following a lengthy selection of Mill excerpts, Marx suddenly

"veered off" and began developing a larger, tangential thought. After

writing his thoughts out, Marx returned to more Mill transcription.

Soon, a second digression followed. Upon its completion, Marx

finished up his summarizing. (Only the middle three parts of this Mill

section of the Paris Notebooks are presented below -- in other words,

most of the opening and all of closing Mill transcriptions are omitted).

 This document is very close in nature to the Economic and

Philosophic Manuscripts. Some have suggested that the ideas

contained herein might be a glimpse into the missing bulk of the EPM

second manuscript.

 

"... A medium of exchange... is some one commodity, which, in

order to effect an exchange between two other commodities, is

first received in exchange for the one, and is then given in

exchange for the other." (P. 93) Gold, silver, money.

 "By value of money, is here to be understood the proportion in

which it exchanges for other commodities, or the quantity of it

which exchanges for a certain quantity of other things." 

"This proportion is determined by the total amount of money

existing in a given country." (P. 95)

 "What regulates the quantity of money?"

 "Money is made under two sets of circumstances: Government

either leaves the increase or diminution of it free; or it controls

the quantity, making it greater or smaller as it pleases.

 "When the increase or diminution of money is left free,

government opens the mint to the public, making bullion into

money for an many as require it. Individuals possessed of

bullion will desire to convert it into money only when it is their

interest to do so; that is, when their bullion, converted into

money, will be more valuable than in its original form. This can

only happen when money is peculiarly valuable, and when the

same quantity of metal, in the state of coin, will exchange for a

greater quantity of other articles than in the state of bullion. As

the value of money depends upon the quantity of it, it has a

greater value when it is in short supply. It is then that bullion is

made into coin. But precisely because of this conversion, the

old ratio is restored. Therefore, if the value of money rises

above that of the metal of which it is made, the interest of

individuals operates immediately, in a state of freedom, to

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restore the balance by augmenting the quantity of money." (Pp.

99-101)

 "Whenever the coining of money, therefore, is free, its quantity

is regulated by the value of the metal, it being the interest of

individuals to increase or diminish the quantity, in proportion as

the value of the metal in coins is greater or less than its value in

bullion.

 "But is the quantity of money is determined by the value of the

metal, it is still necessary to inquire what it is which determines

the value of the metal…. Gold and silver are in reality

commodities. They are commodities for the attaining of which

labour and capital must be employed. It is cost of production,

therefore, which determines the value of these, as of other

ordinary productions." (P. 101)

 

I

n the compensation of money and value of metal, as in his

description of the cost of production as the only factor in determining

value, Mill commits the mistake -- like the school of Ricardo in

general -- of stating the abstract law without the change or continual

supersession of this law through which alone it comes into being. If it

is a constant law that, for example, the cost of production in the last

instance -- or rather when demand and supply are in equilibrium

which occurs sporadically, fortuitously -- determines the price (value),

it is just as much a constant law that they are not in equilibrium, and

that therefore value and cost of production stand in no necessary

relationship. Indeed, there is always only a momentary equilibrium of

demand and supply owing to the previous fluctuation of demand and

supply, owing to the disproportion between cost of production and

exchange-value, just as this fluctuation and this disproportion likewise

again follow the momentary state of equilibrium. This real movement,

of which that law is only an abstract, fortuitous and one-sided factor,

is made by recent political economy into something accidental and

inessential. Why? Because in the acute and precise formulas to which

they reduce political economy, the basic formula, if they wished to

express that movement abstractly, would have to be: In political

economy, law is determined by its opposite, absence of law. The true

law of political economy is chance, from whose movement we, the

scientific men, isolate certain factors arbitrarily in the form of laws.

 Mill very well expresses the essence of the matter in the form of a

concept by characterising money as the medium of exchange. The

essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in

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