Marx’s comments on James Mill's book

terms, the greater the inverse relationship of its value as money to the

exchange-value or money value of the material in which it exists.

Hence paper money and the whole number of paper representatives of

money (such as bills of exchange, mandates, promissory notes, etc.)

are the more perfect mode of existence of money as money and a

necessary factor in the progressive development of the money system.

In the credit system, of which banking is the perfect expression, it

appears as if the power of the alien, material force were broken, the

relationship of self-estrangement abolished and man had once more

human relations to man. The Saint-Simonists, deceived by this

appearance, regarded the development of money, bills of exchange,

paper money, paper representatives of money, credit, banking, as a

gradual abolition of the separation of man from things, of capital from

labour, of private property from money and of money from man, and

of the separation of man from man. An organised banking system is

therefore their ideal. But this abolition of estrangement, this return of

man to himself and therefore to other men is only an appearance; the

self-estrangement, the dehumanisation, is all the more infamous and

extreme because its element is no longer commodity, metal, paper, but

man's moral existence, man's social existence, the inmost depths of

his heart, and because under the appearance of man's trust in man it is

the height of distrust and complete estrangement. What constitutes the

essence of credit? We leave entirely out of account here the content of

credit, which is again money. We leave out of account, therefore, the

content of this trust in accordance with which a man recognises

another man by advancing him a certain quantity of value and -- at

best, namely, when he does not demand payment for the credit, i.e., he

is not a usurer showing his trust in his fellow man not being a

swindler, but a "good" man. By a "good" man, the one who bestows

his trust understands, like Shylock, a man who is "able to pay".

 Credit is conceivable in two relationships and under two different

conditions. The two relationships are: first, a rich man gives credit to a

poor man whom he considers industrious and decent. This kind of

credit belongs to the romantic, sentimental part of political economy,

to its aberrations, excesses, exceptions, not to the rule. But even

assuming this exception and granting this romantic possibility, the life

of the poor man and his talents and activity serve the rich man as a

guarantee of the repayment of the money lent. That means, therefore,

that all the social virtues of the poor man, the content of his vital

activity, his existence itself, represent for the rich man the

reimbursement of his capital with the customary interest. Hence the

death of the poor man is the worst eventuality for the creditor. It is the

death of his capital together with the interest. One ought to consider

how vile it is to estimate the value of a man in money, as happens in

the credit relationship. As a matter of course, the creditor possesses,

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besides moral guarantees, also the guarantee of legal compulsion and

still other more or less real guarantees for his man. If the man to

whom credit is given is himself a man of means, credit becomes

merely a medium facilitating exchange, that is to say, money itself is

raised to a completely ideal form. Credit is the economic judgment on

the morality of a man. In credit, the man himself, instead of metal or

paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as a man,

but as the mode of existence of capital and interest. The medium of

exchange, therefore, has certainly returned out of its material form and

been put back in man, but only because the man himself has been put

outside himself and has himself assumed a material form. Within the

credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man,

but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated

in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both

an object of commerce and the material in which money exists.

Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existence, my flesh

and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the

material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer

resolves the value of money into money but into human flesh and the

human heart. Such is the extent to which all progress and all

inconsistencies within a false system are extreme retrogression and

the extreme consequence of vileness.

 Within the credit system, its nature, estranged from man, under the

appearance of an extreme economic appreciation of man, operates in a

double way:

 1) The antithesis between capitalist and worker, between big and

small capitalists, becomes still greater since credit is given only to him

who already has, and is a new opportunity of accumulation for the

rich man, or since the poor man finds that the arbitrary discretion of

the rich man and the latter's judgment over him confirm or deny his

entire existence and that his existence is wholly dependent on this

contingency.

 2) Mutual dissimulation, hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness are carried

to extreme lengths, so that on the man without credit is pronounced

not only the simple judgment that he is poor, but in addition a

pejorative moral judgment that he possesses no trust, no recognition,

and therefore is a social pariah, a bad man, and in addition to his

privation, the poor man undergoes this humiliation and the

humiliating necessity of having to ask the rich man for credit.

 3) Since, owing to this completely nominal existence of money,

counterfeiting cannot be undertaken by man in any other material than

his own person, he has to make himself into counterfeit coin, obtain

credit by stealth, by lying, etc., and this credit relationship -- both on

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