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
meia@marx.org
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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