or,shall we resort to the natural standard of value,labour,and thereby set our productive resources free?"Since labour-time is the intrinsic measure of value,why use another extraneous standard as well?Why is exchange-value transformed into price?
Why is the value of all commodities computed in terms of an exclusive commodity,which thus becomes the adequate expression of exchange-value,i.e.,money?
This was the problem which Gray had to solve.But instead of solving it,he assumed that commodities could be directly compared with one another as products of social labour.But they are only comparable as the things they are.Commodities are the direct products of isolated independent individual kinds of labour,and through their alienation in the course of individual exchange they must prove that they are general social labour,in other words,on the basis of commodity production,labour becomes social labour only as a result of the universal alienation of individual kinds of labour.But as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is immediately social labour-time,he presupposes that it is communal labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals.In that case,it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity,such as gold or silver,to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price;but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity,and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished.But this is by no means what Gray had in mind --goods are to be produced as commodities but not exchanged as commodities .Gray entrusts the realisation of this pious wish to a national bank.On the one hand,society in the shape of the bank makes the individuals independent of the conditions of private exchange,and,on the other hand,it causes them to continue to produce on the basis of private exchange.Although Gray merely wants "to reform"the money evolved by commodity exchange,he is compelled by the intrinsic logic of the subject-matter to repudiate one condition of bourgeois production after another.Thus he turns capital into national capital,[10]and land into national property [11]and if his bank is examined carefully it will be seen that it not only receives commodities with one hand and issues certificates for labour supplied with the other,but that it directs production itself.In his last work,Lectures on Money ,in which Gray seeks timidly to present his labour money as a purely bourgeois reform,he gets tangled up in even more flagrant absurdities.
Every commodity is immediately money;this is Gray's thesis which he derives from his incomplete and hence incorrect analysis of commodities.
The "organic"project of "labour money"and "national bank"and "warehouses"is merely a fantasy in which a dogma is made to appear as a law of universal validity.The dogma that a commodity is immediately money or that the particular labour of a private individual contained in it is immediately social labour,does not of course become true because a bank believes in it and conducts its operations in accordance with this dogma.
On the contrary,bankruptcy would in such a case fulfil the function of practical criticism.The fact that labour money is a pseudo-economic term,which denotes the pious wish to get rid of money,and together with money to get rid of exchange-value,and with exchange-value to get rid of commodities,and with commodities to get rid of the bourgeois mode of production,--this fact,which remains concealed in Gray's work and of which Gray himself was not aware,has been bluntly expressed by several British socialists,some of whom wrote earlier than Gray and others later.[12]But it was left to M.Proudhon and his school to declare seriously that the degradation of money and the exaltation of commodities was the essence of socialism and thereby to reduce socialism to an elementary misunderstanding of the inevitable correlation existing between commodities and money.[13]
FOOTNOTES
1.Locke says inter alia:"...call that a Crown now,which before ...was but a part of a Crown ...wherein an equal quantity of Silver is always the same Value with an equal quantity of Silver....For if the abating 1/20of the quantity of Silver of any Coin does not lessen its Value,the abating 19/20of the quantity of the Silver of any Coin will not abate its Value.And so ...a single Penny,being called a Crown,will buy as much Spice,or Silk,or any other Commodity,as a Crown-Piece,which contains [20or]60times as much Silver."All you can do is to raise "your Money,...giving a less quantity of Silver the Stamp and Denomination of a greater",but "'tis Silver and not Names that pay Debts and purchase Commodities".
