They quite correctly stated that the vocation of bourgeois society was the making of money,and hence,from the standpoint of simple commodity production,the formation of permanent hoards which neither moths nor rust could destroy.It is no refutation of the Monetary System to point out that a ton of iron whose price is ?3has the same value as ?3in gold.The point at issue is not the magnitude of the exchange-value,but its adequate form.With regard to the special attention paid by the Monetary and Mercantile systems to international trade and to individual branches of national labour that lead directly to international trade,which are regarded by them as the only real source of wealth or of money,one has to remember that in those times national production was for the most part still carried on within the framework of feudal forms and served as the immediate source of subsistence for the producers themselves.Most products did not become commodities;they were accordingly neither converted into money nor entered at all into the general process of the social metabolism;hence they did not appear as materialisation of universal abstract labour and did not indeed constitute bourgeois wealth.Money as the end and object of circulation represents exchange-value or abstract wealth,not any physical element of wealth,as the determining purpose and driving motive of production.
It was consistent with the rudimentary stage of bourgeois production that those misunderstood prophets should have clung to the solid,palpable and glittering form of exchange-value,to exchange-value in the form of the universal commodity as distinct from all particular commodities.The sphere of commodity circulation was the strictly bourgeois economic sphere at that time.They therefore analysed the whole complex process of bourgeois production from the standpoint of that basic sphere and confused money with capital.The unceasing fight of modern economists against the Monetary and Mercantile systems is mainly provoked by the fact that the secret of bourgeois production,i.e.,that it is dominated by exchange-value,is divulged in a naively brutal way by these systems.Although drawing the wrong conclusions from it,Ricardo observes somewhere that,even during a famine,corn is imported because the corn-merchant thereby makes money,and not because the nation is starving.Political economy errs in its critique of the Monetary and Mercantile systems when it assails them as mere illusions,as utterly wrong theories,and fails to notice that they contain in a primitive form its own basic presuppositions.These systems,moreover,remain not only historically valid but retain their full validity within certain spheres of the modern economy.At every stage of the bourgeois process of production when wealth assumes the elementary form of commodities,exchange-value assumes the elementary form of money,and in all phases of the productive process wealth for an instant reverts again to the universal elementary form of commodities.The functions of gold and silver as money,in contradistinction to their functions as means of circulation and in contrast with all other commodities,are not abolished even in the most advanced bourgeois economy,but merely restricted;the Monetary and Mercantile systems accordingly remain valid.The catholic fact that gold and silver as the direct embodiment of social labour,and therefore as the expression of abstract wealth,confront other profane commodities,has of course violated the protestant code of honour of bourgeois economists,and from fear of the prejudices of the Monetary System,they lost for some time any sense of discrimination towards the phenomena of money circulation,as the following account will show.
It was quite natural that,by contrast with the Monetary and Mercantile systems,which knew money only as a crystalline product of circulation,classical political economy in the first instance should have understood the fluid form of money,that is the form of exchange-value which arises and vanishes within the metamorphosis of commodities.Because commodity circulation is looked at exclusively in the form C --M --C,and this in its turn solely as the dynamic unity of sale and purchase,the specific aspect of money as means of circulation is upheld against its specific aspect as money.If the function of means of circulation in serving as coin is isolated,then,as we have seen,it becomes a value-token.But since classical political economy was at first confronted with metallic currency as the predominant form of currency,it regarded metallic money as coin,and coin as a mere token of value.In accordance with the law relating to the circulation of value-tokens,the proposition is then advanced that the prices of commodities depend on the volume of money in circulation,and not that the volume of money in circulation depends on the prices of commodities.This view is more or less clearly outlined by Italian economists of the seventeenth century;it is sometimes accepted,sometimes repudiated by Locke ,and firmly set forth in the Spectator (in the issue of October 19,1711)as well as in the works of Montesquieu and Hume .Since Hume is by far the most important exponent of this theory in the eighteenth century,we shall begin our survey with him.
