difficulties, for which money is a cunningly devised expedient. Arguing from this perfectly superficial view, an ingenious English economist has rightly maintained that money is merely a material instrument like a ship or a steam-engine, but not an expression of a social relation in the field of production and consequently not an economic category; and that it is, therefore, wrong to treat the subject in political economy, which really has nothing in common with technology.[1]
The world of commodities implies the existence of a highly developed division of labor; this division is manifested directly in the great variety of use-values, which confront each other as particular commodities and which embody as many different kinds of labor. The division of labor embracing all the particular kinds of productive occupations, is the complete expression of social labor in its material aspect viewed as labor creating use-values. But from the standpoint of commodities and within the process of exchange, it exists only in its results, in the variety of the commodities themselves.
The exchange of commodities constitutes the social metabolic process, i. e. the process in which the exchange of the special products of private individuals is the re-
- ↑ "Money is, in fact, only the instrument for carrying on buying and selling (but, if you please, what do you understand by buying and selling?) and the consideration of it no more forms a part of the science of political economy, than the consideration of ships, or steam engines, or of any other instrument employed to facilitate the production and distribution of wealth." Th. Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, etc. London, 1827, p. 178, 179.
