treat labor-time as the measure of value of commodities, and at the same time confound labor embodied in the exchange value of commodities and measured by time, with the direct natural activity of individuals.
The first sensible analysis of exchange value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New World where the bourgeois relations of production imported together with their representatives sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its lack of historical traditions with a surplus of humus. That man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern political economy[1] in his first work which he wrote when a mere youth and published in 1721.
He declares it necessary to look for another measure of value than precious metals. That measure is labor. "By labor may the value of silver be measured as well as other things. As, suppose one man employed to raise corn, while another is digging and refining silver; at the year's end, or at any other period of time, the complete produce of corn, and that of silver, are the natural price of each other; and if one be twenty bushels, and the other twenty ounces, then an ounce of that silver is worth the labor of raising a bushel of that corn. Now if by the discovery of some nearer, more easy or plentiful mines, a man may get forty ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did twenty, and the same labor is still re-
- ↑ "Benjamin Franklin, The Works of, etc.," ed. by I. Sparks, vol. II., Boston, 1836. "A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency."
