covery only for those who, when they analyse it, start from its fully developed shape. The act of exchange gives to the commodity converted into money, not its value, but its specific value-form. By confounding these two distinct things some writers have been led to hold that the value of gold and silver is imaginary.[1] The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol. Nevertheless under this error lurked a presentiment that the money-form of an object is not an inseparable part of that object, but is simply the form under which certain social relations manifest themselves. In this sense every commodity is a symbol, since, in so far as it is value, it is only the material envelope of the human labour spent upon it.[2] But if it be declared that the social characters assumed by objects, or the material forms assumed by the social qualities of labour under the regime of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same breath also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned by the so-called universal consent of mankind. This
- ↑ "L'oro e l'argento hanno valore come metalli anteriore all' esser moneta." (Galiani, l. c.). Locke says, "The universal consent of mankind gave to silver, on account of its qualities which made it suitable for money, an imaginary value." Law, on the other hand, "How could different nations give an imaginary value to any single thing … or how could this imaginary value have maintained itself?" But the following shows how little he himself understood about the matter: "Silver was exchanged in proportion to the value in use it possessed, consequently in proportion to its real value. By its adoption as money it received an additional value (une valeur additionelle)" (Jean Law: "Considérations sur le numéraire et le commerce" in E. Daire's Edit. of "Economistes Financiers du XVIII. siècle.," p. 470).
- ↑ "L'Argent en (des denrées) est le signe." (V. de Forbonnais: "Eléments du Commerce, Nouv. Edit. Leyde, 1776," t. II., p. 143.) "Comme signe il est attiré par les denrées." (l. c., p. 155). "L'argent est un signe d'une chose et la représente." (Montesquieu: "Esprít des Lois," Oeuvres, Lond. 1767, t. II., p. 2.) "L'argent n'est pas simple signe, car il est lui-même richesse; il ne reprêsente pas les valeurs, il les équivaut." (Le Trosne, l. c., p. 910.) "The notion of value contemplates the valuable article as a mere symbol; the article counts not for what it is, but for what it is worth." (Hegel, l. c., p. 100.) Lawyers started long before economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely imaginary. This they did in the sycophantic service of the crowned heads, supporting the right of the latter to debase the coinage, during the whole of the middle ages, by the traditions of the Roman Empire and the conceptions of money to be found in the Pandects. "Qu' aucun puisse ni doive faire doute," says an apt scholar of theirs, Philip of Valois, in a decree of 1346, "que à nous et à notre majesté royale n' appartiennent seulement … le
Treatise concerning the East India Trade being a most profitable Trade." London, 1680, Reprint 1696, p. 4.)
