an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economical and moral order of things.[1] Modern society, which soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[2] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.
A commodity, in its capacity of a use-value, satisfies a particular want, and is a particular element of material wealth. But the value of a commodity measures the degree of its attraction for all other elements of material wealth, and therefore measures the social wealth of its owner. To a barbarian owner of commodities, and even to a West-European peasant, value is the same as value-form, and therefore, to him the increase in his hoard of gold and silver is an increase in value. It is true that the value of money varies, at one time in consequence of a variation in its own value, at another, in consequence of a change in the value of commodities. But this, on the one hand, does not prevent 200 ounces of gold from still containing more value than 100 ounces, nor, on the other hand, does it hinder the actual metallic form of this article from continuing to be the universal equivalent form of all other commodities, and the immediate social incarnation of all human labour. The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. In its qualitative aspect, or formally considered, money has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and therefore, as a
- ↑ "Οὐδὲν γὰρ άνθρώποἰσιν οῐον ᾰργυρος
Κακόν νόμιδμα ἕβαστε τοῦτο καί πόλεις
Πορθεῖ, τόδ᾽ ᾰνδορας ἐξανίστησίν δόμων.
Τόδ᾽ ἐκδιδάσκει καὶ παραλλάσσει φρἐνας
Χρησὰς πρὸς αίσχρὰ ὰνθρώποις ἒχειν
Καὶ παντὸς ἕργυν δυσσέβειαν εἰδέναι.
(Sophocles, Antigone.) - ↑ "Έλπίζούσης τῆς πλεονεξίας ἀνάξειν ἐκ τῶν μυχῶν τῆς τῆς αὐτὸν τὸν Πλούτωνα." (Athen. Deipnos.)
