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nydus/A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyPublic

This work presents Karl Marx’s initial installment of a projected treatise on political economy, later incorporated into the broader scope of Capital. It provides a detailed analysis of money and the history of value theories, while also featuring the foundational formulation of the author’s materialistic interpretation of history.

Page 122 of 331
Table of Contents

CHAPTER II.

country the function of a measure of value and therefore of money, different commodities can serve as coin side by side with gold. These subsidiary mediums of circulation, such as silver or copper coins, represent definite fractions of a gold coin within the sphere of circulation. Their own silver or copper weight is, therefore, not determined by the proportions of the respective values of silver and copper to that of gold, but is arbitrarily fixed by law. They may be issued only in such quantities in which the diminutive fractions of gold coin which they represent would constantly circulate either for purposes of change for gold coins of higher denominations, or for realizing equally small prices of commodities. In retail trade silver and copper tokens belong to distinct spheres of circulation. In the nature of things, the rapidity of their circulation is in inverse ratio to the price which they realize in each separate purchase or sale, or to the size of the fraction of gold coin which they represent. If we consider how immense the volume of the daily retail trade in a country like England is, we will understand from the comparatively insignificant proportions of its combined volume how rapid and steady the circulation of the subsidiary coin must be. From a parliamentary report of recent date we see, e. g., that in 1857 the English mint coined £4,859,000 worth of gold, £733,000 of silver nominal value which contained metal actually worth £363,000. The total amount of gold coined in the ten years ending December 31, 1857, was £55,239,000, and of silver only £2,434,000. The supply of copper coin in 1857 amounted only to £6,720 nominal value containing £3,492 worth of copper; of this £3,136 was in pennies, £2,464 in half-pennies, and £1,120 in farthings. The total value of copper coined in the ten years was £141,477 nominal, the metallic value being £73,503. Just as gold coin is prevented from permanently retaining its function of coin by the legal provision of the loss of weight which demonetizes it, so are the silver and copper tokens prevented from passing from their spheres of circulation into that of gold coin and acquiring the character of money by the provision of the maximum amount for which they are legal tender.

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