CodalSearch this book — or all of Codal…⌘K
Projects
Sign inStart a book
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 187 of 331
Table of Contents

CHAPTER II.

Hume should have shown that under a given system of notation the quantity of characters used does not depend on the magnitude of the numbers, but that on the contrary, the magnitude of the numbers depends on the quantity of the characters used. It is perfectly true that there is no advantage in estimating or “counting” values of commodities in depreciated gold and silver, and that is the reason why nations have always found it more convenient with the growth of the value of the commodities in circulation to count in silver in preference to copper, and in gold rather than in silver. In proportion as the nations became richer, they converted the less valuable metals into subsidiary coin and the more valuable ones into money. Furthermore, Hume forgets that in order to count values in gold and silver, it is not necessary that either gold or silver should be “on hand.” Money of account and the medium of circulation are identical with him and both are “coin.” Hume concludes that a rise or fall of prices depends on the quantity of money in circulation, because a change in the value of the measure of value, i. e. of the precious metals which serve as money of account, causes a rise or fall of prices and, consequently, also a change in the amount of money in circulation, the rapidity of the latter remaining the same. That not only the quantity of gold and silver increased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that the cost of their production had declined at the same time, Hume could know from the closing up of the European mines. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the prices of commodities increased in Europe with the influx of the mass of American gold and silver; hence the prices of commodities in every land are determined by the mass of gold and silver to be found there. This was Hume’s first “necessary consequence.”121 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prices had not risen uniformly with the increase of the quantity of precious metals; more than half a century passed before any change in prices became perceptible, and even then it took a long time before the exchange values of commodities came to be generally estimated according to

187