Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/110

Rh. Under this system, says Gray, "to sell for money may be rendered, at all times, precisely as easy as it now is to buy with money; . . . production would become the uniform and never-failing cause of demand." The precious metals would lose their "privilege" as against other commodities and "take their proper place in the market beside butter and eggs, and cloth and calico, and then the value of the precious metals will concern us just as little . . . as the value of the diamond." "Shall we retain our fictitious standard of value, gold, and thus keep the productive resources of the country in bondage? or, shall we resort to the natural standard of value, labour, and thereby set our productive resources free?"

Labor-time being the intrinsic measure of value, why should there be another external measure side by side with it? Why does exchange value develop into price? Why do all commodities estimate their value in one exclusive commodity, which is thus converted into a special embodiment of exchange value into money? That was the problem which Gray had to solve. Instead of solving it, he imagined that commodities could be related directly to each other as products of social labor. But they can relate to each other only in their capacity of commodities. Commodities are the direct products of isolated independent private labors, which have to be realized as universal social labor through their alienation in the process of private exchange, that is to say,