Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/70

Rh labor which assumes the form of social labor as a result of the universal alienation of the products of individual labor, he necessarily fails to recognize in money the direct embodiment of this alienated labor. For that reason he sees no inner connection between money and labor which creates exchange value, and considers money merely as an instrument introduced from outside into the sphere of exchange for purposes of technical convenience. Franklin's analysis of exchange value did not exert any direct influence on the general trend of science, because he discussed only special questions of political economy whenever there was a definite practical occasion for it. The contrast between useful work and labor which creates exchange value agitated all Europe during the eighteenth century in the form of this question: what particular kind of labor constitutes the source of bourgeois wealth? It was thus assumed that not every kind of labor which is realized in use-values or yields certain products does thereby directly create wealth. With the physiocrats, however, as well as with their opponents, the burning question was not, what kind of labor creates value, but which is it that creates surplus value. They approached the problem in its complicated form before they had solved it in its elementary form; such is the historical course of all sciences leading them by a labyrinth of intersecting paths to the real starting points. Unlike other builders, science not only erects castles in