Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/95

Rh Owing to the fact that money, when serving as the standard of price, appears under the same reckoning names as do the prices of commodities, and that, therefore, the sum of 3£ 17s. lO½d. may signify, on the one hand, an ounce weight of gold, and on the other, the value of a ton of iron, this reckoning name of money has been called its mint-price. Hence, there sprang up the extraordinary notion that the value of gold is estimated in its own material, and that, in contradistinction to all other commodities, its price is fixed by the State. It was erroneously thought that the giving of reckonningreckoning [sic] names to definite weights of gold is the same thing as fixing the value of those weights. In so far as gold serves as one of the elements in determining price, i. e., where it performs the function of money of account, it not only has no fixed price, but has no price whatever. In order to have a price, i. e., in order to express itself in a specific commodity as a universal equivalent that other commodity would have to play the same exclusive