Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/100

 fraud becomes known, and your pretended Asiatic cashmeres will fall to the price of the French article. In giving a false standard to gold and silver, King Philippe could only make dupes so long as the fraud was not known. Like any other shopkeeper, he deceived his customers by a false description of the commodity, but that could not last long. Sooner or later he must suffer the rigor of the laws of commerce. Is it that which M. Proudhon wishes to prove? No. According to him it is from the monarch, and not from commerce, that money receives its value. And what is it that he has effectively proved? That commerce is more sovereign than the monarch. Let the monarch order that a mark shall be henceforth two marks, commerce will always tell you that these two marks are only worth one mark as before.

But for all that, the question of the determination of value by the quantity of labor has not been taken a step further. It still remains to be decided if the value of these two marks—again become the original mark—is determined by the cost of production or by supply and demand.

M. Proudhon continues: "It may be equally assumed that if, instead of altering the money it had been in the power of the King to double its quantity, the exchange-value of gold and silver would have immediately fallen to half, always in consequence of this proportion and equilibrium."

If this opinion, which M. Proudhon shares with the economists, is correct, it is a proof in support of their theory of supply and demand, and not in support of the "proportion" of M. Proudhon. Because, whatever may have been the quantity of labor embodied in the double quantity of gold and silver its value would have fallen by