Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/102

 money. Undoubtedly, in international commerce the value of money, as that of every other commodity, is determined by labor time. But that is simply because gold and silver in international commerce are means of exchange as products and not as money; that is to say, that in this connection gold and silver lose that very character of "fixity and authenticity," of "sovereingnsovereign [sic] consecration," which is for M. Proudhon their specific characteristic. Ricardo has so well understood this truth that after having based his whole system on value determined by labor time and after having said, "Gold and silver, as well as all other commodities, have value only in proportion to the quantity of labor necessary to produce them and put them on the market," he added, nevertheless, that the value of money is not determined by the labor time embodied in its substance, but only by the law of supply and demand. "Although paper money has no intrinsic value, nevertheless if its quantity be limited its exchangeable value may equal the value of metallic money of the same denomination, or of bullion estimated as specie. It is by the same principle, that is to say by the limitation of the quantity of money, that coins of a low standard are able to circulate at the same value as they would have had if their weight and their value were those fixed by law, and not at the intrinsic value of the pure metal which they contain. That is why in the history of English money we find that our currency has never been depreciated in the same proportion as it has been changed. The reason is that it has never been multiplied in proportion to its depreciation" (Ricardo.)

J. B. Say, on the subject of this passage of Ricardo, observes:

"This example should suffice, it seems to me, to con-