Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/211

 204 APPENDIX

labor, a day of labor, an hour of labor, would repre- sent the equivalent which the holder could receive of any other commodities which were in the stores of the bank.* That is the fundamental principle which he has carefully developed in all its details, based upon existing English institutions. With this system, says Gray, “it would be as easy to sell for money as it is now to buy with money ; production would be the uniform and inexhaust- ible source of the demand.”} The precious metals would lose the “privilege” which they have over other com- modities, and “would take the place which belongs to them on the market side by side with butter, eggs, cloth, and calico; and their value would interest us no more than that of diamonds.”** Ought we to retain our artificial measure of value, gold, and fetter thus the pro- ductive forces of the country, or ought we not rather to make use of the natural measure of value, labor, and liberate the productive forces?*** Since labor time is the actual measure of value, why by the side of it should there be another, extrinsic, value? Why should ex- change-value be transformed into price? Why do all commodities estimate their value in a single com- modity, money, which thus becomes equal to the value of exchange?

That was the problem which Gray had to solve. In- Stead of solving it, he imagines that commodities can

hecAe estimated value being previously put upon produce, let it be lodged in a bank, and drawn out again, whenever it is required, merely stipulating, by common consent, that he who lodges any kind of property in the proposed national bank may take out of it an equal value of whatever it may contain, instead of being obliged to draw out the self-same thing that he put in.”—Ibid, p. 68.

+ Ibid, p. 16.


 * Gray.—“Lectures on Money,” &c., p, 180.
 * Thid, p. 169.