Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/212

 APPENDIX 205

assort themselves, in direct relation with each other, as the products of social labor. But they cannot assort themselves in relation to each other otherwise than as they are. Commodities are the immediate products of individual labors, independent and isolated, which can express themselves as. general social labor only by changing themselves in the process of individual ex- change; labor, in the production of commodities, only becomes social labor by losing its character of individual labor. In representing the labor time contained in com- modities as labor time directly social, Gray represents it as collective labor or as the labor time of individuals directly associated. In such conditions, as a matter of fact, a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, could not be for the other commodities the incarnation of labor in general, value in exchange would not become price, but neither would use-value become value in ex- change, the product would not become a commodity, and thus would disappear the basis upon which bourgeois production rests. But that is not the idea of Gray. The products must be produced as commodities, but they must not be exchanged as commodities.

Gray confides to a National Bank the excution of this pious desire. On one side society, by the intermediary of the National Bank, renders the individuals independent of the conditions of individual exchange, and on the other side it leaves them to continue to produce on the basis of individual exchange. Logic compels Gray to successively deny all the conditions of bourgeois pro- duction, although he desires merely to “reform’’ money, the consequence of the exchange of commodities. He transforms capital into national capital,* property in ~* The business of every country ought to be conducted on a national capital—John Gray “The Social System,” p. 71.