Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/213

 206 APPENDIX

land, into national land,* and when we look more closely into it we see that he does not receive in one hand the commodities and deliver with the other certificates for labor received, but that he regulates production itself. In his last work, “Lectures on Money,” in which Gray sets himself to present his labor-money as a purely bourgeois reform, he loses himself in still more trans- parent absurdities.

Every commodity is money, that is Gray’s theory, and this is the result of his incomplete and, therefore, mistaken analysis of commodities. The “organic” con- struction of “labor-money,” of the “national bank,” and the stores of commodities,” is only a dream in which we are enabled to get a glimpse of the dogma as a universal law. The dogma that a commodity is money, or that the labor of an individual contained in it is social labor, does not become a truth simply because a bank believes in it and acts upon it. ‘Failure in this case plays the part of practical criticism. What Gray has not said, and what he has not imagined—that is to say, that labor- money is an alluring economic phrase for those who have a pious desire to dispense with the use of money, with the value of exchange of commodities, with the com- modities of bourgeois society—has been loudly pro- claimed by English Socialists who have written before and since himself.+

But it was reserved for Proudhon and his school to

seriously proclaim the degradation of money and the exaltation of commodities, as the principle of Socialism,

Ibid, p. 298.
 * The land to be transformed into national property.—

+ For instance, B. W. Thompson’s “An Enquiry into the Distribution of wealth, &c.,’ London, 1827. Bray :“Labor’s Wrongs and Labor’s Remedy,” Leeds, 1839,