Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/94

 merce is purely conventional, and every other commodity could, less conveniently perhaps, but in a sufficiently satisfactory manner, fill this rôle; the economists recognise and cite more than one example of this. What, then, is the reason for this preference generally accorded to the precious metals, of serving as money, and how is this speciality of functions of money, without analogy in political economy, to be explained Is it possible to re-establish the series from which money seems to have been detached, and thereby to bring it back to its true principle?"

Already, in putting the question in these terms, M. Proudhon has supposed the existence of money. The first question he should have put is, why, in the exchanges as they are actually constituted, exchange-value should have had to be individualised, so to speak, by the creation of a special agent of exchange. Money is not a thing, it is a social relation. Why is the relation of money a relation of production, like every other economic relation, such as the division of labor, &c.? If M. Proudhon had clearly asecrtainedascertained [sic] this relation he would not have seen in money an exception, a member detached from a series, unknown or to be discovered.

He would, on the contrary, have recognised that this relation is a link of, and as such, intimately attached to, the whole chain of the other economic relations, and that this relation corresponds to a determined mode of production, neither more nor less than individual exchange. What does he do? He begins by detaching money from the whole of the existing mode of production, in order later to make it the first member of an imaginary series, a series to be discovered.

Once the necessity for a special agent of exchange, that is to say the necessity for money, is recognised, it is